“Alors, Madame, we’ll help each other.”
“I answer your questions before.”
“Within an hour the police will raid the quartier,” Aimée said. “Spreading the net to catch big fish like Tso, but your little fish will be caught too. Unless you help me.”
Madame Liu’s eyes narrowed. “Not my business.”
“The staff’s your business,” Aimée said. “If you don’t believe it, see for yourself. Go near République, out on rue Beaubourg. Check out all the parked surveillance vans.”
Madame Liu’s fingers crabbed the dishtowel in her hands. Weighing her options, Aimée figured.
“Or do you like paying protection money to buy Ching Wao’s Mercedes?” Aimée tapped her heel on the damp cobbles.
A shout came from the kitchen. Madame Liu’s brows knitted in alarm.
“Mais alors, Madame, there’s not much time.”
Madame checked her watch. A long moment passed before she nodded. “What you want?”
Aimée explained what she wanted her to do. Asked Madame to repeat it. Satisfied, she handed Tso’s phone to Madame.
Madame Liu glanced at her watch again. Nodded and hit the first contact number. She spoke the brief message in Wenzhou dialect. Then the same message again for the next three numbers.
“Remember what I said,” Aimée said. “Close in ten minutes. Only inform people you trust.”
Madame Liu nodded.
“You catch killer for great-auntie?”
“Not yet.” Aimée pulled out the phone’s memory chip, ground it on the cobble under her heel. Pulled her own out and left a message for Prévost.
Aimée turned to head down the alley.
“But I see that girl,” Madame Liu said. “Tonight.”
Aimée froze.
“Man follow her on street.”
“One of Tso’s men?”
Madame Liu shook her head. “Maybe Frenchman. I don’t know.”
“What did he look like?”
“Coat, hat, I don’t see face. Bag of crumbs, like he feed the pigeons.”
Few people fed pigeons this late at night in the winter. The RG or the flics? Or …
“Which way did she go, Madame?”
“Toward Métro.”
AIMÉE RAN, CELL PHONE to her ear. “René, please tell me Meizi’s with you.”
“With me? I’m meeting her near Square du Temple.” René’s voice mounted in worry. “Meizi told me everything. The diagram …”
This felt wrong. “You mean Meizi told you over the phone, on the street?”
“Bien sûr. It’s safer for her to come to the tower, that’s why …”
Bread crumbs to feed the swans in the square’s pond. Of course. And it was coming together. Samour’s killer’s next victim.
“A man’s following her, René,” Aimée said. “Hurry, I’ll meet you there.”
She clicked off. Saved her breath, wishing with every step she hadn’t smoked that cigarette.
At rue du Temple she met a locked gate; the Square du Temple closed early in winter. She looked both ways, then hoisted herself over the side fence. Through the spindle of bare tree branches she saw the glass-roofed, green-metal band shell, home to classical music in summer, now forlorn in the mist. The frost-tipped grass, the playground, and the statue of Béranger obscured by the low-lying fog.
The waterfall gurgled, slipping over stones and feeding into the pond, whose surface was a dull, opaque shimmer of broken ice. A lone swan glided and disappeared. Somewhere a bird trilled. The park, deserted in the dark, cold evening, held night sounds: splashing water, framed by distant traffic.
Aimée shivered, stamped her feet. Nervous, she continued around the pond’s mud-rimmed edge. Saw floating bread crumbs.
“Meizi?” she called, alarmed.
No answer.
Aimée exhaled a plume of frost.
A dark figure moved in the shadows. She heard footsteps, snapping branches. Coming closer.
An attacker?
Then splashing farther away. A scream.
Aimée broke into a run, her heart racing.
“Meizi?”
Furious splashing. A figure ran from the bushes, but she could only make out a dim outline in the darkness.
Meizi yelled, thrashing in the water.
Aimée reached down and grabbed Meizi’s arm. Pulled her up on the mud bank from the pond. Frightened, Meizi backed up, catching her foot on a root.
“Aimée? Someone tried to at—attack me,” said a shaking Meizi.
Tso, or someone else? “Hurry, someone’s watching you.”
Her teeth were clicking in the cold, her jeans dripping at the pond’s edge. “I twisted my ankle, I can’t make it.”
