by Cara Black
“She appeared just as Madame Delmas arrived for our appointment. So we could only talk for a second.”
He blinked. As the words left her mouth, they sounded weak, even to her. She went on. “Supposedly, my father had a daughter. She’s half-Haitian.”
Aimée rarely talked about her father. Or his death in the Place Vendôme explosion while he was carrying out a con-tract surveillance for the Ministry. The surveillance had not only killed him, it had discredited him.
“But you never told me, Aimée.”
“How could I? It’s news to me. I didn’t know until yesterday afternoon,” she said. “Look on the back of the photo.”
René turned it over. “There’s a date . . . looks like 1964. Call me a skeptic,” he said, shaking his head, “but that’s during Papa Doc Duvalier’s regime of terror in Haiti. Do you think it’s worth the paper it’s printed on?”
She sat up. “What do you mean?”
“The whole island was in undeclared civil war. The government was so corrupt that it bankrupted its own health ministry and took sanitation funds to finance the presidential palace. They had no running water to drink, much less to wash the blood from the streets.”
“Since when do you know so much about Haiti?”
“From Loussant, my student at the hacktaviste academy, an escaped Haitian exile.” René smoothed down his tie. “Tonton macoutes butchered his family. He lost his leg.”
“Tonton macoutes?” Aimée asked.
“Papa Doc’s paramilitary.”
Aimée thought back to the tilt of Mireille’s chin, the vague familiarity, the movement of her hands.
“You’re saying what, René?”
“This woman claims Monsieur Leduc was her father?” He paced back and forth in front of the banks of terminals. “Eh, why not? She’s done her homework, learned your background. Under the Code Napoleon, she’d be entitled to half of every-thing. Half your inheritance. Have you thought about that? Your apartment, the business. We’d be ruined.”
“She’s shown me no proof, René,” she said. “As a matter of fact, she never showed up again.”
“Et voilà, she tried a scam,” said René, the beginning of relief in his voice. “Scammers work quickly so their marks don’t have time to think. Any interference and they move on to the next mark.”
René stopped mid-step and stared at her. “What’s wrong?”
Aimée’s hands were trembling. “It didn’t end there, René. She’s a murder suspect now.” Aimée didn’t need her degree in criminology to know the flics would go after Mireille once they’d questioned Darquin and Dr. Severat.
René’s mouth dropped open.
“Sit down, René.”
And she told him about it from the beginning.
Worry creased René’s face. He rubbed his forehead.
“Stay out of it, Aimée. This Mireille’s running a scam. The murder doesn’t involve you,” René said, his voice quiet. “Furthermore, your father’s name, Jean-Claude, is not an unusual one. There’s more than one Leduc in the phone book.”
“That’s crossed my mind too,” she said. René was right: Mireille had lured her to the murder scene and disappeared.
The disks whirred, stopped. She hit EJECT.
“And your father never told you about her, right?”
She shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t know.”
“A woman walks into the office claiming she’s your half sister. . . . You don’t really believe this story, do you?”
Put that way. . . .
“Logic would dictate—” Aimée began.
René interrupted her with a shake of his head. “You’ve got that look on your face. A look that says otherwise.”
“I mean . . . I don’t know. I need to learn more.”
“What does this Mireille want? Money?”
“I’ve told you all I know,” Aimée said. “She looked scared, mentioned a file. Then I found a man, a Professeur Benoît, dead.” She hesitated, then spoke. “Someone saw her arguing with him.”
“Who?”
“A woman, Dr. Severat, noticed Mireille arguing with the professor yesterday afternoon, before he was murdered.”
“So she claims she’s your sister; lures you to an address to take the fall for a murder; and, of course, she’s never contacted you, you’ve never seen her again.”
“I know all the arguments, René. I’ve gone over them again and again in my head. It looks simple, but it’s not.” Torn, she didn’t know how to explain it. Couldn’t find the words for this feeling in her heart. “René, put yourself in my place. A woman claims she’s your sister. She’s about to show you some proof, but men chase her for some reason; she’s involved in a murder. The facts don’t seem to add up, but they could. What would you think?”
