Murder in the Latin Quarter (13 page)

“
Allo?
” Martine’s voice wavered.

Aimée heard the pop of a cork in the background. Laughter.

“Martine?”

“I’m in a meeting, Aimée,” Martine said.

“Sounds well lubricated.”

“Welcome to publishing. You wouldn’t believe the expense accounts for these meetings, and for book launches,” she said. “The stories I could tell you about Bernard-Henri Lévy’s editor. . . .”

“I’m more interested in the story behind Edouard Brasseur’s interview on RTL.”

“Hold on. Who?”

“Edouard Brasseur,” Aimée repeated. “How’d RTL get an interview with a former rebel who’s wanted by his government?”

“The Haitian? Rumor is that he approached the producer,” Martine said. “Something relating to a high-profile researcher who was murdered Monday night. He insisted on giving a statement, refuting the allegations being made.”

Aimée caught her breath. “Allegations against Azacca Benoît, the ENS professor?”

“But didn’t they find photos . . . with boys . . . ?”

Aimée sat up. “You’re kidding.”

“Kidding? Look at today’s
Choc.
”

A scandal tabloid.

“
You
read
Choc?
” Aimée asked, surprised.

“Everyone does, even if no one admits it.”

“The man was a womanizer, Martine. . . .”

“
C’est ça.
I’m wrong, I confused him with Catherine Deneuve’s gardener.”

“Benoît also consulted for a firm, Hydrolis, on World Bank proposals,” Aimée said. “Know anything about them?”

“The World Bank?” Martine laughed. “Take a number. There’s a long line.”

“Eh?”

“I mean the World Bank’s under fire, left, right, and center,” she said. “A consultant, tainted by the same brush? That’s what you’re thinking?” Martine didn’t wait for an answer. “But what’s it to you?”

“My sister . . . well, I’m not—”

“Sister?” Martine interrupted. “And you’re letting it out now, Aimée? All these years . . . you never told me?”

Hurt layered Martine’s voice.

“Like I knew, Martine? Call me confused and bewildered. She appeared in my office just this Monday, claiming she’s my sister from—”

“Your wild mother?” Martine interrupted. “Well, that makes sense, given that she changed names like she changed countries. Who knows how many half-siblings you have?”

Aimée caught her breath. Morbier had jumped to a similar conclusion. A chill crept over her heart as she thought of her mother starting a new life without her. Ridiculous. She didn’t even know if her mother was alive. What could she do about it, anyway?

“
Non,
Martine, a half-sister from Papa.”

“Your
father?
”

Loud voices, then a squeal of laughter in the background.

“Hold on . . . the top model who wrote her life story has just arrived. And they call that literature!” Martine snorted. “Still, it makes for a change from the usual navel-contemplating literary types. But it’s the busiest time of the year, Aimée. I’m jammed with the
Rentrée de Litérature .
. . seven hundred books published this month. Tell me who’ll read even half of them!”

Martine paused and exhaled. “What’s Edouard Brasseur’s connection to this half-sister?”

“That’s what I want to find out. Please, Martine.”

“You mean she’s really your sister?”

“I think so. But it’s worse: she’s a suspect in Benoît’s murder.”

“
Merde,
Aimée . . . your family. . . .”

More laughter.

“I’ll sniff around,” Martine said. “Meet me tomorrow at the hammam. Got to go.” And she hung up.

The waitress set down a
tartine,
a long crusty baguette filled with cheese, cornichons on the side, and an espresso.

“
Merci.
”

At least the afternoon’s temperature had fallen by a few degrees. As she sunk her teeth into the sandwich, Aimée noticed a message on her phone, from an unknown number.

She leaned forward on the small marble-topped table to hear the message. Someone clearing his throat, then a small cough and a whisper, difficult to identify. “Listen, it’s about Benoît.” Familiar, but definitely not Mireille. “That commendation. Well, when he came back . . . maybe it won’t matter.”

