Murder in the Latin Quarter

by Cara Black

  “They found Benoît,” the voice said without preamble.

  “Then you’ve got the information.”

  “He was murdered. The file is gone.”

  Shock flooded over her.

  “It’s up to you to find it,” the voice continued.

  The phone fell from Léonie’s hands and clattered on the parquet floor.

  Darkness descended . . . non, not now. She breathed, forcing the air into her lungs. If she didn’t go now, it would be too late.

  Tuesday Afternoon

  AIMÉE ENTERED PIANO Vache, a student dive down the hill from Place Sainte Geneviève on the narrow rue Laplace. The place was dark; the corners smelled of beer. Despite the outside heat, the stone walls kept the interior chilled. Like a cavern, she thought, the blackened sixteenth-century stone walls unchanged, a favored haunt of students for centuries. And hers, too, in her Sorbonne days when she’d spent hours drinking and debating philosophy, trying to sound intellectual like everyone else. Always aware that in the quartier they fol-lowed in the footsteps of Descartes, Verlaine, and Camus.

  Furnished with flea-market tables and mismatched chairs, the place had a homey feel. Here she could clean up, examine what she’d found, and still reach the database center in time.

  In the lull before the aperitif hour, the bar was deserted except for Vincent, who was setting up bottles in rows behind the bar. A good place to sift through the contents of Benoît’s locker undisturbed.

  “Long time, Aimée,” Vincent said. Tanned, muscular, in his thirties, all in black except for the silver belt buckle that caught a gleam of light. He hadn’t changed.

  He ran an appreciative glance over her. “Rough and tumble, comme toujours.” He hadn’t forgotten. A few years ago, their one-night stand had extended for a week. Until she’d found out that he was married. Very married, with a pregnant wife.

  “Here for a drink, a chat, or both?” He winked. “Le strych-nine? The usual?”

  Why not? On second thought, though, she changed her mind. She needed a clear head.

  “Without the strychnine,” she said.

  He bypassed the absinthe bottle, reached out and knocked the grounds from the metal espresso filter. The machine grumbled to life.

  She passed through the stone arch to the cavernous back room and took a seat at a table by the upright piano, below the stuffed cow sticking out of the wall. Beneath them, in the ancient vaulted caves, existed the remains of a torture chamber with rusted iron instruments on the walls, at least according to Sorbonne lore. She’d never explored to find out for herself. On weekends, DJ’s spun here and bands played for a hefty cover charge. Chalk it up to the ambience.

  A minute later, Vincent set a demitasse of espresso on the wooden table gouged with initials, and a small shot glass of milky absinthe beside it.

  “On me. In case you change your mind.”

  She’d almost changed her mind about him once. “How’s your wife?”

  “Finished law school. And left me. Now I have the kid.” He pulled out his wallet and flashed the photo of a pink-cheeked toddler.

  “Trés belle, Vincent.“

  “Like you, Aimée.” He grinned. “My life’s different now.”

  She nodded. “Right, you’re a single dad. And your life’s not your own.”

  Like her own father.

  “It’s funny, but I kind of like it this way.” Fatherhood became him. He gestured to the seat beside her. “Feel like some con-versation to go with that?”

  She felt tempted. After all, the only male in her life right now had a wet nose and short legs, and needed a grooming appointment.

  “Only if you’re a world-renowned expert on pig anatomy.”

  She smiled and dumped the contents of her bag on the table next to the demitasse.

  “I knew I’d picked the wrong profession,” he said, taking the hint.

  At least he had someone who waited at home for him . . . albeit with colic or wet diapers.

  “The place heats up in an hour or two. But you know that. Take your time.” He strode back to the counter.

  Alone, she sipped the espresso. If laced with too much absinthe, it became lethal. It had been outlawed for years; she’d always wondered how the owner obtained the illegal liqueur.

  She stared at the few assorted items relating to Azacca Benoît among her Le Clerc compact, kohl eye pencil, day-timer, and broken shells from the Marseilles beach. Not much. Then she got to work.

