Cara Black: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

Good chance, then, Aram knew the street talk. Or saw something. At least she figured he didn’t buy into the Chinese wall of silence.

“ Mon dentiste. Très bon ,” he was saying. “You need dentiste ?”

“ Non, merci .”

Did she have something stuck in her teeth? She ran her tongue over her teeth to check. But she’d speak with this Aram, the hotel proprietor, later.

In her heeled boots, she picked her way over the melted slush and puddles, avoiding the cobble cracks. She felt eyes on her back. Visiting the luggage store had set off her sensors. The awareness that she was being watched sent a frisson up her spine.

She noticed the quick looks from shop merchants. Everyone here had something to hide. How would she ever find Meizi when she couldn’t even find anyone willing to talk?

The address listed on the dead man’s library card was only a block away. She didn’t know if he lived alone or had a family, but she’d find out. She’d discover his connection to Meizi.

Diesel fumes lingered like a fog in the narrow canyon of street between the blackened stone facades. Aimée walked along the medieval gutter, a worn groove puddled with melted slush, down a passage to the next street. Here, roll-down aluminum shuttered the shop fronts. The old, faded sign of a printing press appeared above a wall plaque commemorating a member of the French Resistance, Henri Chevessier, shot by the Germans in 1943. A lone pigeon pecked at soggy bread crumbs near a drain. A forgotten islet of quiet.

Rusted metal filagree covered the dusty glass in the water-stained door. Aimée located No. 14 and read the nameplate. Samour/Samoukashian lived on the third floor. A married couple? Dread filled her as she thought of a grieving widow.

She kept her leather gloves on as she climbed the steep, unheated steps. Chipped plaster, scuffed baseboards, and sagging landings in between floors in the old tenement testified to the passing of centuries. Her breath frosted in the air. She needed to swim more laps in the pool and forego macaroons, she realized, breathless.

The third-floor door stood ajar. Alarm bells sounded in her head. She wished she had her Beretta, but it was home in her spoon drawer. Then smells of frying garlic reached her. Her stomach growled.

“ Allô? ”

“ Entrez ,” a woman’s quavering voice answered. Polished honey-wood floors gleamed under the high, dark-beamed ceiling. Oil portraits and landscapes hung on the whitewashed walls over fragrant pots of paperwhite narcissus. Not what she’d expected. The man had an exquisite apartment. Like a page out of Elle Déco in the “Makeover—what you can do to a historic flat” section.

“MADAME, excusez-moi .”

“It’s Mademoiselle,” said the quavering voice. “Come to the kitchen.”

Aimée followed the paprika and garlic smells down the hall. Warmth emanated from the toasty floor. She wanted to take off her wet boots and go barefoot.

A tiny, trim woman, with hair as white as the blooming narcissus, chopped carrots and swept perfect orange circles into a bowl. Leeks and greens tumbled from a string shopping bag on the wooden table.

“My knees.” The woman looked up. Sharp brown eyes in an unlined face, a small scar running under her chin. She set down the knife and rubbed her hands on an apron with what looked like scientific equations printed on it. “At eighty, I only do the stairs twice a day now—not like before.”

Aimée blinked. She felt winded at one go.

“I’ve told you flics , I’m tired of questions,” the old woman said. “So if you don’t have answers, quit wasting my time.”

“I’m sorry, but you don’t understand, Mademoiselle Samour …”

“It’s Mademoiselle Samoukashian, can’t you people remember?”

Aimée handed the woman a card. “But I’m not a flic . I’m a private detective.”

Interest sparked in the woman’s brown eyes.

“Then sit down. Café turc ?”

Turkish coffee? Aimée nodded. “ Merci . Please accept my condolences.”

The woman turned her back on her.

“That doesn’t bring my great-nephew back.”

Nothing would. At a loss, Aimée hesitated. She needed to plow on and find out what she could.

The little woman slipped the chopped carrots into a longhandled brass pot of boiling water, then adjusted the blue flame. “Drumming up business? But you don’t look like an ambulance chaser. Why visit me?”

A sharp-eyed old bird who got to the point, this octogenarian. Aimée draped her leather coat on the thatched cane chair and sat, unbuttoning her vintage checked-wool Chanel jacket, a church bazaar find.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she offered again, the words sounding trite. She took a breath and continued. “But I presumed Pascal Samour lived here.”

“Then you saw my address on Pascal’s old student library card, like the flics did.” She nodded. “Bon, I figured you were smarter than you look.”

Aimée dropped her bag, but caught it in time before her mascara, encryption manual, and nail polish scattered across the warm floor.

“Pascal lives … lived near Square du Temple,” said Mademoiselle Samoukashian. “He taught at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.” The engineering school a few blocks away.

“I saw … found his body last night.”

“But how is it a detective just happens to find his body?”

Aimée couldn’t let the old bird intimidate her. She had to find out why Pascal had Meizi’s photo in his wallet.

“That’s why I’m here, Mademoiselle,” she said.

Mademoiselle Samoukashian handed Aimée a Limoges demitasse and saucer. Into it she poured frothing brown liquid, then crowned the coffee with a lip of foam. “Armenian style, with cardamom.”

“ Merci .”

The old woman uncovered a plate of crescent rolls smelling of apricot. “ Dziranamahig . We’re Armenian, Mademoiselle,” she said. “My grandparents sought refuge here from the Turkish genocide. And then we were only rounded up again here during the war, that time by French police. Since the last war, I don’t trust the flics . And I don’t trust them now. Neither did Pascal.”

The war? “But that was fifty years ago.”

“More. I’m hoping you’re better at math than that.” She shook her head. “Drink. Then I read your grinds. Then we see.”

See what, Aimée wondered.

“Please, first hear me out,” Aimée said, determined to leave out the horrific details. “Last night, my partner and I were eating dinner nearby in Chinatown when an old woman came into the resto shouting about a murder. We followed the crowd behind the luggage shop, and your … and we found Pascal. Everyone ran away, but I picked up his wallet to learn his identity. There was nothing in it but his library card.”

“That’s all you know?” Sadness pooled in Mademoiselle Samoukashian’s eyes.

“Meizi Wu’s picture was on the back of his card.” Aimée took a sip. “Can you tell me about their relationship? Anything you know about Meizi?”

“Ask her.”

“Meizi’s disappeared.”

She nodded, matter of fact. “ Bien sur , she’s illegal, terrified.”

Like a steamroller, this little woman. “So you know Meizi?”

“Never heard of her. But that’s most everyone in this slice of the quartier. Alors , it never changes—immigrants, illegals. Roundups just like in ’42.”

“Roundups?” Was she really comparing Chinese sweatshop workers today to French Jews deported to extermination camps?

“I know the feeling. Hunted, hiding, moving all the time.”