Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis (4 page)

Monday Midnight

AIMÉE PUSHED OPEN the gleaming green door of the
Chambre Professionelle des Artisans Boulanger-Pâtissiers
, the bakers’ union and academy, and rushed past bread sculptures, ancient kneading tables, and a turn-of-the-century wooden bread cart in the foyer. Woodcuts of bread ovens lined the walls. The door clicked shut behind her. Now if she could just . . . The door buzzer sounded and she jumped. Her hands trembled. To get in, you had to know the door code, like she did; few buzzed unannounced at night. The buzzer sounded again, echoing off the stone-paved foyer. She leaned down, trying to catch a glimpse of the person who was buzzing for admittance through the crack in the four-hundred-plus-year-old door. But no one was visible in the dim sodium yellow of the streetlight. A car engine started, and she heard the the motor idling on the quai. She hoped it was the person who had followed her, about to drive away. Then a muffled cough came from right outside the door. She had to hurry and get out of here.

Pungent warm yeast smells filled her lungs. In the rear, she saw a group of men in the kitchen wearing white cooks’ shirts buttoned on the side, like a culinary military uniform, she always thought. Indeed, the baking master ran the academy with precision rivaling the nearby Arsenal’s cavalry exercises.

A row of bullet-like moist white baguettes sat on the marble kneading table, poised for insertion into the wall oven.

“Escaped again, eh?” Montard asked, measuring cup in hand, his wide brow and flushed face beaded with perspiration.

The buzzer sounded again. Montard shot a look over his flour-dusted shoulder. “Another man who wouldn’t take no for an answer? This one’s persistent.”

She’d used the academy’s back exit before. It came in handy when a date turned sour. She shrugged, sticking her shaking hands in her pockets.

“The espresso is on me, Montard.”

“Someday . . . you’re always asleep when I’m working.”

The oven timer beeped and Montard sprang into position, reaching with a long wooden paddle to hoist the baked loaves onto cooling trays. She walked past the industrial-sized aluminum mixer and hundred-kilogram sacks of flour and bins of Maldon sea salt to open the fire exit door. Threading her way through the courtyard, past a dormant rose trellis and hedges winding by an old well, she emerged by her own courtyard’s old carriage house. She paused until she was sure that no one was following her. Shining her penlight in the corners, she checked her courtyard again. And then trudged upstairs. In her apartment bedroom, René, his sleeves rolled up, sat on the floor working on his laptop. The baby cooed on the duvet.

She pulled the gauze draperies aside and peered out the window. Shadows wavered on the quai below.

“Someone followed me.”

“So you led them here?”

She pulled a crisp, warm baguette from her pocket. “I took a minor detour at the baker’s.”

She needed a cigarette. Too bad she’d stopped smoking last week. Again.

“Did the mother call yet?” she asked.

René shook his head, grabbed the nub end of the baguette, and chewed while he scanned the computer screen. His flexed his toes in their black silk socks. “You might want to put the tabs right.”

Curious, she sat next to him cross-legged, scanning the report displayed on the screen of the laptop, and asked, “Didn’t I?”

“The diaper tabs.” He pulled the blanket away to show her the cooing baby’s legs.

She stared at the now properly arranged diaper.

“You put the diaper on backward,” René said.

A kitchen towel wreathed the baby’s neck like a bib. Aimée’s large lime bath towel propped her on her side.

“I checked with my friend, a pediatric intern. He said it’s better for their digestion for them to lie like that. I’d say she’s ten days to two weeks old.”

Surprised, she bent forward, scanning the baby’s face.

“How can you tell?”

He shrugged. “See.” He lifted some sheets of paper covered with blurred black-and-white images. “He faxed these photos of umbilical cords from his textbook. And told me to check the soft crevice on her head, the fontanel. It’s much too early for it to close so don’t drop her on her head.”

René pulled on a corner of the blanket and the baby stiffened, her arms shooting out, fists clenched.

