Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

Saturday, 6 A.M.

DAWN, LIKE A silver pencil, outlined Aimée’s mansard bedroom window frame. Light slanted over Melac’s crumpled jeans on the wood floor and glittered off the Manurhin revolver poking from his back pocket.

Aimée felt his warm breath in her ear. His tongue on her neck. His musk scent on her skin.

Delicious. The white feather duvet bunched around her shoulders as she ran her toe along his warm ankle. She grinned to see his eyes were half hooded with sleep.

Trilling came from the phone console on her escritoire. “Room service?” She nibbled his ear. “How thoughtful.”

He shook his head and flicked his tongue over her neck. “Remind me to dump that in the river.”

The phone clicked and went to the answering machine.

“Aimée?” René’s voice, as tense as a taut bowstring. “Meizi’s phone’s disconnected. I’ve been out looking for her all night.” Pause. “Call me.”

The red light blinked on her answering machine. Her throat caught. She imagined René driving in the ice, the cold. Alone. While here she lay, entwined with Melac in her warm bed.

She reached for Melac’s cell phone on the Louis Quinze bedstand. Melac’s hand shot out to stop her. “Let René handle this. It’s our weekend, remember?”

As a Brigade Criminelle inspector in the elite homicide squad, his hours varied according to his cases. He’d come over after his shift the previous night. Tired, she’d hesitated before giving him a brief account over a glass of wine. She figured le Proc would have referred the investigation to the Brigade Criminelle. When she’d asked him why he hadn’t been assigned the case, he shook his head. “Work’s over, we’ll talk later.” He’d pulled her sleeve and they’d ended up under the duvet.

“René’s upset, I’m calling him,” she said, sitting up in bed.

“You agreed with me, remember?” He traced his finger over her lips. “Our first weekend in a month.”

“But René’s important. And it’s still our weekend,” she said, rolling over.

Melac messaged her neck. “Leave it, Aimée.”

She hesitated, pulled in two directions. But leave René stranded? “He sounds frantic.” The cell phone ringing in her hand interrupted her. A number she didn’t know. She showed him the screen.

Melac bolted upright and took his phone from her hand.

“Zut! Some double standard going on here, Melac?”

“Oui?” he said into the phone.

His soon-to-be-ex, Nathalie? She stifled a groan. Or his eleven-year-old daughter, Sandrine? Melac, a devoted part-time father, spent every other weekend in Brittany. This could take forever.

Melac leaned forward, his warm arm slipping away. A chill settled on her skin where it had been. He cleared his throat. “A car in ten minutes?”

Aimée felt a sinking in her stomach. Unfair.

Springing into action, he rose from the bed, grabbed his jeans, and disappeared into her bathroom, all in one motion. She heard running water, his voice on the phone with the taxi company.

Running out. Just like her papa used to do whenever he was called.

He returned a moment later, dressed, looking for his shoes. “Let me guess, you’re going to the boulangerie.” She kept her voice even.

“Sorry.” He sat down on the bed, stroked her cheek with his damp, warm hand.

“No croissants?” Her glow gone, she fluffed the feather pillow.

“I’d like to crawl under the duvet and continue where we left off, but I’m reassigned. I meant to tell you.” His gray-blue eyes were full of his urgency to leave and worry about other things. Things she didn’t know about.

She pulled the sheets around her shoulders. “Don’t tell me. A new posting?”

“A promotion, a new six-month assignment,” he said. “One I can’t talk about.”

“Or you’d have to kill me?”

He smiled. “I signed a confidentiality agreement. Took an oath.” He stood. “Désolé. Don’t count on me this weekend.”

The call, his sudden departure … it all happened too fast. She put on her father’s old wool robe, tied the belt. Fear clutched her stomach.

“Were you going to tell me, or just wait until—?”

“Tonight, over dinner and that bottle of Veuve Clicquot in your fridge,” he interrupted. “It’s a step up for me. Think of the bright side.”

Hard to, with an empty weekend ahead.

“Trust me, Aimée.”