“Depends on her height, Aimée.”
Exasperated, she reached for her bag.
“You can’t be sure until she shows you more proof than this, Aimée.”
“Did I say I was?”
He seemed on edge, touchy tonight. The cold air in the climate-controlled cavern did nothing to improve his mood.
“Leave it alone, Aimée.”
As if she could.
Guilt stirred her. “I had Papa, a childhood, food on the table.” She stared at René. “But maybe she didn’t. I need to know.”
“You’re reading too much into this, Aimée.”
He meant she wanted to believe. Maybe a big part of her did. But she had to see proof.
THE JOB FINISHED , Aimée and René emerged onto the shadowy street. The bushes of the hedgerow rustled. And a lone starling flew up in alarm, batting its wings and scattering fallen leaves on the windshield of René’s vintage Citroën DS.
Even if she’d lost the men who watched her apartment, she was wary, on the alert. She scanned the street for a dented Peugeot. But the only vehicle, a parked butcher’s truck, appeared empty.
“Where’s your scooter?” René asked.
She needed to recover it from behind the dumpster near her apartment.
“Sparkplug problems. Mind giving me a ride?”
THE PANTHEON’S DOME, half-illuminated like a lunar landscape, rose ghostlike over the buildings. The fingernail of a crescent moon hung over the chimneypots riding the rooftops.
Aimée glanced at her cell phone. No messages from Mireille or even Darquin.
René shot her a look. “How’s the contractor working out?”
“There’s a glitch already. But it’s under control.”
She hated complying with building codes, following regulations, getting a new loan and other headaches. But René had insisted that they needed to expand. And he was right.
“Stay on top of it. That’s where your mind needs to be, Aimée.”
“True, René.” But a supposed half-sister entering her life and then disappearing, followed by a murder, made it hard to focus.
René turned down the radio. His voice had changed. “I know these students who’re working on a computer marketing venue, a new concept. An incubateur they call it, like those startups in Silicon Valley.” René pronounced it Zeleekon Val-lée, his eyes gleaming. “One’s got his Papa’s money, another’s a techie, and the third’s a marketing genius. We could get in on the ground floor, Aimée. You know, help them set up, work on the platform.”
Of course this excited him. He loved new challenges.
“It’s the coming thing. No one’s done it before. It’s the future, Aimée.”
Maybe he was right. But marketing and selling ideas, concepts built on air with the expectation of profits overnight—or so the dot.com hype went—made her wary.
“Let’s talk tomorrow,” she said.
Reaching Ile St. Louis, she pointed to narrow rue Saint Louis-en-l’isle. “I’ll get off here.”
“But your apartment’s a block away.”
“I don’t want to take a chance with those mecs who fol-lowed me,” she said. “Besides, my scooter’s parked here.”
“If you’re nervous, stay at my place, Aimée,” René said.
René inhabited a small studio filled floor-to-ceiling with computers, printers, and scanners. She’d have more room curling up on his Citroën’s leather rear seat, with his police scanner to keep her company.
“Non, merci, René,” she said, shutting the car door. “A demain, until tomorrow.”
He drove off through the long shadows of horse-chestnut trees. A church bell pealed, echoing in the night. Nervous, she checked the street. Only the glow from a few lighted windows, the trickle of water in the gutter. She hitched her bag onto her shoulder and found her scooter. She tried the ignition. Dead. The engine didn’t even turn over.
She cursed, pushing the scooter over the cobblestones, vowing next time to replace the old spark plug sooner. Old and tempermental, the scooter sat in the courtyard carriage house more often that not.
Instead of rounding Quai d’Anjou to her apartment entrance, she used the rear door as she had this morning. Per-spiring and out of breath, she shoved the scooter and lifted it over the threshold. She fumbled for her keys.
“Don’t turn around.” A voice that could have been female or male.
Aimée’s spine stiffened. A current of air floated over her legs as the door clicked shut behind her.
