Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis (25 page)

“Call off your dogs, Morbier. They’re so close I can smell them.”

“What do you mean, Leduc? We’re on rue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville crossing rue de l’Ave Maria.”

Four blocks away.

She heard a car door open, saw a man getting out of the car. Her hands trembled.

“Get prepared for a reception committee.” She clicked off before she dropped the phone. And stood there alone, with her supposed backup blocks away.

Her heart skipped. The only thing she could think of was to press 34B51 on the digicode of the next building.

The massive carved seventeenth-century door opened. She slipped inside, into former stables that were now a delivery bay for school supplies. A ramp led to the lower playground gate, which could not be glimpsed from the street. She tugged at the door and it clicked shut behind her.

A few years ago the junkies had discovered this enclave but she didn’t see any discarded needles among the tufts of overgrown grass. She followed the border of the enclosed playground to a back door where she counted on finding a key. From time immemorial, janitors had left one here for deliverymen, always in the same place. She slid her fingers over the wall, located the loose stone, and pried it out. In the dirt-encrusted space she found the janitor’s key where he’d always kept it. She and Martine had used it on occasion when they’d been late to class.

She unlocked the door and put the key back. Inside the school, she ran down a narrow low-ceilinged hall lined with bulletin boards laden with notices of class schedules and after-school club meetings. The smell of paper, the dull luster of the linoleum floor—nothing had changed since her day. No doubt the cracked ceilings upstairs still leaked puddles onto the marble floors.

This was formerly the residence of the first archbishop of Paris. Later it had been an outpost of Charles V, then Marie-Thérèse’s chancellor’s quarters. It had became a sugar refinery and then, in the last century, a high school.

Perspiration dampened Aimee’s collar. She had to figure out what to say to Gabriel when she found him.

Using the stairway, she descended into the bowels of the École Massillon, to the blackened boiler room. The fourteenth-century foundation emitted a dank chill, barely combatted by the heat radiating from huge soot-stained boilers abutting the wall. They must recently have been stoked. The boilers were firing at full blast, and charcoal dust lay everywhere. Carved out of the thick wall was the half-oval window she remembered. It was not glassed in; it was needed for ventilation. This window was level with the sidewalk and looked onto rue du Petit Musc. Quai des Celestins lay beyond it, then came the Seine, and, across the river, the Hôtel Lambert on the Ile Saint-Louis. The Hôtel Lambert, again.

She leaned against the window’s rusted bars. She could see a pair of brown walking shoes and the bottom half of khaki trousers passing by on rue du Petit Musc’s pavement. The man was so close she could have reached out and untied his shoelaces.

“Gabriel?”

The legs turned and retreated. The streetlight illuminated a
mec
with blond hair, a barrel chest, and close-set eyes now scanning the building.

“I don’t see Nelie,” she said.

“And I don’t see you. Why’d Krzysztof leave?”

She had to keep him talking until Morbier arrived.

He hunched over and peered down and inside.

“Don’t you have something for me?” Gabriel asked. His gravel-edged voice was the one she had heard over the phone.

The light from the boiler illuminated her coat sleeves but she didn’t think he would be able to get at her through the chipped and rusted iron bars. But her certainty was wrong.

With two swift kicks, he dislodged them.

She jumped back but thick fingers reached in and grabbed her, encircling her neck. Her face was wrenched hard against the gritty stone. She tried to bite his fingers but couldn’t turn her head so that her teeth could find a purchase. Her hands were free, though, and she scratched his and tried to get away. His pressure on her throat increased and as she struggled, her face was thrust against the wall again. Where were Morbier and his men?

“You don’t . . . have Nelie, do you?” she sputtered, her fingernails scraping against the stone as she sought something, anything, to fight back with.

Her hand caught the metal poker used to stoke the furnace that hung from the boiler door. Choking, she wrapped the tail of her tuxedo jacket around her hand, seized the hot poker, and slammed it against his thick knuckles, his hands, his arms. The air filled with the smell of singed hair and burning cloth.

“Ayyeee . . .”
One hand relinquished his grip. She kept beating the other until it, too, fell away.

“You set the bomb—”

“Screw you.” The blade of his Laguiole knife sliced through the air. She heard footsteps. Men were coming. “Where’d you take the brat?” he asked.

