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

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.