Murder in the Sentier (18 page)

“Parfait!
” she said, as the man hit the slow, late-summer fly.

She wanted a quiet place to read the articles, digest Caillot’s words, and look at Modigliani prints.

After laying twenty francs on the zinc counter, she drove three blocks, parked the scooter in Place Louvois, which bordered the Sentier, and stepped across the street to the seventeenth-century Bibliothéque Nationale.

She showed her yellow research card then sat down at number 32, her assigned place, a seat away from the tall wood-framed windows in the Occidental manuscript section.

Her favorite section.

She sat fourth from the aisle, overlooking the cobbled courtyard. Floor-to-ceiling books covered the walls.

She took a deep breath, inhaling the musky manuscript smells emanating from the old paper. The aura of the past, the stillness, reassured her in this changing world. During her École des Medicines years she’d studied here on Thursday afternoons. Now the familiar beams of fading lemon light and oversized hard wooden chairs brought back a timeless feeling.

In front of her, the upright wood cradles for books and manuscripts and the oak spindle place holders were covered with a honeylike patina. All nineteenth century. Aimée fingered the book spindle, the pointed tip worn and darkened, aware of the overall hush broken only by the turning of pages and occasional patron’s cough.

Next to her a man studied a tea brown parchment, stiff and oily, with a cracked lump of red sealing wax below an intricate flourish of curlicue script dated 1424.

She sat back, took a deep breath, and began. The copies she’d made from the microfiche took all afternoon to read. Before the last call-up of the day, she’d finished taking notes and listing the possible remaining Action-Réaction and Haader-Rofmein members. Six, counting Jutta and Liane Barolet, had done prison time or gone underground. If Jules Bourdon, who she discovered came from a wealthy intellectual family, and her mother had fled to Senegal … why had Jutta been killed now? The timing was important but she didn’t know why.

She gathered her papers, recovered her card from the reference desk librarian, and trudged to the
estampes et photographie
room. She found a book of twentieth-century prints. Modigliani’s fluid, elongated lines and curves radiated sensuousness. And a haunting love of his subjects. Mainly women.

An essay accompanying a 1987 exhibition guide to Modigliani’s paintings gave her perspective. A thought crossed her mind. Had Laborde, an Alsatian, identified with Modigliani, also an outsider in France?

She wondered how it all meshed: Modigliani, Laborde’s abduction and death and her father’s subsequent police hearing.

Her father couldn’t be called an art connoisseur though her grandfather qualified as a dilettante. Money had been tight, but her father saw to it her shoes had no holes, her books were new, and the
boulangerie
honored a standing Saturday morning order of
brioches
after her piano lesson, since he couldn’t be there to buy them.

She rode back to her office and parked the scooter below. Aimée hurried along the pavement, past the dark green shop-front with
PARIS-ROLLERBLADE
on it. She climbed the stairs, opened the door of her dark office, switched on the light, then her laptop.

“Working up Michel’s system,” said the Post-It on René’s screen. Out of guilt, she put in some time and made a sizable dent in the pile on her desk. A sweet lucrative Media 9 contract would keep the wolf from the door. But they had to nail it with safeguards for their security setup.

Security, like anything, had to be continually upgraded and maintained. Hackers, crackers, and script kiddies always found a way in … at least she and René did. That’s how they tested their security. But script kiddies, so called because they lacked the finesse of crackers, would manage, sooner or later, to break into a system and wreak havoc. Frugality, shortcuts, and untrained staff cost firms more in the long run. A lot more.

She’d seen it too often. Corporations who wouldn’t pay for a strong lock yet cried when the barn door opened and the horses escaped. She and René refused to do damage control and inserted nonculpability clauses in every contract.

After another hour, she’d written alternatives to the client’s questionable clauses, made René a copy, and faxed the revisions to Media 9.

On the wall she tacked up copies of the old
WANTED
posters. More than a million of them, printed and distributed in the summer of 1972. The equal numbers of men and women pictured, she imagined, stiffened the patriarchal backbones of Germany and France.

