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

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.