Murder in the Latin Quarter

by Cara Black

  Peaceful, another world. This was the once-sleepy edge of the Latin Quarter where Modigliani and Kees Van Dongen had painted in cheap ateliers. Not these days. “A shame how bourgouise bohemians and trendy firms infest the quartier,” she’d heard a longtime resident complain over the radio; “old-timers like us can’t afford it any more.”

  She knocked on the curtained window of the middle atelier, which bore no sign. Quiet reigned, except for the steady drip of water from a metal spigot leaving a silver trail in the moonlight. There was no answer.

  Tired, she ached to lie down. Even the pile of leaves looked inviting.

  Still no answer to her knocks. He wasn’t here. She needed to sleep. She’d call him later and discover what he hadn’t yet disclosed about the World Bank.

  If she could only make her feet move, she’d find a taxi. . . .

  The door opened and rays of light fell on the cobbles. Edouard, his sleeves rolled up, shirt collar open, stood framed in the doorway. The steady hum of a printer came from the interior.

  “Will Mireille make it?” he asked.

  She nodded. “She’s on a ventilator but she’s responding.” Her foot caught on a stray ivy vine and she stumbled.

  Edouard caught her. “Doesn’t look like you will.”

  He led her into the warm interior. Fax machines, humming copiers, and several computers filled the cramped atelier. Binders labeled IMF and WORLD BANK were stacked on the floor. A cinnamon aroma filled the air. Pinpricks of light from halogen lamps danced on the glass ceiling.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  “Drink this first.” He handed her a brown hollowed-out gourd containing a milky liquid. The rounded shape of the gourd was smooth in her hands.

  “What’s this?”

  “Un cremase. You need it.”

  She sipped a mixture of sugarcane rum, sugar, cinnamon, and coconut. It lay thick on her tongue, potent and sweet, and laced with so much alcohol, her breath could have started a fire.

  “The gourd grows on the calabas tree,” he said. “Where I come from, it’s said a spirit lives in the calabas.”

  Her mouth opened. He hadn’t seemed like the type to go native. “You believe in spirits? That’s kind of at odds with your persona.”

  “For me, gourds are like an investment.” He gestured to a shelf holding a collection of incised and carved tan and dark brown gourds.

  And then he lifted her in his arms, carried her, and set her down on a settee. Her right heel caught and her shoe fell off.

  Her arms, legs, everything felt weighted down. She strugled to stay alert. The atelier lights were like stars.

  Then his face was close to hers. Long lashes fringing those amber eyes.

  “You’re full of surprises,” he said. “Legs to forever, big eyes, and, with all that, you’re clever,” he said, running his fingers through her hair.

  Clever? She didn’t feel very smart. But she wanted him to keep talking, to keep running his hand through her hair.

  “Your hair is full of bits of . . .” He looked down at a pebble in his hand. He sniffed it. “Limestone.” A pensive look came over his face. “Why didn’t I put it together? Mireille was in the quarry with the illegals, right?”

  “You’re perceptive, Eurodad.” She realized she was still holding the gourd and took a long sip. And another.

  Sweetness lingered in her mouth. The rum had gone straight to her head. And his lime scent reminded her of Yves, the last man in her life.

  She propped herself up on her elbow, wishing she didn’t look such a mess. Wishing she didn’t crave the sensation of his fingers running through her hair. Wishing she wasn’t attracted to him.

  Down, girl, she told herself.

  She pointed to the World Bank binders. “It all comes down to Benoît’s report, doesn’t it?”

  He nodded. The light shone on his burnished cheekbones.

  “And here I thought you were a bad boy.”

  He smiled, the first smile she’d seen. “Well, I do have a dark side.”

  “Liar.” She couldn’t believe she’d said that.

  “Guess I need to prove it.”

  “But the World Bank—”

  “Later.”

  His arms were around her again. Enveloping arms, his citrus scent and his warm breath in her ear, his lips trailing down her neck. She didn’t want him to do this, but at the same time she hoped he wouldn’t stop. How did that song go . . . “How can this be wrong when it feels so right.”

