“Composed of fellow Gadz’Arts?”
He gave a brief nod. “That’s where Pascal came in,” Jean-Luc said. “He visited me at my office several weeks ago. Turns out he worked on a fiber-optic formula and wanted my advice.”
The connection. Aimée willed her fingers to remain steady on her glass.
“Anything specific you can tell me?”
Jean-Luc shook his head. “Pascal caught me between meetings. A five-minute conversation.” He shrugged. “To play fair, I couldn’t reveal the company’s plans. I can’t say I understood all the projects we’d undertaken. That’s why I attend these symposiums, to get up to speed.”
“That’s it?” Aimée felt hope slipping away.
“Three days ago, he begged me to meet at his office,” Jean-Luc said. “But I’d just gotten back from our new lab in Strasbourg. Then Friday night he left the message, excited, saying he’d found something, a fourteenth-century technique that could be the missing fiber-optic link. He needed to show me, show me before …” His lip trembled.
“Please go on, if you can,” she said, hating to push him. “Before what?”
He nodded. “He said, ‘before they find out what I’ve done,’ almost as if he’d stolen something.”
“You’re sure?” Yet according to the DST, Pascal worked for the security of the country.
“But I don’t know who or what.” He squeezed her hand, then let go. Large, tapered fingers, worn fingernails. Even as department head he’d said he still did the dirty work. “Then this afternoon.” He downed his wine, his brow furrowing. “I couldn’t find reports in my briefcase for today’s presentation. Gone. My secretary checked, but I hadn’t left them at the office.”
He shot her a troubled look.
“Vital reports?” Aimée asked.
“Topics relating to our presentation,” Jean-Luc continued. “We’re on the cusp of discoveries in fiber optics. But of course, no detailed specifics. We’re sharing the current trends with the participants.” His phone vibrated. He glanced and ignored it. “It’s like a knife in my heart. I can’t believe Pascal would have taken the reports from my office. I don’t want to believe it. But if I’d met him Friday, defused the situation, convinced him to own up or …” Pause. “But I’m projecting.”
Had Pascal stolen reports? She needed to think about this new spin.
“I’m still not understanding how this links,” she said. “Was he obsessed with the project?”
“A geek, you mean?” Jean-Luc’s tone changed, verging on sarcastic.
Realizing she’d struck a sore point, she shrugged. “I’m quoting your fellow Gadz’Arts, de Voule.”
“We’re all geeks, some of us more obviously than others,” he said. “Fascinated by engineering and the arcane.” He shook his head, almost apologetic now. “No one wanted to date mecs like us in engineering school.”
So he spoke from experience? Had he in his youth resembled Pascaclass="underline" glasses, wild hair, a distracted and bookish look? If so, he’d changed. Pascal hadn’t.
“Vraiment? You?” She’d ease a smile onto his face. Get him to talk. Reveal more about Pascal. Learn what she didn’t know, why he suggested Pascal stole. “More like a catch, I’d say.”
He grinned. “And you?”
“Me?” He turned the tables in a neat switch.
“So you’re taken, Aimée?”
By a man married to a job he couldn’t talk about? Who might never have a weekend free but asked her to go with him to Martinique?
“Relationships? I don’t get them.” She shrugged.
“But I can tell,” he said. “Alors, give me credit for trying.”
He hadn’t tried very hard. And his being department head of a conglomerate, not bad boy enough for her.
“Weren’t de Voule and Pascal outsiders?” Aimée asked, persisting. “De Voule said you and Pascal butted heads. That you used him. How do you explain that?”
“Crapaud! You believe de Voule? Consider the source.” Jean-Luc downed his wine. “Alors, de Voule inherited his father’s company. Lucky for him. A mediocre engineer, a passable technician who paid lip service to our traditions to bolster his credentials. His firm’s in financial trouble. Their ministry project defunded. Yet he thinks himself too good for a Gadz’Arts, can you imagine?”
“Yet Pascal didn’t buy into any of it, did he?”
“We knew where we stood with him.”
She poured more wine. The bottle was almost empty. “Did you use Pascal?”
“Moi? The other way around. I felt sorry for Pascal. These flashes of brilliance he had, with no discipline to follow through. His scattershot approach. We were so different from each other, but I understood him. His obsessive tendencies from a solitary childhood. Like my own. Now I hate to think he repaid me by …”
“Stealing reports? Is that what you’re implying?”
“I hope to God not.” He glanced again at his cell phone, worried. For a moment vulnerable. “Another work crisis.”
Overwhelmed by responsibility. She could relate to that.
“Forgive me, but I need to go over tomorrow’s project.” He gathered his overcoat from the rack. A camel-hair coat. It was one of several similar coats on the rack, but her stomach went cold. And she remembered the man darting in front of the car. The thread in her fingernail after the attack. “That’s your coat?” Had it been him? Her throat caught.
He snorted in disgust. “Can you believe that?” He pointed to a grease stain. “A brand new coat—I only just bought it this afternoon. Dirty. Teaches me not to shop the sales again.”
“Today?” A tingle in her ankles rose up her legs.
“Before my seminar. A new coat, to make a good impression. And look.” He shrugged for a moment like a little boy.
Relief flooded her. It couldn’t have been him.
“Look, if my reports surface in Samour’s files, will you tell me? Keep it between us? No need to implicate Pascal now.”
Not to mention keeping his company ignorant of this. But she understood.
Jean-Luc kissed her on both cheeks. Lingering kisses, and then he’d gone. She wanted him to be wrong about Pascal. Very wrong.
Sunday, 7 P.M.
AIMÉE STOOD AT Café des Puys, running her chipped rouge-noir pinkie over the zinc counter. What she wouldn’t give for that cigarette in her bag.
One drag. That’s all.
Anxiety settled over her mind as she wondered about the DST’s agenda, their claim to Pascal, de Voule’s firm’s financial trouble, Jean-Luc’s intimation that Pascal stole his fiber-optics report. They each had different reasons for lying. Who to believe?
Just as she was about to reach for the pack the blonde had given her, the waiter slid an espresso in front of her. So instead, she took sugar cubes from the bowl. No chocolate on the demitasse saucer this time. No instructions either.
“Monsieur, un chocolat?”
“All out,” he said, without looking up.
Alors, she’d appeared as instructed. Done her part. Foolish to think the DST could lead to her mother. Secret meetings, games, all smoke and mirrors. She’d promised Mademoiselle Samoukashian she’d find Pascal’s murderer. But she still hadn’t connected the pieces, or found out who murdered him. Or why.
Tired, she downed the espresso, slapped five francs on the counter. The next time the DST made contact, she’d tell them where to go. About to leave, she glanced up. In the café mirror her gaze caught that of the man sitting in the back.