Murder on the Champ de Mars (16 page)

Radu Constantin stepped back, startled. Gravel crunched under his feet. “That busybody he brought to the hospital—that
gadji
—I knew she’d cause trouble.”

Lines of washing whipped in the wind, an eerie echo traveling between the caravans. From inside the big top came the whine of violins. “We perform tonight. I’m busy.”

“Twenty years ago, Aimée’s father investigated Djanka’s murder.” René ad-libbed before Constantin could interrupt him. “After her sister’s death, Drina raised Nicu as her own. But in the hospital yesterday, on her deathbed, she told Nicu about his real mother. Showed him his birth certificate.” René hated lying, but this followed close to the truth. As much as he figured it would.

“How’s this your business? Anybody’s business but ours?” Radu Constantin shouted.

René knew he had to keep going. “Drina said she had a secret to tell Aimée about her father’s murder.
Phutt
, before she could—she’s abducted.”

“What craziness comes out of your mouth?” Radu’s dark eyes flashed. “My sister Drina is … how you say …” He searched for the word. “Like at the airport, in transit. Her soul’s not at rest. Leave it alone. We take care of things our way.”

“But Drina’s missing, gone,
non
?” Exasperated, René wanted this man to see reason. “Now, with Nicu’s murder …”

Radu Constantin suddenly put his hands over his face. Rocked back and forth. Then he lifted his hands up to the sky, folded, as though in prayer.

René sighed. “I’m so sorry.”

Radu hadn’t known.

A few seconds later Radu seemed to come back down to earth and looked at René. “He’s not family,” he said dully.

René’s brain stalled. These disparate events Aimée
seemed hell-bent on connecting jumped all over the place. Yet if he didn’t press and learn more while Radu Constantin stood towering over him in a black cloud of anger and despair, when would he? “You mean his real mother, Djanka, or Aurélie, wasn’t family? Was Nicu’s father a non-
manouche
? Pascal?”

“Leave us alone.” Radu Constantin motioned to the middle-aged man René had seen polishing his fender before. The man set his rag down in a pail, lit another cigarette as Radu disappeared back into the tent. Shrugged.

“You heard, let’s go.”

“Is he always like this?” René asked the man, whose cigarette was hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

“I just married into the family,” he said, the reek of alcohol coming from his pores. Glinting blond stubble on his chin and blond hair slicked back, he looked like the odd man out in this group. He stuck a pack of matches in his pocket and walked toward René and motioned him down the alley.

For one who hit the bottle so early in the day, his feet were steady on the cobbles. Still, that didn’t exactly make him a reliable source of information.

“I feel terrible about spilling what happened to Nicu,” said René. “But I don’t understand him. Or his reaction. We only want to help, can’t he see that?”

“Forget getting anything out of them, believe me.” The man was turning into a conversationalist.

“I’m an outsider, eh? They’re not going to talk to me, they’d rather let a poor woman die while they handle it on their own,
c’est-ça?”

“Don’t try to figure them out. Not healthy.”

René bristled. “Doesn’t he care that his nephew was murdered this morning?” René knew Radu did care—he’d seen the emotion rocking him. But he wanted details.

The
mec
chucked his still-burning cigarette into the running
gutter. René heard a
thupt
. “Feuds round here can go back generations.”

René stood at the corner, the sky oyster-grey beyond the mansard windows lining narrow Passage de Clichy. The
mec
ducked in a doorway to light another cigarette. His gaze darted down the passage. Satisfied no one was on the lookout, he leaned forward.

“Drina’s sister was shunned. Went by Aurélie and slept with a
gadjo
—a non-
manouche.”

“This Pascal, Nicu’s father … Where is he?”

A quick shrug. “No idea. They threw her out.” Engulfed in the
mec
’s smoke and red-wine fumes, René wished for a big gust of wind. A tornado. “That’s what happened to the sister. Never mentioned. She’s dead to them. Her kid, too.”

Not according to what Aimée had seen. René tried to digest this.

And then, without warning, the
mec
strode away. René ran up the street as fast as his throbbing hip let him.

“Wait, Monsieur …?”

The
mec
kept going.

“Monsieur? Monsieur?”

Before he hit the corner of Passage de Clichy, the
mec
turned.

“They’re cursed.”

