Murder in the Latin Quarter

by Cara Black

  “I d-don’t know what you mean.”

  Nervously, his hands went to his striped tie, adjusting the knot.

  “You dined with him, you knew him,” she said. “Did he seem different, upset that day? Of course you asked him what was troubling him, offered to help?”

  Carnet bolted from his chair. “Mademoiselle, I don’t see what any of this has to do with—”

  “Professeur Benoît’s murder? But it does, Monsieur. We think he was murdered for the papers you were hiding for him.”

  “Mais non!” He shook his head. “Impossible.”

  “You sound sure, Monsieur Carnet.”

  Carnet’s mouth twitched. “Benoît is . . . esteemed as a researcher and scientist.” Carnet glared folding his arms across his chest. “He must stay that way.”

  “He was murdered on Monday night,” she said. “Would you prefer to accompany me to the Commissariat?” She let her words dangle. And regretted them right away. She had no authority to take him in, much less question him. But she knew someone who could. She reached for her phone, about to punch in Morbier’s number.

  “Non, please. He said it was confidential.” Carnet’s words were halting. “H-he said it concerned a personal matter with a woman . . . he didn’t want to walk back into the classroom with . . .” Carnet averted his eyes. “Porno.”

  Porno? Photos of some woman in a compromising position? She didn’t think so.

  Benoît had given his report to Carnet for safekeeping, telling him to keep it hidden, confiding a false reason for doing so. But whoever he’d met later at the Cluny concert, she figured, had scared him. So he’d entrusted the key to Mireille, trusting no one but her, a fellow Haitian, a woman who owed him, a woman who’d understand the file’s importance. Or had it been the opposite, that Benoît had counted on Mireille’s not understanding the contents? Even safer.

  “You’ll keep this to yourself?”

  She glanced at the time. Almost two o’clock.

  “Of course, Monsieur. Please show me what this key opens,” she said. “I’m in a hurry.”

  He led her down the corridor, past an old laboratory, Marie Curie’s simple and spartan office containing bookshelves, her desk, chairs, and a fireplace.

  “We decontaminated the building in the eighties,” Carnet said as they navigated a warren of passages. “Otherwise, you’d never be allowed back here. Too many of our workers had high radioactive counts.”

  Even then? Aimée shivered.

  Carnet pointed to a door bearing faded black script: RADIUM REPORTS. He opened it to reveal a small, dark wood-paneled room lined with old-fashioned lockers.

  “This one.” Carnet pointed to the first on the left. “You’ll keep this confidential?” he asked again.

  “Oui, Monsieur Carnet, don’t worry about Professeur Benoît’s reputation . . . it’s strictly confidential.”

  Aimée put the key in the old lock. It fit. She turned the key and opened the door. Inside the dusty-smelling chamber was a padded envelope marked “Mireille.”

  At last!

  ON RUE PIERRE and Marie Curie, a slight drizzle bedewed the metal fence. Aimée hurried to the next street and around the corner until she found an Internet café. She took a table near the back by the terminals. Expectantly, she slit open the envelope and withdrew the contents: several folded sheets of yellow graph paper. She unfolded them. Three pages were covered with chemical formulas, tables of statistics, percent-ages, and more chemical formulas. No header, no names, not even Benoît’s. These were lab worksheets.

  She couldn’t make head or tail of them. It looked like Greek to her. Crestfallen, she wondered what these formulas meant and why they’d caused a man’s murder. But she knew someone who would understand and whom she trusted.

  He was working today. With luck, he’d decipher these notes and tell her what they meant before 3 P.M.

  Aimée handed a ten-franc piece to the kohleyed woman with platinum blond spiked hair at the fax machine. “I’d like to send a three-page fax.”

  “Cover sheet?” the woman asked with the rolling vowels of a northern, Lille, accent.

  “No cover sheet. I’m in a hurry.” About to hand the papers to the woman, she noticed two men standing in the rain out-side the windows of the café. She hadn’t seen them when she came in.

  “The fax number?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  She punched in the fax number for Serge, the morgue lab pathologist, and fed in the sheets of Benoît’s writing.

  “Receipt?” the woman asked.