It was Darquin, the guard. About time. “I never saw that Mireille again, but . . .
non,
it’s better to tell you in person. If you get this message, meet me at 5 P.M. I’ll be at the mass at the Eglise Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.”

Darquin had remembered something. Perhaps it might clear Mireille. Aimée grabbed the
tartine,
left the espresso and a twenty-franc bill, and ran for the bus.

Wednesday Late Afternoon

“MADAME? MAY I help you?” asked the corner flower-seller whose station was across from the Pantheon.

Léonie smiled. “That bunch, please,” she said, pointing at the blue delphiniums. Perfect for a church offering.

Her cell phone rang. It was Ponsot, her former chauffeur, now a rent-a-guard. She used him from time to time for little jobs, like delivering messages and carrying out surveillances. But he wasn’t even good at that.

“A problem, Ponsot?” Léonie said, glancing across the cob- blestoned street. She scanned Saint-Étienne-du-Mont’s Gothic and Renaissance soot-stained façade. This was the church that housed the relics of Saint Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris.

“He’s late. Not my fault,” Ponsot said. “He’s an old man.”

She had beaten a path straight here after Ponsot’s first call. Rushed over. She summoned her strength. Control . . . she had to get control. After last night’s fruitless effort, she’d gotten this link from her contact: the guard at the lab where Benoît had been murdered.

“According to you, Darquin will attend the five o’clock mass here.”

“He’s cheap, too, wouldn’t pay for a drink at the bar. Blamed it on his constipation.”

Léonie didn’t need scatological comments from Ponsot. She didn’t pay him for that.

“Not ten minutes ago, he used the public phone,” Ponsot said. “He called a woman, acting like he’s some kind of secret agent, and left her a cryptic message.”

Why didn’t you press him, get more information? she wanted to say. It was what she paid him to do. But when so much depended on something, she’d learned you had to do it yourself.

“
Merci.
” She paid the flower-seller and took the fragrant blue delphiniums in her arms.

“Cryptic message?” she repeated.

“I overheard him say Benoît’s name,” he said.

At least Ponsot was good for something.

Then she saw him. An old man, in a dark blue suit too large for his shrunken frame, standing at the corner near the bus stop, by the church. Cars and buses raced around the Pantheon, leav-ing a trail of diesel exhaust. Classes over, teenage students from the
Lycée Henri Quatre
opposite, carrying books and wearing backpacks, spilled over the pavement on rue Clovis.

A young crowd. The old stood out. Like she did.

“Thick white hair, black-framed glasses?”

“That’s him,” Ponsot said. “Lost his wife last year.”

She edged across the pavement toward the white-striped pedestrian crossing. Only narrow, cobbled rue Montagne Sainte Geneviève lay between them.

She’d planned to find a pew near him and strike up a con-versation after mass. To enlist his aid with her offering of flowers to the Virgin. Old widowed gentlemen loved to ap-pear gallant at no cost to themselves. She’d lead him into a conversation about his job, ask where he worked, slowly guide him, and then pump him about Benoît. Find out what he’d seen in the hope of eliciting information that would lead her to the file. Nothing difficult, if she did it right.

She had to hurry, before the woman he’d contacted might appear.

Laughter and shouts from students filled the afternoon air.

“Monsieur—” the rest was lost in the ambient noise. Darquin looked up and turned, as if he recognized someone calling him. She saw a medal on his lapel, a war veteran who wouldn’t let anyone forget it.

The Number 89 bus hurtled past, blocking her view. Fol-lowed by a Renault. She heard the screech of brakes, then a loud thump, and didn’t see Darquin any more. But she heard raised voices, shouts . . . a scream. Students were pointing.

“I’m a doctor. Make way . . . clear some space!
Nom de Dieu .
. . the old man’s under the wheels. . . .”

The crowd parted. The flower-seller hurried into the street, raising her hand to stop traffic. And then Léonie saw blood pooling between the cobblestones’ cracks. Darquin’s body was half under the Renault.

