Murder in Clichy (16 page)

Thursday

RENÉ SQUIRMED ON THE dirt floor and thumped his feet. The dank chill, and the diffused light from the kerosene lantern, reminded him of the ancient cave in the Loire Valley he and his mother had camped in one August holiday. With its thick walls it stayed cool despite the heat of summer. But he hadn’t had his ankles taped up then.

“Time for
pipi
?” asked the gravel-voiced man.

He nodded and tried to talk but the tape over his mouth garbled his voice.

“Water?”

He nodded harder. The
mec
came into view, blocking the pile of bricks, and the ants still pushing their crumb. He had to get out of here.

“Let’s see, it’s been a while,” said the
mec
.

A while . . . more like six hours!

The
mec
was wearing denim overalls, snakeskin boots and his brown hair was pulled back in a stringy ponytail. He slit the duct tape binding René’s ankles with a knife and pulled René to his feet. Were they going to kill him?

“Little guys like you have an interesting sex life, eh?”

René snorted.

“What’s that?” he grinned. “Oh I forgot, you can’t speak.”

René’s cheeks burned with a searing pain as the
mec
ripped the duct tape off his mouth. He groaned.

“Quiet!”

“Sick. I’m going to be sick,” René whispered, his voice hoarse.

“Watch the boots,” the
mec
said, pushing René toward a rusted iron bucket by a pile of old newspapers. “Over there.”

René gagged. “I’m dizzy,” he gasped, heaving. “Help me.”

“Hold the wall,” said the
mec
, a look of disgust on his face.

“Can’t.” He gagged, spitting near the man’s boots.

“Not on the boots, dwarf, or I kick you with them.”

René heard the slow rip of duct tape and felt his wrists being freed. Numbed, tingly, but
free
. He leaned on the wall for support, pushed off and shot out his left leg, kicking the surprised
mec
in the kidney. The man doubled over. René’s next powerful straight kick landed under the
mec’s
chin and whipped his head back.

If his hip hadn’t throbbed so much he’d have broken the
mec
’s fourth and fifth rib, too. Still, he would need a hospital visit.

René flexed his short, swollen fingers, grabbed the duct tape and wound it around the
mec
’s mouth, hands, and feet. Then, huffing, he pulled the limp body behind the high cobwebbed pile of bricks.

Phone, where was his phone? Not on the dirt floor where there were only men’s magazines and a small notebook. He grabbed the notebook with his numbed fingers and stuck it in his pocket. He took the kerosene lantern, the fumes making his nose itch, and searched the moaning
mec
’s pockets. Only a pack of Gitanes. His fingers didn’t obey well, but he ran them over the packed dirt, back and forth. And near the corner they found his cell phone. With his thumb he turned it on as he stumbled toward the stairs. He punched in Aimée’s number.

He heard several clicks, then ringing. But there were footsteps on the stairs.
Merde!

“I’m underground in an
abri
near a Bata shoe store,” he whispered and clicked the phone to silent mode.

“Hey, the beer’s cold,
”
said the second of his captors. “Wake up! Where are you?”

René ducked behind a rotting wood chair and felt something long, like a pole. He grabbed the end, slid it across the third to bottom step, and raised it. The chair blocked his view but he heard the whoosh of air and a loud
ouf!
as the man tripped and fell. Bottles crashed, spraying beer. There was a smell of malt everywhere.

Stunned, the heavy-set red-haired man sprawled on the dirt floor. René reached for his thick neck, pinched the carotid artery, and gave it a twist. The man’s head sagged. René shone the lantern on him, took the roll of duct tape, and covered his mouth with tape.

Sweat dripped between René’s shoulderblades. After binding those thick wrists he had run out of tape. He undid the man’s belt, shifting and moving the inert body until it finally came free of the man’s waist. Then he looped the belt and knotted it several times around the man’s ankles.

René tried to ignore his throbbing hip as he hobbled upstairs. He felt along the pebbled wall in the dark, ran into a rough wooden door and tried the handle. Locked.

So close.

He had to think fast. The third man was bound to arrive at any moment.

He called Aimée.

“René . . . don’t hang up,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Aimée, I’m in Paris, underground someplace.”

“I know. Stay on the line,” she said, breathless. “Whatever you do keep the phone on. We’re triangulating your position.”

“Hold on. Don’t talk,” René said.