“You need to try.” Aimée nodded toward the low fence. The glow of a cigarette tip by the bare branches. “I’ve worked out a deal with the flics to protect you, Meizi. But we have to hurry. You’re being followed.”
Meizi’s eyes glittered in fear. Aimée pulled her back into the bushes, put her arm around her shaking shoulders, and guided her through the damp foliage.
Trying not to make a sound, Aimée propelled her to the mound by the grilled fence.
“Climb over.”
Meizi winced. “You’re kidding, right?”
Instead of arguing with her, Aimée gripped Meizi’s shoulder tighter, pointed to the foothold in the low grillwork. “Put your good foot here, see? Then swing your other leg up.”
Before Meizi could protest, Aimée boosted Meizi up, then climbed over, herself. “Give me your hand … et voilà.”
Down on the pavement, every step Meizi took squelched water from her dripping shoes. Aimée gripped Meizi’s shoulder tighter. The frigid air made breathing hard. She struggled not to slip on the ice and to keep Meizi, shivering and soaked, moving forward. “We’re almost there.”
So dark, and the street blanketed in fog.
“Where’s the diagram, Meizi?”
“I threw it away,” she said, her voice trembling. “Don’t you see, it’s all trouble since …” She stumbled, leaned hard into Aimée.
Something glinted ahead. “René’s up there,” Aimée said. “Just to the corner, you can make it.”
Then the start of an engine. A car’s headlights blinded her. The wheels crunched ice. Merde. They’d been seen.
With a burst of energy, she ran, pulling Meizi along with her.
“My ankle!” Meizi cried.
“Half a block, not far.”
Meizi let go.
“The car!” René shouted. “Watch out.”
Aimée heard an ouff as Meizi stumbled on the street, shoving Aimée forward. Aimée’s heel caught in the cobble cracks, and then she was flying through cold air. A thump as her head hit the lamppost. Lights spinning. And she crumpled, dazed, on the wet pavement.
The car’s engine whined.
Aimée heard Meizi’s scream. A sickening thud. Shots.
René was firing and running.
The car pulled away. Red brake lights evaporated in the fog.
“Non … non,” she heard René’s voice break. Saw the gun in his hand.
THE REST PASSED in a blur. Vaguely, she was aware of the surveillance van, the flashing blue lights from the flics’ cars, her examination in the emergency room of Hôtel-Dieu, the public hospital. Sometime later, the waiting room, Meizi in the operating room, René’s pacing, and Prévost’s long face.
“But I wrote down the license plate number,” René was saying in the waiting room.
“We found the car,” Prévost said. “Stolen and abandoned at Place de la République.”
“But Tso’s men followed her,” René said, insistent. His fingers drumming the blue plastic chair.
“We apprehended them approximately fifteen minutes prior to the incident.”
“Incident?” René shouted. “Attempted homicide!”
Prévost cast a look at the flics by the reception desk. “We took them into custody at Théâtre Dejazet’s back entrance. But I think Mademoiselle Leduc knows more about that.”
Thanks to Madame Liu.
Aimée nodded. Pain shot through her temple. She shouldn’t have done that. The doctor had diagnosed a raging headache, not even a mild concussion, and had counseled against foot races or long division.
“Did you get anything from dumping Samour’s phone?”
She hadn’t heard back from Saj on the microcassette yet.
“Different SIM card,” Prévost said. “Replaced.”
Useless now.
She wished her head didn’t ache. Wished the nurse would update them on Meizi’s surgery. “But the killer’s still out there,” she said.
“Tso’s under interrogation, Mademoiselle,” Prévost said. “He’ll talk.”
Enjoying his cake and claiming the credit too. But she didn’t care. “Don’t you understand? A Frenchman followed Meizi. Ask Madame Liu. Aren’t you investigating—?”
“Monsieur Friant, I’m sorry.” The surgeon in green scrubs appeared, taking off his surgical mask. “We did everything we could to save her. But she suffered massive internal bleeding.”
René blanched. Staggered. Aimée caught his arm.
She stared at Prévost. “It’s homicide now.” Prévost turned, strode past the white curtains to the flics down the green-tiled hall.