  The loose papers, a notebook, graphs, and charts she put in one pile. The lab coat, folded, in another. A plastic bag with a moldy uneaten piece of something in another.

  Touching these things gave her a strange feeling. Stolen. A corpse’s things. A man sprawled lifeless under the gatehouse window, so far a cipher except for his status as a world author-ity on pigs, and for Dr. Severat’s words . . . consumed by his work, passionate, dedicated. She’d found a window onto this man; now she needed to open it, discover his connection to Mireille, and what had put her in danger.

  Or what had led her to murder him.

  She found the item that had fallen from Edouard’s pocket: a postage-stamp-sized pouch of straw-colored burlap. She sniffed it. It gave off a sage and cinnamon smell. Affixed to it was a red cloth string, similar to the red string she’d observed tied around Mireille’s wrist. Some kind of Haitian amulet?

  She’d watched her father once at his desk in the Commissariat, touching a hairbrush, a tattered holy card, a small bottle of Arpège with faded gold letters on the label. “Why do you look in ladies’ purses, Papa?” she’d asked. He’d shrugged; the banal residue of a life was spread over the green blotter on his desk. “It’s to get the feel, the least I can do,” he’d said. Later, she realized he was attempting to discover a person, a sense of them. To accord the victim some respect.

  She opened the notebook and flipped the pages. A pencil-scrawled list, left-handed by the slant, named common chemicals like sulphuric acid, lead, and mercury. She could tell that much. Like a shopping list. And lab requisition slips for these chemicals were tucked into the next page. There was no explanation, no notes to help her.

  A waste. And now she’d have to figure out how to return it.

  In Benoît’s lab coat pocket she found a rolled-up Pariscope, the weekly entertainment guide published on Wednesdays. Thumbing through it, she found a page folded back with a red line circling a listing for a baroque music concert at the Roman baths in the Musée Cluny at 5 P.M. the previous night, Monday. Just prior to Benoît’s murder: she’d found his body close to half past eight at the laboratory gatehouse.

  But at least it told her—non, she thought: it gave rise to the supposition—that a man immersed in research had nevertheless attended a baroque music concert at the Cluny. A baroque music aficionado?

  She took out her cell phone, checked the listing, and reached the Musée Cluny office a moment later.

  “Bonjour, I’m inquiring about the evening baroque music concerts.”

  “Désolée, they’ve just ended for the season,” said a high-pitched voice. “We always end mid-September when the weather starts to change.”

  “But I missed last night’s concert. . . .”

  “A shame, Mademoiselle. The last of the season.”

  “Of course it was open to the public?”

  “Bien sûr. Sold out.”

  That told her nothing. She thought hard. Perhaps they still had a list. “Do you have a record of the reservations?”

  “I doubt that’s still in our computer.”

  She thought fast. “I’d like to know if my friend bought me a ticket. I need to repay him if he did.”

  “But you could ask him, Mademoiselle.”

  Too late for that. “Do you mind checking?”

  “Hold on, please.”

  A few clicks. A small sigh. “The system’s down, Mademoi-selle. I’m sorry.”

  System down? It figured. National museums like the Cluny operated through the Ministry computer system
, which was slow, ponderous, and outdated. If René ever got his fingers on it, he’d fix it in a moment. He loved a challenge. He had once threatened to enter the Louvre site, streamline the catalogue and database section up to the fifth century . . . and give the seventy-year-old staff members heart attacks.

  “But you do have a printout of reservations?”

  “We’re about to close.”

  A typical fonctionaire answer. Employed by the government to push papers in return for salary, stellar benefits, and secure jobs for life. The joke went: “Work? Of course I don’t work: I’m a fonctionaire.”

  “This list. . . .”

  Voices erupted in the background. “Mademoiselle, I’m sorry, but. . . .” More voices. “I can’t help you. Apart from the usual organizations who reserve. . . .”

  Organizations. She hadn’t thought of that.

  “That’s it! He’d have done it through them. Tell me again the names of those organizations.”

  “But I didn’t tell you yet.”

  Of course she hadn’t. But Aimée had to get this fonctionaire to spill. “He just changed jobs, but he. . . .”

