Murder in the Palais Royal (12 page)

Then an acid sweet odor overlaid with that of malt scotch met her nostrils. Shocked, she saw her son Olivier sprawled on the bed’s duvet beside his own vomit, passed out. His jeans and rumpled suede jacket trailed off the chair; his billfold lay on the floor.

“Wake up, Olivier!”

A groan answered her. She could only stall fifteen minutes at most; she still had to revise the script yet again for the minister’s approval. Instead of telling her son about Nicolas’s suicide, holding his hand, calming him down, she’d have to get him into the shower.

A chirping beep came from somewhere near Olivier’s head. His long tanned arm reached for his cell phone.

“No, you don’t.” She grabbed the cell phone. “Get up. What are you doing here?”

“
Maman.
” His eyes opened. Those long lashes, the pout of a mouth, that slim jaw. Just like her father.

Her baby.

“What time is it?” He yawned, stretched, and then winced. “Bang-up rave last night . . . this morning . . . whenever.”

“But you have class. Since when do you lie in your own spew?” Disgusted, she stood with her hands on her hips for a moment, then opened the window. “Now clean it up.”

The breeze scented by flowering lime trees lining the Palais Royal garden below wafted inside. The waters spouting from the central fountain into the circular pool glinted in the fading light. The quadrangle was like a private garden in the center of Paris. And with the gates locked at night, it was a garden just for the elite.

“Don’t worry,
Maman.
The maid. . . .”

“And let talk begin, Olivier? You’re not allowed to use this apartment. How long before the staff leaks that my spoiled playboy of a son—”

“You’ll get around it,
Maman
, you know how.”

She’d spoiled her only child. Gone wrong a long time ago, letting him getting away with things because of her guilt for working late hours. Or was it his inborn charm that got around her?

“And abuse this privilege? My work, my service to the Republic, is what earned this. It’s part of my compensation.”

“Save that for the earnest interns,
Maman.
”

“That’s enough, Olivier. I want your word that you’ll never use this suite again.”

He nodded. She noticed all the messages on her cell phone. But she had to deal with Nicolas’s suicide before she ran back to deal with the ministry crisis.

“We have to talk about Nicolas Evry.”

Ready for tears or remorse, she watched him.

“That loser?” He exhaled in disgust, then sat up and shrugged. His boxers lay low on his hips. “You paid him off, right? History, far as I’m concerned.”

She stepped back, shocked at his coldness. “How can you say that? You’re damn lucky he took all the blame.”

“For a price.”

She shook her head. “I can’t stomach this.”

Olivier crinkled his nose. “I agree. Pretty rank.” He balled up the duvet, shoving it into the corner. He scratched his crotch. “I’m taking a shower.”

“Here your father and I were so worried how you’d take the news, that it would scar your psyche.”

“Quit the New Age stuff,
Maman
.” With a bored expression, he paused at the bathroom door. “And no more martyred looks. I’ll go to class. Promise.”

“Bon.
I should get down on my knees and thank you for that, eh? The boy’s dead, you don’t give a—”

“Who?” Surprise painted his face.

“Didn’t you know?”

“Stop the riddles,
Maman.
”

And she realized Roland had passed the awful job on to her. Angered, she inhaled, trying to control herself, wondering how to word her news.

“Nicolas died in prison,” she said unable to say “suicide.”

Olivier shook his head. “A tough place. So, he got a shiv in his back from a cellmate?”

“This isn’t American
télé,
Olivier. He committed suicide.”

A blank look filled Olivier’s face, then he averted his gaze. Was he remembering?

She’d never forgotten her six-year-old son tugging at her skirt in their country-house kitchen that scorching hot day. “Why’s
grand-père
hanging from the tree? He told me I couldn’t climb it. And he’s sticking out his tongue at me. It’s not nice.” She’d found that her father had hanged himself from the pear tree in the garden. Again she felt her searing pain. She’d tried to shield Olivier in her arms, tried to block his view. Mimosa scent wafting in the heat from the bush near her father’s dangling foot, she recalled. She stifled a sob.

Where was the six-year-old who’d clutched a fistful of mimosa behind him, dirty streaks from tears running down his cheeks? “I’m sorry,
Maman.
Are you mad? Did he make a mistake? Won’t
grand-père
come back when he’s better?” There was an apologetic tone in his voice, as if he’d done something wrong. Her own father, the grandfather Olivier had looked up to.

What had happened to her beautiful boy?

Money in the right hands went only so far. What if Olivier was implicated, his onetime white supremacist affiliation discovered? With a Vichy-government, Nazi-sympathizer grandfather, the old stories would get raked up.

