Cara Black - AL05 - Murder in Clichy

Fools. “You broke into the gallery? Thank your stars you weren’t caught. Did the woman tell you anything?”

Gassot couldn’t fathom Picq’s steel-blue gaze.

“We’d have told you,” Picq said.

They hadn’t told him about anything else.

“What about Tran?”

“He’s going to the maison ,” Gassot said.

“It’s time for action!”

Gassot expelled a breath of disgust and shook his head. “Always the hothead, aren’t you? It’s folly.”

The telephone rang.

Picq leaned over the counter next to a sealing machine. His frizzy white hair poked out from his cap. He was there to answer the telephone for his nephew, who’d gone to lunch.

“Oui, allô?” he said. “The dentures are ready for you, monsieur.”

He hung up and turned back to them. “The Castorama store off Passage de Clichy had everything we needed,” Picq said. “Fertilizer, plastic plumbers’ pipe,” he said, tapping the counter. “All under here. No one suspects us, even though it’s what they watch for now. Don’t you read the papers?”

Gassot read the PMU racing forms when he got his monthly pension, but that was it. He shrugged, “ Et après ?”

“We now have everything we need to make a simple pipe bomb,” Picq said.

“I don’t like it. C’est fou . We want the jade in one piece!” Gassot said.

His comrades had always preferred action to planning. Nothing had changed since Indochina.

“We have to open the safe in the house,” Picq said. “I was in the demolition unit, remember? I can do this with my eyes closed.”

“Never.” Gassot stood up. “If the jade’s in there, you’ll ruin it. I won’t have anything to do with this crazy scheme.”

A buzzer went off.

“Calm down,” Picq said, “I can coax a newborn from a ton of steel. Tran’s in place, right? He lets us into the house and then—”

“But we don’t know the jade’s in there,” Gassot interrupted.

Nemours waved Gassot’s remark aside. “Where else, eh?”

Picq switched on an industrial dryer for enamelware and slid in a small tray of gleaming teeth. An even heat emanated from it, warming the back of the lab. Comfortable and safe.

But Gassot shuddered. It reminded him of the false teeth of an old Vietnamese woman at Dien Bien Phu. Her grandson had been caught in a tunnel with French rations. The fire bombing had left her burnt and naked. “Ivory,” she’d said pulling the teeth out and offering them, since she’d had nothing else to barter.

The corporal had shot the old woman and her grandson anyway. The next day the elite Parachute troops found out they’d been innocent. Years later he’d seen the photo of the Vietnamese girl burnt with napalm with the same expression on her face.

Gassot knew he had to reason them out of this.

“Listen, Picq, it’s just a feeling but I think they stashed the jade in a safe place, somewhere. After the old man died, Thadée must have discovered it.”

“Stands to reason,” Nemours said. “According to Albert, he talked big, but he didn’t deliver.”

“You think he was killed because he didn’t hand over the jade?” Gassot said. “But that makes no sense. He was the key, the connection.”

“You don’t kill a connection,” Picq said. “You kill a failure.”

So why did this ring false , Gassot wondered.

“Instead of blowing up the man’s safe, we should be searching for Albert’s killer, and the jade.”

“And you think we’re not? At least, you concede Albert was murdered?”

Gassot pulled the folded napkin out of his pocket. Showed them the threat scribbled on it: “We’re going to roll your pants leg up, too.”

Nemours’s face paled. “It’s all connected. Ever since we found out the jade’s in France—”

“Since it’s in the wrong hands, bad luck has followed it,” Gassot said.

Picq and Nemours exchanged a look.

“You’re not going native on us again, eh?”

Gassot’s eyes flashed. “Remember the officers, they ate the best . . .”

“And we ate the rest,” finished Picq.

Gassot walked toward the glassed-in front of the shop, wondering what more he could say to persuade his comrades to hold back. If they lay low they would be led right to it—and avoid whoever meant to kill them.

He pushed away the thoughts of Bao that crowded his mind. More and more he wondered about Bao. The idealist with soft rounded cheeks, who pared the skin off a mango in deft strokes. Bao, whose laugh had sounded like warm rain.

Gassot stiffened as a uniformed policeman and plainclothes flic entered the shop. “We’re looking for Monsieur Picq. We have some questions,” said a flic in a windbreaker, pulling out a search warrant. “Concerning some recent purchases he made at Castorama.”

Gassot shivered. “I’m just a customer,” he said, trying to control the shaking in his voice. “Monsieur Picq’s back there.”

And with that, Gassot opened the door and slid into the narrow passage.

Thursday Early Evening

“WE’RE STAYING IN A hotel,” Aimée said as she cleaned René’s bloodied hands with disinfectant. The taxi pulled up on rue Sauffroy in front of Kinshasa Coiffure, its windows covered with pictures of women with braided cornrows and Afros. HÔTEL BONHEUR read an old sign by a window of the second-story building. Smells of fish and coconut mingled in the dusk.

“Here?” René asked.

She tipped the taxi driver.

“Always four star with you, Aimée,” he said.

“There’s an elevator and plenty of electrical outlets. I’ll get your car and park it in back, if you want.”

“Don’t you think we’ll stick out?” he said, observing the African women in bright scarves on the street.

“No one will think of looking for us in the African music center of Paris,” she said. “And the owner owes my cousin Sebastian a favor.”

“But we’re still in Clichy.”

“That’s why it’s perfect. Did you see the faces of the men who were holding you? Could you recognize them?”

He nodded. “One heavy-set with red hair, the other lean with a ponytail.”

Like the RG men who had been on the quai outside her apartment.

“What happened, René?”

He rubbed his neck. “They threw a net over me on the office stairs, then put a choke hold on my throat. A carotid sleeper special!”

René reached in his pocket and winced. “Does this help?” he said, pulling out the notebook.

“I’m proud of you, partner,” she said, scanning the pages.

One had writing on it, with a phone number. Regnier’s number.

“This confirms it,” she said. “Regnier, the suspended RG mec, kidnapped you to make sure I handed over the jade. How’s your hip?”

“I’ve felt worse.” Though he couldn’t remember when. With an effort, he tried not to limp.

The hotel room’s furniture—two beds, an angular leopard-skin couch and 1960s Formica end tables—seemed out of place under the tall ceilings and ornate nineteenth-century scrollwork moldings. Lemon verbena scents came from the bathroom. She took out her laptop and hooked it up.

“Saj will bring laptops from the office and we’ll work from here. That’s if the doctor gives you the OK.”

“I don’t need a doctor,” he said. “I just need to lie down, and to bandage my wrists. What about Miles Davis?”

“He’s on holiday at the groomer’s. Loves it, according to the groomer.”

“Is Guy coming?”

She turned away.

“What’s the matter, Aimée?”

“Time to talk about that later. There’s something more important.”

René’s brow furrowed. She reached for the box of gauze bandages. She wasn’t very good at this but she had to say it. “I know I’m not the easiest person to work with René. But I can’t see myself anywhere but Leduc Detective. And you’re part of that. I do know that with your skills, you could go anywhere. Maybe you’ve received other offers. Was that what you meant the other day?”