  And then his fingers unzipped her dress, her legs were around him. His black hair and shoulders were framed by the glass ceiling. A single morning star blinked in the apricot blush of dawn.

  Friday Midday

  RINGING CAME FROM far away. Aimée’s head felt heavy, her brain fogged with the longing for more sleep. She spooned into the warm arms cocooning her.

  The insistent ringing pierced the layers of sleep. She felt measured breaths warm on her neck. Her eyes blinked open. She heard the soft patter of rain, like cat’s paws, above on the glass roof. Saw the overturned gourd, her dress and heels on the floor. Slants of light patterned the wooden floor. And she remembered where she was.

  Edouard’s atelier. His long legs wrapped around hers, that cleft in his cinammoncolored chin. In his sleep, he nuzzled her neck.

  More ringing. Her cell phone. Mireille . . . what if her condition had worsened? Stupid, sleeping with Edouard; stupid, wanting to nestle, feel him all around her.

  She forced herself to move out of his warm arms, picked up her clothes and bag from the floor. Her phone had stopped ringing. Barefoot, she padded past computers and leaned against the fax machine, pulling on her dress, zipping it and slipping into her heels. Her eye fell on the fax tray. A sheet with the words “Benoît’s World Bank proposal, meet me at Le Champo, 3 P.M. Léonie.”

  Léonie. World Bank. She and Edouard had never gotten that far. What hadn’t Edouard told her?

  Dying for an espresso, she looked around. No kitchen. She grabbed the faxes from the tray. She’d check her phone mes-sages outside, bring coffee back from a café. It was not the time to wake him up; she’d do that later. And discover his connection to the World Bank.

  An overcast pewter sky hung over the courtyard. Raindrops beaded the glass roofs, trailing in rivulets. A steady drip from the overhead gutter mingled with the scratching of a broom from the pavement outside the courtyard’s open door. Aimée took cover under the glass awning in the corner. Damp vegetal smells came from the pots of geraniums and leafy hanging branches.

  She put her finger to one ear to hear better and checked her messages. “Call me” from René. She’d call him later. The second from Professeur Zarek. “Good news, Aimée. Mireille’s responding well. We only had to keep her on the ventilator an hour. No complications, she’s stable and resting. Now I’m going to sleep.”

  Aimée’s shoulders sagged in relief. Time for that espresso.

  Loud footsteps filled the courtyard.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Messieurs?” said a woman’s voice.

  Aimée peered through the branches as what looked like an army of men in rain jackets strutted past an older woman. The concierge, by the look of her blue work smock. She bran-dished her broom at the leader, a man with his back to Aimée who towered over her.

  “You can’t barge in here like this!”

  “But we can, Madame.”

  Aimée saw the flash of a plastic laminated card, and, as he turned, the orange armband labeled police. Panic hit the pit of her stomach.

  He gestured to the men lined up outside Edouard’s atelier door.

  Her cell phone rang. She hit ANSWER with shaking fingers.

  “Come back to bed.” Edouard’s sleep-filled voice. “I miss you, we’ll take up where we left off—”

  “Get up! There are flics outside your door.”

  Fists pounded on his door.

  A clanging sound. He must have dropped the phone.

  “Did you bri
ng them here?” he demanded, awake now, accusing.

  “Non. Is there a back door, a window?”

  “Merde!”

  “Who’s Léonie? How’s she involved?”

  “What?”

  “She wants to meet you at 3 P.M. . . .”

  “The salope. You have to stop her, understand?”

  “Why?”

  “Stop her before it’s too late.”

  “But how?”

  The phone went dead.

  The flic raised his arm. “If you’ll step aside, Madame, and let us do our job,” he said. He gestured to the others. “Let’s go.”

  They used a metal crowbar to crack the doorframe.