Olivier put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her. She had to snap out of it and deal with the present. Instead of comforting him, he was cradling her in his arms.

“Don’t cry,
Maman.
”

“Is there something you didn’t tell me, Olivier? Something I should know?”

“Nicolas was a strange
mec
. Moody.”

“Did he tell anyone, Olivier?”

“He liked money too much. And I told you, I hardly knew him.”

“Madame de la Pecheray?” It was Jean-Georges’s voice.

“Un moment.
” She blotted her eyes with the towel.

“It’s all right,
Maman.
” Olivier lifted her chin. “Believe me. Listen to Papa.”

She hoped he was telling the truth. And she hoped she hadn’t heard that cold tone in his voice. Just imagined it.

“
Alors
, I’d never disturb you, Madame,” said her secretary through the closed door, “but the minister’s en route here.”

Jean-Georges watched her back. A jewel. But then watching Gabrielle’s back was his job in the Ministry of Culture.

“Hurry, clean this up, Olivier. Hide your things.”

Clean up, hiding. Wasn’t she always cleaning up and hiding something?

A
IMÉE SAT ON their hard office floor across from Saj, who was crosslegged on the tatami. Sunbeams caught reflecting gleams from the chandelier’s prisms. Outside the window, the hum of afternoon traffic was punctuated by the blasts of a horn, the rumble of buses.

Saj liked spreading out on the floor. A bamboo curtain, a tatami mat, and a surge protector were all he required. He leaned over his laptop, long dirty-blond dreadlocks cascading down his back over his cotton muslin shirt. A leather strip held coral and turquoise beads, from his recent ashram stay in India, around his neck.

“Sounds like you want the pedigree,” he said.

“Whatever you call it. Hack into the bank, Saj.”

“That’s René’s metier.”

“Right, but René can’t help us,” she said. “We have to get to the bottom of this. This amount tripped off the alarms,” she said. “You know what that means.”

“Inquiries, freezing the account, tax audit, the usual?”

“Not that bad, I hope.”

No one knew Ministry systems and networks like Saj, or how to hack into them. The Ministry had intervened to commute Saj’s prison sentence so that he would patch the holes he’d hacked. They’d even kept him on call as a consultant.

“My banker was guarded, Saj,” she said. “I’m sure someone in his office was listening to the conversation.”

Saj stretched, brown prayer beads clicking around his wrists, still tan from India. He reached for his tea. Steam rose curling in a lazy spiral. The only reminder of René’s bloodstain was a pale circle on the wood floor that she’d scrubbed this morning.

“I’ve known the banker for years,” she said, shifting on the hard floor. “He wouldn’t tell me anything, but before he hung up he whispered ‘Tracfin’.”

Saj sat up. Whistled. “Tracfin, the money-laundering investigators?”

“You know it?”

“Tracfin stands for
Traitement du Renseignement et Action Contre Les Circuits Financiers Clandestins
, Treatment of Information and Action Against Illicit Financial Circuits. Sounds bland, but I’d say your banker pointed you to what used to exist in a subbranch below the normal radar. Initially with customs, Tracfin’s now the financial intelligence unit of the Ministry of Economy. They investigate and decide whether to alert the judicial authorities to prosecute. Kind of
über
investigators.”

Aimée pushed the demitasse of now-cold espress away from her feet toward Saj’s tea cup of Rooibos, red bush tea. This didn’t sound good.

Saj typed, his fingers flying over the keys. Then he turned the keyboard in her direction. On the screen she saw a grid of numbers and columns of acronyms. One was TRACFIN.

Saj clicked on the acronym, and reams of code came up.

“Irritating, too,” he said. “Now they’re official and part of a European network-sharing and regulatory system.”

“Can’t you wiggle in?”

“We’re talking big boys with big resources, Aimée. This takes work. There are new EU banking-compliance safeguards against money laundering. Now if René were here, together we could worm in.”

Saj cocked his head. His gray-green eyes clouded. Did even Saj distrust her?

“You can’t think
I
shot him? Or that I know about this?” Aimée asked.

He stared at her. “You did something.”

“I went from René in the hospital to the
flics
dogging me. So far, it’s the worst seventy-eight hours of my life.”

Apart from finding her father’s charred remains on Place Vendôme’s blackened cobblestones.

“Feels like a kick in the gut from nowhere,” she said.

“In the stream of life, all is relevant,” Saj said. “Witness the Sanskrit term around my neck,
Sita:
a furrow for planting seeds.”

What did that mean? But if she didn’t convince Saj and get him on her side, she faced big trouble. She gave him a quick account.

