by Cara Black
The finality in Josephe’s voice raised the hair on Aimée’s arms.
“Father’s optimistic; his faith guides him,” Josephe said. “The people who live in Port-au-Prince get electricity for one hour a day, if they’re lucky, and running water for a few hours daily. Human rights abuses in the system have changed little since the Duvalier days. The violence. . . .” She shrugged.
“You mean the tonton macoutes?” Aimée said.
The phone rang.
Josephe said, “Change comes from the grassroots level.”
The copier emitted a printed page that read: “More myths by those who claim to help Haiti . . . their lies endanger aid. Under the guise of party reform, Edouard Brasseur, former rebel against Duvalier, makes false accusations of corruption.”
The name Edouard Brasseur caught her eye. But he’d told her he worked in import/export.
“Josephe,” said Father Privert, picking up a sheet of paper, “I told you we must only write about feeding children and working to provide clean water for Cité Soleil, not about factional infighting. These inflammatory, divisive articles. . . .”
“We’re exposing the truth,” Josephe said. “You agreed. Re-member, Father?”
Aimée wondered: was Josephe a radical? She wished she’d been able to speak to Father Privert in private. She distrusted Josephe now.
Josephe’s eyes flashed as she continued: “Remember that radio interview, and the lies he fed them?”
“Enough, Josephe. Edouard supported us before.”
Aimée asked, “You’re in contact with this man, Father?”
“My dear, no one knows how to reach him. The government has put a price on his head.”
But Aimée had just talked to him in the café on rue Buffon. “Yet he gives radio interviews?”
“He lives in the shadows, Mademoiselle. That’s all I know.”
Yet he’d come out of the shadows to question her, even given her his card. Didn’t smell right, as her father would have said.
“We’ve got a deadline,” Josephe said with finality.
“Thank you for your time.” Aimée put her card in Father Privert’s hand. “Just in case you see Mireille.”
AIMÉE CROSSED THE courtyard, which was bathed in afternoon shadows. The crisp scent of laundry wafted by her. With a quick step, she avoided dripping water from the newly laundered shirts hanging from the balcony above.
If Father Privert and Josephe harbored illegals and provided them with sanctuary, she reasoned that they’d never open up to her, putting the foundation and their work at risk by doing so. But now she knew that Benoît had attended the Cluny concert hours before his murder.
Hunger gnawed at her. She found an empty table at the nearest outdoor café and ordered. It was time to use a connection, to call Martine, her best friend since the lycée. Mar-tine worked part-time at Le Figaro on the editorial side, doing investigative journalism, as well as consulting on book projects for a Left Bank publisher. She tried Martine’s flat over-looking Bois de Boulogne, shared with Gilles, her well-off aristo boyfriend and his children. No answer, so she called Martine’s cell phone.
“Allo?” Martine’s voice wavered.
Aimée heard the pop of a cork in the background. Laughter.
“Martine?”
“I’m in a meeting, Aimée,” Martine said.
“Sounds well lubricated.”
“Welcome to publishing. You wouldn’t believe the expense accounts for these meetings, and for book launches,” she said. “The stories I could tell you about Bernard-Henri Lévy’s editor. . . .”
“I’m more interested in the story behind Edouard Brasseur’s interview on RTL.”
“Hold on. Who?”
“Edouard Brasseur,” Aimée repeated. “How’d RTL get an interview with a former rebel who’s wanted by his government?”
“The Haitian? Rumor is that he approached the producer,” Martine said. “Something relating to a high-profile researcher who was murdered Monday night. He insisted on giving a statement, refuting the allegations being made.”
Aimée caught her breath. “Allegations against Azacca Benoît, the ENS professor?”
“But didn’t they find photos . . . with boys . . . ?”
Aimée sat up. “You’re kidding.”
“Kidding? Look at today’s Choc.”
A scandal tabloid.
“You read Choc?” Aimée asked, surprised.
“Everyone does, even if no one admits it.”
“The man was a womanizer, Martine. . . .”
“C’est ça. I’m wrong, I confused him with Catherine Deneuve’s gardener.”
