Cara Black: AL05 - Murder in Clichy

Aimée tried to catch René’s eye, but he’d bent down to tie his shoes.

“I’m new to Paris,” Linh continued, twisting the amber prayer beads on her wrist. “Mostly I fund-raise at Cao Dai meditation seminars. And I am petitioning the International Court of Justice and Amnesty International for my brother’s release.”

“Doesn’t that conflict with your vocation?”

“Not at all,” she said. “As the Dalai Lama says, ‘There are many paths all leading to the same place.’ My mission and our practice glide together.”

Aimée heard sincerity in Linh’s voice. But corporate security was the bread and butter of Leduc Detective. After last month’s incident when she’d been assaulted, she’d vowed to steer clear of anything else.

“Think of it as our donation, Linh,” René said. He gestured to the envelope. “May I take this? We will deliver it for you, gladly.”

Surprised, Aimée shot René a look.

“No problem,” René continued, “we’ll make the phone call . . .”

“And you will arrange to give this envelope to him? He will have something for me.” Linh put her palms together again, a gesture of greeting and farewell.

René returned her gesture. “We will try.”

“WHY GET us involved, René?” Aimée asked as soon as they were outside on the narrow street, lychee seeds crackling under their feet. She hitched her bag onto her leather-clad shoulder. “Trying to earn good karma?”

René pulled on a Burberry raincoat, tailored to his height. In the weak afternoon light a flurry of windswept brown leaves and Chinese candy wrappers swirled from the gutter. “What’s a half-hour to meet this man, Baret, to give him this envelope? Et alors, you’re going to the seventeenth to check on the Olf project anyway. And a little good karma wouldn’t hurt, would it?”

She nodded. Maybe he was right. All she ever did was over-tip taxi drivers, hoping to earn late rainy night taxi karma.

Apart from the oasis of the nearby Buddhist temple, in the midst of a mind-numbing sea of concrete tower block buildings, in this polyglot quartier of Vietnamese, Chinese, Laotians, and Cambodians, the thirteenth arrondissement had little charm. It was impersonal, its gray uniformity punctuated only by bright red Vietnamese pho noodle restos, Asian video shops, and hairdressers’ salons.

She paused at the bus stop by Armée du Salut , the ferroconcrete Salvation Army building, designed by Le Corbusier: a treasure trove of cheap, used armoires.

“See you back at the office, René,” she said, and caught the bus.

RAIN PATTERED on the windows as dusk descended over Avenue de Wagram. The chic quartier , off one of the streets radiating from the Arc de Triomphe, lay in the seventeenth arrondissement. Hopeful, Aimée wound the black wool scarf around her neck, signed in, and mounted the stairs spiraling up to Olf’s state-of-the-art corporate headquarters, located in a wood-paneled hôtel particulier . A mixture of steel and curved aqua glass-walled offices constituted the mansion’s top two floors.

But the project management staff dealing with her proposal had left for a trade show outside Paris. A wasted trip! She wrote a note and left it in the chef des opérations box.

Downstairs, the concierge’s post was vacant. Where was the security man she’d seen? Shadows from the pillars crisscrossed the black and white floor. As she wrote her initials by her name on the sign-out log, the timed lights shut off.

In the darkness, she felt her way, her boot heels echoing on the tile, her shoulders tight with apprehension. She sniffed. Only the smell of cold stone and floor wax.

Then a rustling and the click of a door closing.

Is someone there?” she called. “

Silence.

She felt a frisson of fear. And for a moment it was as if she were blind again, groping in darkness, her only guide sounds, odors, and the currents in the air. Panicked, holding her breath, she kept going and felt the cold, smooth marble of a pillar. Seeing the dim glow of the streetlight, she let out a sigh of relief.

With a quick step, she made her way through the door to the street. She looked back but saw no one following her. A few blocks away, she turned into rue de Lévis, glad of the bustling street market marking the tony quartier .

In the chill dusk, horns beeped. “ Crevettes, un kilo !” shouted a fishmonger standing by the tubs of bright pink shrimp, frost framing his words in the evening air. Lighted stalls with every kind of cheese and produce filled the narrow pedestrian rue , an old Roman road once used by Jeanne d’Arc and her army. Shoppers jostled Aimée on the rain-slicked pavement.

She punched in Thadée Baret’s number on her cell phone which rang and rang. She was about to hang up when someone answered.

“Allô? ”

“Monsieur Thadée Baret?”

“Un moment. ”

She heard what sounded like the télé, the whoosh of an espresso machine in the background.

“Oui?” A man asked, “Who’s this?”

“Aimée Leduc here. I’m trying to reach Thadée Baret. The nun Linh gave me this number.

“About time,” said the man, urgently. “I’m Thadée. You have something for me?” His suspicion had vanished.

“An envelope, we should meet . . .”

“How long will it take you to get here?” he interrupted.

“Where’s here?”

“Near Place de Clichy.” He spoke fast. His breath came over the phone in gasps.

“Say ten minutes, by the Métro. But can’t we meet at my office?” Aimée asked.

“No. Come here. Stand in front of the boulangerie ,” he said. “Across from Sainte Marie des Batignolles church.”

Odd. But she knew it was a crowded, busy place. It should be safe. Easy to melt away in the crowd if this man turned out to be even more strange than he sounded.

“How will I know . . . ?” she began.

“I’ll find you.”

Why all the mystery? she wanted to ask. But he’d hung up.

She knew Clichy, the less-chic part of the many-faced seventeenth, a district containing two worlds: Aristocrats with de la before their name, whose children attended the local école primaire and later ENA, school of the elite, before nabbing a government post. And immigrants with - ski , akela, or khabib at the end of their names, destined for the short BAC exam, a trade school, and a factory job. The seventeenth was an arrondisse- ment of elegant consulates and the best closet-size Turkish kebab shops this side of the Seine. Now, noticing the Mercedes parked between trucks on the street, Aimée became aware of a newer cross-section of moneyed bourgeoisie and hip médiathèques added to the traditional working-class population of Clichy.

Clichy? Only a few called it Clichy these days: the flics, kids, and old gangsters who’d gone to the Gaumont cinema palace and thought it was classy. It was the area Henry Miller had tramped through, fringing the Place de Clichy, with its Boulevard des Batignolles and its boules players and narrow streets. Nowadays, the kids who sold drugs called Clichy and its boulevard bleeding into Pigalle their place of business. From the chic Avenue de Wagram and Arc de Triomphe quartier to the double wide Boulevard Pereire, nicknamed the maréchaux , lined with foreign sex workers, the seventeenth now held something for everyone.

Aimée ascended the Place de Clichy Métro steps, slipping on her leather gloves against the chill November wind. Late afternoon commuters surged around her. Darkness descended before six this time of year. The Café Wepler, a Wehrmacht soldiers’ canteen during the German Occupation—(earlier immortalized in Vuillard’s painting)—glowed in the dusk. Its awning sheltered a stall displaying Brittany oysters on ice to passersby.