Trust a flic? Never, she wanted to scream. She’d lived this while growing up with her father, the long years he was a policeman, and even after he left the force to be a private investigator—all the nights he never came home, the stakeouts, the toll showing on his face. The terrible not knowing if he’d turn the key in the front door again. Then the bomb explosion in Place Vendôme. His charred body parts …

“Trust you?” The words caught in her throat. She’d gone against her code to never get involved with a flic. It never worked out. “Two minutes ago my partner called for help, but that didn’t matter. Now your job rang and you’re leaving. Phfft, like that. At least I know where I stand.”

“Zut! It’s an opportunity I can’t pass up, Aimée. Takes care of my alimony. We’ll carve out next weekend.”

She looked away.

“Didn’t we agree,” he said, cupping her chin in his hand, “at your suggestion—non, at your insistence—that our work took priority? No recriminations if work called. I respect that.” His eyes clouded. “Of all people, I thought you understood the demands of my job.”

His ex, Nathalie, hadn’t.

Part of her wanted to lock the door, barricade him in. Tell him she wouldn’t live like this. Break it off. The other part itched to help René.

“Nice to use my own words against me, Melac.” She reached for her cell phone.

Melac sat back down on the bed. “I’m not your father.” He took her face in his warm hands again. “I always come back. You won’t be able to get rid of me.”

Melac put on his down jacket in the hallway. She hesitated. But Melac knew everyone.

“Ever had dealings with Prévost?” she asked. “A flic in the troisième arrondissement?”

Melac’s grip tightened on his scarf, emblazoned with hearts—his daughter Sandrine had knitted it. “Middle-aged, thin lips, married to a Chinese woman?”

She nodded, shivering. She turned the sputtering radiator’s knob to high.

“Why?”

“He questioned us last night.”

Melac shrugged. “A fixture in that area. Speaks some dialect. A plodder. I worked with him once. There were rumors.”

She was instantly alert. “Rumors like what?”

“That he’s a frustrated Ming dynasty classical scholar, a disillusioned Orientalist.” Melac shrugged. “He liked the horses. And cards.”

That gave her food for thought. “Liked? Past tense?”

Melac shrugged again. “Disciplinary action years ago.”

“So you’re saying he’s bent, on the take?”

“I’m saying that’s old news. Ancient history.”

“Any idea who’s assigned to this case at la Crim?”

“Not me.” He buttoned his leather jacket.

“Smelled like the RG’s involved.”

“A task force?” He shook his head.

She’d have to ask Morbier, her godfather, a commissaire. But he was in Lyon, and hadn’t returned her calls.

The taxi’s horn sounded from below.

“Go.”

He gave her a long, searching kiss. A moment later the hall door slammed shut behind him.

At the window, she watched him leave, but he never looked up. A pang hit her. Like her father. Her mind went back to her last day of école primaire. The playground, the swings, landing on concrete. Her skull fracture.

So vivid in her mind, like yesterday.

Her father’s worried face drifting in and out. Overhearing the doctor—“The operation’s touch and go.”

Beside her father at the hospital bed was white-faced Morbier, a man who didn’t pray, with a priest. The smell of incense, the cold holy water, administering the last sacrament. The huddling nurse. “The operating room’s ready, mon curé.”

Then the sun-filled room, her stuffed bear on the pillow, the tubes in her arm.

She remembered her father’s smile: “Ma princesse, you’ll need to quit the acrobatics for a while.” The nurse saying, “She needs to take lessons and learn to fall correctly.”

Aimée shook her head. She’d made it.

She said a silent prayer Melac would too.

RENÉ’S HORN TOOTED from the quai below her kitchen window. She opened the window to the smell of wet foliage and flashed René five fingers. The sluggish gray-green Seine slapped white crests against the stone banks.

Miles Davis licked the last of the horsemeat from his new Sèvres bowl. In her bedroom Aimée pulled on a cashmere sweater over her black lace top, hitched up her stovepipe, stonewashed suede leggings, and stepped into her friend Martine’s high-heeled Prada ankle boots. At the door she grabbed her vintage Chanel jacket. Miles Davis wagged his tail expectantly and sniffed his leash. “On y va, furball. Madame Cachou will do the honors.”