“Benoît also consulted for a firm, Hydrolis, on World Bank proposals,” Aimée said. “Know anything about them?”
“The World Bank?” Martine laughed. “Take a number. There’s a long line.”
“Eh?”
“I mean the World Bank’s under fire, left, right, and center,” she said. “A consultant, tainted by the same brush? That’s what you’re thinking?” Martine didn’t wait for an answer. “But what’s it to you?”
“My sister . . . well, I’m not—”
“Sister?” Martine interrupted. “And you’re letting it out now, Aimée? All these years . . . you never told me?”
Hurt layered Martine’s voice.
“Like I knew, Martine? Call me confused and bewildered. She appeared in my office just this Monday, claiming she’s my sister from—”
“Your wild mother?” Martine interrupted. “Well, that makes sense, given that she changed names like she changed countries. Who knows how many half-siblings you have?”
Aimée caught her breath. Morbier had jumped to a similar conclusion. A chill crept over her heart as she thought of her mother starting a new life without her. Ridiculous. She didn’t even know if her mother was alive. What could she do about it, anyway?
“Non, Martine, a half-sister from Papa.”
“Your father?”
Loud voices, then a squeal of laughter in the background.
“Hold on . . . the top model who wrote her life story has just arrived. And they call that literature!” Martine snorted. “Still, it makes for a change from the usual navel-contemplating literary types. But it’s the busiest time of the year, Aimée. I’m jammed with the Rentrée de Litérature . . . seven hundred books published this month. Tell me who’ll read even half of them!”
Martine paused and exhaled. “What’s Edouard Brasseur’s connection to this half-sister?”
“That’s what I want to find out. Please, Martine.”
“You mean she’s really your sister?”
“I think so. But it’s worse: she’s a suspect in Benoît’s murder.”
“Merde, Aimée . . . your family. . . .”
More laughter.
“I’ll sniff around,” Martine said. “Meet me tomorrow at the hammam. Got to go.” And she hung up.
The waitress set down a tartine, a long crusty baguette filled with cheese, cornichons on the side, and an espresso.
“Merci.”
At least the afternoon’s temperature had fallen by a few degrees. As she sunk her teeth into the sandwich, Aimée noticed a message on her phone, from an unknown number.
She leaned forward on the small marble-topped table to hear the message. Someone clearing his throat, then a small cough and a whisper, difficult to identify. “Listen, it’s about Benoît.” Familiar, but definitely not Mireille. “That commendation. Well, when he came back . . . maybe it won’t matter.”
It was Darquin, the guard. About time. “I never saw that Mireille again, but . . . non, it’s better to tell you in person. If you get this message, meet me at 5 P.M. I’ll be at the mass at the Eglise Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.”
Darquin had remembered something. Perhaps it might clear Mireille. Aimée grabbed the tartine, left the espresso and a twenty-franc bill, and ran for the bus.
Wednesday Late Afternoon
“MADAME? MAY I help you?�
�� asked the corner flower-seller whose station was across from the Pantheon.
Léonie smiled. “That bunch, please,” she said, pointing at the blue delphiniums. Perfect for a church offering.
Her cell phone rang. It was Ponsot, her former chauffeur, now a rent-a-guard. She used him from time to time for little jobs, like delivering messages and carrying out surveillances. But he wasn’t even good at that.
“A problem, Ponsot?” Léonie said, glancing across the cob- blestoned street. She scanned Saint-Étienne-du-Mont’s Gothic and Renaissance soot-stained façade. This was the church that housed the relics of Saint Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris.
“He’s late. Not my fault,” Ponsot said. “He’s an old man.”
She had beaten a path straight here after Ponsot’s first call. Rushed over. She summoned her strength. Control . . . she had to get control. After last night’s fruitless effort, she’d gotten this link from her contact: the guard at the lab where Benoît had been murdered.
“According to you, Darquin will attend the five o’clock mass here.”
“He’s cheap, too, wouldn’t pay for a drink at the bar. Blamed it on his constipation.”