Like a fit, or a convulsion. Aimée’s mind raced ahead to the emergency room, huddled doctors, forms to fill out. Inconvenient questions.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, worried.

René thumbed through the faxed pages.

“Let’s see, I read about it . . . here, it’s a Moro reflex, it says here. It’s normal. If she didn’t have reflexes then you would worry.”

“How can you—?”

“Stroke the sole of her foot,” he interrupted. “From heel to toe.”

She brushed her fingers across the warm foot. The baby’s toes flared upward and then her foot curled inward like a wrinkled peach.

“Eh
voilà,
the plantar reflex,” he said. “They’re just little bundles of reflexes when they’re not poop machines. My friend said they even have an
en garde
fencing reflex.”

She stared, amazed. There was so much to know. And it was such a responsibility.

“Notice her perfectly shaped head?” The baby’s nose crinkled in a yawn and her eyelids lowered, and a moment later they heard her little snores of sleep.

Every baby was cute, she thought.

“They don’t all come out like that, my friend said. Probably a C-section.”

René put the faxed sheets down on the parquet floor.

“How do you know you were being followed?” He didn’t wait for her answer and shook his head. “It’s your overactive imagination as usual.”

“I didn’t imagine a tire iron!” she said. “Or ruin a good pair of silk Chantal Thomas stockings for fun. Hold on, I’ve got to change.” She went into the bathroom, peeled off her shredded stockings, and wiggled out of the Chanel. By the time she rejoined René, she’d put on leggings and a denim shirt.

“It doesn’t make sense, René, unless someone’s watching for her outside.”

“What do you mean?”

She told him about the shuttered garage, the figure with the tire iron chasing her across Place Bayre.

René’s eyes widened.

“That’s why the mother hasn’t come back—she’s afraid.” She paused. “Or more than afraid. She may be injured. Or worse.”

“Call the
flics,
” René said.

Aimée had to make him understand. “I don’t know how, but this woman knows me, René,” she said. “And I believe her; she was fearful for a reason. Would you feel better if the baby was at social services when she shows up? Then she would be hauled into jail for abandoning her infant, all because she begged me to watch the baby and I wouldn’t help her for a few hours.”

“Did I advise that?” He averted his eyes.

That’s what he’d meant.

“I’ll tell her—
non,
convince her—to speak to the
flics
once she turns up.”

“But you don’t know how to care for a baby.”

Like she needed him to remind her!

“I’ll do what I can.” The rest, well . . . she stared at the phone, willing it to ring.

Tuesday Morning

PENETRATING THE FOG of sleep, Krzysztof heard a long, piercing whistle. He blinked awake, panicking, grabbing at what enfolded him. The stinging welts on his back flamed. He realized he was lying inside a sleeping bag on the floor. The memory of last night’s surprise attack came back: the CRS truncheons, sirens, revolving blue lights, Gaelle’s blood, their group scattering. The peaceful organized march shattered. Running, escaping through the wet bushes. The ransacked MondeFocus office and Brigitte’s anger and accusations.

Something clanged and sputtered. He inhaled the aroma of fresh-ground coffee and just-baked bread. His eyes cleared and he saw a red-haired woman sipping a soup bowl–sized
café crème
at a worn farm table. Despite the frigid air, she wore a lace halter top and torn jeans, and her feet were bare.

Now he remembered finding this safe place, a squat the others had told him about. No one would bother him here. He checked his cell phone for voice mail. Nothing. Why hadn’t Orla returned his call? He’d left three messages on her phone last night.

“Coffee, Prince Charming?” The woman grinned.
La rouquine,
the redhead, they’d called her. A steam kettle boiled on the stove in the squat’s industrial-sized kitchen.

He saw her blowtorch leaning against the battered Indian-style sandalwood screen. Gaelle had told him last week about this
artiste
who was sympathetic to their cause. She welded metal sculptures and could hold her wine. Last night’s empty bottles filled a corner. He had seen how much she could drink before he’d passed out.

The files were gone, Gaelle was in the hospital, MondeFocus was against him. Very well, he would act on his own.

