Wasn’t everything blamed on the Separatists? And he still hadn’t answered her.
“Where were you, Monsieur Conari?”
“The isle of beauty,” he said. “Corsica.” He let out a sigh.
The priest beckoned to Conari.
“Excuse me, I must thank the padre.”
“LUCIEN, WHERE exactly did you see those lights?”
Aimée stood shivering before the building on whose roof Jacques had been shot.
Lucien pointed. “The lights came from over the railing. You can see the hole from here.”
“Where?”
He put his hands around her waist. Strong hands. And lifted her up. Only an inky black hole fringed with frost met her gaze.
“Dots of moving lights,” he said.
A tunnel?
He set her down. His hands rested on her hips a moment too long.
“Tomorrow, I’ll sniff around Petru’s old place if I can find it. Meanwhile, if he reappears, call me.” She handed him her number. “Don’t you have a cell phone?”
“Against my principles,” Lucien said.
Annoying, and it made him difficult to reach.
“If Petru gets in my way, I’ll take care of him.” Lucien shouldered his bag. “I’m really late for a job.”
“Look . . .”
“Leave a message with Anna at Strago.”
“I already did.”
“Just a word of advice.” He paused, his face in shadow. “A girl like you ought to stay away from types like that mec.”
Angered, she stepped back. Her heels sank into the slush.
“The mec with the knife? You think I invited it? He chased me,” she said. “And threatened me, after I found Zette, the bar owner, garroted. Another Corsican.”
The crash of a can and the screeching of a cat came from over a wall. She paused. “Your type’s the one I should watch out for.”
And then his hands encircled her waist and he was kissing her on both cheeks. Soft kisses. Warm and lingering. She took a deep breath, enveloped in his warmth and the wet tang of his leather jacket. There was the cold promise of snow in the air.
“Especially my type, detective,” he breathed in her ear.
She watched until the shadows swallowed him and the echo of his footsteps faded, still feeling his warmth on her face.
Thursday night
LAURE TRIED TO SCREAM. Only garbled sounds came from her mouth. The green walls looked different, they’d moved her.
“Nurse, the patient’s agitated. Monitor the EKG. Now!”
A white-coated doctor stood over her, his prominent nose and plastic-coated badge catching the light from the blinking machines. “Laure, take it easy. Don’t struggle. Do you feel this?”
A pinprick. Cold.
She shook her head. Thought she shook her head. Only her thumb and index finger moved. She concentrated.
“Blink, Laure,” he said. “Once for yes, two times for no. Can you do that?”
Laure blinked twice.
“What’s that? You’re trying to say you didn’t feel it?”
She blinked two times again. Felt her eyes bulging from her head. Couldn’t he see her fingers moving on the white sheet. Look, she wanted to scream, my fingers. The doctor leaned forward, his stethoscope swinging over her chest under the white sheets.
Do it. Touch it. Show him.
But her hand didn’t respond. Her eyes followed the path where her fingers would go; she could almost feel how smooth the steel disk would feel. How cold to her touch. But like a stalled engine, trying to kick over, coughing, choking, sputtering to a stop, the rest of her didn’t cooperate.
“Give her two milligrams of Valium,” the doctor said. “We’ve got to control the tremors or the tubes will pop out.”
Look at my eyes . . . my eyes! She blinked twice in rapid succession. No more drugs, no more slowing my mind and words. She had to communicate. To tell them.
Find Aimée.
“Doctor, she’s trying to tell you something,” said the nurse. “That dose will knock her out.”
“Just do it, nurse.”
Laure pinched his stethoscope so hard it popped off his neck.
Thursday Night
AIMÉE DIDN’T NEED LUCIEN Sarti’s kind of trouble. Why couldn’t she get the way his eyelashes curled out of her head?
At the bookstore on Place des Abbesses that had stayed open late for a poetry reading, she found an edition of that morning’s Corse-Matin, the Corsican daily newspaper.
At least the bookstore had a heater, so she could get the chill out of her bones. On the third page she found two articles datelined Bastia. One reported a bomb threat to the central Bastia post office, discovered to be a hoax. A shorter article described vandalism of a fighter jet on the runway at a military installation, blaming workers from the nearby construction site. The construction company, Conari Ltd., declined to comment. Félix Conari’s firm.
Flights had been canceled, and the airspace over Corsica declared a no-fly zone. Overreaction? That was a precaution the military enforced when national security was at stake. Even at an outpost on the tip of Corsica, far from the French mainland? Yet Conari had flown back.
Her eyes fell on another stack of newspapers.
IN COLD BLOOD, MY HUSBAND’S PARTNER SHOT HIM! The headlines stared back at her from Le Parisien. Next to a photo of Jacques Gagnard in uniform, a sidebar said: “as told by Nathalie Gagnard.”
Sick to her stomach, her anger simmering, Aimée stuck her metal nail file into the antenna slot of her cell phone, wiggled it, and called 12 for information. She requested the number of Nathalie Gagnard and was connected.
“Allô, Nathalie?”
“Why ask me for ideas? You’ve already planned Jacques’s funeral,” said Nathalie, her voice slurred.
Drunk?
“Nathalie, you’re going to retract those lies in the newspaper article,” she said, controlling her tone. “Taking vengeance on Laure won’t bring Jacques back.”
“What? You salauds. I have n-n-no money to pay . . . Jacques . . . gambled it all.”
Aimée caught her breath.
“Gambled?”
A sob answered her. “Debts. I can’t even pay to bury him.”
It began to fall into place. Jacques gambled yet he had a new car. He was in debt. But something on that snow-covered roof was supposed to make him a rich man.
“Nathalie, it’s Aimée Leduc. I’m coming over.”
The line went dead.
On her map, she found the nearest station—Lamarck-Caulincourt, one of the deepest stations, carved out of the old gypsum mines.
Ten minutes later she emerged in the drizzling mist under the curving Art Nouveau arch of the Metro. An inviting yellow glow came from the bistro by the steps. Dark stairs like parentheses ran up both sides of the hill. Then another flight of stairs, a street, and more stairs. They looked like rows of sagging accordion keys. At the top, the frosted white dome of Sacré Coeur resembled a pastry made of spun snow.
Plastic bags tossed by the wind fluttered and caught on a metal grille. Like her progress in this investigation, she thought, every step impeded and whipped about by the wind, ending nowhere. Laure’s innocence was still in doubt. She’d have to make Nathalie admit Jacques’s gambling habit to the authorities. Aimée wouldn’t leave until she did.
Deep inside, Aimée felt that a larger conspiracy existed, and that Laure was enmeshed in it, like the fly in a spider’s web. If only Laure were to recover and could talk!
The green metal lamppost illuminated the little-trafficked side of Montmartre where the occasional café still sold charcoal. A chic pocket of intellos, bourgeoisie, and the occasional Socialist bookshop in which Trotskyite pamphlets still filled the shelves. This was where the Surrealists had invented the “kisso-graphe.” To most, it meant a flight of stairs instead of a street; a climb of several flights, hauling groceries after a long day, rewarded by a breathtaking view.