Murder in Pigalle (17 page)

“I see it in your eyes,” said Sybille.

“And what’s that?”

“Like you want to turn vinegar into honey,” Sybille laughed. “
Bonne chance.
”

On the way she called Martine.

“L
UNCH AT
P
RINTEMPS
, your treat? That’s an EMERGENCY?”

Across the table from her at the Printemps rooftop café, Martine speared a yellow beet with her fork. Martine, a journalist and Aimée’s best friend since the
lycée
, wore vanilla gauze layers that offset her tan. The vista from the department store’s roof
terrasse
spread from the Grands Boulevards to the tour Eiffel to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont.

Starving, Aimée ignored the view. She gulped down the shooter of cold leek vichyssoise then started on the grapefruit, avocado and shrimp salad before attacking the
saumon fumé.

“How can you eat so much in this heat?”

She’d gained four kilos. Right now she didn’t care. “Eating for two.” With any luck she wouldn’t throw this up. Sated, she took a breath and noticed for the first time that Martine was looking with longing at the woman smoking by the handrail. “Now I know what’s different,” said Aimée. “You’re not smoking.” She grabbed Martine in a hug. “Only one thing would ever make you quit. A baby.”

She felt Martine’s shoulders quiver. Her blonde hair brushed Aimée’s cheek as she shook her head.

“What’s the matter?”

Martine bit her lip. “Nicotine withdrawal.”

“Liar. Did you break up with Gilles?” Finally, and come to your senses, she almost said. Martine’s lover had a multitude of
children and an ex-wife living below their big flat overlooking the Bois de Boulogne.

“Does this look like a break-up tan?” Martine asked, indignant. “After two weeks on Martinique?”

A fight and make-up tan, then. “What’s his ex-wife done now?”

Martine was upset. Even though Aimée had other things on her mind, she’d have to hear it. Martine was her friend.

“Quiet for once,” said Martine. “She’s got the children in July.”

“Then what’s …?”

“Your emergency?” Martine interrupted. “I dropped my meeting I was so worried. Did something happen at your doctor’s appointment?”

The appointment Martine couldn’t go to.

“Baby’s fine. It changed me, looking at it and really seeing it.” As she reached for the sonogram, her eye caught on Martine’s open agenda sticking out of her bag on the
terrasse.

A red circle around a date two weeks ago. Martine’s indicator of bad news. Aimée noticed she’d lost weight.

“No one loses weight after they quit smoking, Martine.”

“I’m not ill.” Martine’s eyes brimmed. “I’m not being a good friend right now.”

A cold shaft traveled Aimée’s spine.

“Did I do something?” Again? And she had to ask another favor of Martine.

Pain radiated from Martine’s face. “Two weeks ago,” Martine paused. “I didn’t want to tell you …”

“Tell me what?” Worried now, Aimée took Martine’s shaking hand.

“Or mar your happiness. I couldn’t face you. I had a miscarriage.”

A knife pain of guilt lanced her. “
Mon Dieu
, I’m so sorry, Martine.”

She should have read the signs. So caught up in her own world of this baby and wondering if she should even have it, how to take care of it—all those doubts she’d shoveled on Martine since the beginning of her pregnancy.

“Martine, you have the stable relationship,” she said. “You want a baby and yet here I am, the unfit candidate, moaning about my feet swelling.” She put her fork down. Insensitive again and in hormonal overdrive, as René pointed out to her often these days. It seemed so wrong.

She thought of what the woman in the park had said. “You’d be a better mother than me,” she said. “And you have a posse to help you.” Martine had a mother, tons of sisters, aunts and uncles, not to mention the baby’s father on site.

Martine averted her gaze.

Merde
—stuck her foot in her mouth again. She couldn’t get anything right. First Zazie and now her best friend.

“
Désolée
, Martine, it must be
difficile
for you to watch me go on like this.” She grabbed her hand. Squeezed it. “So terrible for you. Forgive me?”

“Really, it’s okay, the doctor says I’m fine,” said Martine. “We’ll try again in a few months.”

Thinking of Martine’s support system, of her own total lack of one, her head began to swim. How could this be happening? What was Aimée thinking, having a baby? She’d end up like her mother and abandon her child. Or leave others to raise it while she cluelessly doled out money. Like her mother.

