Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis (14 page)

“Madame organizer, they called
Maman
. I crawled around her legs in soup kitchens for the workers. It’s in my blood, I guess.”

No wonder.

“And you? What compels you to write about causes?”

Startled, she ran her finger around the rim of the glass. Not many men asked her what she thought.

“I don’t like injustice, real or abstract. My mother didn’t either.” She paused. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked about her mother with anyone. And never about her mother’s ideals, the causes she’d embraced. “A seventies radical. But I don’t know much. She left when I was eight. To save the world.”

He gave her a sad smile.

“That’s young. Mine left when I was sixteen. Soon after, I stowed away on a freighter bound for Liberia. I came back years later but my father had passed away by then.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Maybe we’re the same in some way, don’t you think?”

Both scarred and searching.

“That and a franc, twenty centimes gets you the paper,” she said, a half smile on her lips. She didn’t want to deal with this.

“You have to face it sometime,” he said, almost reading her thoughts.

As if she could and it would disappear.

She turned away.

He put his hand on her shoulder. Warm. “
Voilà,
done it again.”

“What’s that?”

“Brought down the burden of the world onto your shoulders . . . no wonder I’m not invited to parties.” He shrugged. “My friends tell me to lighten up.”

“Right now I’ve got a story to write,” she said.

She pulled out her worn Vuitton wallet, removed two hundred francs.

“Of course, I’ll pay you for the tape and your time. You’re busy. You can leave it outside your door, and I’ll pick it up or send for it,” she said. “Will this cover your expense?”

“Forget the money,” he said. “Journalists don’t pay their sources.”

Didn’t they? If she didn’t hurry, she’d miss her next appointment.

“I do. You’re a professional.”

“On one condition,” he said, an amused look in his eye. “This goes toward more of that superb Chinon and you come by later.”

AIMÉE SKIRTED PLACE VALHUBERT. His words, the wine, the warmth. She’d wanted to stay. But mixing business and men never worked.

She heard a baby’s cry and turned around to see a woman emerging from the Metro with a stroller, the plastic cover coated with rain, blue-bootied feet just visible. A shudder of guilt went through her. Stella. And those big blue eyes. She had to hurry to her appointment, then relieve René. An oil company seeking an injunction against an environmental protest group; Krzysztof Linski discredited as a right-wing plant and drummed out of MondeFocus; bottle bombs that the CRS knew about in advance while the demonstrators were ignorant: It didn’t make sense.

Ahead, car headlights illuminated the wet pavement. She passed the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, a
belle époque
building Jules Verne would feel at home in—musty glass display cases of taxidermied tortoises from the Galápagos, two-headed fetuses curled in glass tubes from the year 1830. A place where she’d spent many a Saturday afternoon with her grandfather, hiding behind him to peek at the more graphic displays.

She checked her watch again and ran. A raincoated
flic
directed traffic and by the time she’d made it down the bank, littered with sand and salt to prevent slipping, to the Brigade Fluviale’s headquarters, she had a less than a minute to spare.

Quai Saint-Bernard, home in the summer to evening tango dancing, glimmered wet and forlorn in the lights from Pont d’Austerlitz. The slick gangplank to the Brigade Fluviale’s long, low-lying
péniche
swayed over the Seine’s current. She clutched the gangway rope tightly, almost losing her balance twice.

On the left loomed L’Institut du Monde Arabe. And not more than a few barge lengths across the Seine from it lay Place Bayre, at the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, like the prow of a ship. White wavelets lapped against the stone steps and brushed the deserted bank. She thought of the tire iron, of fleeing through the park, and shivered with fear as well as cold.

She tapped on the white fiberglass door. A blue-uniformed member of the river police greeted her, a snarling white German shepherd at his side.

“
Bonjour.
Aimée Leduc to see the
capitaine de police
.”

He pulled the leashed dog back. “
Arrêt,
Nemo!” he said as he motioned her inside. The brigade headquarters reminded her of a holiday houseboat except for the computers, the white erasable boards filled with assignments, the scurrying officers, the thrum of fax machines, and the smell of the river.

“This way.”

