Murder in the Palais Royal (23 page)

Her skirt stuck to her legs. The variable October weather ran chill one day, then blazing hot like today. But it would not be much longer until autumn arrived, with a cold wind under pewter skies.

She kept an eye out for Audric, now twenty-three years old, to match him with the blurred Xeroxed photo on his four-year-old
Carte d’étudiant
. Across the street, whiffs of chlorine came from Gymnastic, a health club, and she longed to get in the pool. Her thighs could use fifty laps.

Not two feet away from her, an old man sucked on a hand-rolled cigarette, picking a flake of tobacco from his mouth. He gave a hacking cough, hawked, and wiped his mouth on his corduroy jacket sleeve, the whole time giving her the eye.

“Old pots make the best soup, Mademoiselle,” he said, leering.

“But I don’t cook, Monsieur,” she said.

“You go the other way?” He licked his cracked lips, fumbled with his fly.

A dirty old man, and in this heat. She sighed.

“Not the time to take out the ‘bishop’.” She pointed to the Commissariat on the corner. “I complain, and the
flics
will curl your nose hair.”

He took off down the pavement.

She fanned herself with the copy of
Voici
. No Princess Diana photo on the cover, unlike all the others. Instead, a photo collage of former celebrities
du jour,
now replaced by new ones. The paparazzi ate them up and spit them out faster than the old man now hawking up phlegm down the street. Not a pretty sight.

She glanced at the pages of the magazine issue which was, she now saw, dated December 1993. Holidays in Val d’Isere, skiing on the slopes. Stick-like models and starlets in attire involving beaded miniskirts and fur vests at aprés-ski parties, snowmobiles parked in front of exclusive chalets with the aristos and their young throwing snowballs, a Baron and Baronne something in front of roaring walk-in fireplaces.

But it made some sense, since Nicolas had been awaiting trial in La Santé in 1993. Still, she wondered why he had kept these old magazines. Before she could ponder further, a small door in the large dark green entry opened and a figure pushing a bicycle emerged from Audric’s building.

She spotted his short brown hair, pockmarked face, and thick black glasses. Audric hadn’t changed much from his photo in four years. He paused on the cracked pavement, then headed up the street, walking his bicycle. He limped, despite a thick-soled shoe; one leg seemed shorter than the other.

A wide tour bus turned into the narrow street and blocked her way. The taxi behind it hooted its horn; the driver got out shaking his fist. Skirting the fracas and the bus, she saw Audric at the end of the block.

She broke into a run; but before she could catch up with him, cars blocked her way on rue Croix des Petits Champs. Now in full force, the transport strike had made all traffic grind to a halt.

She looked up and down the street. No Audric. And then she caught a glimpse of his bike disappearing into Passage Vero-Dodat.

Desperate, she zigzagged between the cars. The whole street was like a parking lot. Below the two statues in niches over the entrance to the covered Passage Vero-Dodat were dark wood-framed old-fashioned storefronts with gilt sconces and small black diamond tiles under a glass-and-iron vaulted roof.

Her grandfather had pointed out the commercial origins of the now-elegant passage; Vero had been Montesquieu’s pork butcher, and Dodat a shopkeeper who’d gone bankrupt.

A bicycle leaned against a storefront in the passage. Audric stood bent over a glass display window of an antique toy store. Didn’t he have school?

“Excuse me. Audric?”

He looked up from a collection of tiny Napoleonic lead soldiers. Light reflected off his thick lenses as he looked her over.

“I get it.” His mouth tightened. “He put you up to this, as usual.”

“I don’t understand.” She pulled out a card from one of the many she carried.

“Since when does a looker follow me? Get lost.”

She imagined him the butt of cruel jokes. The child found in every schoolyard, the beaten-up outcast with scars both outside and inside.

“But we spoke on the phone.” Her hand paused, holding out the card.

“Aimée Leduc,” he read. His voice wavered. “Olivier didn’t put you up to this?”

“Who?” She shook her head. “You don’t seem interested in the Cours Carnot survey. I’ve wasted my time.”

He bit his lip. “I’ve made a mistake.”

“I doubt if you can help me,” she said. “From your phone comments, you had little communication with our target student, Nicolas Evry.”