“W
HERE ARE YOU
, Aimée? I need to load the equipment,” Maxence said on the phone. “The reception starts in half an hour, it’s an early one tonight. I need more setup time for surveillance.”

Merde!
She might have ruined the surveillance job because of her chat with goddamn Donatine. No time even to open Dussolier’s gift for Chloé.

“In a taxi, I’ve got my laptop now.” The rain had stopped, thank God. “My scooter’s parked by the office. Meet me downstairs at the curb.”

“Quoi?”
he said. “Do you still have to change? It’s a diplomatic event this evening. Proper attire and all.”

“Bring me what’s hanging in front of the back office armoire,” she said. “Make sure it goes with the pearls in my desk drawer.”

Ten minutes later, down on rue du Louvre, Maxence stuffed his surveillance equipment in the Vespa’s rear storage unit. He unscrewed the baby seat, clipped and bungee-corded it to the back, climbed on and held the clothes hanger with one hand while Aimée roared off.

Aimée changed while Maxence set up. After an hour at the party, she and Maxence had what they needed: recordings of the
comte
’s sister-in-law’s conversations and photos of the guests she’d hobnobbed with—a Spanish attaché (her current lover) and the Belgian CEO of a rival to the
comte
’s family firm. Aimée could only speculate at this point on whether the
comte
’s sister-in-law or any other family members were passing on insider knowledge of his engineering firm. The
comte
feared plans for a hostile takeover of the family business. Their surveillance work entailed furnishing documentation to the
comte
and letting him decipher their evidence. Things were looking up—if “up” meant finding out your sister-in-law might be scheming against you.

The fading apricot twilight glowed over the Pont Neuf. Aimée could just make out a pale quarter moon, like a fingernail, half obscured by a nest of low clouds hanging above rue du Louvre’s jagged rooftops.

Maxence hefted his equipment from the scooter’s case onto the pavement.

“The sister-in-law looks good for the saboteur,” he said. “But I wouldn’t rule out the
vicomte
from yesterday afternoon. His nastiness quotient matches hers.”

She nodded, her mind elsewhere. Throughout the surveillance she’d struggled to focus on the job. Tried not to think about Nicu’s half-open eyes, his mumbled last words as the Métro rumbled overhead. Her hands covered in his blood.

“Tomorrow night we can look forward to the
comte
’s cousin, more seamy goings-on,” said Maxence.

She shouldered the rest of the equipment. “I’ll take this upstairs.” Time to check Leduc Detective’s virus scans. And to change her clothes.

Ten minutes later, after checking the virus scans and setting the system to run the next cycle, she changed out of her Chanel. Back into her black leather pants, high tops, and, from the armoire, a ribbed, metallic, Lurex Gaultier tee Shouldn’t René have checked in with a progress report on la Bouteille by now? She switched her phone back on and noticed the message from Madame Uzes. Hit callback. Busy. She tried René. Busy.

Didn’t either of them respect call-waiting?

Almost twenty-two hours since Drina’s abduction. Delirium would be developing.

Madame Uzes had left her address on the message. Should Aimée just hop on the scooter and talk to her in person? Checking, rechecking and following up—no matter how small the detail—was what investigating was all about, as her father had drilled into her.
Les petites choses
—the little things that added up. But she’d promised Morbier to stay out of it.

Morbier’s phone went to voice mail.

She couldn’t twiddle her thumbs waiting while the woman’s life ebbed away. She knew the odds were against her, but if any chance existed of saving this woman after she caused the death of her son—or nephew—and finding out who killed her father at the same time, she had to pursue it. There was more at stake than Aimée understood.

She grabbed her vintage beaded clutch—faster than reloading her big bag—keys and leather jacket before she changed her mind.

L
EAFY BRANCHES HUNG
below the lights on the boulevard, sending speckled shadows over the cobbles. Lush foliage smells filled the 7th, the greenest arrondissement in Paris with its squares, parks and gardens, public and private.

She parked her scooter at Madame Uzes’s address, a stone Haussmann building the color of butterscotch with several stories of identical wrought-iron balconies on Avenue Constant Coquelin, a misnomer for the one-block dead-end street.

Aimée pressed the buzzer. No answer. She pressed it again.

“Oui?”
A young girl’s voice.

