“Why do you say that?”
He shook his head. “No one is who they seem.”
“I know about the false identities, the unmarked graves at Ivry, the shops fronting money-laundering operations, the protection racket.” She tapped her heel. “I need more, Monsieur Cho.”
“Look deeper,” he said.
She didn’t have the time for a philosophical exploration. “Deeper?”
Cho backed up toward the door. “My room’s on rue des Vertus. If a Chinese murdered this man, I would have heard, as I told Prévost. I need to get back to work.”
She believed him. “What’s behind the surveillance?”
“The sting operation?” he said. “The usual roundup of little fish. Why do you care? Your neck’s not on the line.”
Cho needed convincing.
“Call this a love bite, do you?” She pulled her scarf down, showed him her bruises. “Whoever murdered Samour thinks otherwise. I was attacked last night. And Meizi, who worked in the luggage store, is in danger.”
“Don’t tell me you want to warn her?”
“Protect her if I can. But I need your help.”
Cho hesitated. “The owners of the handbag, luggage, and costume jewelry shops hide their profits.” His voice lowered. “Never pay into the fisc for illegal workers. You’re right, most of it’s a front for laundering money from China.”
Meizi had told her the same thing.
“But what about Tso, the snakehead? Ching Wao?”
“Both would provide a goldmine of back taxes and penalties,” Cho said. “If the tax men find proof, they’ll freeze their network’s bank accounts. That’s all I know.”
And then he’d gone out the door.
She caught up with him in the wet, footprinted hallway. Slid her card with a hundred-franc note in his hand. “I’d appreciate a call if you hear anything.”
He shook her hand off, a flash of pride in his eyes. “I cooperated for Monsieur Colles.”
Again, she’d put her foot in it. Offended him. “Desolée, Monsieur Cho, I meant no disrespect.” Why had the few interviewing skills she had deserted her?
“Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said, taking out a notepad with measurements from his jacket pocket.
One last effort. She pulled out the photo scan of the chalk diagrams. “Can you tell me anything about this?”
“This? A diagram.”
“Recognize anything?” Aimée asked.
He pulled off his glasses and peered closer. Shrugged.
“What about this?” She pulled out one of René’s photo scans of the chalk diagrams.
He pointed his smudged forefinger to the border. “Formulas.”
“These?” She stared closer at what could be elongated symbols. Why did they seem so familiar? “The ones that look like old French?”
“Partially, and engineer shorthand.” Cho gave a little smile. The first time he’d thawed. “Electrical engineering’s not my field.” Interested now, he studied the diagram. “But we metallurgists sometimes worked with similar equations.”
“So what can you tell me?”
“It’s hard to say.” He shook his head.
Take a guess, she wanted to yell. Instead, she managed a smile. “But with what you know, your expertise …”
“Clearly these symbols represent an alloy. But this … maybe glass?”
She stared at the diagram, wishing she could see what he saw.
“If I enlarge these, could you tell me more?”
“The diagram looks like a map. But this? Your best bet, Mademoiselle?” Cho put his glasses back on. “Find an electrical engineer.”
AIMÉE DOUBLE-KNOTTED THE cashmere scarf around her sore neck, donned her leather gloves, and wove her scooter through traffic on chilly Boulevard de Sébastopol. Thoughts of sunny Martinique and Melac spun in her mind.
Her cell phone rang. With one hand she answered it.
“Saj cracked the encryption, Aimée,” René said.
Finally.
“See you in five minutes.” She clicked off and veered around a bus and gunned her scooter.
AROMAS OF CILANTRO and curry drifted from the Indian takeout cartons on René’s desk. Saj stepped on a Louis XV chair, spread a damask tablecloth over the gilt-framed mirror hanging above the fireplace. He then angled his laptop on Aimée’s desk. “I cracked a portion. A part’s missing. I figure if he’d encrypted this a week, two weeks ago—”
“Then found the other part yesterday,” she interrupted, taking off her leather gloves, “it wouldn’t be in there. I’ll get going on that at the museum.”
“What’s wrong with your wrists?” René asked, looking at her bruises.
It all came back to her—the panic, struggling to breathe, her bound hands, biting at the plastic, rubbing her face against the sharp glass shards, crawling in the wet walkway. She knew if the couple hailing the taxi hadn’t frightened the killer off she wouldn’t be here now. She stilled her shaking hands and told him.
“Samour’s murderer attacked you?” René’s eyes widened.
The memory of the thread from his coat stuck in her fingernail came back to her. “I’m close, René.”
“Too close,” he said. “Have you told Prévost?”
“Not yet,” she rubbed her wrist, “but I will, and I’ll discover when the raid’s planned.” She had to move on. “But how’s Meizi?”
A little smile painted René’s face. “Safe.” Then it disappeared. “For now, Aimée.”
Right now Saj’s discovery of Pascal’s encryption was more important.
“Ready, Saj?” she asked.
He hit a key on his laptop, projecting an image of a bordered manuscript. Her mouth dropped open. Tight lines of black-ink script, ancient-looking and illegible to her, marched across the page, reminding her of the tiny, sharp curls of a monk’s illuminated manuscript. Accompanying the script was a drawing that looked like a primitive blueprint, for what she didn’t know.
“But that looks like Latin.” Not her strong point.
Saj bit into a potato pakora. “Latin’s the standard, the lingua franca. Samour encrypted a recipe.”
“Like a medieval Paul Bocuse?” René stared at Pascal’s encrypted attachment under the chandelier, enlarged on the damask tablecloth. “Cookbooks in the fourteenth century? That looks like an oven.”
Aimée peered closer. “But what is it?”
“I’d say an alchemical formula,” Saj said.
“Alchemy?” Aimée sat up. “You mean wizards, Merlin, eye of newt and mad monks?”
“Why not?” Saj’s eyes gleamed.
René frowned. “It could as easily be a poison. Or a machine.”
“Saj, let’s forget the woo-woo.” Aimée pulled Samour’s book on medieval guilds from her bag and opened to the chapter he had marked. Glassmaking—a coincidence? “To me it’s more concrete.” Her gaze caught on a subchapter heading. “Listen.”
She read out loud, “ ‘Glassmaking guilds guarded secret alchemical formulas and techniques used in the prized leaded-glass-paned windows of cathedrals.’ ”
René’s eyes widened. “He lived in a tower, didn’t he?” René lifted up the diagrams he’d scanned from her digital camera. “Drew these. We just don’t know the connection.”
Aimée grabbed a pakora. “And we need to connect the dots.” Cho’s words came back to her: alloy, glass, formulas. “Look at the elongated swirls, René. They’re symbols, part of an equation or formula. For an alloy, or glass …”
“A machine or a concept,” René interrupted, his voice rising. “Lost in the past, misfiled in the archives. Why didn’t we see it before?”
She nodded. Saj clicked the brown beads around his wrist. A sign his chakras were aligned, or were out of alignment, she could never remember. “But the formula’s incomplete,” Saj said, moving the cursor down. The page ended in what was obviously the middle of the text. “I found corresponding alchemical symbols and phrases,” Saj said, “in Nicolas de Locques’s Les rudimens de la philosophie naturelle.” He patted a thick leather-bound volume under the curry takeout container. “Published in 1655.”