He winced as he got to his feet, still in his Levi’s and half-buttoned shirt, and joined her by the stove, from which heat slowly emanated. She kissed him on both cheeks and handed him a bowl. Her hands, he saw, were rough with blackened fingernails. From the blowtorch, no doubt. The squat was on the site of what used to be an old farm, now scheduled for demolition. The last farm remaining in Paris, it was the abode of artists, political types, and immigrants without papers who hid there. Like him. No one would trace him here.

“I’m late,
ma rouquine,
” he said, glancing at the salvaged train-station clock hung on the peeling plastered wall.

“Come back, Krzysztof,” she said. “We’ll have a long lunch.”

He saw the dancing look in her gray-speckled eyes. But he had no time for that.

KRZYSZTOF GOT OFF the Number 38 bus by the Sorbonne. The headline of
Le Parisien
read RIOT BY MONDEFOCUS AT L’INSTITUT DU MONDE ARABE OIL CONFERENCE: TWENTY JAILED. He took a deep breath; if hadn’t known what to do before, he knew now.

His student ID folded in his back pants pocket, he walked between the pillars of the entry gate and hurried up the wide stone staircase to the library. The wood-vaulted reading room smelled of age—antique mahogany had warped with time and the walnut oil that had been rubbed into it for years had given the wood a rich patina. Krzysztof eyed the room, which was covered floor to ceiling with books but vacant except for a few older scholarly types bent over their work. Most of his fellow students were attending lectures.

He had to find proof. The proof that had been stolen from the MondeFocus office.

The librarian took his ID and he sat down at a computer terminal. He logged on using “Sophocles,” the user ID and password of a philosophy professor that he’d found taped under the desktop in a deserted office last week at noontime. It was so easy to steal passwords and IDs. Krzystof imagined that professor abhorred computers and preferred contemplating his navel, as did most of the tenured staff.

Last week he’d accessed Alstrom’s Web site. Alstrom was the oil conference’s major sponsor. Their external site displayed nothing but blatant propaganda about how their oil exploration enriched the world. Enriched their pockets, more likely.

Now he was going to try the site of Regnault, Alstrom’s PR firm. Operational files might contain telltale documents under a code or project name. He’d seen parts of environmental reports that had been withheld from the media, suppressed. And they’d made him sick.

He logged into a privileged user account and told the system to add a new user, Sophocles. So far, so good.

Ready for the plunge, he logged into Regnault with Sophocles. If Alstrom had bribed ministers to overlook discrepancies in its environmental reports and he could find evidence of this, he could salvage their protest and stop the execution of the proposed agreement.

His fingers tensed on the keyboard, feeling that particular rush, the crackle of expectation. In seven keystrokes he’d be inside Regnault’s network, scanning their operational documents. They’d never know their system had been infiltrated. Nine out of ten times they didn’t recheck privileged user accounts or monitor their firewall.

But a message flashed on the screen:
If you read this, you’re dead.

Krzysztof froze. Someone was on to him.

Or . . . ?

He logged off and grabbed his hooded sweatshirt. He kept his head down, grabbed his ID, and passed through the turnstile before the librarian turned her head.

Tuesday Morning

AIMÉE STARED AT the clock. It was 6:00 A.M. Still no word, no call from the baby’s mother. The dried blood on the baby bag, the figure who had chased her in Place Bayre—these thoughts had kept her up half the night. Yet the responsibility for this small human terrified her most of all.

Streaks of an apricot dawn sky filtered in through the tall window, showing her vintage Chanel, now filthy, hanging from the armoire door. She envisioned the dry cleaner, hand on her hip, rolling her eyes, saying, “Miracles, Mademoiselle, cost more.” Reports were stacked on the desk, talcum powder dusted the duvet. All night she’d listened, alert to the breathing of the sleeping baby beside her, afraid at every hiccup that it would stop.

