by Cara Black
“For what? Questions, a police report?”
The last thing she wanted. But René was hurt.
She fumed, wishing the light they were stopped at would turn green.
“No reports!” René said. “No surgery!”
But right now he was losing blood. “Where were you shot?”
“I need a few stitches, that’s all. . . .”
“René, you don’t know that.” She ground into first, accelerating toward Boulevard Saint Germain.
“Jumping to conclusions as always, Aimée. The place was a trash heap. I just cut myself on glass from a broken bottle. Look.”
He lifted his arm. She saw a glint of glass in a deep slash. There was only an ooze of blood. “You were in medical school. Can’t you fix this?” he asked.
Her jaw dropped. “Me?”
“Forget the hospital. I’m not going.”
Was he trying to do her a favor, knowing the flics would question her about Mireille?
“René, you know I dropped out of Ecole de Médicine . . . you need real medical attention at a hospital.”
“First carrying me, and now insisting on a hospital. . . . No way.”
She’d humiliated him, as he saw it. But what else could she have done? Or was there more behind his refusal? He’d always avoided hospitals, fearing surgeons who wanted to put him under the knife to try surgical intervention to cure his hip dysplasia.
“René, I don’t have instruments. And I certainly don’t have the knowledge,” she said. “And when was your last tetanus shot?”
She saw the determined set to his mouth.
“But I know someone who can help,” she finally offered.
“I thought so,” René said, a groan escaping his lips. “Hurry up.”
* * *
AIMÉE’S STOMACH CHURNED. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to watch. At the wooden table in the pantry, Professeur Zarek’s brow was furrowed in concentration, her bifocals reflecting the penlight Aimée held while she probed in René’s chest with tweezers. In the adjoining white-tiled kitchen, a kettle boiled on the stove, steaming up the back windows facing the Ecole de Médicine. Through the dining-room double doors came children’s squeals and low adult voices.
Only eight o’clock, but it felt like midnight.
“Voilà,” said Professeur Zarek. “The culprit.” A triangular brown glass shard emerged. “Hmm . . . from a Belgian lambic beer, framboise flavored,” she said, reading the still-attached label.
René winced. “Nice to know.”
Professeur Zarek shrugged. “You’re fortunate it missed the artery. And if you’d moved much more, you would have bled like a stuck pig.” She grinned. “Sorry for the medical jargon.”
The last stitch sewed, Professeur Zarek pulled off her surgical gloves, revealing the faint number tattooed on the inside of her arm. She smoothed a stray hair into her white bun and glanced back toward the kitchen.
“You’re still practicing, Professeur?” Aimée asked. She must be past retirement age, Aimée thought, despite her unlined face, taut skin, and petite figure, not much taller than René. Professeur Zarek was part of the wartime generation: no meat, dairy if they were lucky, and then the camps. At medical school, the rumor went, Professeur Zarek’s hair had turned white at seventeen, in the Lodz ghetto.
“I’m called in for consults at the dissection lab,” she said. “A young boy had fallen through a skylight, the shard pierced . . . well, he wasn’t so lucky.”
René swallowed hard. Aimée met his gaze, then Professeur Zarek’s.
“More than lucky,” she said. “If the shard had lodged just a centimeter to the left . . . and. . . .”
Aimée’s knees weakened, thinking what could have happened to René.
“I don’t want to know the story, Aimée.” Professeur Zarek raised her hand. Then she reached for a crystal decanter on the pantry shelf behind her. “This calls for something medicinal, wouldn’t you say?” With a brisk air, she poured thimblefuls of liquid into small pastis glasses. “Eau de vie distilled in Normandy, from a patient.”
The tang of blood and antiseptic mingled with the pear-liquor aroma. Aimée sank onto a kitchen chair.
The liquor took Aimée back to Professeur Zarek’s office, when she had been Aimée’s department adviser, and the late February afternoon on which she’d dropped out of medical school.
“Madame le Professeur, it’s with respect that I must tell you. . . .” Aimée had hesitated. “I’m not cut out for this program.”
“How many times have I heard that pun!” Professeur Zarek made a pained face.