“
Et
alors
, if I’m the godmother shouldn’t I see the sonogram?” said Martine.

Aimée’s phone vibrated on the table. Caller ID showed Virginie. “
Excusez-moi
, Martine, got to take this.”

She put her hand over one ear to listen.

“
Oui
?”

“They haven’t found Zazie.” Virginie’s voice vibrated with fear. Aimée’s heart fell. “No trace of her at that suspect’s … 
keep saying she’s a runaway.” But the conversations on the
terrasse
made it impossible to hear.

“
Un moment
, let me call you back when I’m somewhere I can hear,” said Aimée. She hung up. “Martine, this is the emergency. What ever happened to that friend of yours, the interviewer on that TF1 show? What’s it called?
On the Rue
?”

Martine blinked. “Nadine, the sensationalist? The muckraker?” She blotted her eye with a napkin. “Another
bohème
with a trust fund.”

“Like all of them,” Aimée said. “But I remember meeting her at that faux Leftist gathering back when you were in Sciences Po together.”

She had to reach out to the media via Martine, and she wouldn’t let Nadine’s mudslinging reputation put her off. Time mattered. As the hours ticked by, Zazie’s danger grew.

“
C’est ça
,” said Martine, uninterested.

“Can you call her?”

“She’s not a close friend. Why?”

Sunlight blazed and sparked on l’Opéra’s verdigris cupola, lighting the gold trimmings on fire. So close Aimée felt she’d burn.

“Ask her if she wants a bombshell interview on the street where a woman’s daughter disappeared—how it links to unsolved cases of three twelve-year-olds raped in the same arrondissement.”

Martine’s eyes perked up. “What’s it to you?”

“The
flics
never put it together. Zazie did, and now she’s missing.”

Martine dropped her fork. “Zazie from the café, your little shadow?”

“Not so little. She just turned thirteen. Her mother’s on the phone, frantic. She’s been missing …” Aimée glanced at her watch. “… almost twenty-two hours.”

“Haven’t the
flics
briefed the press?” asked Martine. “Enlisted the public’s help?”

“And reveal how lax and incompetent they’ve been? Fat chance.” Aimée tried to catch the server’s attention for the bill. “Easier to label her a runaway. Please, Martine. Either Zazie’s locked up somewhere, or …” She wouldn’t say it. “… the rapist tried again last night. Thank God the girl got away.”

Martine nodded, determination glinting in her eyes. “Right up Nadine’s alley. She loves scraping the cobbles with the police. She’ll run after the scent like a rabid dog.”

Foaming at the mouth worked for Aimée.

“Plus,” Martine added, “she’d owe me some contacts I need.”

A journalist to the core.

Aimée threw a wad of francs near her half-finished plate and started to rise. Martine touched her wrist. “Word of caution, Aimée. Nothing’s sacred to her—people get singed. But if someone’s going to expose corruption, better she does than I do.”

“
Exactement.
Down and dirty. It’s about finding Zazie now—anything that works.”

Martine had already started to dial. “Where and when?”

“Below Place Saint-Georges, corner of Notre-Dame de Lorette and rue Laferrière in the ninth. Can she get there within the hour with a crew?”

“Less. The vans are very mobile. With luck one of the news agencies will pick it up. Maybe a nice little crowd.”

She grabbed Martine’s other hand. “
Désolée
, Martine,” she said. “I’m the one who’s not been a good friend, so wrapped up, preoccupied …”

“That’s what best friends do—give and take, eh? And don’t let
salauds
mess with little girls.”

Z
ACHARIÉ
’
S HEAD HIT
the crumbling ceiling in the low, dark tunnel under the Hôtel Drouot. He cursed. He hated the mildew and crusty dirt miasma. His fingers trembled. He balled them in a fist to stop shaking. No good. So he shoved his hands in his jacket pockets.

Time to get his bearings, calm his nerves for the dry run. Otherwise the job would go up in smoke. What else could he do? His shirt, damp with perspiration, stuck to his spine.

“We’re done,” Dervier said, his forked tongue darting in full view. “Tunneled and drilled last night. Piece of
gâteau.
”

Professionals. Jules wouldn’t have needed Zacharié at all. Except for the cherry on top.

The cherry of a job that guaranteed Marie-Jo’s release. Zacharié’s gang only knew a part of the plan, only part of the risk. For a moment he was wracked by guilt. Not that he had known the whole plan when he’d had them hired.