Léonie didn’t need scatological comments from Ponsot. She didn’t pay him for that.
“Not ten minutes ago, he used the public phone,” Ponsot said. “He called a woman, acting like he’s some kind of secret agent, and left her a cryptic message.”
Why didn’t you press him, get more information? she wanted to say. It was what she paid him to do. But when so much depended on something, she’d learned you had to do it yourself.
“Merci.” She paid the flower-seller and took the fragrant blue delphiniums in her arms.
“Cryptic message?” she repeated.
“I overheard him say Benoît’s name,” he said.
At least Ponsot was good for something.
Then she saw him. An old man, in a dark blue suit too large for his shrunken frame, standing at the corner near the bus stop, by the church. Cars and buses raced around the Pantheon, leav-ing a trail of diesel exhaust. Classes over, teenage students from the Lycée Henri Quatre opposite, carrying books and wearing backpacks, spilled over the pavement on rue Clovis.
A young crowd. The old stood out. Like she did.
“Thick white hair, black-framed glasses?”
“That’s him,” Ponsot said. “Lost his wife last year.”
She edged across the pavement toward the white-striped pedestrian crossing. Only narrow, cobbled rue Montagne Sainte Geneviève lay between them.
She’d planned to find a pew near him and strike up a con-versation after mass. To enlist his aid with her offering of flowers to the Virgin. Old widowed gentlemen loved to ap-pear gallant at no cost to themselves. She’d lead him into a conversation about his job, ask where he worked, slowly guide him, and then pump him about Benoît. Find out what he’d seen in the hope of eliciting information that would lead her to the file. Nothing difficult, if she did it right.
She had to hurry, before the woman he’d contacted might appear.
Laughter and shouts from students filled the afternoon air.
“Monsieur—” the rest was lost in the ambient noise. Darquin looked up and turned, as if he recognized someone calling him. She saw a medal on his lapel, a war veteran who wouldn’t let anyone forget it.
The Number 89 bus hurtled past, blocking her view. Fol-lowed by a Renault. She heard the screech of brakes, then a loud thump, and didn’t see Darquin any more. But she heard raised voices, shouts . . . a scream. Students were pointing.
“I’m a doctor. Make way . . . clear some space! Nom de Dieu . . . the old man’s under the wheels. . . .”
The crowd parted. The flower-seller hurried into the street, raising her hand to stop traffic. And then Léonie saw blood pooling between the cobblestones’ cracks. Darquin’s body was half under the Renault.
Léonie dropped the delphiniums, backing away. No one paid attention. And no one paid attention as she melted back into the crowd.
Wednesday Late Afternoon
AIMÉE JUMPED OFF the bus across from the neo-classical columns of the Pantheon, the final resting place of the great: Voltaire, Rousseau, Émile Zola, Victor Hugo, André Malraux, and Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Among them, as well, Marie Curie, the first woman whose own accomplishments earned her a place, albeit sixty years after her death, alongside France’s most eminent men.
Aimée stuck her half-eaten tartine in her bag. Five P.M., and she had to hurry to meet Darquin. But further on, a crowd blocked her way, staring and pointing. What was going on?
Paramedics were loading a stretcher into the ambulance parked at the curb. She gasped when she saw Darquin’s chalk-white face before they pulled the sheet over it. Too late.
“What happened?” she asked the teenage girl next to her, horror-stricken.
“The old man fell. Terrible,” she was told.
“You mean just like that?” Aimée asked. “In front of the car?”
The pimple-faced boy next to her shook his head. “One minute he stood there, then he was going forward, his arms out.”
His arms out? A natural reaction to break a fall. Especially if he’d been pushed.
“Did he look confused, afraid?”
The boy shrugged. “He smiled.”
“Smiled?”
“I thought he . . . well, he reminded me of my grandfather.” The boy shifted his backpack, turned to the girl. “Come on, Sophie, we have to go.”
She couldn’t let them leave.
“How did he remind you of your grandfather?”
“He wore a military medal like my grandfather, who always talks about the war.” This boy was more alert than the aver-age teenager. “So he seemed happy, and he smiled.”