For a moment she imagined the room strewn with baby-care manuals, plush toys, dirty diapers, and a fine spray of pureed carrots decorating the cream
moiré
wallpaper. And herself, with sleep-deprived eyes and a misbuttoned sweater dotted with spit-up, like the bookstore owner’s wife around the corner who had three young children.

Next to her on the duvet, a little fist brushed her arm. The phone receiver stared her in the face. She had a business to run: a client meeting to attend, office rent to pay, and the sinking feeling she’d run out of diapers.

The phone rang. She picked it up on the first ring.

“Oui?”

“You sorted things out, right?” René said. “Had a good sleep?”

“Snatched an hour or two, René.”

The sound of a coffee grinder whirred in the background, a kettle hissed.

“You mean . . . the baby’s still there?” René asked. “Are you all right?”

She rubbed her eyes, torn between alternatives. She didn’t know what to do.

“I’m fine,” she said.

The coffee grinder sputtered to a halt.

“You know, and I know, that you’re an innocent party, Aimée,” he said. “But you could be accused of kidnapping.”

“Me, René?” she asked. “Her mother asked me to keep her for a couple of hours.”

“Don’t wait to read about a missing or kidnapped baby in this morning’s paper. It’s time you called Brigade de Protection des Mineurs
,
the child protective services,” René said, his voice rising. “You don’t know what’s going on. The longer you keep her . . . well, why get yourself in trouble?”

She gazed at the baby’s fingers, so small, curled around hers. She stroked the velvet fuzz on the baby’s head, like the skin of a peach. All night she’d racked her brain, trying to figure out who the mother could be and how she knew Aimée and had gotten her phone number.

René made sense. But she couldn’t send the baby away. Not yet. The woman had been in fear for her life and for the baby’s; she hadn’t even diapered her infant. Aimée knew she had to give the woman more time.

“She knows me, René, and she’ll be back,” Aimée assured him, wishing she felt as certain as she sounded.

“You’ll have to wing the Regnault meeting on your own, Aimée. Can you manage?”

“What?”

“I’m off to Fontainebleau,” he said. “The client likes the proposal but has questions to be answered before they sign a contract. This morning. You know how skittish they’ve been.”

A big, fat contract, too, if he could seal the deal.

“Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”

There was a pause.

“Think of the baby. The mother could be in jail, or on the run. Or . . . gone.”

She heard a
thupt
from a gas burner.

“Hasn’t that crossed your mind, Aimée?”

Just all night long.

“Promise me you’ll call child protective services.”

“I’ll take care of it, René.” She hung up.

In the stark daylight his words made sense. She should call the agency. Go through proper channels. But visions of a dreary nursery, short-staffed like all government institutions, filled her mind. Crowded, babies crying, indifferent social workers and judges and reams of bureaucratic red tape. She couldn’t bring herself to turn this tiny mite over to them.

Dulcet tones came from the covers. The little mouth was smiling like a cherub. Aimée lifted her arms up to tickle her and the yellow shirt rose on her birdcage chest. Bluish marks showed by a fold of skin under her armpit. Bruises. An awful thought struck her: this newborn might have been mistreated. Had an abusive mother abandoned her child, thrusting her into Aimée’s care? René was right. She was an idiot; she should have checked the baby more closely last night. Come to think of it why hadn’t René noticed?

Sick to her stomach, she peered closer. What she had thought were bruises—blue marks—looked more like scribbling with a pen. She could make out letters and numbers, a part of a word—
“ing”
—a name? Then
“2/12,”
part of a date? Odd. The mother hadn’t had the time to diaper her, yet she’d written. . . .

She grabbed the first thing she saw on her bedside table—a chocolate-brown lip-liner pencil—and copied into her checkbook the letters and digits she could make out.

The fax machine groaned as a page began to emerge from her machine.
Due to scheduling conflicts, the Regnault meeting has been moved up to 8:00 A.M. Please bring the programming reports. Nadia Deloup, secretary.

Aimée thanked God she’d downloaded them last night. She glanced at the old clock and panicked. She had an hour. There was only one person she could call on.