She followed him and a now friendly Nemo, who smelled her legs and keened to be petted. The officer slid another door open and they crossed a deck to an adjoining
péniche
.

“
Bonjour,
Mademoiselle Leduc,” said Capitaine de Police Michel Sezeur. Shorter than Aimée, he had brown hair combed back
en brosse
. He wore a Manhurin standard-issue revolver in a holster on the belt of his form-fitting blue twill trousers. “I regret that I can only give you five minutes.” He gestured toward a row of blinking red lights on his telephone.

“I appreciate your making the time for me, Capitaine,” she said and sat down on a swivel chair facing his crowded desk.

The
péniche
rocked in the backwash of a boat speeding past and her stomach lurched. Waves lapped over the steamed-up portholes and gray mist hovered in the distance.

“Commissaire Morbier confirmed your request,” he said, handing her a stapled report several pages in length

Smart and quick. He’d checked with Morbier after her call.

“You’ll find all the details in this report: our recovery of the victim at 02:47 hours, attempts at resuscitation by one of our paramedic qualified divers, the assessment of the inspector who arrived on the scene and decided upon the next course of action, and the victim’s subsequent removal to the Institut médicolégal. Standard procedure as you will see.”

“About the CRS involvement—” she started to say.

He kept a tight smile. “You know the CRS carry no bullets, their guns are sealed, and they can’t attack the public unless provoked or for due cause.”

“A demonstrator’s in the hospital—”

He cut her off. “Due to illegal assembly, failure to disperse, and discovery of weapons. The CRS only react if demonstrators cross the line. Which, I believe, one of them did.” He sat. “But that’s not my area nor the reason you’re here, correct?”

“How do this victim’s circumstances correspond to or differ from those relating to other bodies you’ve recovered?”

“We find fifty to sixty bodies a year in the Seine. More often than not, they’ve been submerged a long time.”

“But this one wasn’t. Mind telling me the river’s depth and temperature?”

“Usually four to five meters
*
.” He gestured to a wall chart of the river confluences. The
péniche
rocked and her stomach lurched again. A door swung open, revealing a line of hanging wet suits. “However, the Seine can rise two to three meters more, as it has now. The current’s strongest now. Temperature-wise, it’s three to four degrees in winter, up to twenty
**
degrees in the summer.”

“You mentioned that the corpses are usually submerged. How does that affect the body?”

“It’s not rocket science, Mademoiselle. In winter, bodies sink, in spring, they bloat. Sometimes they blow up with body gases like a hot-air balloon. When they’re black and swollen it’s difficult to distinguish between a man or a woman. We’ve recovered bodies as far away as the
barrage,
the sluice gates south of the Tour Eiffel.” He paused. “That one took three weeks to travel eight kilometers.”

Curious, she leaned forward, though it had little to do with Orla.

“Three weeks?”

“The current, the time of the year, and water temperature all have to be taken into account. Plus the
silure,
the big-river fishes, and the
écrevisses,
fresh-water crawfish
,
had eaten more of the extremities than usual.”

She shuddered, thinking of them feasting on Orla.

“Some fishmongers near Les Halles supplemented their income by selling
les écrevisses
.” He smiled. “Until we stopped them.”

Aimée glanced at an array of rusted firearms and a collection of rope knots behind glass on the wall. “Artifacts from the river?”

He grinned. “Treasures. I found the Sten gun used by the Résistance on the river bottom. On another dive I brought up this revolver, from the 1930s. It had been a dumping point for gangsters from rue de Lappe. Amazing to find it, considering the murkiness of the water, Mademoiselle. We must use our hands; we can’t see a thing down there. And twenty minutes in a wet suit is all a diver can take.”

Interesting, but it got her no further. She had to ask him for guesses with respect to what she wanted to know. “Two more questions, Capitaine. How long do you think this woman’s body lay in the water? And, in your opinion, how far could it have traveled from the point at which it entered the water?”

“The Seine’s risen several centimeters since last night and will continue to rise due to runoff and rain. We’re near flood levels.” He exhaled. “Given the body’s temperature and the lack of severe bloating or discoloration, I’d hazard three or four hours. The autopsy report should be more definite.”