  “No, thanks,” Aimée said. “Don’t turn your head,” she con-tinued to the woman, “but do you see two men outside in leather jackets?” She put the sheets back in her bag.

  “The ones who’re getting all wet?” A real Lilloise by the sound of her.

  “That’s right,” Aimée said.

  “They must like you,” the woman said.

  Aimée’s chest tightened. “How’s that?”

  “One of them’s pointing at you,” she said.

  “There’s a back door here, right?” Aimée said, placing a twenty-franc note by the fax machine.

  “In back next to the WC,” she said.

  “And you never saw me leave.”

  The woman pocketed the note, slipping the confirmation printout into the shredder. “I never even saw you at all.”

  AIMÉE MADE HERSELF walk at a normal pace. Instead of going back to her table, she headed for the Ladies’ Room. Next to it was the sign marked exit. She pushed open the door and emerged into the rain and a traffic-clogged street. She took off running, zigzagging between the cars, inhaling the fumes of the buses that had ground to a halt. She had to make the most of her few minutes’ head start.

  She turned the corner, dodged into the first open door, climbed up the stairs, and found herself in the imposing marble-floored entrance foyer of the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Law. She stepped inside the first lecture hall she came to and stood at the back.

  No one paid her the slightest attention. The students’ attention was focused on a speaker at the proscenium. All heads were bent, taking notes.

  She called Serge’s private lab line and cupped her hand over her cell phone.

  His voicemail responded. Merde!

  “Serge, I’ve faxed you three sheets of paper,” she whispered. “Call me to tell me what they mean, and I’ll owe you for life.”

  She backed out, crossed the foyer, and headed for the rear exit on rue Cujas.

  CINEMA CHAMPOLLION, DUBBED “le Champo” by generations of students, curved around rue des Ecoles. A for-mer music hall, it had showed films since the Occupation. Le Champo, started by a critic, had run on a shoestring maintained by film buffs, students, and future directors like Claude Chabrol. A Romy Schneider film retrospective was running according to old black-and-white film posters.

  Aimée scanned the minuscule foyer.

  Several students and an old man stood in line, buying tickets for the afternoon matinee. No one else. She had no clue what Léonie looked like, much less how to stop her. She tried Edouard’s number. Six long rings, then Edouard’s phone turned off without even offering voicemail.

  Why would the flics raid his place if he belonged to Euro-dad? What had happened to him? And so far there was no word from Serge explaining what Benoît’s notations meant and how they related to the World Bank.

  “The film is starting, Mademoiselle,” said the usher.

  Aimée slid her francs over the worn counter, received a torn ticket in return, and found her way into a hundred-seat theater. She took a seat in the back row. A 1968 Pathé news-reel showed the Sorbonne protests, long-haired students throwing cobblestones, the flics marching in formation from the Pantheon, screaming and yelling, was on the screen.

  Déjà vu.

  Her mother had taken her to the Sorbonne protests to hand out banners they’d lettered with VIVE LA REVOLUTION. Aimée remembered the cold rain, tugging on her mother’s sleeve, wondering what it a
ll meant, why her mother’s eyes shone. She heard her mother’s voice with that American accent, saying “We’re changing the world, making history here. You’re part of it, Aimée!”

  But what had they changed? These Sixty-eighters now paid mortgages, wore suits, worked in the government and ministries they’d vowed to tear down. And her mother? Banned from France, a former terrorist declared persona non grata, on the world security watchlist.

  But these memories got her nowhere. The hollowness of loss never went away, but her mother had. Stop. She had to keep to the business at hand. Finding Léonie. The old man slumped in his seat; the two students cuddled entwined, ignoring the film. There were no other heads silhouetted against the screen.

  The title Phantom of Love flashed on the screen, the film credits rolled, and the camera settled on Romy Schneider’s pale face, her pouting lips and famous widely spaced eyes projecting a vulnerable waif-like quality. The haunting opening strains of a cello filled the theater.

  A woman took an aisle seat a few rows ahead of Aimée. She looked around at the red velvet seats and turned, revealing a stylish coiffure and an expectant air.

  No one else had entered the theater.