She grasped the Swiss Army knife in her bag, flexed her fingers. As soon as she reached the overhanging pear tree branches, she’d. . . .
“Keep going, Aimée.”
That voice. The lilt in those words.
“Mireille?” She spun and almost lost her grip on the scooter handlebars.
She saw a different Mireille, her composure of yesterday afternoon gone. She was young-looking, yet she had to be older than Aimée. Mireille’s large eyes batted in fear. She wore her hair pulled back in a disheveled knot.
“A man followed me in the Metro,” she said, her voice quivering. “I’m scared.”
A surge of protectiveness filled Aimée despite her suspicions. “We can’t talk here.” She pushed the scooter onto its kickstand, then took Mireille’s arm. Light from a tall window facing the courtyard glowed. “Upstairs,” she said and led Mireille up the worn marble stairs illuminated by a circular glass lantern to the black-and-white tiled landing and her door.
Mireille took in the tall double doors carved with rosettes and chestnut leaves. “You live here?” she asked.
Aimée pulled her inside and bolted the door. Miles Davis emitted a slow growl and sniffed Mireille’s ankles. He scooted off, his tail between his legs. She guided Mireille over the creaking parquet hall floor to the kitchen window. Pinpricks of light dotted the Seine. The plane trees, dark blots between the street lamps, lined the stone wall. There was no one standing on the quai.
Still no guarantee. They could be watching from a dark car.
“Were you followed here, Mireille?”
“I ran.” Her voice cracked. “I waited for you around the corner for an hour. I don’t think I was followed.”
It paid to play it safe, keep the lights off and use the rooms in the back wing, whose windows couldn’t be observed from the street. Aimée opened the double doors of the salon, a high-ceilinged room filled with musty air she rarely used. It held a directoire desk, matching chairs, and her grandfather’s finds from Drouot auctions. Aimée picked up the box of wooden matches and lit the half-burnt candles still in the candlesticks.
“It’s like a museum,” Mireille said, glancing at the shadows on the trompel’oeil muralled ceilings.
“Grandfather. . . .” Aimée hesitated: it felt awkward saying this. “. . . bought this place cheap after the war. His seven-teenth-century bargain, with archaic plumbing and nonexistent heating.”
Mireille paced by the window overlooking the interior courtyard and stared out, clutching her hemp bag. “They’re hunting me like a dog. I shouldn’t have come here. . . .”
Not here five minutes, and already she wanted to leave.
“First you’re going to answer my questions,” Aimée said. “Why did you set me up, Mireille?”
Mireille’s shoulders tensed. “Set you up?”
“You’re running a scam—”
“I don’t understand,” Mireille interrupted.
“I found Azacca Benoît’s body. His ear was cut off. You lured me to rue Buffon to take the blame for his murder.”
Mireille made a sign of the cross, then raised the gold cross she wore from her neck to her lips. She rubbed the thin red thread knotted at intervals around her wrist. “You’re serious . . . mon Dieu. I didn’t know.”
“You were seen arguing with him, the flics suspect you . . . and you don’t know?”
“Forgive me for endangering you.” Mireille’s lip quivered. “I just bring trouble. Bad juju.” She rolled down the waistband of her skirt, revealing a red-pink spiral on her honey-colored hip. “The sign. I’m marked.”
“That’s just a birthmark,” Aimée said.
“Ogoun marks his warriors.”
“Ogoun?”
“That’s what my Auntie said. Ogoun’s the defender, the warrior deity. You call him Saint George the dragon slayer.”
Aimée pointed to the cross around Mireille’s neck. “But. . . .”
“I’m Christian, like everyone in Haiti, bien sûr.” Her brow creased. “But where I come from. . . .” She paused. “The spirits, the offerings to deities, our beliefs are all woven together. Like a patchwork. The African gods aren’t separate. I grew up with these beliefs; they’re part of our culture.”
Candle wax dripped down the tarnished silver candlesticks in a slow trail of drops.