“And at short notice,” he said. “I’m impressed. Good job.”

“I know the tunnels,” Dervier said. “We’ll enter via the cistern chutes that run here like wet dogs.” Under the city lay ancient mines, quarries and series of passageways threaded by tunnels. Métro and train systems cut through old passageways hemmed by sewage and gas pipelines—a warren Dervier knew like the lines in his old mother’s face. God knew what she’d done down here during the Occupation, with the rumored
black market, the brothels and the hiding places for Jews—all available for whoever could pay.

Dervier raised nine fingers.

Nine hours to the heist.

Dervier timed their practice run based on the job’s outlined scope—a robbery of the underground vault that should take fifteen minutes once they’d broken in. What Dervier did not yet know was that as the team emptied it, Zacharié would gain entry via the vault into the Ministry’s temporary storeroom, in the building behind the one they were breaking into. That was Zacharié’s special job. To take the thing Jules had hired him to steal.

Dervier clicked his stopwatch. “Fifteen minutes and forty seconds.”

“Ask me if I’m surprised, Dervier.” He summoned a grin, nudged him. “You’re the best.”

Each of the crew had his own motivation to succeed. Dervier faced a mountain of medical bills. Gilou itched for the thrill and getaway. Ramu, gambling debts. Tandou, the tunneler,
zut
, this was how he earned, with three kids and another on the way.

No margin for errors. The “supplemental” plans Jules had given him lay damp against his shirt under his jacket, directing him to the real object he’d been hired to deliver. He’d planned to add the change to Dervier’s itinerary at the last minute. He needed to get the team through the beginning of the plan first.

“Forget the big paintings and sculptures,” said Dervier. The team nodded in approval. “Remember, we’re going for the portable
objets d’art
, silver and jewelry.”

No doubt Dervier had his fence lined up. But he’d noticed Zacharié’s look. “Don’t give me a sad face, Zacharié. Every object’s valued and insured. Half of the coots whose names’re on the little tags have passed away. Think of it as a gift from the grave to their descendants. Old
grand-père
’s forgotten gold watch suddenly becomes an insurance windfall.”

Let Dervier rationalize. Jules had taken his Marie-Jo as hostage. Zacharié had no choice.

In the cold, dank tunnel, he felt a sheen of perspiration on his upper lip, his stomach in knots.

He pulled out the diagram Jules had given him.

“What’s this?” Dervier asked, shining his flashlight.

“Just between us. It’s an add-on to the plan. I need you to open those back exits, like here and here,” said Zacharié, pointing.

“Tell me you’re joking, Zacharié. There’s fifteen tons of concrete laid there after rue Papillon sunk in the RER excavations,” said Dervier. His tongue flicked. “See.” Cement supports shone in the bobbing yellow beam from Dervier’s flashlight. “They evacuated the whole street, and still people died. Now they run a Fête des Papillons to make people forget. As if they could.”

“
Allez
, Dervier, you’ve got the equipment, work around it. Not that difficult.”

“In eight hours?”

Zacharié’s hand tensed.

God in heaven, how stupid he’d been to agree to Jules’s plan. Yet his only alternative—at the time—had been enduring eighteen more months of prison while his ex and that pedophile decamped with Marie-Jo. Now, with his ex’s DUI, he’d have been sure to gain custody of Marie-Jo, but Jules had forced him to jeopardize all that.

At every step he’d racked his brains for a way to pull out yet still satisfy Jules and guarantee Marie-Jo’s return. For the life of him he couldn’t think of a dodge. Trapped. Like in this tunnel—no way to turn except straight ahead into Jules’s web.

“I need this gate opened,” he said. “And I need you to figure in twelve more minutes.”

“Here?” Dervier’s flashlight beam played on the dripping tunnel. “Why?”

“So I can get out via the sewer while you’re packing up the vault.
Compris
?”

The whole thing was a tight wire, a balancing act. Deep inside, a sliver of fear vibrated—what if Jules refused to release Marie-Jo? Knowing Jules, hostages were more trouble than they were worth. He pushed that thought down.

Play the chump again. Play right into Jules’s palm.

“Something in it for me, Zacharié?”

He’d hooked him.

“This should sweeten it, Dervier.” Zacharié put a wad of francs into Dervier’s waiting hand.