  Aimée left her seat and hunkered down in the aisle by the woman. In the darkened theater, Aimée couldn’t see much except that the woman wore a white wool suit, Escada by the look of it, and that her complexion was too tan for the Riviera. Her hands played over the Virgin Mary medal near the pearl button of her jacket.

  “Léonie?” Aimée asked.

  The woman spoke under her breath, not moving her head. “I talk to principals, not messengers.”

  Nice attitude! But what had she expected? Edouard had called her a salope.

  “My name is Aimée Leduc. I’m a detective.” Aimée’s knees hurt from crouching in the aisle. “The flics raided Edouard’s atelier. But you know that, don’t you? He wants you to stop the proposal.”

  Royet had warned her! Léonie’s hand gripped the medal. “Raided . . . when?”

  The old man a few rows up turned around, glaring. “Shhh!”

  “Just a matter of time until they show up here,” Aimée whispered and gripped her arm, leaned forward. “Say five minutes?”

  “Who do you work for?” Léonie asked, not missing a beat.

  A shiver ran through Aimée. She wondered what this woman’s connections were.

  “It’s personal.”

  “Everything’s personal. Especially money.”

  Did Léonie think she wanted to broker a deal, for a price? How could she stop Léonie when she was clueless? It felt like driving in night fog on a twisting mountain road, hairpin curves every few feet and no visibility. “My sister’s been accused of Benoît’s murder.”

  “Quiet!” The old man turned around again.

  Léonie’s lips pursed. “You want to clear her? Meet me in the lobby.”

  Aimée waited outside the quilted-leather swinging doors. Three minutes passed. Had she played it wrong? She hurried back into the theater. Only three heads were silhouetted against the screen now.

  No Léonie. Gone. How could she have been so stupid?

  Aimée ran toward the EXIT sign, pushed it open, and stood on rue des Ecoles. Students crowded under the café awning ahead of her. She scanned the pavement in the drizzling rain.

  No taxi stand, no bus stop. No Léonie.

  The rain beat harder. Every doorway held shivering wet bystanders, café entrances were filled with slim, jeaned, androgynous types and mothers with strollers. The gutters ran with water flowing down from Mont Saint-Genèvieve, named for Genèvieve, who’d defended the city against the Huns and stopped Attila.

  People ran, clutching newspapers over their heads against the rain. Then she saw the white Escada jacket amid the crowd heading up rue Saint Jacques, a flash of white in the sea of black umbrellas bobbing up the hill.

  The Sorbonne’s open doors let out a stream of students running for shelter and halting Aimée’s progress. Léonie’s white jacket disappeared. Panicked, Aimée ran faster, threading her way uphill. No sign of Léonie now.

  A narrow street veered to the left. She followed it past the Collège de France’s soot-stained portals, her eyes misting with rain. Another street, narrower, with leaning seventeenth-century façades of blackened stone. A passage no wider than a horse cart opened on the right.

  Aimée found herself in front of a closing door. She stuck her foot in the doorway, pushed it open. Léonie was fumbling with keys.

  Panting, her wet shoulders heaving, she caught Léonie’s hand.

  “How much do you want?” Léonie asked.

  Money?

  “I’m not for sale, unlike Benoît.”

  Shock painted Léonie’s face. “No one bought him off.”

  Aimée’s mind spun. That put a different slant on the article Martine had shown her. Had Benoît planned to publish his findings and been killed to prevent him?

  “Why do you want Benoît’s file?”

  Léonie turned away. But not before Aimée saw the haggard look on her face in the light. She looked ill. She was too thin.

  “Who else wants it besides you?” Aimée asked.

  “You don’t want to know,” Léonie said, her words coming in short spurts. “Or you may be next.”

  Aimée shivered. Soaked, out of breath, her legs aching, she wanted to hit something.

  “And the men outside my apartment, watching my office? They’re already after me.” Aimée said. “Too late.”

  “You sound like Edouard,” Léonie said. “My nephew’s the idealist in the family. He had the luxury; the rest of us had to survive.”

  Her hands clenched. “Edouard’s your nephew?”

  A thin smile creased Léonie’s lips. “I see he worked his charm on you. You’re not the first.”

  Hell, she’d slept with him, contemplated doing it again. He reminded her so of Yves. And she’d been ready to tell him about the file.