Instead of the protest Aimée had expected, Professeur Zarek nodded. “Your gift lies elsewhere, Aimée.”
She had felt inadequate, struggling to keep up. Squeamish at the sight of preserved organs beside her yogurt in the lab refrigerator. With that weakness, she wouldn’t even have made a good flic like her father.
The professor shrugged. “You’ll disappoint your parents’ expectations. . . .”
The opposite, in fact. Her father never had understood her studying so hard and passing the scientific baccalauréat exam, determined to enter the field of medicine.
“Guilt’s a luxury.” Professeur Zarek lit a filtered Gitane with her Bic lighter and exhaled a stream of blue smoke. It lingered in the air. She gave an odd smile. “Only the living can afford it.”
Aimée didn’t know what to say. Rays of weak light hit the professor’s desk. Treatises and medical journals were piled on shelves in the bookcases. Acrid cigarette smoke mingled with the smell of paper and old books.
“To tell the truth, I didn’t think you’d last this long,” Professeur Zarek told her. “The first year weeds out 84 percent. Only one out of six make it. Don’t beat yourself up over this. It’s not worth it.”
“But I wanted to try. . . .” Try harder.
“Take it from me. Guilt doesn’t change anything. Or bring anyone back.” Professeur Zarek’s eyes shone; deep dark pin-pricks, their gaze somewhere else. In some other time. Another place.
She’d pulled a decanter and two shot glasses from her desk drawer and uncorked the crystal stopper. It had contained amber liquor smelling of pears. “From a patient. Homemade in Normandy, eau de vie.”
She poured the clear liquid into the glasses. But then there was only the sweet smell of the liquor, not the coppery smell of blood.
“Aimée . . . Aimée?”
Startled, Aimée came back to the present. She was standing in Professeur Zarek’s pantry. René was stitched up, and a birthday party was going on in the dining room.
“Your heels, Aimée. Look at the blood on your shoes.”
Her mind went to the mannequin caught like a fly in a spider’s web, Mireille’s effigy, the shots, the headless chicken. . . .
She grabbed a paper towel. “Désolée, Professeur, I’ll clean this up.” She got down on her hands and ripped fishnet-stockinged knees to wipe the floor clean.
Professeur Zarek downed her eau de vie. “Now if you don’t mind, Aimée, my granddaughter’s birthday. . . .”
“Forgive me for taking you away,” she said. “Many thanks.”
“For what? An excuse to share a drink with a former student and her partner?” She paused. “Just make sure you go out the back entrance through the courtyard.”
“Grand-mère!” A doe-eyed four-year-old, with chocolate cream icing like a moustache on her lip, stood at the pantry door. “I saved you a piece, Grand-mère.” She opened her small arms. “This big.”
“So you did, mon p’tit chou.” Professeur Zarek leaned down to kiss her forehead. Only Aimée noticed the slight tremor in the professor’s cheek. Then it was gone. With a quick movement, she rolled her sleeve down over her tattoo. “So you did.”
WIND WHIPPED UP the narrow street. The pillared Ecole de Médicine loomed darkly ahead. Aimée paced on the worn cobblestones outside Professeur Zarek’s building, deep in thought. “René, we disrupted a ritual.”
A sharp dresser, René wore only handmade shirts.
“Mireille talked of Ogoun, a vodou deity,” she said. “But she said the traffickers promised to let her have her papers back. If they lured her by performing a vodou ritual. . . .”
“To shoot her?” René paused, his hand on the door handle. “Who knows? More to the point, the bad guys saw you. They heard you warn Mireille.”
Her chest tightened.
“Come clean with Morbier, Aimée!” René said. “Tell him what’s happened.”
“That we fled from a shooting?” No use arguing with René right now. And then it hit her.
“We’ll listen to the police scanner in your car.” Why hadn’t she thought of this before?
“To find out—”
“What the flics know, René,” she interrupted. “If they’ve apprehended those mecs.” Or Mireille.