  Aimée kept to the eaves, her head down, shoulders trembling. At the courtyard door she turned right, holding her bag over her head as if against the rain, shielding her face from the parked flic cars. She made herself walk at a normal pace, keeping abreast of a woman pushing a wheeled shopping cart. Something rubbed against her hip. She reached in her pocket. It was a key. The key from Mireille’s bag. And Mireille’s words came back to her . . . “Marie Curie.”

  What had she been thinking? Stumbling into Edouard’s atelier, then his warm arms, because he had reminded her of Yves. How could she have slept with him? While the key to Benoît’s file was in her hand.

  Mireille had begged her to take the file but had had no time to tell her where it was. Mireille had hidden it. Locked it away.

  She tried Edouard’s number, got a busy signal. Right now she couldn’t help him except by meeting this Léonie. Her watch read 1 P.M.

  The sky opened and rain pelted the street. Every passing taxi had an OCCUPIED light. Her hair wet, rain soaking her jacket, she kept pace with the woman with the wheeled shop-ping cart as far as the corner. There she broke into a run.

  She had to find what this key opened.

  Aimée scanned the street. No flics. No taxis. The nearest Metro blocks away.

  She pulled out her pocket map, scanning the rain-beaded page of the fifth arrondissement. The Marie Curie Institute and Museum was only two streets over.

  She didn’t stop until she spied the Curie Museum’s door-way. Soaked and panting, she bolted into a group of laughing schoolchildren huddled in the shelter of the doorway for protection from the rain. She helped up a small girl from the ground.

  “Pardon me,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  The girl nodded. A tag saying “Ecole Maternelle 2eme, Sylvaine” was pinned to her rain jacket. “The museum’s boring. It’s more fun watching the rain.”

  Rain peppered the rising gutters, splashing up like silver needles. The teachers stood, smoking, below an overhang. Several boys played piggyback, others exchanged trading cards, the backpacks at their feet getting soaked.

  Aimée took off her damp jacket. Across from the fawn-brown brick building stood the blue-and-white street sign, rue Pierre et Marie Curie. Sheets of rain fell on the Curie Institute complex. The narrow street branched toward the Pantheon and Ecole Normale Supérieure.

  She leaned down. Her heels slipped and she braced herself against the wall. Her gaze locked with that of the little girl. “So, Sylvaine, did you like the museum?”

  “It smells funny.”

  “Funny?”

  Sylvaine’s ponytailed head bobbed, her eyes serious. “Lots of radioactive things there. But we couldn’t see them. They’re invisible. We saw old machines.”

  “You’re on a school field trip, non?” Aimée asked.

  “The only fun part was the ‘race for radium’ game we played,” she said. “The old lady had discovered invisible things, but we couldn’t figure out how she did it.”

  “Ah, you mean Marie Curie?”

  “She looked like a farmer with a microscope.”

  A farmer for radium. Aimée tried not to smile. “But look how smart Marie was.” Aimée pointed to the street sign. “She worked hard, and they named this street after her.”

  Sylvaine’s brow furrowed in thought. “If I have to work that hard, I want the place clean.”

  As if Madame Curie had had the choice, Aimée thought. She’d discovered radium in an abandoned shed formerly used as a dissecting room by the School of Medicine. She’d been lucky to have been allowed to set up a lab there.

  The force of the rain was dwindling. The teachers ground out their cigarettes under their shoes. “En y va, children. Time to go.”

  Aimée edged backward among the children. Had Mireille meant the Marie Curie Museum? Or the Institute? Neither made sense; Benoît had been an expert on pigs, not radiation.

  But this was a place to start.

  Aimée followed a hallway, emerging in the visitors’ line at the desk in the dark narrow lobby where a receptionist pecked away on a computer keyboard, a phone crooked between his neck and shoulder. Steam curled from the cup of espresso by the keyboard. The bitter aroma made her want a sip.

  “Next?”

  Two people were ahead of her.

  Aimée picked up a museum pamphlet. Photos of a simple laboratory, and of a young woman in a long black skirt poised over a microscope, were displayed. One page gave a timeline of her experiments and discoveries, her struggle with Institute Pasteur for funding and of her Nobel prizes.

