Murder on the Champ de Mars (31 page)

Françoise hadn’t moved. Aimée wanted to shake this cosseted woman who either couldn’t fathom the danger or … Aimée froze. She felt as though a vise was tightening around her throat. What if she’d read this wrong—what if Françoise was in league with them? Whoever “they” were.

The sudden ringing of a telephone on the hall table pierced the silence.

“I wouldn’t answer that,” said Aimée. And then she had a thought. “Are your husband’s things still here?”

“Most of them are packed in his old office. Why?”

The hall phone stopped ringing. The sound was immediately followed by the trilling of a cell phone. Françoise jumped and took it out of her trench coat pocket.

“Wouldn’t answer that either,” Aimée snapped and took it from her.

Françoise’s blue-violet eyes blinked. For the first time, she looked terrified.

“Get your daughter, your passports. Now.”

The next moment, she’d disappeared up the wide staircase.

Aimée had to use this time wisely. She didn’t know what
she was looking for in Gerard Delavigne’s office, but Françoise’s words—
Your bosses would have done anything to keep my husband quiet
—kept running through her head.

Keep him quiet about what?

She only knew she had precious few minutes before the
flics
would ring the bell.

Delavigne’s office was lined with empty bookshelves; the floor was covered in packing boxes and furniture shrouded by sheets. The sodium lights shining on the Champ de Mars gave off just enough light through the tall windows for her to see. Like having a private park outside your house, she thought, except for the flashing red light of the ambulance parked on the
allée
where they’d just been walking. Where Roland Leseur sat dead on the bench.

The musty smell of old paper tickled her nose, and she sneezed. In the corner sat a withered ficus in a Chinese porcelain planter. A large baroque desk with a wooden inlay was bare except for an old framed portrait of Giscard d’Estaing. No drawers.

Think. This man had been Pascal Leseur’s classmate. They’d attended the elite
grande école
together, which was a conduit to a ministry position. They were the types who melded for life, kept the power in-house. The old boy’s network.

Françoise and Gerard had been sent to faraway postings to get them out of the way. Say Gerard’s ambassadorships hinged on what he knew of Pascal’s suicide and the cover-up over Djanka. Knowledge so valuable he needed to be kept quiet and in clover? Quick and dirty, but a working theory.

She flicked on her penlight and scanned the boxes—filled with old magazines and books, mostly. Some boxes were labeled P
HOTOS
or D
ECORATIONS
. She moved toward the empty bookcases. Didn’t he have a safe? Most men of his ilk would.

She pressed her fingers along the bookcase ridges and found it on the lowest shelf—an old Fichet-Bauche safe, like her grandfather’s. Open and empty.

Of course, Françoise would have packed the valuables for the move. She looked more carefully at the boxes near the bookcase and found one labeled
DOCUMENTS, FINANCIALS
.

She hated rummaging through people’s personal documents. But not enough to stop her from shining the penlight on the box’s contents. Kneeling, she flipped through the family birth certificates, marriage certificate, property deeds, Banque de France
livret
. The usual.

But underneath was a distinctive blue folder, legal-size and bearing the insignia of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. State secrets? But these were old. She thumbed it open. A black-and-white photograph of a half-dressed young boy and a man in what looked like a hotel room; written on the back were the words
Insurance via Pascal
.

“What are you doing in here?”

Aimée’s heart jumped to her stomach. She looked up to see Françoise standing in the doorway with a young woman. Their figures were silhouetted against the flashing blue lights from the police car out front, and their faces tinged red from the ambulance lights bleeding in from the Champ de Mars.

Think, she had to think. She slipped the folder under her windbreaker and did it back up, took the penlight out of her mouth and got to her feet.

“What right do you have to go through our things?”

“Maybe I got it wrong, Françoise,” she said, edging forward to the door. “Roland was the target, you the bait.”

“What in God’s name do you mean?”

Aimée wished she could read the woman’s expression.

“You’re in league with them,” Aimée said. “That’s why we got away,
n’est-ce pas
?”

Françoise was moving her hands and fingers rapidly. She had turned to face the young woman beside her, who responded, signing with her hands.

“My daughter Janine’s deaf,” Françoise said. “But she reads lips, and she says you’re lying.”

