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

They rounded more corners in the winding tunnel and finally came to an open space. The shuffle of footsteps sounded from deep inside the dark cavern.

“Hélène?” Aimée’s voice echoed.

“Jean?” a woman’s voice quavered in reply.

“Hélène, it’s Aimée Leduc.”

Aimée shone the penlight. An old woman, her white hair in two long braids, wearing a white wool jacket, stood in the shadows up against the wall. Aimée saw violet eyes and a young face, incongruous with the woman’s white hair and stooped posture. Then the woman shielded her eyes with her hands. A Pharmacie Leclery shopping bag sat on the floor at her feet. “You’re blinding me.”

“Jean’s hurt, Hélène. I came instead.”

“ Oui , I know. Put out the light. Paulette’s sick. . . .”

Paulette?

“Please, Hélène, we can’t see without light. Where’s the baby?”

Aimée heard a hiss as a gas camping lantern went on, flooding the chiseled walls with light. She saw a camping stove, a metal pot, plates, a broken chair, several shopping bags. Not much. In the corner, Hélène, crouched near a metal cot. On it lay a young, hollow-cheeked woman covered in brown sheets and green army blankets. Her brown hair was plastered to her face in wet strands.

Aimée recognized Nelie. They’d found her at last. And stood paralyzed with horror as she realized that the sheets Nelie was wrapped in were brown from dried blood.

“The bad man’s coming to hurt Paulette.” Hélène’s eyes were wide with panic. She grabbed Aimée’s arm. “Did he hurt you, like the other girl?”

Hélène was living in the past; she’d confused Nelie with Paulette. And because of that she’d saved Nelie’s life.

“You mean Orla . . . the girl he threw into the Seine?”

“But I took care of Paulette, I thought I’d done for him.”

So that’s what she’d meant in her words to Jean Caplan.

“I saw him—”

“Hélène,” Aimée interrupted, putting her arm around the thin, shaking shoulders. “Where is the baby?”

“Shhh,” Hélène said, her eyes fluttering in terror. “The bad man’s here.”

“ Nom de Dieu , we have to get this girl to the hospital,” René said. “Now!”

Aimée bent over Nelie, whose face was sweaty and pale, and whose breath was labored. She was hemorrhaging by the look of the new bright red stains on the sheets. She must have lost so much blood. She looked like a broken bird.

“Call for the ambulance, René.”

She propped Nelie’s head up, took a bottle of water from the floor, and raised it to Nelie’s lips. Hélène stood in the shadows by the wall again, wringing her hands.

“After my C-section,” Nelie said, “there were . . . complications. . . . I became so weak that . . . I couldn’t take care of my baby. I had nowhere else to go . . . but I knew . . . you were working with my uncle; he told me. Then one time . . . on your street . . . I saw you. I looked up your telephone number.”

The effort of saying so much exhausted her and she closed her eyes.

So that was it. . . .

Nelie made an effort to go on. “At the march, I . . . couldn’t walk; the incision had beome infected. We hid in your courtyard but I heard noises. Orla ran the other way, to distract him . . . then I . . . I know he’s after me . . . but now I can’t move,” she said, then whispered, “Hélène thinks I’m someone else . . . but she has been feeding me and hiding me. Otherwise . . . he would have found me . . . by now.”

“We’ll get you to the hospital.”

René had his cell phone out and was muttering at it. “Bad reception,” he said.

“My baby, she’s . . .” Nelie continued haltingly.

“But Hélène has her, doesn’t she?” Aimée asked. “Hélène?” She called. But there was no Hélène, just the sputtering camp light.

Aimée panicked. What had Hélène done with Stella? She ran to the mouth of the cavern. “Hélène, come back!”

And then she heard noises from the nest of blankets near Nelie.

“What’s that?” René said, going over to the blankets.

A gurgle. So familiar an ache of longing filled her. Please, she prayed, let it be her.

René leaned over and rose with Stella cradled in his arms. He draped a blanket around her and gave Aimée a meaningful look. “I’ll take Stella to the bookshop and call SAMU from there. Can you manage?”

“Go.” The sooner the better, she thought. “Take the camp light. Go, René, hurry.”

René took off with Stella in his arms; his footsteps echoed from the tunnel.

Aimée rested her palm on Nelie’s forehead. She was scorching hot, but she shivered in the damp blankets, burning up with fever.

“The doctor told me . . . I have proof,” she said, her eyes bright and wandering. “They framed us. We were running like fugitives . . . but I couldn’t run anymore.”

“I understand. Tell me about the proof in the doctor’s report.”

“Alstrom loaded an old tanker with toxic waste, sent it out to the oil platform . . . and they sank it there. The crew all died . . . drowned . . . except for the captain. He’s dying from uranium poisoning.”

“How do you know this?”

“I found out in La Hague,” Nelie said. Her eyes fluttered. “I saw the captain. He admitted it. And the doctor’s examination notes . . . symptoms of uranium poisoning. That’s proof that Alstrom lied.”

She had to get Nelie out of here right away. But Aimee’s ribs ached and she knew she couldn’t carry Nelie through the quarry tunnels and up the rungs of the ladder to the surface.

“Nelie, I’ll tie you to the blankets and pull you, OK? We have to get you help.” Aimée laid a blanket on the sandstone floor, reached under Nelie, and lifted her onto it, then folded another blanket over her and tied it around her.

“Your uncle found the files, didn’t he?”

Nelie blinked. Then her eyes closed.

“Stay with me, Nelie,” Aimée pleaded.

“Everything . . . the doctor told me,” Nelie said. ”But it’s all . . . report.”

They heard footsteps. “Hélène?”

No answer.

And then her penlight went out.

Thursday Evening

KRZYSZTOF’S KNEES SHOOK as he sat in his uncle’s study under the framed chart showing the Polish royal lineage. Next to it was the Linski escutcheon. Beneath it his uncle’s Légion d’Honneur medal was displayed.

“I need your help, Uncle.”

“No more places to hide, Krzysztof?” his uncle asked. “And now, as I hope you realize, not even from yourself?”

Krzysztof winced internally. It had been even harder than he had imagined to put himself at the old man’s mercy.

“We can still stop the oil agreement—”

“Not that again!” his uncle interrupted. “After the bomb incident, police everywhere, the registrar from the Sorbonne and reporters besieging me all day!” he said, shaking his head. “Have you gone mad?”

“I’m wanted by the police. Won’t you just listen—”

“To what? You can’t escape your heritage, Krzysztof. Yet you persist in trying to throw everything away.”

“But there’s nothing to throw away!”

His uncle buttoned his sweater vest and straightened his tie. His position as chargé d’affaires was in reality a sop thrown to a decorated war veteran with connections and aristocratic blood.

“That’s your heritage.” His uncle pointed above his head to the 1791 article in the constitution declaring Princess and Infanta Maria Augusta Nepomucena Antonia Franziska Xaveria Aloysia of Poland and her successors in direct line for the throne: Frederick Augustus, present-day elector of Saxony, to whose male successors de lumbis [from the loins] we reserve the throne of Poland. Should the present-day elector of Saxony have no male issue, then the consort, with the consent of the assembled estates, selected by the elector for his daughter shall begin the male line of succession to the throne of Poland. Therefore we declare Maria Augusta Nepomucena, daughter of the elector, to be Infanta of Poland, reserving to the people the right, which shall be subject to no proscription, to elect another house to the throne after the expiration of the first.