“That explains nothing,” Aimée said. “Look, you walk into the office, claim you’re my sister, tell me you have proof and want to meet. Then you bolt from the café, leaving an address on the napkin. I find a dead man, a professor of animal anatomy, there. But you want me to believe you didn’t try to frame me for his murder?”
Mireille crossed herself again. “I didn’t know where else to meet you.” Her chin trembled.
“You sent me to the gatehouse and I found his body. What’s your connection to Professeur Benoît? What do you want of me, Mireille?”
“I had the professor’s address. He came from my Auntie’s village. I was desperate and I begged him to help me. Bound by our ways, he let me stay in the gatehouse so they wouldn’t find me.”
“So who wouldn’t find you?”
“The men who stole my papers,” she said. “Benoît offered to help me get a temporary permit and a real job.”
Not according to Dr. Severat’s story. She’d said Mireille was a hanger-on taking advantage of Benoît’s kindness, exploiting a village tie.
“A staff person overheard you arguing with him in the laboratory.”
Mireille looked away, her gaze resting on the frayed edge of the Aubusson rug.
“Do you deny arguing with him?” No answer. “The flics believed her. You’re a suspect, Mireille.”
“A suspect?” Her eyelids batted in fear. “I don’t understand this. Who told the flics this?”
Aimée remembered that brief flicker in Dr. Severat’s eyes. Did it come down to jealousy?
“You didn’t answer my question, Mireille,” she said. “But we’ve got the whole night to find the truth.”
“You always pay, non? Nothing’s free.” There was bitterness in Mireille’s voice. She collapsed on the Louis Quinze fauteuil. Her fingers raked over the frayed upholstery seat. “Professeur Benoît’s a generous man . . . was. Bit of a womanizer, but. . . .” She shrugged. “Nothing unusual. When I said no, I’d find somewhere else to stay, well, he got mad. That woman must have overheard.”
“When was this?”
Mireille bit her fingernail. “Sunday, I think. But later Benoît apologized to me,” Mireille said. “He told me he’d got-ten too involved with this woman. She’d pressured him to move in with her. But he had so much on his mind . . . he worked all the time. I’d see the lights on in t
he lab. Then on Monday he asked me to keep a file for him.”
That caught Aimée’s attention.
“You mean the file he left for you with the guard?”
She nodded. “It would be just until he came back, he said.”
“Came back from where?”
“An appointment? I don’t know.” Tears welled in her eyes. “He seemed nervous. Jumpy. He told me he trusted only me.”
“Trusted you, over any of the laboratory staff?”
“I don’t know why, I don’t understand anything they do there,” she said. “He said I owed him a favor, that I should do what he asked and keep my mouth shut.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t come to find my father earlier.”
A look of shame crossed Mireille’s face. “Call it pride, but I wasn’t going to look him up until I got settled and had a job. It was easier to seek help from a village connection. But Professeur Benoît never came back yesterday,” she said, her voice rising. “Then this man followed me from the laundro-mat on rue Buffon and lurked across the street. When I was in the café waiting for you, I saw him again and ran.”
“What did he look like?”
“Dark glasses, big, filled out his leather jacket.” Aimée remembered the man on the quai, the Peugeot? Same man? “He had a motorcycle.” Mireille shivered and put her hands over her face. Her hair came loose, curly strands escaping down her neck. She looked up and took a breath. “He chased me. I took the wrong Metro train and got lost. By the time I made it back to rue Buffon to meet you, the place was crawling with flics. I knew I couldn’t go inside.”
“Why didn’t you tell them this and explain?”
“Me, with no papers? I thought the flics had come to arrest me and deport me.”
“Mireille, a lawyer can help you claim asylum,” she said. “I know someone. . . .”
“Do you know how many Haitians petition for asylum, how many are waiting? The quotas won’t even cover last year’s appeals.”
Aimée had had no idea.
She held out the old photo of her father, the one of Mireille as an infant with her mother. “Can you explain these photos?”
Candlelight flickered over Mireille’s expression. “Tim tim. You want me to explain? Tim tim.”
