“Interesting angle, musician. You’re the one stereotyping.”
“So, you willing to hang out with an alleged Corsican Separatist?” He interrupted, shooting her a look.
Cut the sarcasm, she wanted to say.
“Not if I can help it.” No reason for him to know she made a beeline for bad boys, once even a Neo-Nazi who’d turned out to be a good guy in disguise. “Convince me you’re not one.”
“To you, we’re goatherds with shotguns, taking care of vendettas, savage and wild like our island, eh?”
“Let’s get back to the point. What did you see the night Jacques Gagnard was killed?”
“You, handcuffed, being herded into the police van,” he said, not skipping a beat.
There was more, she sensed it.
“Did you hear shots?”
His hand trembled for an instant on the ice-coated railing.
“I think you saw something,” she said.
“You’re not a flic.”
“I told you, I’m a private detective,” she said. “Someone framed my friend but I’m going to get her off.”
“That’s what this is about?” His fingers relaxed.
She nodded. “I found Jacques Gagnard, dying, on the snow-covered roof. His heart still responded, his eyes blinked.” She looked down at a hole in a patch of gray snow. “He tried to tell me something. His eyes communicated. It’s hard to describe.”
The flics had dismissed it as a dying person’s involuntary response. Why was she telling him this? She should shut up, ask the questions.
Lucien rubbed his arms and leaned on the railing. “They gunned down my grandfather in the village. He bled to death under a chestnut tree,” he said, his voice low. “It took a long time. I sat with him as the shadows lengthened. A dragonfly fluttered, attracted to the blood on his chest. His three fingers moved . . . and moved . . . my brother told me I imagined it. I was young.” He paused, rubbed the growth of stubble on his cheek. “A week later my uncle found the murderers, three of them, hiding in a lemon grove.”
He shrugged. “I still see the branches swollen with fruit, lemons fallen split and pulped on the dirt, their citrus scent mingled with the metallic tang of blood. Revenge, that I would have taken, an obligation to my grandfather. . . .”
His eyes seemed faraway. He spoke hesitantly yet he was confiding something deeply felt. No stranger had ever spoken to her like this—by turns intimate, sarcastic, then sad.
She was sure he knew more than he was telling about Jacques Gagnard.
“Let’s try again. Tell me what happened. Why weren’t you questioned at the party?”
He turned away, his face in shadow.
“You need my help, musician. Assuming you’ve told me the truth.”
“Revenge, that’s in my culture. I helped you, didn’t I? Let it go. I’ll get by on my own.”
“With the CRS roaming everywhere? There’s probably an alert out on you already if you’re a member of Armata Corsa.”
“Not me. Not anymore. You are misinformed. I play music. That’s what I do.”
“How do I know you weren’t working with Petru? You could have killed Jacques Gagnard, and set another flic up, then double-crossed Petru. And maybe that’s why he’s after you.”
Was that hurt in his eyes?
“I’m sick of this,” he said. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life. You’ve got the wrong person.”
“Convince me.”
“Few have a code. Honor.” He leaned close to her; his breath touched her face. “Should I trust you?”
“Why not? Who else can you trust?” she said. “I’m interested in neither your political nor nonpolitical views. My friend’s in a coma. She’d never shoot her partner. All I care about is clearing her.”
He studied her. Deciding.
Bon, she’d say it the way he’d understand. “That’s my code, Lucien.”
So he told her what happened: Félix, the party, the woman, and how he’d forgotten his ID and had to sneak away. She remembered the list of party participants who had been interviewed. There were no Corsican names.
She nodded. “Now try again. Tell me everything you saw. Tell me what you left out.”
“Left out?” He closed his eyes. Thought. “An old man came out to walk his dog. And I saw light,” he said. “A flickering light, escaping from holes in the ground.”
“You mean the construction site? Here?” she asked, excited.
She pulled out her diagram.
She pointed and he nodded.
“After the shot, I heard breaking glass.”
The skylight. Their escape.
“The fence around the construction is low there. I saw the lights.”
It made sense. She remembered seeing the glowing tip of a cigarette on the ground. She’d wondered where those damp footprints had led. Now she knew; they hadn’t gone out into the street, but down somewhere in the construction site.
“What’s in your backpack?”
He blinked in surprise. Then gave her a wide smile and leaned his leather-clad elbows on the railing. “Search it. Be my guest. I have nothing to hide.”
She ignored his mocking gaze, his long legs. “Why don’t you show me?”
He pulled out his wooden music case, unlatched it.
“My cetera,” he said lifting out the wooden instrument. The bowed wood face was smooth and worn from playing, the strings new. “A traditional instrument, our variation of a lute.”
From his case rose the scent of bergamot and was that currant? Non, deep and dense, more like a dark fig.
“Our tradition makes music out of everyday life; it’s music with its feet on the ground.”
She’d heard a Corsican polyphonic chorus coming from the church around her corner one evening, and stood, transfixed. Ancient, yet timeless, resonating somewhere deep within.
He plucked his cetera. The high melodic notes carried on the crisp air, evoking another world, another time.
A couple, arm in arm on the ice, paused and listened.
He laid the instrument back in the case with care.
“You don’t trust me, do you?” he said. “Because I’m Corsican.”
“As long as we help each other, I do,” Aimée said.
“More Corsicans live in France than in all of Corsica. It’s a diaspora. There are villages with only twenty people left, old peo- ple. Mountains cover eighty-five percent of the island. Rich Parisians come for vacation eager to imbibe nature, wine, and organic honey.” Sarcasm layered his voice. “But haven’t you heard, we’re integrated now? Pasqua is the Minister of the Interior; that model, the one for Marianne, is Corsican; even the quay by the Préfecture’s named after Corsica.”
“Did Petru know Jacques Gagnard? Or did you?” she asked, keeping her voice even with effort.
He shook his head, but he turned away and she couldn’t read his face. There was a thick roll of paper in the back pocket of his backpack.
Plans, copies of blueprints for targeted buildings?
“What’s that?” she asked warily.
“My once-brilliant career,” he said. “Ruined by the Separatists.”
He unfolded the thick sheets. SOUNDWERX was engraved on the top of the pages.
“They forgot the Isadore after Lucien,” he said. “Close enough; Lucien Sarti. A contract that will never be executed.”
Her cold hands dropped her penlight and the contents of her bag spilled out in the slushlike snow: sand from the Brittany beach, her kohl eye pencil, Nicorette patches, worn Vuitton wallet, dated Hôtel Dieu pass to Laure’s ward, well-thumbed cryptography manual, the holy card from her father’s funeral, a black leather neck cord with a knotted silver teardrop pendant, a worn Indian take-out menu, and her cell phone. She dried the items off with her gloves and scooped them back inside.