“So the bad boy Mathieu’s married and wouldn’t give you an alibi?”

She nodded.

“A typical piece of media fashion fluff,” he said. “Meanwhile, someone posing as you shot René, and the video you showed the
flics
led them to the taxi dispatch and straight to your door.”

She nodded again. “Cold and calculated.”

“Then the skinhead you put away four years ago cries ‘coverup,’ implying he’s put you in danger. And you think, somehow, that’s why René was shot?”

The wind chimes tinkled from his bamboo curtain.

“And now you want to get me implicated too?” he said.

Her shoulders sagged. Even if she lost the business her grandfather and father had founded, she had no right to pull him down with her. “You’re right, Saj. I’ve already led to René being shot. I couldn’t stand it if you got hurt too. “It’s not fair to put either of you in more danger.” She started to get up.

Saj was hunched over his keyboard. “It’s your aura, Aimée,” he said. “A clouded blue. Indicative of disharmony, disturbed cosmic connections.”

Now he was blaming her on a karmic level. “Another nail in my karmic coffin, Saj?”

Nicolas’s pained pleading eyes and the crowded visiting room in La Santé passed through her mind.

“Straighten your back and we’ll try the lotus position.”

“Not now, Saj.” With so much hanging in the balance, Saj wanted her to meditate!

“This will help,” he said. “It will liberate the chakras and life force.”

“Espresso does that for me.”

Saj draped an orange prayer scarf printed in Sanskrit with “
Om Mane Padme Hum
” over her shoulders. “I received this from my Guru in Varanasi and dipped it in the holy Ganges. Three times.”

No doubt it was a living, breathing laboratory of imported bacteria. Then she brightened. “You mean you’ll help?”

“I’m implicated already, Aimée, just by working here.” He inhaled deeply, letting his breath out with measured puffs. “And with that aura, you
do
need all the help you can get. Me, too. Now, try cleansing deep breaths. Tracfin’s sophisticated; requires work.”

She set her Valentino boots to the side, straightened her spine, breathed, and closed her eyes. Tight.

* * *

A
N HOUR LAT E R , chakras aligned, Aimée pressed the button and the door buzzed open to rue du Louvre. Saj waved and headed to the Métro to meet a contact who’d dealt with Tracfin.

“Aimée Leduc,
non?
” said a woman.

Blond, in her early twenties, the woman wore a short black skirt, low black heels, and a long cardigan sweater that fell to her knees. With a nervous movement, she pulled her sweater tighter against the rising wind. On closer inspection, black roots showed in her limp hair.

“Oui?
” Aimée was confused. She’d cleared her calendar and wasn’t supposed to be here. She was supposed to be in New York with her brother. Who would look for her here?

“I need to talk to you,” the blonde said, a strong Occitan drawl to her words. From somewhere in the southwest, Aimée thought. Toulouse? Wary, she hesitated to take this woman upstairs to the office.

“Did we have an appointment?”

“I’m Clémence.”

So this was Nicolas’s ex. No
bonjour
or introduction. But there was a panicked look in her hollow eyes and pale face that excused this.

“You left me the appointment notice for La Santé?”

Clémence nodded.

“You’re right, we need to talk. And you need to explain. I visited Nicolas in La Santé. He’s gotten me in trouble, hasn’t he?”

Clémence clutched her stomach. She leaned against Aimée’s fawn-colored stone building. Passersby, bundled against the rising chill, stared.

“Something wrong?” Aimée asked. She took Clémence’s arm. “Can I help you?”

Clémence shivered and shook Aimée’s hand off. “You don’t know, do you?”

“‘Know’? I think you’ve got things to tell me. Nicolas and I never finished our conversation. I waited under the prison wall, too, but he never appeared. I want to know why he was afraid.”

“Too late.” Tears brimmed in Clémence’s mascara-smudged eyes.

Concerned, Aimée gestured to the red-awninged café on the corner.

“Let’s talk in there.” The canvas awning’s scalloped edges flapped in the wind rising from the Seine.

Inside the café, wisps of cigarette smoke spiraled in the close air. Virginie, the owner’s wife, chatted with a man in overalls at the zinc counter and nodded at Aimée.

“
Bonjour, un espress et une Badoit, s’il vous plaît
, Virginie,” Aimée requested.

“Sit down, Clémence,” she said, pointing to the round marble table in the corner. “Now you can tell me why I’m in danger. Who ‘they’ are. Why Nicolas said he’d throw me his notebook over the wall, but didn’t.”