“Why him?”

She pointed to the old Napoleonic metal soldiers. “Expensive, eh?”

“Not for a collector.”

He seemed the type who still played with toy soldiers in his room.

He shrugged. “To be honest, Nicolas Evry can’t figure in your study. He never took the
prépa
course for the École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales
concours
.”

She hated doing it, but she pulled out the travelers’ checks she’d intended to use on her trip to New York. It was all the money she had left to live on, with her account frozen.

“As I mentioned, there’s remuneration, but I need to verify your information. Why don’t you tell me about it?” She pointed toward the Café de l’Epoque.

Longing shone in his eyes, but he stepped back. “I can’t . . . he won’t understand.”

“Understand what?”

“I’m late.”

She’d lost him. “Who? Olivier?”

From the way his mouth opened in surprise, she’d hit home.

“What’s his connection to Nicolas?”

Without a word, Audric backed up. But she remembered seeing Olivier’s name in the files.

She caught his sleeve as he reached for the bike handlebars. “You’re afraid. Why, Audric?”

“Nicolas committed suicide, didn’t he? That’s what all this is about.” A muscle twitched in his cheek. “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

From the street, car horns blared.

She let go of his sleeve. “I think it was murder, Audric. Can you tell me what changed Nicolas in November 1993?”

“Changed? You related to him or something?”

Before she could answer, the alarm on Audric’s watch beeped. In his wire bike basket she saw an École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales calendar. “I’m late for a lecture.”

“You said he hung around you,” she said. “Why did Nicolas join the skinheads?”

Audric’s eyes almost popped out from behind his glasses.

“He wasn’t the only one, was he?”

Audric grabbed the handlebars, swung his shorter leg over the seat. She stepped in front of the wheel.

“Maybe your parents should know their son dabbled in the neo-Nazi movement.”

“It’s not like that. Not that way.”

She stared at him. “Or maybe you did more than dabble. Maybe you torched a synagogue.” She pulled out the Cours Carnot file. “Your father’s a playwright and your mother . . . they’re divorced, I see; but anxious, I’m sure, to know. . . .”

He took off his glasses, wiping the perspiration from his brow. “
Non,
please, you don’t understand.”

“Then help me understand, Audric,” she said. “Or I talk with your father.”

“Nine P.M.” He swung his leg over the bike. “Here in the café.” And he pedaled off.

***

O
N QUAI D’ANJOU in front of her apartment, she caught sight of a man sitting on the stone wall, legs swinging as he spooned something from a cup. Twilight hovered, and the quay-side lights cast mercury-silver pools on the Seine’s surface.

She heard a cough. And recognized Melac. She’d never returned his call. Did his appearance mean he’d found a link between her and Clémence?

He held an ice cream cup from Bertillon’s around the corner.

“This vanilla bean’s a winner,” he said. “Fantastic.”

She shook her head, clutching her keys. “Then you haven’t tried their white peach sorbet.”

“Next time,” Melac said, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

Nonplussed, she shifted her heels on the gravel. “Don’t tell me this is a social call.”

He set the empty cup on the stone wall.

“The GSR test came back negative for gunshot residue on your hands,” Melac said.

“You sound surprised. But maybe you’re here to inform me of the line of investigation you’re following in René’s shooting.”

“Sounds like you’re telling me how to do my job.”

That had gained her no points. She should try tact, as René often suggested. But her stubbed toe throbbed and Melac annoyed her. Especially the way he’d waited in front of her apartment.

“Liken it to an onion,” he said, pausing as if in thought.

Handsome in a rough way in his black shirt and jeans. His jacket lay on the stone wall. Was he off duty?

“Every time you peel a layer, there’s another one.”

Something about the way his eyes flickered raised the hair on her neck.

“Who peels onions? I don’t get your point.”

“The financial police faxed a request for your criminal record, if any,” he said. “That tells me they’re mounting an investigation; it’s kind of what they do.”

His condescending attitude more than rankled. He knew something. Something she didn’t.

“So I comply and notice the Interpol flag on your family member. I keep peeling the onion, finding cross-references, cross-searches, and my chief tells me to comply with the financial police request because they have reasonable suspicion, et cetera.” He nodded. “But, of course, I’m waiting to hear what you have to say.”

