Cara Black: Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

“A man’s been murdered,” René snapped. “But you’re grilling us?”

Outside the clear circle in the steamed-up window, Aimée saw a police truck idling on rue Beaubourg. Moments later it cleared the way for the van from the morgue. A lone passerby watched. A sad end.

“More than one way to peel the onion in Chinatown,” Prévost said. “That’s what it’s about here.”

Meaning what, she wondered. “Did you find a weapon?”

“My job’s to ask the questions. Not you.” Prévost stared at René.

An unmarked van pulled up outside on the street, and three men emerged wearing sweaters, no coats. One yawned, stretched, and climbed back inside.

Her shoulders tightened. Now it fit together. “You’re conducting police surveillance in the area, n’est-ce pas? The murder’s connected?”

“Not for me to say,” Prévost said.

His gaze flicked over the men hunched at the counter and darkened. His thin lips tightened. He glared at her—a warning to shut up? One of the mecs at the counter half turned as if he were listening.

Turf issues? she wondered. Bad blood between competing forces? Had they stepped into the middle of a rat’s nest?

Aimée noticed René’s short legs dangling from the stool, his dripping handmade Lobb shoes. She caught the wince as he shifted. The damp exacerbated his hip dysplasia.

“Different rules apply here,” Prévost said. “Gangs, protection. The quartier’s infested with gangs and protection rackets. These Chinese glom together like sticky rice.”

His thinly veiled racism didn’t inspire much confidence. Probably a member of the right-wing France for the French party.

“Quite a generalization, Prévost,” she said. He spilled too much for a flic . Or he was warning them of the score. Why?

“ Et alors? I’ve worked this quartier five years,” he said, his tone changing. “My wife’s from Shanghai; she says the same thing.” He thumbed the pages in his notebook. Wrote something. A professional demeanor now. He slid two business cards over the table.

“What avenues are you looking into?” Aimée asked.

“Too early in the investigation to say.” He stood and put his notebook in his coat pocket. “Tomorrow we’ll talk at the commissariat .”

She sensed something else. Something she couldn’t put her finger on. What was this surveillance?

The men at the counter smelled of RG, Renseignements Généraux , the hydra-headed intelligence branch on Île de la Cité. Not known to cozy up with uniforms at the counter. But if they worked surveillance in Chinatown, had the murder muddied their surveillance? Or was it all connected?

• • •

OUT ON THE dimly lit street, she pondered Prévost’s insinuations. Was the murder retribution by a Chinese gang for stepping into the wrong territory? Or for a debt? A woman?

Meizi.

“Zut, René, the area reeks of surveillance. We don’t know what’s going on.”

“We’re going to find out, Aimée.”

“Us?” For once René, Mr. Play-it-safe, wanted to investigate something criminal? Talk about the shoe on the other foot. “You did notice the mecs at the counter, René.”

“No answer at the dojo,” he said. “It’s closed.”

“You think Meizi would go there?” she asked.

René’s green eyes blazed. “Meizi’s parents hide in the back of their shop if a customer comes in.”

“They don’t speak French.”

“ Exactement . Few Chinese here do. Fewer have papers.”

René’s words were filled with implications she didn’t like to think about. “The Wus operate an illegal business?”

René shook his head. “Like we’ve talked about that during the little time I’ve had with Meizi and her parents?” He waved his short arm. “This street’s full of sweatshops. Hear that?” In the dark street, she heard a low thrum. “Buildings tremble at night, Meizi told me, from machines in basements and attics. Sweatshops full of illegals working in secret. The last thing anyone wants to do is draw attention. Didn’t you see how everyone ran away? They’re scared.”

Or guilty. Aimée’s boot heel caught in a drain. She couldn’t let it go. “Yet someone tipped off the flics ,” she said. “Ask yourself who, if no one wants to draw attention. The word got out, the old woman gave the warning in the resto . If Meizi already knew, or—”

“Somebody wanted the body found, Aimée,” René interrupted.

She kicked an iced cobble, regretted it right away. “After she opens your present, serves the soup, Meizi takes a phone call. Disappears.”

René ran his fingers through his hair, then knotted his scarf around his neck. “I know she’s in trouble.”

“An understatement, René. Her … friend was murdered behind her family’s shop.”

“Meizi’s my soul mate. She never talked about anyone else,” René said. “ Zut , you met her parents. Strict and traditional. Something’s happened, don’t you see?”

Why couldn’t he get it? “René, the victim carried her photo in his wallet.” She wanted to sit him down in the snow, make him understand. “Prévost regards her as a suspect.”

He shook his head. Denial. “ Bon , I don’t need your help to find Meizi. Not that you offered, Aimée.”

He took off down the iced cobbles, favoring his right leg. He usually tried to hide his slight limp.

Her heart ached. She didn’t want René hurt. Her mind raced with scenarios—Meizi, illegal, maybe owing a debt, finding René, a dwarf, thinking him an easy mark. A vulnerable man, due to his stature. What if Meizi had been playing cat and mouse, giving and withholding? Using her parents as a chaperone tactic to ensnare René into marriage for residence papers?

She caught up with him at the corner. Took his arm and stared at him. “I could have told Prévost. I didn’t, did I?”

He shrugged her off.

“ Mais , you’re my best friend, René,” she said. “I’m in this with you.”

Aimée followed his gaze to the Wus’ shuttered luggage storefront, the scattered wet plastic bags in the gutter. He flipped open his phone and hit Meizi’s number. He shook his head, his brow creased. “Her phone’s off.”

A light flickered on in a floor window above the shop. Had the Wus returned? The back walkway was blocked by orange-and-white-striped crime-scene tape labeled Police Zone Interdite . But on rue Volta, she saw a side door to the building, grillwork with a lion’s face at its center.

Too bad she’d left her lock pick set at the office. She took out her mint dental floss.

“Flossing your teeth?” René quirked an ironic eyebrow at her.

“Stand in front of me.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, René.”

He stood in the snow caked in the doorway as she knotted the floss and slipped her finger inside the ornate, rusted grillwork. The knot caught on the brass handle, which she knew came standard in these seventeenth-century doors. She tugged, heard a click, and pushed the creaking door open.

“Hurry, René.”

AIMÉE HIT THE light switch, illuminating a narrow staircase winding upward like a corkscrew. The timed light clicked in eerie counterpoint to their footsteps on the cracked, upturned linoleum. Fried garlic and sesame oil odors clung in the shadowy corners.

No answer when René knocked on the shop door.

Aimée studied the ancient gas fixtures poking from the hallway ceiling, the metal spigot dripping into a pail. Just like many an old tenement. She imagined more than a hundred people living in this building, one sink per apartment and a communal WC between the floors.

A hum grew louder as they ascended the stairs, like cicadas in Provence at summer twilight. But in this decrepit hallway, cut by sharp drafts, the hum issued from something else.