She tried the DST, asking for a status report as to her request for her father’s file. All she got was a recording saying that file series was sensitive and only available to those with high security clearance.

Courtesy of her high-level contract with Equifax, she pulled up a fairly granular, up-to-the-minute credit report. With the password she’d stolen last year on a bank consulting job, she got to work. After entering the number, she found the information she wanted.

She picked up the phone and punched in the number she’d stored in her memory. One she never wrote down. She’d avoided calling it until now. She’d never before had enough material with which to do a deal with the devil.

“Oui?
”

“I want to find someone,” Aimée said.

“Then you have to pay,” Léo Frot said at the other end of the line. His nasal voice competed with an occasional metallic ting in the background.

“How much?”

“Price mounts when someone doesn’t want to be found.”

“How do you know that, Léo?”

“Why would you call me if you could find them?”

Léo hadn’t changed. He’d squeeze the venom from a viper and charge the snake for it.

Too bad he was right.

She couldn’t data mine the files at the
police judiciare
on Quaides Orfèvres. None of them were computerized. Everything before the nineties was handwritten, stored in folders and police blotters. Dossiers. Face it, everything sensitive was done with pen and ink … probably quill pens.

“Someone do a walkabout, eh?” Léo asked.

“Walkabout?” she asked.

“We just came back from Australia,” he said. “That’s what they call an aborigine’s disappearance there.”

Typical Léo. Must be desperate to brag about his trip to someone, she thought. She’d known him for years. They’d gone to the
lycée
together. His father was her dentist.

“What if I do a systems security scan for you in return.”

Silence.

“Why do I feel that’s unfair?” Léo scraped something in the background.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “But that’s worth more than cash, believe me. You can’t imagine the stuff I find.”

“Like what?”

She knew he’d bite. His credit history lay before her on her screen. “Like the amount overdue on your Visa card. A gold one. And they’re about to pull it.”

“But they said …”

“Forget it,” she said. “The process started six hours ago…. I see bad credit in your future. Very bad.”

“Change it and I’ll help you,” he said.

She thought he caved in too fast.

“Files on Action-Réaction and the Haader-Rofmein gang,” she said. “From the seventies on.” She paused, hesitating. “And my father’s police review.”

A pause.

“Can’t
you
find them?” Léo asked.

“If they were in the system, I would,” she said. He knew that, too. “But I don’t feel inclined to break into the
prefecture
at Quaides Orfèvres. Makes me squeamish.”

“So I have to?”

“
Tiens
, Léo,” she said, “it’s your department.”

There was a long pause.

“Only if you adjust my credit report.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

She hit several keys and his bank balance flashed in front of her. “You’re overdrawn, Léo!”

“Fix that”—he took a deep breath—“and you’ve got my fingers at your disposal.”

“My partner hasn’t broken Banque de France’s encryption algorithms yet,” she said.

But she lied. René had done it two years ago. Even amped up their security system to a faster, better-tested algorithm called Blowfish. As he often said, better to be paranoid than sorry.

“Everything’s automated,” she said. “Programmed for glitches … too late….”

She let that sink in.

“But if I shut down the billing department with a postage-meter problem, that gives you an extra day.”

Pause.

“One day?”

Greedy
mec!

“Figure the weekend,” she said, struggling to sound patient. “On Monday you pay the Visa and prevent a lifetime of nasty credit ratings that could screw up your application to refinance your Neuilly house.”

“It’s Chantal,” he said, expelling air in disgust.

Aimée had met his wife, Chantal. Bubbleheaded but she seemed kind.

“Her heart’s set on a Corsican holiday bungalow,” Léo said. “With a hot tub!”

“I’m sure it’s difficult.” Aimée found it hard to feign sympathy for this couple. A vast majority of Parisian families struggled with two jobs even with subsidized day care, to buy necessities and pay the skyrocketing rents for their small apartments.

“But you have to come here to see the records; I’m so busy,” he said, his tone petulant. “When I find them, they go no farther than the lavatory.”