  “Apart from Charité Saint Vincent de Paul and Hydrolis, who reserve seats for guests and contributors, as usual, I can’t help you.”

  But she had. A long shot, but it gave her a place to start. Benoît could have reserved through either of them. It would be a tedious job, but if she located his name she might find a connection to whoever had provided him with a ticket.

  Then again, he might have just shown up and bought a ticket on his own. Alone? Somehow she didn’t think so. . . .

  Charité Saint Vincent de Paul said no Azacca Benoît was on their guest list, and the Hydrolis receptionist informed her in a curt voice that she’d need to check with Human Resources. She’d have Human Resources get back to Aimée tomorrow at the earliest. Ten minutes on the phone, and Aimée had struck out at both places.

  Too bad her laptop was still in her office. Otherwise, she could have hacked in to check their records. But they might not have kept the data, since the season had ended.

  She stared at the absinthe. Tempted, imagining the licorice taste, the kick like a knock on the head. But she had to focus. She took a last sip of the now-cold espresso, set her cup down, and then realized she’d left a moisture ring on the notebook cover. Lifting it up and wiping it with her jacket sleeve, she noticed indentations . . . marks, non . . . writing . . . she ran her fingers over it . . . then grabbed the eyeliner pencil from her bag, angled the kohl tip, and rubbed it over the cover. Numbers showed in white where the kohl didn’t penetrate. 01 . . . a phone number? Paris land lines began 01 . . . followed by the eight digits of a Paris phone number.

  Stemming her excitement, she transcribed the phone number to the back of the envelope. Something? Or nothing. She had to think, to figure her approach.

  First she hit INFORMATION on her cell phone.

  “Reverse Directory, please.”

  “The number?”

  “01 43 90 76 82,” she said.

  Pause. The shot glass of absinthe caught the light slanting in from the open door. A murmur of voices, the slap of an exchanged high-five, and Vincent’s laughter came from the bar.

  “Osteologique Anatomée Comparée, 61 rue Buffon, Mademoiselle.”

  “Merci.”

  The lab where Benoît worked. Odd that he’d written it down. A reminder to himself? she wondered.

  She tried the number. A tired much-played recording came on. “You’ve reached the central lab directory. If you know the extension you want, enter it now. For the office directory, press 2.” She pressed 2, found Assistant Professeur Huby’s number, and entered it. Instead of Huby himself, his voicemail came on. Before the short recording cut off, she left a message asking him to call her.

  She glanced at her Tintin watch. Ten minutes to get to the bank’s database center. She slid Benoît’s belongings back into her bag, left the absinthe, and slapped some francs down on the counter on her way out.

  Vincent’s good-bye trailed her as she stepped out onto rue Laplace, a twelfth-century street lined with stone and timbered medieval buildings. Already she felt a change in the air taking the edge off the heat. Slight, but a harbinger of fall and of curling leaves on the cobbles.

  RENÉ FRIANT, AIMÉE’S partner, all four feet of him, stretched up to reach the data disks on the shelf. A handsome dwarf with a trimmed goatee, wearing a silk shirt with suspenders holding up eggshell-white linen trousers, he reached up standing on the tiptoes of his handmade shoes. Despite the fact that he had a black belt in karate, his short arms and legs made even the simplest tasks a challenge. But she’d never heard him complain.

  She kissed him on both cheeks. She couldn’t read the look that clouded his green eyes. She hesitated. He hated being helped. “Everything go smoothly at your La Défense meetings, René?”

  “You’re half an hour late, Aimée,” he said, looking her up and down. He pulled over a chair, hiked himself up, and stepped on the seat.

  “Traffic, René, désolée.” She ran her fingers through her hair. They came back sticky with cobwebs and leaves. She’d been so absorbed, she’d forgotten to clean up.

  “And hens have teeth, Aimée.”

  “Look, René. . . .”

  He held up his pudgy hand.

  “Save it. I’ve got another meeting at La Défense. Tomorrow. They love meetings, these bureaucrats.” He scratched his neck. “Did Madame Delmas give us the green light?”

