Cara Black: AL07 - Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

The long toot of a passing barge rose from the Seine.

The baby was making sucking motions with its mouth. The little pink hands flailed, brushing her like butterfly wings. She extended a finger toward the hand and the tiny pink fingers grasped hers, clutched it. She saw the perfectly formed, minuscule, pearlescent pink fingernails.

Nothing had ever been so tiny, so exquisite. So helpless.

The cries started again. Merde! Crying brought attention, the neighbors, or . . . whoever was after the mother.

“What should I do with you?” she asked aloud.

The cries dwindled. She could have sworn the fuzzy head, hardly bigger than her fist, turned toward her voice.

“Where’s your mother, little one?” she asked.

Dampness radiated from the courtyard’s surface. The baby might catch cold! She disengaged her finger and flicked on the Beretta’s safety. Then she noticed the striped baby bag on the ground next to the dirty jacket. She picked them both up.

Cradling the baby close, she mounted the worn marble steps to her apartment. And then a warm wetness began to spread over her arms and chest. It—she—was wetting on Aimée’s vintage Chanel black dress! It was a flea-market treasure she’d bargained down to five thousand francs.

She unlocked her door and strode to the kitchen, thoughts of a hungry baby, her deadline, and the cryptic message from the mother churning in her head. Something terrible had happened. She had to think.

She unzipped the baby bag, searching for a note. In it she found disposable diapers, a bottle, and a tin of powdered Lemiel formula “premier age” —for newborns to four months.

Boil water, she told herself. People boiled water in the movies when babies were concerned. Sterilize everything. Bon , she poured a bottle of Evian into a saucepan and read the formula label. There had to be instructions.

She spread a towel on her bed’s duvet cover, laid the baby down, and took a disposable diaper from the bag. She studied the Velcro tabs, the flat white panel with yellow ducks resembling an origami puzzle.

Miles Davis whined and cocked his head.

“We’ll manage, right, Miles?” Too bad he only had paws; she could use another pair of hands.

She went to work. When the diaper encased the baby, Aimée wrapped her in the chenille throw that lay across the foot of her bed. She kicked the radiator several times until it sputtered to life. And kicked it again.

Aimée leaned down, studying each pale chestnut eyelash, the daintily formed kiss of a mouth, the nautilus-shell ears. The pearlescent glow of her skin. She was perfect in every way. Aimée searched for a resemblance to someone she knew. She drew a blank.

Her eye was caught by the photo on her spindle-legged dresser. A photo of Aimée herself, aged six months, in a white onesie, lying on a blue flannel blanket. But she looked huge compared to the little one lying on her duvet.

The face of her long-vanished mother rose in her mind: carmine red lipstick and huge doe eyes. Her American mother, who hadn’t been home when eight-year-old Aimée returned from school one rainy afternoon. Or any afternoon after that. No explanation, no good-bye. Gone. Leaving her father to cope. He’d thrown away her mother’s things and refused ever to talk about her.

The smell of burning plastic came from the kitchen.

The bottle.

The saucepan’s plastic handle had melted onto the burner. A mess. Her culinary skills didn’t even extend to boiling water.

She salvaged what she could, filled the bottle with boiled water, measured out the formula, added it to the water, and shook the bottle just as the instructions directed. Her hand bumped the Beretta in her pocket. Zut! Ninety-nine percent of all household accidents happened in the kitchen!

Somehow she had to feed this baby and get her work done. She stuck the Beretta in the closest drawer with serving spoons and looked at the time. If she didn’t hurry she’d miss her deadline.

She tested the formula on her wrist. Too hot. She added cool water, shook the bottle again.

She could do this, she had to, she told herself. In her bedroom, she put the nipple of the bottle to the baby’s lips. But the little thrusting mouth just emitted screams. “Cooperate, can’t you? Try, please,” Aimée begged.

Little blue eyes stared back at her.

Aimée shook the bottle and giant air bubbles filled it but no formula flowed. Aimée sucked on the nipple in desperation and swallowed a mouthful of bland milky slush. It was not the sweet, velvety drink she’d expected. Formula dripped down her front and she stuck the now-flowing bottle into the baby’s mouth.

The laptop alarm beeped; she had set it to signal three minutes before the system needed to go up. She panicked, grabbed a pillow, and rushed to her laptop, propping the baby with the bottle in the crook of her arm.

One last system check to make. But she needed to verify the algorithm. She had it somewhere . Scrabbling through the papers on her desk, she finally found it.

The bottle was empty now. She hefted the baby, white fluid dribbling from its mouth. Aimée had to burp her. Of course, they had to be burped after a bottle. But she just had to finish this . . .

And the baby spit up all over the desk.

Monday Evening

KRZYSZTOF LINSKI HURRIED past the piano-shaped ice sculpture in the vast salon of the Polish Foundation’s seventeenth-century town house on the Ile Saint-Louis. He’d just make it if . . .

“Where’s your dinner jacket, Krzysztof?” Comte Linski, his uncle, demanded.

Caught! Krzysztof played with the zipper of his hooded sweatshirt. Merde! He’d be imprisoned at the gala the foundation was sponsoring if he didn’t maneuver his way out of it.

“But, Uncle, I’m late. . . .”

“The crown prince of Poland, dressed in Levi’s?” His uncle frowned as if in disapproval of the moisture-beaded magnums of champagne standing in ice buckets, ready to be poured for the assembling guests.

Leaning on his cane, his uncle blocked Krzysztof’s escape from the somber room, which was decorated with bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes whose spines were molting and crackle-surfaced oil paintings of nineteenth-century Warsaw. Everything here reeked of the past.

“Our committee’s donating Chopin’s death mask to the foundation’s collection; we expect you to say a few words to our assembled guests, but not dressed like that.”

Dream on, Krzysztof refrained from saying.

“We’re marching tonight to stop the signing of the oil agreement,” Krzysztof said, hoping to avoid an argument. “If I don’t hurry—”

“Not that silly business again!” In the chandelier’s light, his uncle’s medals gleamed. The ones he trotted out for occasions like this were all pinned to his waistcoat: ribbons earned in the Polish resistance and his French Légion d’Honneur medal, on its red ribbon.

“But I helped organize the protest, it’s vital that I be there. I need to leave now, Uncle.”

“Your duty’s more important, Krzysztof,” his uncle told him.

In Krzysztof’s opinion, preventing global pollution and the poisoning of the seas was more important than paying tribute to a man dead one hundred years.

“Your duty lies here, Krzysztof,” his uncle continued. “This is your culture, your heritage. These are your people. How can some abstract cause compete?”

Strains of a Chopin piano sonata drifted over the white-haired crowd. The old folks came out in force for a gala and free meal. No one here was under seventy. Their formal attire emitted a whiff of mothballs, Krzysztof noted.

The comte grabbed his elbow. “Think of what you owe your ancestors.”