“It’s not that easy,” she said.
“Consider this what I owe you,” he said. “Since I didn’t make it when you played footsies on that Marais rooftop.” He referred to her case last November, when an old Jewish woman was murdered in the Marais. Morbier glanced at his watch, an old Heublin from the Police Nationale graduation. Her father had kept his in the drawer. “We’re even.”
“Morbier, let me explain—”
“Leduc, you’re a big girl,” he interrupted, “I want a full pension when I retire. Comprends?”
Arguing with him would get her nowhere.
“Merci, Morbier,” she said, pecking him on both cheeks.
She joined the crowd on boulevard de Belleville. At the Métro entrance, the cold spring rain pelted her black velvet pants and beaded her eyelashes. She debated, standing in the drizzle, while commuters veered around her, a wet island in a sea of umbrellas.
The smart course of action would be to leave Belleville, escort Anaïs to a lawyer, and follow up on the Electricite de France job proposal. And she was smart. She had a business to run and a brilliant partner who more than helped shoulder responsibilties.
Yet every time she closed her eyes she saw the burning ball of white-yellow heat, felt the clumps of flesh raining down on her, heard blood sizzling on a car door. Her hands trembled, though not as badly as last night. And she couldn’t get Simone’s voice or Anaïs’s white-faced horror out of her head.
AIMÉE STEPPED into a phone cubicle on avenue du Pere Lachaise to save her cell phone battery. On her left a florist’s sign above baskets of violets promised tasteful funeral arrangements.
“Résidence de Froissart,” a woman’s voice answered.
“Madame, please,” Aimée said. “Is this Vivienne?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Aimée Leduc,” she said. “I helped Madame last night.”
A pause. Pots clanged in the background. The voice sounded different, unlike Vivienne.
“How’s Madame feeling?”
“Madame’s unavailable,” she said.
She could understand Anaïs not feeling well, but she wouldn’t give up that easily.
“Unavailable?”
“I can take a message.”
“Did the doctor visit?”
“You’d have to speak with k Ministre about that,” she said.
Most likely Anaïs had slept and recuperated. But the guarded tone bothered her. She heard a loud buzzing.
“May I speak with Monsieur le Ministre?”
“Not here,” the woman said. “Pardonnez-moi—someone’s at the door.”
Before Aimée could ask her to have Anaïs call her, the woman hung up. She stared out into gray rue Pere Lachaise where rain pattered over shop awnings. She noticed a cat peering from a window. The cat looked dry and well fed. She tried calling again but the line was busy.
Frustrated, Aimée punched in Martine’s number at Le Figaro.
“Mais Martine’s at a board meeting,” said Roxanne, Martine’s assistant.
“Please, it’s important,” Aimée said, “1 must talk with her.”
“Martine left you a message,” Roxanne said.
“What’s that?”
“I wrote it down,” Roxanne said, her tone apologetic. “I’m sorry to be cryptic, but Martine made me repeat this: ‘Start where Anaïs told you; there’s a lot more in the pot-au-feu besides vegetables.’ She said you’d understand.”
Understand?
Aimée thanked Roxanne and hung up.
She didn’t like this. Any of this. She felt torn after vowing to stick to corporate work and build her computer security firm.
The plastic surgeon who’d pieced her together after the Marais case told her to be careful—next time might not find her so lucky. Her stitches had healed nicely. He’d done a good job, she had to admit; no one could tell. He’d offered to enhance her lips gratis. “Like the German models,” he’d said. But she was born with thin lips, and figured she’d exit with them.
Someone once told her the Buddhists believe if you helped someone you were responsible for them. But she wasn’t a Buddhist. She just hated the fact that someone could blow a woman up and get away with it, and put a little girl’s mother in peril. And for what or why she didn’t know.
At the shop next to the florist, she bought an umbrella and then entered a nearby café. She used the rest room, washing her face and hands, to try to get rid of the jail cell odor—a mix of sweat, fear, and mildew. Refreshed after a steaming bowl of café au hit, Aimée boarded the bus for the apartment on rue Jean Moinon.
The cold wind slicing across lower Belleville didn’t feel welcoming. Nor did the gray mesh of sky.
Through the bus window Aimée saw the store with a hand of Fat’ma talisman in the window. She stood, gripped by the image of the small metal hand with turquoise stones and Arabic sayings to ward off evil words.
Just like Sylvie’s—the one Anaïs gave her.
Hopeful, Aimée got off the bus and went into the store. Maybe she would find an answer about Sylvie’s Fat’ma.
The crammed store was lit by flickering fluorescent light strips.
Her heart sank.
Hundreds of Fat’mas lined the back wall. They hung like icons, mocking her.
The owner sat on the floor. He ate his lunch off a couscous platter shared with several other men, who appeared disturbed at her entrance.
Aimée pulled the hand of Fat’ma from her bag.
The owner stood up, wiped his hands on a wet towel, and slid behind the counter.
“Sorry to interrupt you, Monsieur,” Aimée said. “Do you recognize this Fat’ma?”
He shrugged.
“Looks like the ones I carry,” he said.
“Perhaps this one is distinctive. Could you look?”
He turned it over in his palm, then gestured toward the wall.
“The same.”
“Perhaps you remember a woman who bought this—long dark hair?”
“People buy these all the time,” he said. “Every other shop on the boulevard carries them as well.”
Her hopes of finding out more about Sylvie had been dashed.
Aimée thanked him and went out into the rain.
She crossed Place Sainte Marthe, the small, sloped square with dingy eighteenth-century buildings. Wind rustled through the budding trees. A knot of men clustered near the shuttered café, smoking and joking in Arabic.
Blue-and-goldenrod posters plastered over abandoned storefronts proclaimed: FREE THE SANS-PAPIERS—JOIN HAMID’S HUNGER STRIKE PROTESTING FASCIST IMMIGRATION POLICIES. Behind Place Sainte Marthe seventies-era housing projects loomed, jagged and towering.
She walked over the same route she’d driven with Anaïs. The April wind, raw and biting, pierced her jacket. Her ears felt numb. As she entered rue Jean Moinon, she curled her hands inside her pockets, wishing she’d worn gloves.
Pieces of blackened metal bumper and a charred leather armrest remained from the explosion. Almost everything else had been cleaned up from where Sylvie Coudray had gone up in a shooting ball of white fire and flames. The only other evidence was the oily, blackened residue filming the cobblestones. But after a wet spring that too would be washed away.
A dark curly-haired custodian swept the Hopital St. Louis side entrance near the apartment. His plastic broom, like those used by street cleaners, had known better days. Wet leaves clumped together, refusing to budge over the cobble cracks. He wore a woolen turtleneck and headphones, the wires trailing to his blue work coat pocket. He seemed oblivious as she approached. Something familiar—what was it?—stuck in the back of her mind; then it disappeared.
“Pardon, Monsieur,” she said, raising her voice, stepping into his line of vision.