Should she look for another way out and cut her losses? Stall them while she escaped and let them finish whatever game they played? “What do you think, Françoise? Tell me the truth. Before you answer, remember that your daughter’s involved now. If she’s hurt, they’ll only regard her as collateral damage.”

“I think you’re rude, abrasive and smart,” she said. The doorbell rang. “And you’re right in only one assumption—that if we don’t leave now, we won’t leave at all.”

“Then how do we get out?”

“This way.” Aimée followed Françoise, who had the bulging Hermès carryall tucked under one arm and Filou under the other, back through the dark kitchen and the pantry and out through the servants’ door. On the leaf-clogged path to the service gate, Françoise pulled her elbow.

“Over here.”

Janine led them through the dark garden. Nestled behind a purple-flowering paulownia tree was a glass-paned hothouse, a winter garden. Janine opened the door and they stepped in; it was filled with orchids and humid air.

Janine took a key from under a flowerpot and opened the rear glass-paneled door to another door in the stone wall. A click and that door opened to a narrow
allée
—so narrow Aimée’s shoulders scraped the stone. A moment later they emerged onto Avenue de la Bourdonnais.

They kept to the shadowed doorways until they reached rue Saint-Dominique. By the time Aimée was sitting in the front passenger seat of a taxi with Filou on her lap, four blue-and-white police cars had whizzed past with their sirens screaming.

“Gare du Nord,
s’il vous plaît,
” she said, panting, to the driver.

Aimée caught her breath as the brightly lit iron lady, the sparkling Tour Eiffel, shrank in the rear viewmirror. She
thought as quickly as she could. Not counting on their luck to hold, she opened her cell phone’s speed-dial contacts and punched the SNCF booking number. She knew it would come in handy someday. Moments later, she’d reserved two seats and Filou’s accommodation on the last Eurostar departing for London.

“Françoise, do you remember how many joggers went by the bench?”

“Two, three?” She thought. “
Non
, it was the same one with a headlamp. He went by twice, that’s right. I almost ran into him.”

Of course. Aimée should have noticed.

The black Seine quivered gel-like below them as they crossed Pont Alexandre III. Aimée would worry about the jogger later. Right now she had to get as much information as she could from Françoise.

“Did you and Roland ever speak about Drina or her sister Djanka?”

“We only ever discussed private issues.”

She realized Janine was watching her lips. “Tell Janine this is personal and to close her eyes,
d’accord
?”

The taxi bumped over the cobbles in Place de la Concorde passing the obelisk, a needle-like shadow against the sky.

“I’m waiting, Françoise.”

“But I can’t talk with the driver listening.”

Aimée turned toward the driver, a bearded older man in a plaid scarf, and gestured to the headphones looped around his neck. “Mind wearing those?” She slipped a fifty-franc bill on top of the Discman on his lap.

“Pas de problème,”
he said and stuck them over his ears. “I love good music.
Les
Temptations—
magnifique.
”

She smiled. Janine had closed her eyes. The taxi driver honked at a bus.

“We’ve got maybe fifteen minutes, Françoise. Get talking.”

Pain clouded those blue-violet eyes. “Roland wanted us to
rekindle what we had before. True, I still think he was the love of my life, once. But …” Her knuckles whitened on the Hermès bag strap. “I said I’d have to think about it. So much has happened, and my life’s in London now.”

A sob escaped her.

“Françoise, tell me what you know about Pascal’s lover, Djanka. I think it’s related.”

“Pascal loved her, wouldn’t give her or the baby up. Pah—the only decent thing about him.”

Did this all boil down to avoiding the scandal that would erupt from a ministry official having an affair with a Gypsy and recognizing their love child?

“What else, Françoise?”

“On the park bench Roland told me he’d been threatened with blackmail. Something about Pascal’s death, I don’t know.”

“By who, Françoise?”

“Didn’t say. But Roland knew nothing, had always thought it was suicide.”

“An opportunistic journalist who’d twigged Pascal’s name in the tell-all memoir?”

“I don’t know.”

Or the murderer? The taxi passed the church of Saint Madeleine with its spotlit columns and turned onto
les grands boulevards
.

“But recently Roland had started to think it was murder. He just wanted to protect me.”

“Protect you from what?”