  Aimée stepped over the cables running to the bank of computer screens and slipped off her black patent heels. The cold concrete floor sent a welcome shiver up the soles of her tired feet. She set her bag, brimming with reports, on the floor.

  “Bright green. ‘Keep going,’ she said, and she complimented you on a ‘thorough data analysis.’”

  René grinned.

  “Before you rub your hands in glee, René,” she said, glancing at the numbers on one of the screens and clicking open a file, “check this out. She offered a suggestion.”

  René tugged his goatee, scanning the comments written in the data analysis report’s margin. “She’s sharp. Makes sense, the way she’s suggested, to back up the data this way.”

  “Glad you agree, partner,” she said. “What system report needs running?”

  “Done. Just back up these disks and we’re set for tomorrow.”

  “Bravo, René,” she said.

  On top of his form, too. He relished this private bank job and the prestige that tunneling into a bank system gave him among his hacker students. She couldn’t understand it; some hacker thing.

  She slid in the disks. They were sitting in a windowless concrete bunker, the private bank’s data center. Banque Morel, several kilometers away on the Right Bank, owned this run-down anonymous eighteenth-century building near the Val de Grâce church, a huge edifice built by Queen Anne after twenty-three years of sterility to celebrate the birth of her son, Louis the Sun King. The adjoining abbey, closed at the Revolution, had become a military hospital.

  The data center’s headquarters, two levels down, were part of the old Roman remains honeycombing the Latin Quarter. Now retrofitted with reinforced concrete and a ganglion of fiber optic cables, the tunnels supposedly had once led under-ground to an ancient Roman road. No one would suspect that the bank’s data center was located here. The pumping heart of operations contained the private information of the world’s wealthy individuals and corporations.

  The first disk backed up, she slid in the next, producing a slow whirr. She kept on target, ignoring the itch to check her cell phone for messages from Huby or Mireille. It would have been useless; there was no reception down here.

  “Want to tell me about this?” René stood next to her, holding up the small black-and-white photo of Mireille.

  Her hand shot out. “Merci. Must have fallen out of my bag.”

  Irritation crossed his face. “I thought we agreed. . . .”

  “Wha
tever do you mean, René?” She lowered her eyes to the screen, clicked commands on the keyboard.

  “You promised. No missing persons. No other cases, period.”

  First Zazie and now René.

  “Who said—”

  “I’d like to believe you.” René counted on his fingers. “Let’s see: I’ve heard that seven times—non, last year on rue de Paradis you said it too. That makes eight.”

  Her lip quivered. She wished the photo hadn’t fallen out.

  “With Yves dead, murdered, did you expect me to forget investigating?”

  He leaned forward, his green eyes blazing. “We’ve just snared this contract that will lead to bigger and better things. We’ve signed the lease to expand our office next door. Saj’s going permanent part-time to service our growing client list. Why does my gut churn, thinking you’d put our progress at risk?”

  She blinked. Swallowed. René was working overtime and more to build the business. She really wasn’t taking on her fair share of the workload.

  “René, I won’t let anything interfere with my work.”

  And right away remembered the pile she’d left on her desk.

  “So the way you ran in here, distracted, chewing your thumb and looking like you’d fallen out of the dustbin, signifies you’re on top of it?”

  The whirring stopped and she inserted the next disk. She stilled her tapping toe, slid her feet back into her shoes. She tried to ignore the claustrophobic ten-foot-thick concrete walls, the fluorescent lighting, the constant hum of air ventilation.

  “We’re solvent for once, building the agency,” René said. “Getting more work than we can handle, yet something makes me think you’re going backward.” He grabbed the file, thumbed the pages. Then paused. “Bon.” René tented his short fingers. “Your jacket’s full of cobwebs, mascara’s trailing down your cheeks.” He shrugged. “I get it now. A tumble in the hay . . . another bad boy.”

  Foolish to think she could hide this from him. “René, I think . . . I have a sister.” She took a breath. “I first met her yesterday.”

  “What?” His eyes widened.