Inside René’s car, she switched on the police radio scanner. Short phrases came over the police frequency . . . “Alpha . . . Arènes de Lutèce . . . suspects fled . . . no sign of the depart-ing vehicle. . . . Make? Looked like Citroën DS tailights . . . no license number noted . . . not visible . . . any victim? . . . negative.”
Relief mingled with disappointment. No Mireille.
René leaned forward in alarm. “The flics will run every Cit-roën DS registration in Paris through the computer.” He turned the knob to lower the scanner volume. His green eyes flashed. “They’ll pull me over tomorrow en route to my meeting at La Défense.”
“It doesn’t work like that, René,” she said. “They don’t have a license plate number. And checking thousands of Citroëns takes time. Princess Diana’s on their mind right now. There’s a manhunt on for that Fiat Uno, the one that fled the Pont d’Alma tunnel. They won’t have the manpower to devote to us.”
“All the more reason to explain to Morbier.”
“Not after what he told me last night,” she said. “The Brigade’s ready to haul me in.”
“Ridiculous. You’re not an accessory to murder.”
“The flics noted my scooter’s license plate on rue Buffon,” she said. “Mireille came to my apartment last night; right after that, Morbier ‘dropped in.’ I’ve seen men watching my place, but I don’t know who they work for. I need to know how this all fits together.”
“Stop trying to connect everything that’s happened, Aimée.” He raised his hands. “You’re grasping—”
“High-powered rifles with night-vision sights and a vodou ritual, the chicken. . . .” She shook her head. “I need to under-stand what it means. Can you reach Loussant?”
“He doesn’t have a phone. I told you.”
Great. The traffickers who were going to elaborate lengths to trap Mireille might have murdered Benoît. But that made little sense unless the set up had been staged as a warning to Mireille. A complicated warning. Too complicated. And to warn her of what? Mireille had been convinced that whoever was following her was after Benoît’s file.
“Go home and take care of yourself, Aimée.”
Guilt washed over her. “You’ve suffered trauma to your chest. I’ll drive you home, René, then. . . .”
René raised his eyebrow. “Then what?”
“Play it by ear.” She shrugged. “Find a Haitian resto or bar where students hung out. Ask questions. Shoot arrows in the dark, see if one strikes home.”
“Another wild goose chase?” René’s voice lowered. “Look, you haven’t heard the last from Mireille. She’s desperate, she’ll find you. Tomorrow there’s the contractor to deal with at the office. I’m at La Défense. You have to concentrate on work.”
True.
“Have you seen the office, René? It’s knee-deep in plaster. You can’t hear yourself think for the sound of drills.”
“Work at home.”
“Good idea.”
Her exhausted body cried out for sleep. The twenty-four-hour kind. But if she didn’t attempt to find out what lay behind this . . . she wouldn’t sleep a wink anyway.
“First I’ll take you home. Then I’ll take a taxi.”
René didn’t argue, just opened the car door and slumped back against the seat.
She pulled into his underground garage on rue de la Reynie. “There’s something you’re not telling me, René.”
In the dark garage, she felt his warm hand on hers. “You’re obsessed with Mireille.” He paused. “But it’s been almost two years since Yves was murdered, and we never talk about it.”
She twisted the copper puzzle ring on her third finger, the ring Yves had given her the night before his murder. Yves, her fiance for a brief night, had been an investigative journalist. She’d tried to get over his death. Did René think she was try-ing to avoid her grief for Yves by distracting herself with Mireille? She didn’t want to talk about it.
“What’s to say?”
“So, no ‘bad boys’ in sight?”
Edouard? Attractive, but she didn’t trust him.
“Not a one, partner,” she said. “For now, that’s fine. I burden you enough with my nonexistent love life. You’re sweet, René.” She leaned across the seat and bent to kiss his cheek.
He felt rigid.
“You all right, René? Let me help you upstairs and get you settled in. I noticed you limping.”
“That’s all you noticed?”
She could feel the atmosphere change. She’d said the wrong thing.
“Of course not,” she said. “Your idea about that startup, get-ting in on the ground floor, is brilliant.”
“I’ve heard things . . . a boom,” Réne said, “but if it’s got no foundation. . . .”