Léonie dropped the delphiniums, backing away. No one paid attention. And no one paid attention as she melted back into the crowd.

Wednesday Late Afternoon

AIMÉE JUMPED OFF the bus across from the neo-classical columns of the Pantheon, the final resting place of the great: Voltaire, Rousseau, Émile Zola, Victor Hugo, André Malraux, and Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Among them, as well, Marie Curie, the first woman whose own accomplishments earned her a place, albeit sixty years after her death, alongside France’s most eminent men.

Aimée stuck her half-eaten
tartine
in her bag. Five P.M., and she had to hurry to meet Darquin. But further on, a crowd blocked her way, staring and pointing. What was going on?

Paramedics were loading a stretcher into the ambulance parked at the curb. She gasped when she saw Darquin’s chalk-white face before they pulled the sheet over it. Too late.

“What happened?” she asked the teenage girl next to her, horror-stricken.

“The old man fell. Terrible,” she was told.

“You mean just like that?” Aimée asked. “In front of the car?”

The pimple-faced boy next to her shook his head. “One minute he stood there, then he was going forward, his arms out.”

His arms out? A natural reaction to break a fall. Especially if he’d been pushed.

“Did he look confused, afraid?”

The boy shrugged. “He smiled.”

“Smiled?”

“I thought he . . . well, he reminded me of my grandfather.” The boy shifted his backpack, turned to the girl. “Come on, Sophie, we have to go.”

She couldn’t let them leave.

“How did he remind you of your grandfather?”

“He wore a military medal like my grandfather, who always talks about the war.” This boy was more alert than the aver-age teenager. “So he seemed happy, and he smiled.”

She thought for a moment. “Like he’d just met someone?”

“I guess so. He turned around and I almost bumped into him.
Oui,
he spoke to someone . . . then . . . I don’t know.”

An accident? She didn’t think so. Hadn’t he left her a message concerning Benoît? The poor old man had wanted the commendation after all.

She replayed Darquin’s voicemail, searching for a hint of the meaning behind his words. Nothing. Whatever he’d wanted to tell her had gone with him.

A smile, a flash of recognition . . . Darquin knew the per-son who’d pushed him in front of the car.

“Did you see the person he’d met?”

“Look, I only noticed the old man because I almost bumped into him.”

The boy and the girl left before she could suggest they talk to the
flics.
What could she do? What
should
she do?

She glanced around. It could be anyone . . . no, not
anyone
. . . someone from the laboratory or his neighborhood. The
flics
had arrived and were directing traffic; the crowd melted away. She saw no one over twenty-five.

Get out of here, said a little voice in her head. Now! Darquin had been killed only minutes before the time he’d set their meeting for.

She edged among the bystanders lingering on the pavement. The ambulance blocked the street. Then she saw the library doorway, a place to hide.

Keeping pace with the students, she ducked into the entrance of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and pulled out her library card. Access was restricted to students, scholars, and researchers. Some security, at least.

Upstairs, she entered the Salle de Lecture Labrouste, the vast reading room whose vaulted barrel-like ceiling was sup-ported by pierced leaf-patterned cast-iron arches. It always reminded her of a cross between a train station and a covered market hall. And once it had been her home away from home, during med school and later the Sorbonne.

The
bibliothèque
hadn’t changed: seven hundred and fifteen seats, small globe lamps interspersed among the long tables, rubber book-trolley wheels squeaking over the wood floor, the turning of pages, hushed whispers, and the smell of the sun hitting old polished wood.

She took a place that provided a view of the reading room entrance but not much cover. She squeezed her eyes shut, but it didn’t erase the vision of Darquin’s chalk-white face, the blood in the cobblestone cracks. Sick at heart, she knew Darquin had been pushed to prevent him from meeting her.

But regret wouldn’t help Darquin now. She’d use the hour remaining before Banque Morel’s data system update to find answers, the answers Darquin now could never tell her.