His false conversational tone, the ominous tone of calm in his voice, panicked her. She couldn’t speak.

“You wouldn’t want me to get the wrong idea, would you, Mademoiselle Leduc?”

“Instead of an onion, you could liken it to a second-rate dry cleaners,” she said, pointing to the pink dry-cleaning tag peeking from his jacket pocket.

He blinked.

“All the chemicals, but still those stains don’t rub out. Impossible to remove. So you’re stuck with a Sauce Bernaise grease spot for the life of your jacket.”

Melac lifted his jacket sleeve. “How did you know that’s Bernaise sauce?”

“Just like I know you mastered simple addition but nothing more complicated.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Let’s see, a ticket to New York, an American mother who’s a wanted terrorist, and now a financial probe by the big guys,” Melac said. “Add them up and you hit a jackpot.”

“What?”

“Money laundering, arms and drug deals. Big-ticket items,” he said. “And a partner who’s shot after discovering discrepancies in your office bank balance. Even with my ‘limited’ math skills, it adds up.”

Startled, she stepped back into her neighbor walking his dog on the quai. A doddering white-haired man, a former member of the Academie Française, with his Pekinese. “
Par-donnez-moi,
Monsieur,” she said, trying to recover.

He snorted and moved away, crunching fallen leaves.

Now she was ready for him. “But it doesn’t add up, Melac. I’d never hurt René. And my mother left us a long time ago. A very long time ago. She may be dead, for all I know.” Her throat caught, and she turned away. Why did her eyes well up after all this time?

“Sidonie (aka Sydney) Leduc’s file’s open. Active.”

“You mean she’s alive?” She turned and looked at him.

Melac studied her. His demeanor was removed, professional. He folded his arms across his chest. The plane tree branches rustled.

“You want me to beg, Melac? I will.”

“It means no one’s reported her dead,” Melac said. “But in that business, they don’t always identify the bodies.”

She froze.

“What business?”

Melac edged off the wall. Tossed the empty Bertillon cup in the trash. “I thought you’d know.”

“I’d give anything to know.”

“You would?” Melac said. “I’ll remember that.”

He dusted off his jeans, took a step, paused. “What I do know is that your father cut a deal for her. He was a good
flic,
and it ruined his career. A shame.”

He’d gotten that all wrong, too. She took a breath. To give vent to the anger rising inside her would get her nowhere.

“In point of fact,” she said, “one of his partners caught in a bribery scandal shifted the blame to him.
That
ruined his career.”

She controlled her voice with effort. “But you’re right about one thing. Papa was a good
flic.
”

“I’m not the only one interested in you, Mademoiselle.”

“You’re playing with me,” she said, “thinking I’m a pawn that will let you take the queen.”

“I heard you’d cooperate,” he said. “You’re the one being used.”

Melac’s footsteps crunched on the gravel as he walked toward Pont Marie.

Aimée stood rooted to the spot. The branches of the plane tree nodded in the wind.

Alone.

If her mother was alive, would she use her to launder money? The woman she remembered doodled on napkins, burned the milk she was heating on the stove for
café au lait,
and worried if Aimée forgot her jacket.

All the old hurts surfaced. And this brother she hadn’t known existed, what had become of him? But this would get her nowhere.

She had a hunch that whatever had happened to Nicolas in 1993 would explain a lot. The siddur weighed heavy in her bag.

The streetlights’ gleam pocked the pavement’s surface with light. She felt someone watching her. Fear invaded her, from her head to the soles of her feet.

She scanned the quai. Deserted.

If she hurried, she could cross town to reach the synagogue, then make her meeting with Audric. Resolute, she pushed the digicode numbers, entered the courtyard, and found her faded pink scooter. With a quick turn, she keyed the ignition, hit the pedal, and the engine rumbled to life. Out on the quai, she took off her tight shoes, put them in the basket, rubbed her toe, then roared off. Using the narrow streets to avoid traffic, she hoped to make the synagogue before the service ended.

The strike and traffic dictated otherwise. Streets clogged with bicycles, buses, and cars slowed her way. By the time she reached the synagogue, the people were filing out, joining friends talking in groups, everyone discussing how to get home.