“Look, Nicolas insisted he had to see
you
.” Clémence pulled her sweater tighter around herself, sniffling. “They just called from La Santé.” She paused wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

What had happened? Aimée wondered. She searched in her bag for a tissue and came up with her LeClerc mirrored compact. “Here, it’s not that bad. Wipe your eyes. Check your face.”

“Nicolas hanged himself.”

Aimée dropped the open compact. The round mirror fell, shattering on the table top. Sharp glass shards gleamed in the sunlight. Clémence’s sobs mingled with the
whoosh
of the milk steamer. Seven years of bad luck, and more bad karma.

“But I just saw him.” Aimée’s mind went back to Nicolas’s last look, the fear in his deep-set eyes. Her insides went cold. “Do you think he was really murdered?”

Virginie appeared and wiped up the sparkling sharp mirror bits with a damp rag, then set down the espress and bottle of Badoit mineral water beaded with moisture. Without a word, she left, having read Clémence’s stricken face.

Clémence pushed the bottle away. “You were supposed to find out what he wanted. I’m four months pregnant.” Clémence stared at Aimée. “It’s Nicolas’s baby.”

“Don’t con me, Clémence.” Her shock was replaced by disbelief. “La Santé doesn’t have conjugal visits. And he said you wouldn’t even come to see him.”

Clémence grabbed her arm. “He lied. Even after we broke up, I visited him. I felt sorry for him. We went to the
parloir des bébés
.” “What’s that?”

Clémence said, “Those cloakrooms off the lockers.”

“So?”

“Didn’t you see the women and all those babies?”

Of course she had. “You’re saying the guards look the other way?”

“Where do you think the babies come from?” Clémence didn’t wait for her answer. “The
parloir des bébés
. The guards take a little cash and pretend not to know what’s going on. They call the kids ‘stairsteps,’ one for every year of their father’s stay.”

Aimée knew the guards would look the other way for a price. But she’d never heard this. Then again, what woman would take someone else’s baby to visit her man in prison?

“So Nicolas knew about the baby?”

“We had history, but I knew it wouldn’t work. After all, you don’t need a man to raise a kid, eh? And Nicolas. . . .” She shrugged. “Brilliant, but always a
dépressif
, and then his white supremacy talk. I don’t know how much he’d changed. He had a good job in the kitchen, too. His cellmate Sicard helped him get it.”

Why would Nicolas, about to become a father and up for parole, hang himself? Aimée wondered.

Clémence accused, “He wanted to talk to you. You’re the last person from outside to see him. You could have saved him.”

“Me?” Aimée thought about the way he’d looked, what she took for his paranoia. Had she caused his death? Had it been murder? “The only thing Nicolas had time to mention was his lawyer saying ‘they’ were in this together against him, he wouldn’t cover up for a rich
‘salaud,’
and ‘they’ knew about me. That’s all.”

“See, he tried to explain,” Clémence said. “Now I have nothing.”

“He said he had the proof in his notebook. Visiting hours ended. Then, when he didn’t appear to throw it from the wall, I finally left.”

Clémence covered her face with her hands.

Aimée stirred her espress. She suspected Clémence knew more than she was letting on. Time to stretch the truth. “Nicolas said to talk to you.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t information about this coverup get him killed?”

Clémence bowed her head, then looked up, pushing her hair back. Her fingernails had been chewed to the quick, Aimée noticed, as Clémence gripped the bottle of Badoit.

“My partner was shot in our office. Nicolas implied there was a connection between that shooting and his ‘proof.’ I need to know what it was, Clémence.”

She blinked. “
C’est vrai?
What should I say? He talked big, but it was always vague, nothing specific. I hadn’t even seen him in four months.”

Clémence’s surprise seemed real.

“Hadn’t he said anything that might point to what he knew?” Aimée asked.

Clémence thought. “It seemed strange,” she said, pausing. “I threw him cell phones over the prison wall—that’s how it’s done—he sold them to other prisoners. Even with that, and the credit he earned in the kitchen, it didn’t amount to much.

Still, he sent me money until last month.”

Dust motes swirled in the weak autumn light slanting through the café window. A crisscross pattern of shadows covered Aimée’s boot.

“Where did the money come from?”

“Who knows? But it stopped. And I’m broke.” Clémence shrugged. “I’ve got to go. Before I return to work, I need to sign some forms and pick up Nicolas’s belongings.”

“You’re going to La Santé? I’ll go with you, Clémence.”

“Why?” Clémence slung her bag on her shoulder.

“Don’t you realize Nicolas may have been murdered?” she said, desperate now. “His notebook might indicate why my partner was shot. While we’re there, we’ll arrange an appointment with his cellmate.”