“Madame Uzes,
s’il te plaît,”
she said.

“Who’s this?” the girl said.

Aimée leaned closer to the speaker and took out her Moleskine. “Aimée Leduc. She left me a message. The priest at Saint-François-Xavier referred me—”

The door buzzed open. “Fourth floor, left.”

Not needing the exercise for once—since she’d been nursing Chloé, her pants slid off her hips—Aimée took the shaking elevator up. She reapplied Chanel red to her lips, blotted them with a café napkin and dabbed the napkin to her cheeks for color.

On the landing outside the apartment door stood a group of older women in a flurry of cheek kissing. No mistaking the hovering scent of Joy by Patou, one of the most expensive perfumes in the world. Or the uniform whitish-blonde coifs these women wore, each of them sporting a discreet fleur-de-lis, with a ministerial emblem or two pinned on the lapels of their cashmere jackets. This was the domain of generals’ and ministers’ wives, a rare breed that existed only in the
quartier
surrounding the École Militaire and les Invalides.
Très “ancien régime”
types who exuded an understated elegance that money couldn’t buy.

Not her crowd. Now or ever. Yet these women—not one under sixty—freshly
maquillées
, coutured and coiffed, earned her grudging respect.

Every last one of them turned the full beam of their attention on her, the outsider in their midst, as she clutched her scooter helmet and vintage bag. She felt like a counterfeit in the land of Hermès.

“
Pardonnez-moi
, I’m looking for Madame Uzes,” she said.
“Désolée …”

“The tradesmen’s entrance is round the back,” said a voice from the crowd.

Welcoming, too. The wrong day to leave the Birkin at home. Yet her success depended on playing to their noblesse-oblige instincts.

“Mademoiselle, you’re looking for Belle, my niece?” said a woman in the apartment doorway, her white-blonde hair pulled back in a chignon. Chic and soigné. “We’re all Uzes in the apartment—confusing, I know.”

“Madame, the priest at Saint-François-Xavier referred me to her as the head of the Christian Helping Hands program. She left me a message with her address. I’m sorry to intrude, but it’s vital.”

She saw a relaxing of couture-clad shoulders, almost heard a collective sigh of relief.

“Then come in, wait
un moment,”
she said. “I’ll join you before my friends and I are off to an evening reception at the
musée
 …” Madame Uzes lowered her voice. “…  that racy Dali retrospective.” One of the coiffed pack fanned herself with her hand, her diamond tennis bracelet flashing on her wrist, as if to say “racy” wouldn’t quite cover it.

Dali, racy? Maybe in 1963.

“
Merci
, Madame,” Aimée said, making her way through the group toward the door. Sanctioned and approved now by the ladies, she heard murmuring as she passed: “…  all that volunteering … that handsome young priest …”

She was shown into a wood-paneled salon, where she faced a glaring girl of about eleven or twelve years old in a pleated wool skirt and matching blue cardigan, with white socks and black Mary Janes. A de rigueur outfit for the
7ème
—one that had last been in style in the fifties everywhere else.

“Maman’s left me with the old dragons,” she said, shooting a look at her great-aunt back at the door. “Good thing you’ve come. Now they’ll have something to talk about.”

Aimée could just imagine.

The girl pointed to her helmet. “You’ve got a scooter?”

Did a little rebel’s heart beat inside the cardigan? Aimée sensed a possible mine of information.

She smiled. “It’s pink. I’m Aimée. And you?”

“Lisette. The only things that drive down this street these days are hearses,” Lisette said. “That’s the only way people get out of here.”

“Where’s your mother, Lisette?”

“Maman’s at a meeting. She’s always at meetings.”

“That’s right,
ma chère,”
said the elder Madame Uzes, joining them. “My niece Belle took over a monumental job. She spearheads that program, Christian Helping Hands.”

“Isn’t that where she works with
des manouches
?” Aimée asked.

“
Bien sûr
, she sponsors a program for Evangelical Christian Gypsies. Outreach in the spirit of Christian fellowship, open to all Christians. It’s rather like an agency that helps create or find jobs for them using their artisanal skills.”

Aimée couldn’t believe her luck. With a little insistence, she’d find a lead to Drina.

“Nobody knows how to do that work anymore, Maman says,” Lisette informed Aimée. “And they’re cheap.”