He kept the phone in his pants pocket and inched his way back down the steps, fighting for breath. The key had to be on the big red-haired man. He felt around in the pocket of his down-filled jacket and pulled out a cheap pocket calculator. It took him two tries to turn the unconscious man over so he could examine his shirt pockets and his pants pockets. A wallet. Then a ring of keys jingled, and he pulled them out.

René made his way up the stairs again, in the dark. He took one of the long-handled old-fashioned keys, reached up, and slid it toward the keyhole, but the bunch of keys fell from his still swollen fingers and vanished in the darkness.

Below, René heard one of the men stir and groan. René ran his fingers over the stone step. Nothing. He panicked.

If only he could see!

Then his fingers grazed the top of the keys. He tried to grasp them but his fingers just pushed them down into a narrow crack.

He needed something with which to pull them up to him.

He slid down the steps once more, saving his legs for the climb back, and with the knife cut some excess duct tape from the man’s wrists. He climbed back, his legs and hip protesting. He lowered the tape into the crack, tamped it carefully around the bit of key sticking up and prayed the tape would hold. Slowly, centimeter by centimeter, he lifted the keys. By the time he had them in his hand, perspiration was running down his forehead in rivulets and dripping into his eyes.

More noises came from the big man, a knocking and rustling as he struggled against his bonds. Then there was a metallic clang.

The kerosene lantern!

A crackle and
thupt
of something igniting. René’s hands shook. Despite the cellar’s dampness, with so much old wood and paper, the flames would catch, then suck up oxygen for fuel and create an inferno!

He reached up, aimed for the keyhole, and willed his hand to be steady. He missed. He tried again, leaning his short arm against the door. The key didn’t fit. Smoke and kerosene fumes rose, choking him.

René tried the next three keys. The fourth was the right one. He turned it, but the key stuck. With all his might, he pressed and turned. And tried again. The old-fashioned lock clicked and he rammed the door open with his shoulder.

He fell on a wet floor by bags of cement, striking a small cement mixer. A worker, wearing overalls and a bandanna around his head, jumped back in surprise.

“Where is this place?” René said.

“
Señor, no habla Français,
” he said, alarm in his eyes.

René crawled across the floor to pull himself up by the wall. Black smoke billowed up from the staircase. The worker yelled and grabbed a bucket of water.

René made his legs move. Step by step, past an open door and into a garden courtyard. Birds sang by a low ivy-covered wall. He’d never noticed the sweetness of the tang of wet leaves or realized how beautiful a gray sky could look.

Keep going, he had to keep going, follow the narrow lane past the parked vans, and get to the street. Get away.
The arched
porte cochère
lay just before him and he heard a car slow down, shifting into first. He ducked behind a van as the car turned in. A black Peugeot.

Hurry, he had to hurry
. Despite the searing ache in his thigh, he had to keep walking. The car pulled behind him, a door opened and shut. He panicked, knowing it would only be a few minutes before they discovered he’d escaped. He heard someone yelling to call the
sapeurs-pompiers,
the firemen.

He edged past the van, keeping close to the walls, and made it through the arch. Saw a narrow cobbled street lined with parked cars.

He looked up, wiped his brow and saw the street sign: rue Lemercier, a one-way street. He reached into his pants pocket for his cell phone.

“Aimée?” he said. “I’m on rue Lemercier, wherever the hell that is.”

“Near Clichy. Go to your right René. Walk.”

He heard honking. And there she was, jumping out of a taxi and running toward him.

For once in his life the earth and stars aligned: He’d done something he never thought he could do, and with arms opened wide she was running to him.

Somehow he walked, he didn’t know how.

“René!” Tears spilled from her eyes as she grabbed him.

“What took you so long, Aimée?” he said.

Thursday Afternoon

GASSOT, PICQ, AND PORTLY Nemours sat in the back of the Laboratoire de Prothèse Dentaire in Passage Geffroy-Didelot, Picq’s nephew’s denture-making shop. Acrid adhesive smells and sounds of running water came from the front.

“We’ve taken the matter into our own hands,” Picq said.

Gassot hoped his comrades hadn’t done anything stupid yet, but it sounded like they already had.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Gassot said. “Let’s wait and see.”

“We didn’t discover anything in the art gallery,” Picq interrupted.

“What do you mean?” Gassot asked, alarmed “Too cautious, as always, Gassot,” Picq said. “And considering your softness toward natives, dogs, and small children, well, we took care of business.”

Fools. “You broke into the gallery? Thank your stars you weren’t caught. Did the woman tell you anything?”