Aimée located the fifth arrondissement business directory and found the Hydrolis company’s history and description. Founded in the 1960s, she read, by Brice Castaing. Sorbonne-educated, a geographer, his land-survey work for UN relief in Haiti had led him to develop Hydrolis, now an international firm specializing in water-treatment facilities and sewage plants. Hydrolis had grown and now counted four Caribbean countries among its clients. It was now managed by a board of directors, and his son Jèrôme was its CEO. Not much she didn’t know already.

With the help of a librarian assistant in periodicals, a twenty-something long-haired
mec
who gave her the eye, she requested the
Journal de L’eau
from the past five years and the recent
Journals de Culture Haitian.
Also
Lancet,
the British medical journal; she hoped her English wasn’t so rusty that she would be unable to understand the article on pigs.

In the marble-tiled restroom, she called Cloutier. He answered on the fifth ring; sawing and hammering noises were in the background. He’d removed an office wall, from what she could understand, and had several hours’ more work to do. There had been no message from Mireille. No use going to the office tomorrow, she thought, where she wouldn’t be able to hear herself think.

The stack of journals arrived, and she went to work. She skimmed the
Journal d’Eaux
’s table of contents for the past few years. In the March 1995 issue, she found an article on water sewage treatment plants in Third World countries, focusing on the Caribbean.

Her eyes began to glaze over. She could use an espresso.

She skipped over the tables and percentages of chlorine used, the facility maintenance reports, the statistics as to the flora and fauna of areas surrounding sewage-treatment plants. Hydrolis was cited as an example; it had led the way in building the water infrastructure in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Hydrolis’s 1996 proposal for expansion of their treat-ment plant outside Port-au-Prince appeared to be under consideration for World Bank funding. An addendum to the article noted that, due to the unstable political climate, foreign investment projects in conjunction with the World Bank were on hold.

She copied that down. And wondered why Benoît, a world authority on pigs, had been consulted about Hydrolis’s water-treatment proposals. She had to search further. At the documents desk, she requested information on World Bank funding for projects in Haiti. The long-haired
mec
winked at her. “Those documents come from the basement. Sorry, you missed the last request time by half an hour.”

“You mean . . . ?”

“First thing tomorrow.”

She’d have to come back. Unless Martine already had the skinny tomorrow.

“The coffee machine still downstairs?”

“I’d love to join you, but I’m on shift. It’s on the lower level.”

She put four francs in the espresso machine. A thick spurt of brown liquid dripped into the plastic cup. The same watered-down taste, but it was full of caffeine. She tossed it away after a few sips. Poor Darquin, she thought, if only she knew what he’d wanted to tell her. She felt even less safe than before.

Her horoscope in the latest
Elle
advised her to take out life insurance. She’d never even made out a will. Who would her apartment go to . . . Miles Davis? René? Or would the law award it to Mireille?

Back upstairs at the long wooden table, now more wide awake, she checked the
Journals de Culture Haitian
for historical articles and those on vodou. To understand the meaning of that circle of salt, Benoît’s severed ear and peeled skin. . . . The article that caught her eye concerned black vodou.

Black vodou rituals, not practiced in modern times, came from old practices in Benin and the Cameroons, in Africa. They involved the severing of extremities. The leader, the
Grandissime,
tortured victims, preferably young ones, and drank their blood, which was thought to give a certain potency to him.

That could put another spin on Benoît’s murder, a gruesome one, as Morbier had suggested. But she doubted that the murderer had killed Benoît to drink his blood.

In an article about the 1758 colonial laws governing Haitian sugarcane harvesting, she found an interesting and revealing quote: “The cane was rushed to have its sweet sap crushed from it between rollers. If a black slave happened to get a limb caught in these rollers through excessive haste or exhaustion, it was simply hacked off with a machete and the wound cauterised with a torch rather than production being slowed.”

Aimée read further: “It was legal for any White to take any-thing from a black or mulatto he thought better quality than what he owned himself—be it a piece of furniture, a horse or the coat off his back—and if that black ignored this,
his ear was chopped off.”