A knock and the door slid open. Two uniformed officers stood outside. “Ready when you are, Capitaine.”

He grabbed his raincoat from the rack. “Regarding the body . . . well, I can only conjecture.”

“I understand.”

He flipped the pages of the report to the end. “On this diagram, you’ll see, I’ve marked the place where the body was recovered from the sewer grate.”

It was at a point just below Pont de Sully. “But wouldn’t it be unlikely for her body to remain in the same spot at which she was shoved in, considering the river current, the passing Bateaux-Mouches and other barge traffic?”

“I’ve seen it before; it happens,” he said. “A limb catches on a sewer grate, a body twists and sticks in the iron rungs or the underwater steps descending from the bank. Or it becomes entangled in an underwater pylon or with an old fishing line. Sometimes the currents from a Bateau-Mouche will push a body up to the surface.”

“So what do you conclude, Capitaine?”

“Don’t quote me.” He walked to the door. “And I’ll deny saying this, but I doubt she’d been there long at all. It’s just a feeling, a sense, from my twenty years of experience.”

“Can you explain what you mean a little more clearly?”

“I tried to reconstruct the scene. It struck me, well—a possible scenario would be that she reached for help, was struck, and fell back into the water, her lungs filling up then.”

That’s what Serge had intimated, she recalled.

“There’s no way to be certain,” the commander continued. “But it’s almost as if she was trying to grab her attacker.”

Or to grab something from the attacker? Serge had not mentioned any defensive wounds on her hands.

“Who knows? The attacker might have been frightened by the lights of a passing boat. He might have been interrupted and so he ran away not knowing if she survived.”

He put his raincoat on. “And I never said that.”

INTERRUPTED?

Nelie Landrou had made the frantic telephone call to her.

This made sense if she’d seen Orla attacked at the river, been chased in turn, and so feared for her life and the baby’s. She had not even had time to put a diaper on Stella. Shaken, Aimée rounded the curve of Quai d’Anjou.

The rain continued to pelt down. She walked down the worn steps to the spot Capitaine Sezeur had pointed out. White and rust-colored lichen splashed with clumps of lime covered the stone wall; moss feathered the cracks oozing under her wet boots. A Bateau-Mouche glided past, so close she could hear radio static erupting from the deck, and sweeping gray-green water onto the bank and her shoes. Just as quickly, the water receded, trickling back over the weathered stone.

Here. Hunched over, she reached her hand into the icy water. Flailed around until her fingers touched a metal rung, invisible in the murky depths. A whoosh of colder subterranean water, putrid and scummed with foam, gushed forth and was swept away by the current. The capitaine’s conjecture was right. Caught in and buffeted by the sewer stream, Orla couldn’t have been here long or she would have been bruised all over.

Her hand, dripping by her side, tingled. Then the rain stopped and a warm, almost tropical wind whipped her face as she walked the few steps to her building. A weak moon struggled behind wisps of pearl gray clouds hovering over Pont Marie.

Orla had died almost outside Aimée’s window. Capitaine Sezeur had confirmed her suspicions.

But her investigation had fallen short. Brigitte had revealed little about MondeFocus or Nelie. Claude’s video held only blurred, unfocused images and would require painstaking processing to decipher. And then the tape might show only two minutes of dark chaos. There had to be more.

What was clear was that she couldn’t juggle work and take care of Stella.

Yet she needed to sniff under the rocks Brigitte had pointed her at and to find Krzysztof. To focus, or—as the old dinosaurs in the force said—squeeze till the water ran dry.

She tried Brigitte at the MondeFocus office. No answer, so she left a message on the machine.She stopped at the
boulangerie
around the corner and stood in line behind a bent old man. He tipped his cap with a knowing smile.
“Bonsoir.”

She returned his greeting, searching her memory. Did she know him? He struggled to put his loaf of
pain au paysan
inside a plastic bag printed with the green cross of the pharmacy next door. She noticed boxes of bandages and dressings inside the bag.

The
boulangerie
doors stood open to the street where the few passersby were folding their umbrellas to save them from the wind. Meter maids in blue peaked caps checked car meters along the quai. She emerged, baguette in hand, and paused, sensing someone watching her. Her skin prickled.