“Implications over Gerard? I didn’t understand. Didn’t care.”

“And what had he learned about Pascal’s death?”

“A murder, he kept saying. Covered up years ago. Djanka’s, too.”

“You mean Roland thought they were both murdered to mask their affair, prevent a scandal?”

“He didn’t say how or why he thought that. They had a
grand amour
, Djanka and Pascal—Gerard always said that.” A shrug. “But I kept asking Roland, why did it matter now? Stupid. What was the point in bringing all this up yet again? Roland said there was a cover-up, a Monsieur X who had pulled strings and who still holds power. He wants to keep the facts from getting out now. He abducted the Gypsy’s sister to shut her up.”

Monsieur X, a cover-up? She thought back to Thiely’s comments at l’École Militaire
—les barbusses
, paramilitary types who did the dirty jobs, leaving no trace so others kept their hands clean. But keeping it covered up, shutting down a police investigation—that meant a lot of corruption and bribery.

So if her father, as a police officer in 1978, had suspected who was behind the hits and been taken off the case … the only thing he could do was protect Drina and Nicu, tell them to run. Her father had been drummed out of the force not long after; had that been another loose end in this same tangle? A loose end tied up more finally when he was killed in Place Vendôme?

“Did Roland mention the name Tesla? Or Fifi?”

Françoise shook her head. “Roland said, ‘I’m next, and if I tell you any more, you are, too.’ ” Her shoulders heaved with sobs. “He told me that on the phone. Why didn’t I believe him?”

“This Monsieur X, Françoise, any idea who he could be?”

The lit façade of Gare du Nord emerged through the mist.

Françoise shook her head. “That bastard? If I knew, I’d tell you.”

A
FTER THEY HAD
dropped the Delavignes at Gare du Nord, Aimée insisted the taxi circle the Île Saint-Louis twice before letting her out. The lights misted over the Seine and leaves blew along the quai as she checked for a surveillance detail, a lone watcher. After what had happened to Roland Leseur, she couldn’t be too careful. But the few parked cars
showed no window vapor, no figure standing on the corner with an orange-tipped cigarette. The Seine was deserted except for one long barge, colored lights strung on its prow, which sent soft ripples up the river. She still had the taxi let her off around the corner and tipped him extra. She punched the code into the side-street door that led to a back passage from which she accessed her own courtyard.

In the apartment, she set down her keys, kicked off her heels inside her paneled foyer. Sniffed. Warm smells of laundry and … garlic?

S
HE’D ONLY CALLED
once to check on Chloé since Babette had left the office that afternoon. “Babette,
désolée,
” she called.
Merde
, it was after eleven. She was tired, so tired she almost dropped onto the recamier right there.

She noted folded piles of baby clothes, heard Brahms’s “Lullaby” playing softly on the radio she’d found at the flea market.

Babette grinned from the kitchen. “Pot-au-feu?”

Babette, what a jewel!

“Sorry I’m late.” She tasted a bite. Heaven. “Don’t remember seeing ‘master chef’ on your résumé.”

“Not me. It was Benoît, Gabrielle’s
tonton
. He brought it over,” she said. “But I took down the recipe.”

Fighting down a little disappointment, Aimée smiled at Babette. “I’d say he likes you.”

“My fiancé wouldn’t go for that,” she said, gathering up her sports pack. “He’s back from naval maneuvers in Toulon next month.”

Toulon. Who was it that had mentioned Toulon recently?

“A nod to the wise,” said Babette. “Benoît’s returned from Cambodia for an
ethnologie-archéologie
position at the Sorbonne. He’s very single.” Babette winked.

Aimée felt her neck flush.

In bed that night, she tossed and kicked the silk duvet.

She was exhausted, yet sleep eluded her. She flicked on the lamp beside the baby monitor. Took out the blue file she’d found in Gerard Delavigne’s study and stared at the photo. Studied it. From the monogrammed towels, standard furnishings definitely a hotel room: a shirtless young man in his late teens wearing white bell-bottoms and platform boots, à la Saturday Night Fever, leaned over a man in bed. There was something familiar about the man, who was grinning, his middle-aged paunch partially covered by a sheet. She looked closer, gasped. Why hadn’t she recognized the face of one of the era’s most powerful politicians?