“So it was you in my apartment.” She hooked the hot poker around his ankle. “Why do you want the baby?” He let out a piercing yell as the poker connected with bare skin. She yanked him against the building with all her might. She could smell searing flesh. “Why?”

His screams were the only reply.

And then he was surrounded by scuffling legs and the impact of punches, the sounds of thuds. She heard the wail of a siren, then shots, and still she held on, yanking harder. Now she could only smell coal fumes. Outside, a car squealed off.

“Leduc?”

She dropped the poker.

“Let go. It stinks.” Morbier’s face was above her, at the window. “Pretty messy barbecue, Leduc.”

MORBIER SAT BEHIND his desk, rubbing the gray growth on his chin. His jowls sagged and his eyes were red rimmed. He pointed at her soot-stained Che Guevara T-shirt. “Your new hero, Leduc?”

“Part of my cover,” she said.

She took another sip of espresso. Her legs felt warm; the shivering had stopped. The ice pack she held to her forehead was already partly melted and sagging.

Smoke spiraled from a burning cigarillo in the Ricard ashtray. Aimée took another from Morbier’s yellow Montecristo tin and lit it from the box of kitchen matches on his desk.

“Help yourself, Leduc, why don’t you?” he said. “Didn’t you quit?”

“I’m always quitting.” She glanced around. “New office. You’re coming up in the world, Morbier.” Wood file cabinets, a computer screen with a blinking cursor. “I didn’t think you knew how to use one of those,” she said, pointing to the computer.

“I even type like a pro now,” he said. “I’ve graduated from two-finger hunting and pecking.”

Outside his office there was a large open room with vacant cubicles and computers. Once it had been the incident room. She saw the adjoining office, the number five painted on the glass beneath the transom. Her father’s old office.

“A real nice
mec,
Gabriel Leclerc,” Morbier said, consulting some papers in a brown file folder. “Ex-military, low-level ops. I thought I knew him from somewhere.”

She bit back her surprise. “So, he fits Halkyut’s profile.”

“Let’s say he’s a bottom-feeder, not their usual level operative.” Morbier shook his head. “Seems like they didn’t vet him with their usual thoroughness.”

She figured Gabriel was someone Halkyut used for jobs that could go wrong.

“Any good news, Morbier?” After all, it was Gabriel who had set the bomb at the Hôtel Lambert. “Did he give you a confession?”

“The evening’s young.” Morbier smiled wryly. “But it seems that he skipped his parole appointment yesterday. So we’ve got all the time in the world.”

Missing a parole appointment meant there would be no need for lawyers or an arraignment. Gabriel had a ticket to La Santé. He’d be arrested and then it would take several weeks or even months to process his case. With luck he’d end up in a maximum-security prison like Clairvaux.

There was a knock on the frame of the open door.

Aimée looked up to see a young policewoman wearing a blue cap cocked at a jaunty angle.

“Commissaire, a package for you,” she said, with a Provençal accent wide enough to push a cart through.

“From whom?”

“France2.”

Nicolas was on the ball.

“Do me a favor, Officer,” Morbier said. “Set up the VCR for viewing a tape,
s’il vous plaît.
”

Aimée blinked. Morbier polite? Not only did he type now, he also said please.

She stubbed out her cigarillo. “You got a fast response from Nicolas, Morbier. Must be your good manners.”

“That, too. And Nicolas owes me at poker. Big-time.

“Nicolas says this Claude Nederovique made a splash ten years ago but hasn’t produced anything in a while,” Morbier told her. “Is he part of MondeFocus now?”

She shook her head. She didn’t want to direct suspicion toward Claude even if he’d deserted her, abandoned her to those
mecs
.

“He’s just helping out. He’s filming, that’s all,” she said.

She hit
Play
. The images flickered by, disjointed. There was more footage than what she’d viewed on Claude’s video. He and Krzysztof should have gotten to Bobigny a while ago. Yet she’d had no phone call.

Now the video showed a smiling mix of students and Socialist types, milling about on a narrow street. The cameraman talked to an assistant about lighting, angles. Krzysztof and a woman in a red-and-white Palestinian scarf passed out candles. Bottles of wine were being shared in the loose ranks of marchers who were singing “The Internationale.” The camera cut to a blonde with long hair. There was a close-up. From the remarks of the cameraman about her low-cut jeans, it seemed he was a derrière man. Then they heard his sigh as she put the strap of a backpack over Krzysztof ’s shoulder and pecked his cheek. Next they saw an unfocused blue glare. A wobbling handheld shot showed a limping woman shouting. Another woman grabbed her and ran toward the Pont de Sully. More wobbling. The first woman slumped to the ground.

