Cara Black - AL05 - Murder in Clichy

Landless peasants listened to Ho Chi-Minh’s ideology and the Vietminh, not to French colonials and fresh-faced graduates from St. Cyr, the elite military academy. Nor to General de Castries who’d relabeled the peaks ridging the heart-shaped valley of Dien Bien Phu, with his mistresses’ names: Dominique, Eliane, Claudine, Françoise, Huguette, and Béatrice.

The regiment’s annihilation proved it. Even Gassot’s work with Tran had been sabotaged. Old World thinking had been outwitted by Asian natives, in a battle to survive.

A knock at his door. The flics ? Had Picq implicated him?

He grabbed his cane and eyed the open back door where his prosthesis stood, ready for a getaway.

“Who’s there?”

“Phone call in the café, old man,” someone said. “Hurry or your girlfriend will hang up.”

Girlfriend? He wiped his brow. Must be a new code of Nemours’s.

“I’m coming.”

He slipped on the stocking, then the bandage, eased his stump into the artificial leg, and attached it. By the time he had navigated the backstairs and reached the café’s zinc counter, the pockmark-faced youth shrugged his shoulders. “She hung up.”

Gassot wanted to hit him.

“But she’s calling back,” he grinned. “Must like you. Eager, eh?” And he made an obscene gesture.

“Give me a pastis and shut up,” Gassot said.

“You’re not very nice. The flics were asking about you, but I—”

Gassot slammed five francs on the counter and shot out the door.

Friday Evening

THE JASMINE CANDLES, CARDAMOM scents, body heat, and smoke made Aimée want to sneeze. Perspiration dampened the sari she’d wrapped around her forehead, and her heels dipped precariously on the low, tilted platform. With any luck Jacky’s eyes would be centered on the crowd, not the stage.

The lead guitarist’s licks soared as he riffed and jumped around in the spotlight. She swayed in the shadows, the sari covering most of her face, aimed at “cool,” and kept her head down. By the third song, her ears hurt. So much for the rock star life.

At least her dark glasses dimmed the flashing strobe lights. She kept the beat, playing the same chords over and over on the keyboard, watching the drummer whose head never stopped moving.

“Shake.” The bassist threw her a tambourine. She beat it with one hand and with the other kept palming the three chords. As she watched the drummer, she darted looks at the crowd. The dance floor wavered, glittering with swirling dancers. A throbbing disco-ball descended, shooting rays of blue light.

Aimée’s hand at the keyboard was bathed in a blue glow, the hypnotic beat echoing through her body.

“Hey Bombay chérie !” someone yelled, another joined in and then the crowd. “Bom-bay chérie , Bom-bay chérie ,” they chanted, stamping their feet. The skinhead caught the rhythm, chording along with the chant. The crescendo rose.

And then her eyes caught on Jacky edging close to the low stage. She panicked, slipped further back into the shadows. When she looked again, he’d become one with the pulsating crowd intent on dancing. And then the lights went out.

Candles sputtered. And for a moment, Aimée and the drummer kept the beat amid laughter, then there were shouts and confusion.

Someone pulled at her shoes and she kicked them off. Fear coursed through her. Her ankle was grabbed again, and she kicked harder. Jacky’s slicked-back pompadour caught the candlelight as the crowd surged toward the stage. She had to make her legs move, get away. She fumbled by the guitarist, dropped the tambourine, and dove offstage toward the pillows.

Tea sprayed and legs flew. A brass tray shot out from under her. She scrambled forward, intent on getting out before Jacky or the other guy , caught in a knot of people by the exit, saw where she’d landed. On her hands and knees, she crawled through mini-skirt clad women and somehow pushed her way to the door.

“Let me out!” she shouted up at the security guard.

“Wait your turn like—”

“I can’t breathe!”

He took one look at her perspiring face and shoulders convulsed with fear and unbolted it.

She dodged into a wet allée , the cobblestones slick beneath her. Women of a certain age stood in the street, then retreated to the doorways as men passed them by.

“Slow down, ma cocotte ,” one of them said, “you won’t get business that way.”

Aimée pulled the sari above her knees and took off down Passage de Clichy. Then around the corner of the winding passage. A door opened to a dimly lit courtyard with leafless trees. She ran inside, panting, and paused by a sign that said PIANO RESTORATION SINCE 1921. A Schubert étude drifted through the air, soft and lingering.

At the side of the high glassed-in workshop, a green metal half-door was open and someone was lugging a box through it. She caught her breath as a white-haired man came into view.

“Monsieur, Monsieur!” she said. “ I’m sorry to disturb you. May I join you?” she asked, and slid through the door without waiting for an answer. “I need to go out your back door.”

He put his finger over his lip. “Shhh, listen. But the Bechstein’s not ready. These things take time.” He gestured toward a black piano, the light catching the ebony wood. “You young people get so impatient!”

She closed the door behind her and scanned the interior of the workroom.

Inside the gaping piano, bronze-toned piano wires skewed in circles, a frill of confusion.

“Eh, doucement, take your time,” she said playing along, wanting to find an exit other than Passage de Clichy that would lead her to Timbuktu.

She rifled through her leather backpack, pulled out the alternative paper, and found Timbuktu’s address, then grabbed her Paris map, and scanned it. “Your shop’s other exit leads to Passage Lathuille , n’est-ce pas ?”

The tinkling notes of Schubert wafted through the chill workroom. Lyrical, with pauses so deliberate it felt as if the music was working its way under water.

“Can you believe this piece was played on this piano?” His eyes were elsewhere as he stuck his black smudged hands in his blue workcoat pocket. “From a 1938 Prague recording. This piano! And I will repair it and craft that sound again.”

She edged past the workbench with its thin chisels, pliers, and tuning forks.

“It’s played from the soul,” she said. And it was.

“You hear it, too,” he nodded, running his hand over the mirrorlike black surface. “I’ll bend and shape the wood the same way, make the sounding boards to the same specifications. The strings and pins, hammers and keys: there will be no variation.”

“Monsieur, please, where’s the exit to passage Lathuille?”

“No time. None of you have time anymore.” He gave a snort of disgust. “Over there. Don’t slam the door on your way out.”

Aimée made her way through the darkened showroom, felt the sharp edges of pianos, and saw the dim EXIT sign. She unlocked the heavy metal and glass door and relocked it before shutting it. She slipped between the building into a walkway, remnant of a medieval lane, so narrow her shoulders scraped against the damp buildings.

At the end, she turned left into cobbled passage Lathuille. Along the graffitied walls by the tobacco brown, 1930s-style hôtel de passe that rented rooms by the hour, she saw the silver and green fluorescent spray-painted sign TIMBUKTU on an old storefront.

So this was what the band member had meant by “Timbuktu.”

No one stood outside. Deserted? But as she got closer, she heard the thrum of a generator. Some kind of squat, or place for band practice?