Second thoughts? He’d seemed so excited the other night. She’d felt cautious, for once more careful than René, wary of the dot.com bubble hype.
“Let’s explore it,” she said. “Anyway, we’ll talk tomorrow.”
An odd look shone in his eyes. Then he opened the door. Slammed it.
What had she done wrong now?
“René?” She ran after him to the elevator.
He turned. Worry replaced the anger in his tone. “Forget this so-called sister, Aimée.”
“Mirielle? I can’t . . . she’s . . . I think she’s really my sister.”
“And that proves what?”
“A family. The only one I have.”
“Right. And now you’re in danger, too. Don’t you see?”
“I’ll handle it, René.”
“If you’re out of commission, how can you help her? Or our business?”
“It was selfish of me to put you in danger. Forgive me.”
“Like it’s the first time, Aimée?” He shook his head. “Talk to Morbier. If you don’t trust him, well, you know other flics, right?”
She nodded. But it had gone beyond that. The help she needed had to come from the other side. “You’re right, René,” is what she said.
* * *
WERE MEN WATCHING her apartment? She was tired, her nerves were frayed. She didn’t want to find out. She reached Madame Cachou, her concierge, on her cellphone. Despite the late hour, Madame agreed to mind Miles Davis, who loved her.
After a ten-minute walk, Aimée rounded the block onto rue du Louvre. The corner café’s windows were dark. A couple holding hands were walking to the corner; otherwise the street lay deserted. No watchers in sight. A light shone from the office window below that of Leduc Detective.
She kept to the shadows. Inside her building, she mounted two flights of the narrow staircase in the dark. From the landing, she could hear the muted sound of classical radio, a France-Inter symphony concert, the real estate broker’s usual choice at this time of night. The only other occupant, on the floor below her, who worked late. She took off her heels and padded upstairs barefoot. The
dim single bulb barely revealed the hall’s scuffed woodwork. A smell of floor wax lingered in the air.
Leduc Detective’s frosted glass door was dark, the landing deserted. She clasped her Swiss Army Knife in one hand, her office keys in the other. Silence, apart from the last strains of the Haydn concerto below.
She unlocked the door and shuddered when the bolt made a noise. Then she stuck her knife out. Fine plaster dust, visible in the light from the window, carpeted the floor. Like a moonscape, plastic sheets covered the desks and furniture.
The room was empty.
Her shoulders sagged in relief. Lathe and plaster poked from the opening cut in the wall. Cloutier’s tools littered the parquet floor.
She wedged the top of the Louis Quinze chair under the door handle and stacked phone books on the seat. She’d make it difficult for anyone to break in; and if they did, she’d be ready.
From the coat rack she took her shearling suede coat, bought in the market in Istanbul. Tired, she pulled off the plastic covering the recamier, set her shoes beneath it and her knife within easy reach under the cushion. She pulled the coat over her and rolled up her jacket for a pillow.
But, too on edge to sleep, she grew aware of a thumping sound. Wide awake now, she grabbed her knife. Her gaze swept the dark outlines of her desk, the fax machine covered by plastic. No one. The chair stood firmly braced against the door.
She sniffed, finding only the smell of decay and old wood from the open wall. The hint of sewer gas. She tiptoed bare-foot to the radiator as the sounds got louder. Faster. Listening, she backed up against the marble fireplace. Rue du Louvre’s globed streetlights were reflected as hazy pinpoints in the tarnished beveled mirror. There was an invitation to a vernissage, a painter friend’s gallery opening, wedged in the frame. From last summer.
She heard a muted shout, what sounded like cries, and then the rhythmic thumps ceased, followed by a woman’s throaty laugh. No wonder, she thought, and she stepped back. The realtor below had a new paramour. He went through new secretaries with regularity.
She stared at her father’s photo on the shelf; even in the dim light, she could make out his crooked, tired smile. It was a mask, she realized; the past and his secrets had gone with his ashes to the marble drawer in the Père Lachaise mausoleum. Why hadn’t he told her she had a sister? Had he been ashamed? Or was he ignorant of Mireille’s existence? She’d never know.