Significant? But this had taken place under colonial rule long ago. After twenty minutes, she sat back disappointed. Circles of salt were used in vodou for purification, a cleansing rite. Nothing linked salt to execution or death: quite the opposite.

It didn’t add up.

She thumbed through the
Lancet,
the British medical jour-nal. A real egghead’s delight, full of technical studies.

In the third issue, she located an article on swine fever and the importation to Haiti of a white pig species. In essence, it blamed U.S. imperialism for the replacement of the native species of small black pigs. The
Lancet
entry listed an article in the UK
Guardian
from a year earlier as a source.

Pressed for time, she hurried, but it took ten more minutes before she located the
Guardian
on microfiche. What she saw in the Letters to the Editor section made her sit up. The letter, dated 2 April 1996, had been written by Professeur Azacca Benoît.

Dear Editor,

To give historical context to your article on African swine fever, I bring to your attention the fact that the dis-ease entered the Dominican Republic and soon spread down the Artibonite River and over the border into Haiti. The epidemic swiftly killed one third of Haiti’s pigs. But, by late 1981, it seemed to have run its course. The U.S. was taking no chances, however. It funded a program to slaughter every pig in Haiti.

To the peasants producing most of Haiti’s food, the program was devastating. Their small black Haitian pigs, which largely fended for themselves, were so critical to their economy that the same word was used for “pig” and “bank.” People hid their pigs in holes and caves, but President Duvalier’s tonton macoutes rooted the animals out and shot them. Even quarantined herds were exterminated. This decimated the peasants’ economy.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) argued that the slaughter should be seen less as a problem than an opportunity. By replacing the small black pigs with large white ones from the U.S., Haiti could be-come a pork exporter and a lucky new participant in the modern world agricultural economy.

The new pigs grew fast, but needed as much pampering as the Duvaliers. While the peasants lived in bamboo shacks and ate only the food they grew for themselves, the white pigs needed concrete houses, showers, and imported food and medicine. Water resources were prioritized for pig-breeding, which became the preserve of big business, leaving the peas-ants with nothing. It is no exaggeration to say that the demise of the
Kreyòl
pig sped the demise of Baby Doc.

President Aristide’s new government began to import black pigs from other islands and distribute them to the peasants. As a result, when Aristide was overthrown, the new military leaders declared that the black pigs were communist pigs, whose owners should be rounded up as subversives. The white pigs, by contrast, were capitalist pigs and a source of national pride. By the time Aristide returned, in 1994, the peasant economy had been strangled, and much of the peasants’ land had been bought up by companies growing coffee or flowers for export to America. The water systems were now prioritized for foreign export agriculture.

Respectfully,

Professeur Azacca Benoît,

Ecole Normale Supérieur, Paris

Benoît’s own words. She wondered if, a year and a half later, this letter was connected to his current research. Huby would know. He’d shown her the pig-tissue slide. She called the lab, got the recording, and hit Huby’s extension. Voicemail again, and he still hadn’t returned her previous call. She left another message.

She checked the time. If she didn’t hurry, she’d be late. Outside, in the bustling square fronting the Pantheon, the pavement cafés were filled with students. The only evidence that Darquin had died there was the street cleaners, with their plastic brooms, watering the cobbles and sweeping his blood into the gutter.

“DIGGING TO CHINA again?” Aimée asked Delair, the Banque Morel security guard at the reception desk. She gestured to a hole in the floor surrounded by orange plastic net-ting, a grill-like fence, and danger signs.

Delair shrugged. “Pipes burst three floors down. Nice mess in the remnants of the Roman cistern. Again.”

It made her spine prickle. She hated the enclosed claustrophobic feel of the database center below, knowing that tons of rock, sandstone, and concrete were suspended above her. And she wondered if siting the bank’s database center underground had been such a good idea. No doubt a web of tunnels, quarries, and old German bunkers honeycombed the earth beneath their feet.