Gassot couldn’t fathom Picq’s steel-blue gaze.

“We’d have told you,” Picq said.

They hadn’t told him about anything else.

“What about Tran?”

“He’s going to the
maison
,” Gassot said.

“It’s time for action!”

Gassot expelled a breath of disgust and shook his head. “Always the hothead, aren’t you? It’s folly.”

The telephone rang.

Picq leaned over the counter next to a sealing machine. His frizzy white hair poked out from his cap. He was there to answer the telephone for his nephew, who’d gone to lunch.

“Oui, allô?”
he said. “The dentures are ready for you, monsieur.”

He hung up and turned back to them. “The Castorama store off Passage de Clichy had everything we needed,” Picq said. “Fertilizer, plastic plumbers’ pipe,” he said, tapping the counter. “All under here. No one suspects
us,
even though it’s what they watch for now. Don’t you read the papers?”

Gassot read the PMU racing forms when he got his monthly pension, but that was it. He shrugged, “
Et après
?”

“We now have everything we need to make a simple pipe bomb,” Picq said.

“I don’t like it.
C’est fou
. We want the jade in one piece!” Gassot said.

His comrades had always preferred action to planning. Nothing had changed since Indochina.

“We have to open the safe in the house,” Picq said. “I was in the demolition unit, remember? I can do this with my eyes closed.”

“Never.” Gassot stood up. “If the jade’s in there, you’ll ruin it. I won’t have anything to do with this crazy scheme.”

A buzzer went off.

“Calm down,” Picq said, “I can coax a newborn from a ton of steel. Tran’s in place, right? He lets us into the house and then—”

“But we don’t know the jade’s in there,” Gassot interrupted.

Nemours waved Gassot’s remark aside. “Where else, eh?”

Picq switched on an industrial dryer for enamelware and slid in a small tray of gleaming teeth. An even heat emanated from it, warming the back of the lab. Comfortable and safe.

But Gassot shuddered. It reminded him of the false teeth of an old Vietnamese woman at Dien Bien Phu. Her grandson had been caught in a tunnel with French rations. The fire bombing had left her burnt and naked. “Ivory,” she’d said pulling the teeth out and offering them, since she’d had nothing else to barter.

The corporal had shot the old woman and her grandson anyway. The next day the elite Parachute troops found out they’d been innocent. Years later he’d seen the photo of the Vietnamese girl burnt with napalm with the same expression on her face.

Gassot knew he had to reason them out of this.

“Listen, Picq, it’s just a feeling but I think they stashed the jade in a safe place, somewhere. After the old man died, Thadée must have discovered it.”

“Stands to reason,” Nemours said. “According to Albert, he talked big, but he didn’t deliver.”

“You think he was killed because he didn’t hand over the jade?” Gassot said. “But that makes no sense. He was the key, the connection.”

“You don’t kill a connection,” Picq said. “You kill a failure.”

So why did this ring false
, Gassot wondered.

“Instead of blowing up the man’s safe, we should be searching for Albert’s killer, and the jade.”

“And you think we’re not? At least, you concede Albert was murdered?”

Gassot pulled the folded napkin out of his pocket. Showed them the threat scribbled on it: “We’re going to roll your pants leg up, too.”

Nemours’s face paled. “It’s all connected. Ever since we found out the jade’s in France—”

“Since it’s in the wrong hands, bad luck has followed it,” Gassot said.

Picq and Nemours exchanged a look.

“You’re not going native on us again, eh?”

Gassot’s eyes flashed. “Remember the officers, they ate the best . . .”

“And we ate the rest,” finished Picq.

Gassot walked toward the glassed-in front of the shop, wondering what more he could say to persuade his comrades to hold back. If they lay low they would be led right to it—and avoid whoever meant to kill them.

He pushed away the thoughts of Bao that crowded his mind. More and more he wondered about Bao. The idealist with soft rounded cheeks, who pared the skin off a mango in deft strokes. Bao, whose laugh had sounded like warm rain.

Gassot stiffened as a uniformed policeman and plainclothes
flic
entered the shop. “We’re looking for Monsieur Picq. We have some questions,” said a
flic
in a windbreaker, pulling out a search warrant. “Concerning some recent purchases he made at Castorama.”

Gassot shivered. “I’m just a customer,” he said, trying to control the shaking in his voice. “Monsieur Picq’s back there.”

And with that, Gassot opened the door and slid into the narrow passage.