“YOU DO NEED HELP, ” Michou said. He pulled off his red wig, stepped out of a sequined sheath, and hung it on a hanger under plastic. “You don’t know the first thing about them, do you?” He rolled his mascaraed eyes. “Sealing a diaper with packaging tape?”

She’d ruined three diapers and ended up taping one together.

Michou, René’s transvestite neighbor, stepped out of his pantyhose and into sweats. “You said it was an emergency so I came straight from the club.” He slathered his face with cold cream, using a counterclockwise motion. “I won’t be a minute.”

“Does Viard know about your maternal talents, Michou?” He and Viard, the crime-lab head Aimée had introduced him to, had been together for eight months . . . a milestone for both of them.

“Every man wants Paul Bocuse in the kitchen, Mother Teresa to care for his children, and a whore in the bedroom.”

No wonder she had no man. “What kind of dinosaurs think like that?”

“Not that we get it.” He grinned. His face wiped clean, Michou reared back in horror. “What did you do to this formula? It’s like cement,
nom de Dieu!
”

Aimée rubbed her eyes. “I was up all night, Michou, watching her, afraid she’d stop breathing. I couldn’t figure out that damn diaper. And this formula . . .” She shrugged. “You get it in and it comes right up again.”

Michou patted Aimée’s arm. “You need some coffee.”

AIMÉE SHOWERED, SLICKED back her hair, hoped that concealer would cover the rings under her eyes, then rimmed her lids with kohl. She slid into her pinstriped suit, a Dior from a consignment shop, and picked up the daily
Le Parisien
from outside her door.

In the kitchen Michou hummed, hot milk frothing on the stove as he held the baby in his arms. Rays of sun haloed the baby’s head. Through the open window, Aimée saw sunlight glinting on the Seine, a tow barge gliding under the Pont de Sully’s stone supports. Another warm day. She scanned the quai for someone surveilling the apartment but saw no one lingering behind the plane trees or the stone wall. Just the man she recognized from the first floor walking his dog, a plumber’s truck idling out front. A morning on the Ile Saint-Louis, like any other. No sign of a stalker.

Michou stroked the baby’s cheek. “Notice how she turns toward my finger—she’s ‘rooting.’” He placed the bottle between her lips and she sucked. “
Voilà,
she’s a pro! Tilt the bottle up so the formula fills the nipple, otherwise . . .”

“Some kind of baby voodoo, Michou?”

“I’m serious, air’s the enemy,” he said. “If air gets in, she gets gas. Gas you don’t want.”

“
Merci
, Michou, you’re a lifesaver.”

“Such a little beauty, Aimée.”

She was.

He looked at her. “So she’s on loan, to see if you want to order a model?”

“Do I look the type?” Aimée gave him a brief version of how she had gotten the baby.

“Et alors,
the minute the mother calls, I’ll let you know,” he assured her, rocking the baby, blowing air on her toes, eliciting a gurgle.

“You have the touch, Michou.” Some people were born with it . . . a woman’s touch, a maternal side.

“Maybe you do, too, Aimée.” He gave a knowing wink. “It comes with practice.”

“They should come with instruction booklets . . .”

“Like your computer? If only it were that easy,” he said. He grimaced at her chipped lacquered nails. “If you waited long enough for your nails to dry properly, they wouldn’t chip like that.”

As if she had time. She was lucky when she could grab a manicure at all. Still . . . “Gigabyte green, Michou, it’s the new color.”

“Quel horreur.
Without that, you’re naked, Aimée.” He pointed to the tube of Chanel Stop Traffic Red on the counter.

As she wiped the lipstick over her lips, she checked
Le Parisien
for a mention of an abandoned baby or of a woman being attacked on the Ile Saint-Louis. But the headline was about the MondeFocus protest erupting into a riot. The accompanying story alleged that the CRS had provoked the demonstrators. She turned to the short articles from the police blotter, but saw nothing about a woman having been assaulted or a kidnapped baby. The crime section continued on the next page. There had been incidents of purse snatching and an attack in the Châtelet Metro. Strange, nothing about . . . then she saw a short notice in the lower corner:
Body of a young woman found in the Seine by Pont de Sully near Place Bayre.

