Cara Black: AL05 - Murder in Clichy

The few passengers on the bus read or sat with eyes closed, ignoring her. She set the backpack down on the next seat and felt inside it. Her hands touched something hard. A gun? She felt again, rummaged within, touching soft silk and hard smooth carved surfaces. She located a small, intricate object.

She peered inside. The absinthe-green of a jade monkey’s face stared back at her.

Late Afternoon Tuesday

IN THE APARTMENT, NADÈGE pulled her bag from under the bed. The duvet stank of cat piss; feathers floated in the last of the November light slanting through the tall window. Techno pounded on the Radio Liberté station.

She had to make her legs move or her uncle Thadée would find her like this, hollow-eyed and shaking. Waiting for the next pipe of life. He’d throw her out, like her father had.

She’d slipped. Again.

Her little Michel, only five years old, needed milk money. But she needed money more. Well, Grand-mère would take care of him. Bien sûr. Grand-mère always did.

The phone chirped. Merde! She hunted under the piled Le Parisien newspapers, around overflowing yellow ashtrays with RICARD printed on them, beneath the leather jacket on the soft wood floor. Where was it?

She wound her thick silky black hair in a knot and held it in place with a tortoise-shell comb.

“Allô?” she said finally when she had retrieved the phone.

“Where’s Thadée?” asked a deep voice.

“Playing pool at Académie de Billard,” she said. More likely, buying smokes at the café- tabac , she thought, wishing she had one herself. He was supposed to meet her here. Why hadn’t he come? He’d left his jacket.

“Then I’m the Queen of Hungary,” said the voice.

“Very funny,” she said.

“Tell Thadée I’m waiting.”

“Maybe I will,” she said, throwing her makeup into her bag, scrabbling into her shoes and her shearling parka. “Maybe I won’t. Tell me what you want.”

“No candy then. Kiss those bonbons goodbye.”

“Wait a minute, Thadée’s straight . . . what’s . . . ?”

He’d hung up. Arrogant salaud ! She had other sources. But she didn’t want Thadée to know about them. If he found out, he wouldn’t let her stay here again.

Monsieur Know-it-all! the Bonbon King . . . what did he know? Not much unless Thadée had confided in him. Thadée had gone to clinch the deal. The deal, he’d told her, that would settle his debts, hers, and more.

Taking the two hundred francs she found in Thadée’s jacket pocket, she slipped down the winding back stairs. Passed through the gate to the cobbled courtyard with its decaying vegetable dampness and rotten wood molding smells, a repository for vats of used cooking oil re-sold to cheaper restos. A Romanian flophouse, doubling as a sweatshop in the day, faced onto it.

As Nadège exited onto rue Truffaut she saw a motorcycle take off, spraying gray splinters of ice and wetness. Her eyes rested for an instant on a stroller with a crying infant, an old woman huddled on the pavement, and then on Thadée’s body sprawled against the phone cabinet. Gasping, she edged toward the crowd. She tugged the red silk cord around her neck feeling for her lucky piece. Saw the blood, the flics , medics, and one of the Bonbon King’s henchman edging into the throng. She ducked before he could see her. Her hands shook. It didn’t make sense, this wasn’t supposed to happen!

Could she help Thadée? But she knew he was beyond help.

She backed up, shaking uncontrollably. Where could she go? And what about Thadée’s stash that he said would clinch the deal?

She ran back to the courtyard, her heels echoing on the soot-blackened stone. In the rear, behind an old staircase, she loosened a stone and felt behind it for the hollow in which Thadée had once hidden dope: only bits of brick and old paper wrappers. Dirt got under her fingernails. Then she felt something cold. Metallic. She scraped it out. An old-fashioned key. But to what? Sirens wailed. She dropped it into her vintage Versace bag and ran.

Tuesday Early Evening

AIMÉE’S HEART POUNDED. STILL shaken, she stood at the eye clinic reception desk in Guy’s private consulting office on rue de Chazelles. The freshly painted, high-ceilinged suite overlooked the old metal foundry in whose courtyard the Statue of Liberty had been forged. Now, the courtyard stood deserted, gray and beaded with rain.

The last evening patient had passed her as she came in. Guy smiled, pushed his glasses onto his forehead and set his stethoscope on the reception counter.

“Doctor Lambert,” his receptionist said as she put on her coat, “I’m sorry but I’m late picking up my daughter from daycare. Do you mind . . . ?”

“Go ahead, Marie,” he said. “I’ll close up.”

Marie smiled at Aimée and left.

“Lock the door,” Aimée told him, “I may have been followed.”

“Kind of jumpy, aren’t you?” Guy said, coming forward and kissing her on both cheeks. Lingering kisses. “I’ve missed you. Geneva was boring without you.” He ruffled her hair.

“Sorry,” she said, inhaling his Vetiver scent. “Perhaps it’s force of habit.”

“But you’ve given all that up, haven’t you?” he said. He put his hands inside her coat, ran his warm fingers down her spine.

“You think I’m overreacting?” she asked. “Just before I came here . . . there was an incident.”

“ Quoi? Criminal work again? You know your optic nerve’s delicate, that stress could cause a rupture. You have been warned.”

She didn’t need him to tell her this again. She hadn’t seen him since he returned from the medical convention in Switzerland and already they were off to a bad start. Maybe she should leave.

He looked at her coat. “What’s this? Blood?”

“I think I need stitches.”

“What’s going on, Aimée?” he asked in alarm. He pulled her into an examining room. “You’re paler than usual.” He took her coat off, rolled up her sweater sleeve. “I’m so stupid . . . tell me about this incident . . . what happened?”

“I thought it was a graze but. . . .”

“Looks deep.”

A black-red slit, the length of a toothpick, oozed below her elbow.

He lifted her onto the cold examining table. The white paper crinkled. “What happened?” Antiseptic smells of alcohol and pine soap wafted over her.

“A man died in my arms. Shot.”

He stared at her, then pulled out disinfectant, surgical tweezers, needle, and thread.

“I should report this,” he said, swabbing her arm with topical anesthetic. “What about your promise to stay out of trouble?”

She gritted her teeth.

With deft movements, he probed, pulled out a sliver of gray metal, and cleaned the wound. “Your leather sleeve protected you, it could have been much worse. What do the police say?”

She tried to ignore the stinging and his question as he sewed her up.

Outside the window, the half-moon hung over the foundry, bathing it in a pearlescent sheen. The glowing orb reflected on the glass roof.

“Guy, you make it sound as if I invited a bullet,” she finally said, pulling back after his last stitch. She shivered, feeling cold.

“Four stitches. I suppose, for you, it’s all in a day’s work,” he said.

“But it’s not like that, Guy,” she said as he taped a bandage to her arm.

“Take this for the pain,” he said, handing her a glass of water and a pill. “Tell me what happened, Aimée. You trust me enough to come here to get stitched up, tell me the rest.”

“I didn’t want to get involved in anything. The Cao Dai say giving back is as good as receiving. I just wanted to help.” She downed the pill with water, took a deep breath and told him how she had tried to “give back” by doing Linh’s errand.