She’d met him in the Art Nouveau men’s lavatory in the Quaides Orfèvres once before.

“Some files might have traveled to the DST,” she said. “Can you check?”

“DST!” Léo groaned. “The ninth-floor division on rue Nélaton?”

“Good place to start.”

“Talk about paranoia,” Léo said. “Everything one says or does there gets classified. Papers must be locked in office safes and even when you take a piss you have to lock your office.”

“I bet you know the combinations of some safes.”

She heard his slow chuckle.

“Or you know someone who does,” she said.

“What did you say you’d do about the Visa?” he asked.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Thursday Afternoon

M
ARIUS
T
EYNARD WALKED
past his receptionist, Madame Goroux, who was busy at the keyboard.

“Mark me out for this afternoon,” he said.

“Monsieur Teynard, there’s a late afternoon appointment….”

“Tell the boy to take it,” he said. The boy, as he referred to his nephew, was fifty-five. Teynard slipped on his oatmeal-colored linen jacket, ruffled his white hair back from his temples, and gave her a half-smile. “You know how to handle him.”

He knew Madame Goroux would think he was visiting his mistress, who lived on the next block in the rue de Turbigo. She often covered for him. Let her think what she wanted.

Out on the haze-filled street where the heat hovered, hemmed in by the tall Haussmann buildings, he turned in the opposite direction. Teynard headed toward the
préfecture de police
on Quaides Orfèvres.

Along the broad part of rue de Turbigo that sliced the edge of the Sentier, he passed the Kookai boutique. Salesgirls smoked outside on the steps and the
tatouage
sign on rue Tiquetonne blinked orange-pink neon in the dusk. A dope haven if he ever saw it, but he knew the
flics
let it slide as long as their informants checked in with them. And, he reminded himself, that wasn’t his business.

Not anymore.

In the distance he saw the Tour Jean-Sans-Peur nestled behind the sandstone-colored school. The scum had been right here … a stone’s throw from his office.
Merde!

He was getting slow, admit it. Not on top of it anymore. Yet no one said that but himself. Be your own harshest critic, he’d learned, then no one else could be.

But that would change. He’d entered the fray. Time to wipe out the degenerate lice once and for all, if it was the last thing he did.

The hunt, the chase—these were the only things keeping him alive. The shivery tingle on the back of his arms … it was what he lived for. Face it, had always lived for.

He’d deluded himself when he retired from the
préfecture
, started the agency, and kept half-time hours. Even the DST contract work hadn’t filled the need. Keeping a young mistress had become difficult, and so time-consuming. His true mistress was his work.

He needed to get this information face-to-face, without risk of compromised phone lines, big-eared subordinates, or his former cronies from the Quai des Orfèvres. Time to mine his old-boy network.

Thursday Afternoon

O
USMANE
S
ADA’S FEVERISH
brow was beaded with sweat. He felt worse than before his visit to the marabout. Across from the sewing factory where he worked, he stopped in a Sentier café.

A few old men played backgammon at a Formica table. It took a while before the owner excused himself and asked Ousmane, in a brisk tone, what he wanted. Propping himself up at the zinc counter, parched and shaky, Ousmane allowed himself one small luxury. He ordered a steaming glass cup of sweet black tea, mint flavored. So soothing and such a comfort. Then he’d find his straw mattress and sleep his fever off. He’d promised himself he’d try what his
maman
had always advised … nothing sweats out a fever like hot, sweet mint tea, she’d always said.

Idrissa needed him in a few hours … already he was feeling better. Mandinkas never let the grass grow under a baobab tree, he remembered his father saying. He paid for the tea, and the owner acknowledged his tip with a nod of his head.

Ousmane made his way toward the sewing factory downstairs in the narrow Passage Ste-Foy. The dark passage’s light source was the flickering fluorescent bulbs in an upstairs office. Ousmane saw the yellow feather fetish, an omen of evil, just before he stepped on it. Too late. It crunched under his scuffed shoe. In horror, he clutched the stone wall. No way to reverse it, he knew. He’d been cursed for the second time that week.