  His usual tactics? But he’d helped Mireille! Was Léonie telling her the truth about him?

  Her eyes closed, sighing, Léonie leaned against the lighted list of building tenants. Aimée saw an envelope sticking from her bag. Léonie Obin was the name written on it.

  “Foolish, foolish boy . . . Edouard hasn’t changed. He still blames me for supporting Duvalier.”

  “And the tonton macoutes?”

  Léonie staggered, clutching her cane. She caught herself and took a step toward the door.

  “You’re in over your head. I’m leaving.”

  “Not yet.”

  Aimée had been reading the names on the list of tenants.

  “Benoît was consulting for Hydrolis on a proposed water proj-ect. Hydrolis’s application is up before the World Bank funding committee,” she said. “You’re after his report. But why?”

  Léonie shook her head. “Forget it.”

  Aimée pulled the envelope from the woman’s handbag.

  “Give that back!” Léonie demanded.

  “Maybe Benoît’s report presented a problem for the Haitian Trade Delegation,” she said, pointing to the trade delegation address on the envelope. A mask descended over Léonie’s drawn features.

  “This Caribe-Invest Bureau, up on the third floor here, it’s just a front, isn’t it?” Aimée ventured, desperate to provoke a reaction. “What is the significance of Benoît’s file to you? Who has a financial interest in finding it?”

  Even though she possessed the pages of his report, they had revealed nothing to her. If only Serge would return her call and explain. But if she prodded Léonie, maybe she would reveal their importance.

  “The thugs you hired to find Benoît’s report ended up killing him. And still didn’t find it.”

  “I didn’t hire them. You’re naïve.”

  “Benoît trusted my sister, an illegal, whose aunt came from his village, rather than you. Were you the enemy?”

  “You’re guessing.”

  Aimée thought hard . . . coming
up blank. . . . She pulled out the papers she’d taken from Edouard’s fax machine and read them. One concerned Feed the Children. Father Privert’s organization.

  “Benoît’s file concerns water, doesn’t it?” Aimée guessed.

  From the look on Léonie’s face, her words had hit home.

  “Father Privert believes polluted water causes more children’s deaths than hunger,” she said. “Hydrolis operates water-delivery systems and sewage-treatment plants. Potential projects worth millions are awaiting World Bank funding. You and the Trade Delegation must be getting a hefty cut. You hired thugs to murder Benoît before he could deliver the results of his inquiry to the World Bank. The circle of salt, slicing off Benoît’s ear . . . all done to divert suspicion to the tonton macoutes.”

  “Salt’s for purification.” Léonie shook her head. “You’ve got it wrong.”

  She’d wondered about that herself. But Léonie knew more than she’d let on. “Why don’t I believe you?” Aimée said.

  “You’re resisting the spirit,” said Léonie, her voice matter-of-fact. “The force is working through me.”

  What did she mean, Aimée wondered.

  “Tonton macoutes peel the victim’s face off,” Léonie said, “to prevent the spirit from finding rest in the afterlife.” Her eyes pierced Aimée’s. “But you know that. I sense it. Ogoun protected Benoît. He still does.”

  Aimée stepped back. Mireille’s words came back to her . . . her mother’s face . . . she had been unable to talk about it. Had the tonton macoutes done that to her mother?

  Léonie’s gaze was somewhere else. Far away.

  “I think I understand now,” Léonie said.

  “Understand what?” Aimée asked?

  “Jérôme Castaing emulates his father,” Léonie said. “When Duvalier, the doctor who helped cure yaws, the tropical dis-ease ravaging Haiti, a noirist—dark as night—who spoke Kreyòl, a man of the people, came to power, he was a good man. He gave us pride.”

  What did this have to do with Hydrolis? Aimée shivered in the drafty vestibule.

  “At first, we regarded Duvalier as a savior, like Toussaint l’Overture, the slave who freed our country from French rule. Later Duvalier changed. But that’s another story,” said Léonie. “His tonton macoutes resented the French. They ambushed Castaing, a geographer surveying the countryside, and tortured him. He lost an eye, but he lived; he was luckier than most. Duvalier interceded to save him. But Castaing figured Duvalier owed him more than that. He made the whole island pay.”