She thought for a moment. “Like he’d just met someone?”
“I guess so. He turned around and I almost bumped into him. Oui, he spoke to someone . . . then . . . I don’t know.”
An accident? She didn’t think so. Hadn’t he left her a message concerning Benoît? The poor old man had wanted the commendation after all.
She replayed Darquin’s voicemail, searching for a hint of the meaning behind his words. Nothing. Whatever he’d wanted to tell her had gone with him.
A smile, a flash of recognition . . . Darquin knew the per-son who’d pushed him in front of the car.
“Did you see the person he’d met?”
“Look, I only noticed the old man because I almost bumped into him.”
The boy and the girl left before she could suggest they talk to the flics. What could she do? What should she do?
She glanced around. It could be anyone . . . no, not anyone . . . someone from the laboratory or his neighborhood. The flics had arrived and were directing traffic; the crowd melted away. She saw no one over twenty-five.
Get out of here, said a little voice in her head. Now! Darquin had been killed only minutes before the time he’d set their meeting for.
She edged among the bystanders lingering on the pavement. The ambulance blocked the street. Then she saw the library doorway, a place to hide.
Keeping pace with the students, she ducked into the entrance of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and pulled out her library card. Access was restricted to students, scholars, and researchers. Some security, at least.
Upstairs, she entered the Salle de Lecture Labrouste, the vast reading room whose vaulted barrel-like ceiling was sup-ported by pierced leaf-patterned cast-iron arches. It always reminded her of a cross between a train station and a covered market hall. And once it had been her home away from home, during med school and later the Sorbonne.
The bibliothèque hadn’t changed: seven hundred and fifteen seats, small globe lamps interspersed among the long tables, rubber book-trolley wheels squeaking over the wood floor, the turning of pages, hushed whispers, and the smell of the sun hitting old polished wood.
She took a place that provided a view of the reading r
oom entrance but not much cover. She squeezed her eyes shut, but it didn’t erase the vision of Darquin’s chalk-white face, the blood in the cobblestone cracks. Sick at heart, she knew Darquin had been pushed to prevent him from meeting her.
But regret wouldn’t help Darquin now. She’d use the hour remaining before Banque Morel’s data system update to find answers, the answers Darquin now could never tell her.
Aimée located the fifth arrondissement business directory and found the Hydrolis company’s history and description. Founded in the 1960s, she read, by Brice Castaing. Sorbonne-educated, a geographer, his land-survey work for UN relief in Haiti had led him to develop Hydrolis, now an international firm specializing in water-treatment facilities and sewage plants. Hydrolis had grown and now counted four Caribbean countries among its clients. It was now managed by a board of directors, and his son Jèrôme was its CEO. Not much she didn’t know already.
With the help of a librarian assistant in periodicals, a twenty-something long-haired mec who gave her the eye, she requested the Journal de L’eau from the past five years and the recent Journals de Culture Haitian. Also Lancet, the British medical journal; she hoped her English wasn’t so rusty that she would be unable to understand the article on pigs.
In the marble-tiled restroom, she called Cloutier. He answered on the fifth ring; sawing and hammering noises were in the background. He’d removed an office wall, from what she could understand, and had several hours’ more work to do. There had been no message from Mireille. No use going to the office tomorrow, she thought, where she wouldn’t be able to hear herself think.
The stack of journals arrived, and she went to work. She skimmed the Journal d’Eaux’s table of contents for the past few years. In the March 1995 issue, she found an article on water sewage treatment plants in Third World countries, focusing on the Caribbean.
Her eyes began to glaze over. She could use an espresso.
She skipped over the tables and percentages of chlorine used, the facility maintenance reports, the statistics as to the flora and fauna of areas surrounding sewage-treatment plants. Hydrolis was cited as an example; it had led the way in building the water infrastructure in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Hydrolis’s 1996 proposal for expansion of their treat-ment plant outside Port-au-Prince appeared to be under consideration for World Bank funding. An addendum to the article noted that, due to the unstable political climate, foreign investment projects in conjunction with the World Bank were on hold.
