Cara Black - Murder in Belleville

“Unavailable?”

“I can take a message.”

“Did the doctor visit?”

“You’d have to speak with k Ministre about that,” she said.

Most likely Anaïs had slept and recuperated. But the guarded tone bothered her. She heard a loud buzzing.

“May I speak with Monsieur le Ministre?”

“Not here,” the woman said. “Pardonnez-moi —someone’s at the door.”

Before Aimée could ask her to have Anaïs call her, the woman hung up. She stared out into gray rue Pere Lachaise where rain pattered over shop awnings. She noticed a cat peering from a window. The cat looked dry and well fed. She tried calling again but the line was busy.

Frustrated, Aimée punched in Martine’s number at Le Figaro.

“Mais Martine’s at a board meeting,” said Roxanne, Martine’s assistant.

“Please, it’s important,” Aimée said, “1 must talk with her.”

“Martine left you a message,” Roxanne said.

“What’s that?”

“I wrote it down,” Roxanne said, her tone apologetic. “I’m sorry to be cryptic, but Martine made me repeat this: ‘Start where Anaïs told you; there’s a lot more in the pot-au-feu besides vegetables.’ She said you’d understand.”

Understand?

Aimée thanked Roxanne and hung up.

She didn’t like this. Any of this. She felt torn after vowing to stick to corporate work and build her computer security firm.

The plastic surgeon who’d pieced her together after the Marais case told her to be careful—next time might not find her so lucky. Her stitches had healed nicely. He’d done a good job, she had to admit; no one could tell. He’d offered to enhance her lips gratis. “Like the German models,” he’d said. But she was born with thin lips, and figured she’d exit with them.

Someone once told her the Buddhists believe if you helped someone you were responsible for them. But she wasn’t a Buddhist. She just hated the fact that someone could blow a woman up and get away with it, and put a little girl’s mother in peril. And for what or why she didn’t know.

At the shop next to the florist, she bought an umbrella and then entered a nearby café. She used the rest room, washing her face and hands, to try to get rid of the jail cell odor—a mix of sweat, fear, and mildew. Refreshed after a steaming bowl of café au hit, Aimée boarded the bus for the apartment on rue Jean Moinon.

The cold wind slicing across lower Belleville didn’t feel welcoming. Nor did the gray mesh of sky.

Through the bus window Aimée saw the store with a hand of Fat’ma talisman in the window. She stood, gripped by the image of the small metal hand with turquoise stones and Arabic sayings to ward off evil words.

Just like Sylvie’s—the one Anaïs gave her.

Hopeful, Aimée got off the bus and went into the store. Maybe she would find an answer about Sylvie’s Fat’ma.

The crammed store was lit by flickering fluorescent light strips.

Her heart sank.

Hundreds of Fat’mas lined the back wall. They hung like icons, mocking her.

The owner sat on the floor. He ate his lunch off a couscous platter shared with several other men, who appeared disturbed at her entrance.

Aimée pulled the hand of Fat’ma from her bag.

The owner stood up, wiped his hands on a wet towel, and slid behind the counter.

“Sorry to interrupt you, Monsieur,” Aimée said. “Do you recognize this Fat’ma?”

He shrugged.

“Looks like the ones I carry,” he said.

“Perhaps this one is distinctive. Could you look?”

He turned it over in his palm, then gestured toward the wall.

“The same.”

“Perhaps you remember a woman who bought this—long dark hair?”

“People buy these all the time,” he said. “Every other shop on the boulevard carries them as well.”

Her hopes of finding out more about Sylvie had been dashed.

Aimée thanked him and went out into the rain.

She crossed Place Sainte Marthe, the small, sloped square with dingy eighteenth-century buildings. Wind rustled through the budding trees. A knot of men clustered near the shuttered café, smoking and joking in Arabic.

Blue-and-goldenrod posters plastered over abandoned storefronts proclaimed: FREE THE SANS-PAPIERS —JOIN HAMID’S HUNGER STRIKE PROTESTING FASCIST IMMIGRATION POLICIES. Behind Place Sainte Marthe seventies-era housing projects loomed, jagged and towering.

She walked over the same route she’d driven with Anaïs. The April wind, raw and biting, pierced her jacket. Her ears felt numb. As she entered rue Jean Moinon, she curled her hands inside her pockets, wishing she’d worn gloves.

Pieces of blackened metal bumper and a charred leather armrest remained from the explosion. Almost everything else had been cleaned up from where Sylvie Coudray had gone up in a shooting ball of white fire and flames. The only other evidence was the oily, blackened residue filming the cobblestones. But after a wet spring that too would be washed away.

A dark curly-haired custodian swept the Hopital St. Louis side entrance near the apartment. His plastic broom, like those used by street cleaners, had known better days. Wet leaves clumped together, refusing to budge over the cobble cracks. He wore a woolen turtleneck and headphones, the wires trailing to his blue work coat pocket. He seemed oblivious as she approached. Something familiar—what was it?—stuck in the back of her mind; then it disappeared.

“Pardon, Monsieur,” she said, raising her voice, stepping into his line of vision.

He looked up, his prominent jaw working in time to what she imagined was the music beat. She saw the name, “Hassan Ely-mani,” embroidered in red on his upper pocket.

“Monsieur Elymani, may I have a moment of your time?”

He pulled out his headphones, set the broom against the crook of his arm, and lifted a bracelet of worry beads from his pocket. Brown and worn, they slid through his fingers.

“You a flic?” he asked.

“My name’s Leduc; I’m an investigator.”

“Tiens, they don’t do business there anymore,” he interrupted. “Scattered. I told the police,” he shrugged. “Like the clouds on a windy day.”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Monsieur Elymani.”

“Over there,” he said, pointing beyond the day-care center to the narrow passage jutting into rue du Buisson St. Louis, with buildings slated for demolition.

“Voila. The slime hung out near rue Civiale,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“Catch me up, Monsieur,” she said, scanning the street. The view from Sylvie Coudray’s window, she imagined, looked over those rooftops dotted with pepper-pot chimneys. She wanted to know what he saw.

“Who exactly are you referring to?”

“Les droguées,” he said, his cork-colored fingers coaxing the worry beads through his hands.

Junkies? Parts of the area, she knew, held pockets of them. Morbier, a commissaire, had told her flics often let junkies carve out a corner for themselves. “For efficiency,” he’d said. “We keep tabs on them, and they don’t venture further for clientele. Designer drugs come and go, but there’re always addicts with habits who work, pay bills, and stay afloat.” His tolerant attitude surprised her. “Fact of life,” he continued. “When they wash up on my turf, I put them back out to sea.”

Elymani ran his eye over her clothing. “You undercover?”

“You might say that,” she said, realizing her appearance could give rise to that conjecture. “I’m interested in Sylvie Coudray,” Aimée said pointing to the first-floor windows.

“I’m not a betting man,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “But does this have to do with the explosion?”