  On the wall was her photo, beneath the words “‘A scientist is also a child placed opposite natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.’—Marie Curie, 1933.”

  Amazing, Aimée thought: this little woman, who against all odds had changed the course of science and of the world. And then died of cancer from exposure to the radioactive materials she’d discovered.

  “The tour’s filled.” The man at reception looked up with a harried frown. “Next one’s in an hour.”

  “I’d like to speak to the administrator,” Aimée said.

  “Concerning?”

  “We have a few questions concerning the Institute’s internal audit.”

  He took a sip of espresso from the small white demitasse cup. “We weren’t told. Your people always make an appointment.”

  “Not these days.”

  “The director’s in a meeting.” He shook his head. “Impossible.”

  Directors were always in meetings. But she was determined. Mireille had said “Marie Curie.” “What’s the name of her assistant? I forget.”

  “Monsieur Carnet?”

  “C’est ca.” She nodded. “If you’ll show me to his office?”

  “He’s busy.”

  She smiled. “I don’t think I heard you right, Monsieur.”

  “Eh?” he said.

  “I think what you meant to say is that you’re happy to assist and prove helpful to our internal audit, which will affect your funding. And your job.”

  He set the cup down. “Your name?”

  “Mademoiselle Leduc.”

  A few moments later, she stood in a small office.

  “Mademoiselle Leduc?” A man with a white beard contrasting with his short cropped black hair extended his hands to catch and pump hers in a dry grip.

  “We’re not prepared, our director’s at a meeting, this seems—”

  “Highly irregular, I know,” she interrupted with a broad smile. “But I need your help. It’s confidential, of course.”

  The receptionist reappeared with two steaming demitasses of espresso, then bowed out.

  “Please sit down.”

  She set her cell phone to vibrate and crossed her legs, wishing her damp dress didn’t cling like skin. She plopped two cubes of brown sugar, stirred, drank, and welcomed the jolt of caffeine. As she brushed back her wet hair, she caught Edouard’s scent on her wrist and the scene of the flics raiding his atelier flashed through her mind. Right now she couldn’t think about that. The key and Mireille’s words were the only things she had to go on.

  And as her father always said, if you have to lie, stick to the truth as much as possible.

  “To save your time, Monsieur Carnet, I’ll get to the point.” She leaned forward as i
f to share a confidence, showing him her father’s police ID to which she’d forged her own name.

  Monsieur Carnet’s shoulders stiffened.

  “Our administrator deals with such things, I’m—”

  “—part of the managerial staff who, I’m sure, will prove help-ful,” she finished for him. “I’m investigating a homicide.” She passed him the key from Mireille’s bag. “Do you recognize this?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Monsieur Carnet, we found this on the victim.”

  Flustered, he dropped the key on top of a requisition order pad.

  “Homicide? Murder?” He sprung from his chair like a frightened bird. “Why are you asking me?”

  She wished he’d answer instead of asking questions.

  “The victim was a professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieur. We’re investigating possible links—”

  Recognition replaced the confusion in his small eyes. “Pro-fesseur Benoît!”

  She clutched the edge of the desk. Carnet had known him. Then she realized that the Ecole Normale Supérieur was right around the corner. These Grands Ecoles and the top re-searchers hung around together.

  “So you knew him?”

  “The canteen.”

  The man stared at her as if she’d understand.

  “Now I don’t understand. Can you explain?”

  “They’re renovating the Institute kitchen, so we eat at the ENS canteen.” Monsieur Carnet sat back down. “I eat . . . ate lunch with him. The news of his death horrified me.”

  Excited, she leaned forward.

  “Did you eat with Professeur Benoît on Monday?”

  “Monday? I don’t remember.” Carnet blinked. “Mais oui, of course, the cassoulet. . . .”

  Food. Funny how memories often came down to food.

  “Why didn’t you inform the authorities about this?”

  Carnet’s hands brushed over the oak desk’s smooth surface. Aimée’s antennae went up.

  “You let Benoît keep something here, didn’t you?”