Nelie. It was Nelie.

The next shot showed the woman in the red-and-white Palestinian scarf, which was now soaked with blood. Aimée didn’t recognize her but seeing the scarf turning red with her blood made Aimée queasy. The cameraman’s voice said, “Hurry . . . bomb squad’s arriving.” He zoomed in . . . then came a shot of a backpack out of which bottles and yellow rag fuses were spilling.

Watching the tape she felt relieved. The march had happened just as Krzysztof had described it. But the most important question was still unanswered.

Morbier said, “Great idea, Leduc! You’ve wasted my time. It’s after midnight. I could have been halfway home, and not had to call in a favor.”

“Wrong, Morbier.” She hit the
Rewind
button.

“Important, eh? All I saw was a bunch of long-haired radicals partying, and the CRS doing its job.”

Her shoulders tensed at Morbier’s dismissive tone. It was all there, in blurred color. Why didn’t he see it?

She hit
Play
once more, took the remote control, and stood close to the screen. “OK, see, here’s Krzysztof.” She pointed to him as he passed out candles. Then she fast-forwarded. “Here’s the blonde.”

“It’s blurred; it’s hard to see what’s happening.”

“Bear with me. You’re seeing this at sixty images a second, not frame by frame.”

“Quite the expert, eh?”

She was just parroting what she’d learned from Claude.

“Notice something else, Morbier?”

“I concur with the cameraman—nice derrière.”

“The blonde’s putting the backpack on Krzysztof’s shoulder,” she said. “She kisses him. And then she disappears. But see the blond man on the sideline?”

“Gabriel Leclerc,” Morbier said. He scratched a kitchen match on the table’s edge and lit up a cigarillo.

She fast-forwarded and hit
Stop
. “This woman . . . recognize her?”

Morbier exhaled a puff of blue smoke. “Orla.”

“But do you recognize who she’s reaching for? It’s Nelie Landrou.”

“So that’s what she looks like.”

In slow motion they saw Nelie limping. She had an anguished look on her face, and was almost doubled over as she ran. But there was no baby; Aimée didn’t see Stella.

“Keep going, Leduc.”

She forwarded the video in slow motion now. “Here’s the proof the blonde gave the backpack with the bottle bombs to Krzysztof. It was a setup.”

“You’d be a good
avocat,
Leduc,” Morbier said. “It’s easy to interpret the video the way you want, in your client’s favor.”

Aimée was frustrated. “Look at the video. The proof is right there!”

“Or it was an elaborate plan, and Krzysztof expected her to bring the bottle bombs in the backpack and to give it to him.”

Aimée rewound the video to show Krzysztof’s smiling face as the blonde was kissing him. “I think he’s just a sucker for a pretty face. Doesn’t it look like that?”

“It wouldn’t persuade the tribunal.”

She sat down, tired. “It doesn’t have to. Gabriel Leclerc’s off to La Santé anyway for a good long visit. Show him this in a
tête-à-tête
. Get him to spill. Tell him you’d appreciate his cooperation and you’ll reciprocate, et cetera.”

“Reciprocate?” Morbier snorted. “It’s out of my hands. Out of my realm now.” But he tapped his pencil, a sure sign he was thinking.

“Promise Gabriel a three-man cell instead of the usual one for six,” Aimée said. Her temples were throbbing. She needed more ice. “Or say you’ll try to get him assigned to the VIP wing. You know, along with the disgraced financiers and officials.”

There was silence except for the whir of the tape rewinding. Aimée could smell the bitter dregs of her espresso. She was worn out. All she wanted to do was crawl under her duvet.

“He’s pretentious enough to like that,” Morbier said. “You actually think he’ll admit that Halkyut is involved in sabotaging ecology groups and, in particular, MondeFocus?”

Smart. Why had she underestimated Morbier? He had to watch his back and he was always moaning about imminent retirement. And he didn’t like taking on the ruling powers.

“Morbier, you won’t lose your pension or anything else, and you’ll just gain in self-respect.”