Her hands clutched the rim of the steaming
café au lait
bowl as she read:
Police request help in identifying a young woman, early twenties, recovered from a drain in an overflowing sewer in the Seine.”

The public was allowed into the morgue in such cases in hopes that someone could identify the victim.

Her skin prickled. She recalled the figure with the tire iron who had chased her in the Place Bayre, across from the Pont de Sully. So close by, almost outside her window.

Her cell phone trilled.

“Taxi downstairs, Mademoiselle.” The meeting would start in twenty minutes.

“Go. Buy more diapers on your way back.” Michou kissed her on both cheeks. “What about
bisous
for the little peach, eh?”

Aimée leaned down into the baby smell, kissed the soft cheeks, and swallowed hard. She tucked the newspaper under her arm and headed for the door, walking faster than she had to. Then she turned around, came back for the denim jacket, thrust it into her backpack in a plastic bag, and ran.

AIMÉE NODDED TO Vavin, Regnault’s head of publicity, a man in his mid thirties, trim, with wide-set eyes. He was cradling a cell phone at his ear.

“
Bonjour,
Monsieur Vavin.”

He flashed her a quick smile and raised a finger, indicating that he wanted her to wait a moment.

She knew his type: a harried blue-suit who traveled all the time, delegating and supervising ten publicity campaigns all running at once.

Beige carpet, beige walls, beige cabinets. He stood behind his desk. Also beige. The only personal touch was a framed photo on his desk, a smiling child on a wooden hobby horse.

Vavin clicked off his cell phone. “We’ve been hacked,” he said, punching the thick stapled pile of computer printouts on his desk. “Our system’s compromised, Mademoiselle Leduc.”

“Not since last night, Monsieur Vavin. Remember, you only hired us yesterday.” She opened her laptop and brought up the report on her screen, forcing herself to concentrate and ignore the article about the drowned woman she’d reread three times in the taxi. “As contracted, you hired my firm temporarily to maintain your operating system. Shall we go over what I’ve accomplished so far?”

If he’d hired Leduc Detective last week when she had presented the security proposal to him, instead of yesterday, the hacker would have been foiled. But she thought better of pointing this out.

“You can see from these results, it’s running smoothly. The system is secure.” She smiled. “For now.”

He studied her screen and calmed down. “Excellent, Mademoiselle. I like the way you’ve streamlined user functions and smoothed out the glitches in the interface. You’re as good as you claim. A small independent security firm like yours is what we need right now.”

She decided to seize the opportunity to reoffer the comprehensive security design he’d hedged about committing to the previous week.

“My firm found vulnerabilities in your system during our comprehensive security overview. We did a minor patch last night. With hackers, you can close the door but they’ll look for an open window. In our proposal we noted that . . .”

“We pay you to keep them out.” He gave her a tired smile.

He wanted a finger to plug a hole in the dike but sooner or later it wouldn’t be able to hold back the flood.

“As outlined in our proposal, your system has numerous flaws and we recommend stronger firewall protection.” She paused for effect, consulting the file in her hand, which she’d memorized. “My report shows that twice last month hackers took advantage of your vulnerability. It’s not in your interest or ours to apply Band-Aids to an old system.”

“Correct,” he said. “But my manager’s overwhelmed. I put your proposal on his desk but he was off to Johannesburg. This year our accounts have tripled. And, as with many companies enjoying a growth spurt, our auditing and computer services have been neglected.”

“I suggest you start fresh.”

“In the meantime, Mademoiselle Leduc, we need to operate and keep our systems functioning and secure.”

She turned to the window overlooking the Jardin des Plantes, the botanical garden, while she thought. A few protesters with banners reading STOP OIL DUMPING stood on the pavement below, fanning themselves in the heat. She wondered why there were protesters in front of Regnault.