Miles Davis scampered down the wide marble staircase, his leash trailing on the worn steps grooved in the middle, to the concierge’s loge in the courtyard. Madame Cachou’s early morning yoga on the télé had finished. Perfect timing.

In the loge, Madame Cachou ruffled Miles Davis’s ears. “My favorite little man.” The concierge, who was in her sixties, perspired in a purple yoga outfit. A matching sweatband encircled her gray hair. “I’ve lost five kilos, not even a twinge of bursitis.” Her eyes narrowed at Aimée’s pale face. “You should try it.”

That and a lot of things.

Aimée smiled and handed her the leash. “Merci, Madame.”

Plumes of exhaust came from René’s Citroën idling at the curb. Oyster-gray clouds hovered on the horizon. Another frigid day. She stepped over slush in the cobbled gutter, felt the urge for a cigarette, and visualized her concierge’s glowing face. She could go without a cigarette. Five more hours and she’d be a month, cigarette-free.

“I forgot Melac had the weekend off,” René said, turning down the radio weather forecast. Another brewing storm. “Désolé.”

“Not anymore.”

She slammed the door shut. Relationships—she was just no good at them. Never picked the right man. She should know better. And a flic!

“The dojo’s open for early practice,” he said. They counted on finding Meizi’s real address in the dojo membership. “Thanks for coming, Aimée.” René swung the Citroën into sparse traffic on Pont de la Tournelle.

“You think I’d let you do this alone, partner?” She checked the backseat. “Where’s your martial arts bag?”

“Not important. Meizi’s in trouble. You were there, you saw—everything was fine until she got that phone call.”

Aimée noted the dark hollows under René’s eyes. “You look like hell, René.”

“Not enough beauty sleep.”

She felt for him.

Inside the dojo, the gong signaling a meditation session reverberated. The Thai monk in orange robes raised his folded hands in greeting. The young French nun, her shaved head covered by a wool cap, ran her fingers down the membership ledger. “I don’t see Meizi Wu listed.”

Odd. “Try W-O-O,” Aimée suggested.

René added, “She sometimes goes by Marie.”

The nun shook her head.

“But I met Meizi here at practice,” René said, exasperation in his voice.

“Check for yourself, René,” the nun said, pushing the list over. “But we don’t let people drop in on practice; they need to join.”

Sandalwood incense wafted from the meditation room.

He pushed the list back to the nun. “But you’ve seen her. Black ponytail, jeans, petite, a bit taller than me.”

“Chinese?”

René nodded.

“But those girls clean the bathrooms.”

Startled, René stepped back. “What do you mean?”

“Cash, you know.” The nun rubbed her fingers together.

So they paid girls under the table. No tax. No trace.

“But I met her in a martial arts class,” he said.

“One of the perks is taking a class for free,” said the nun.

A stunned look appeared on René’s face, so Aimée broke in. “Don’t you have an address? Or a number to reach her at?”

The nun blinked in alarm. “It’s not how it looks. We operate on donations, and it helps the girls out. I don’t want anyone to get in trouble.”

“A bit late for that,” Aimée said. “She’s disappeared.”

René spread his hands, pleading. “We’re trying to help her. Please.”

The nun looked around the deserted teak-wood foyer. She pulled out a paper from the drawer. “Ching Wao. We call him and he sends girls to work.”

“They’re illegals?” Aimée asked.

“I don’t ask.” The nun paused. “But I hope this girl, Meizi, is all right.”

RENÉ SPOKE INTO his cell phone outside the dojo as freezing wind off the Seine whipped the quai. He paced back and forth, trying to get reception as the Métro clattered on the overhead tracks from Austerlitz.

Meizi had lied about living above the shop, and about cleaning bathrooms at the dojo. What else was she hiding?

Aimée couldn’t bear to see René heartbroken. If she could find Meizi, talk to her, and … what? Get her to admit she had another man?

Aimée opened the glove compartment and felt around. Under René’s car registration she found his licensed Glock pistol.

With a full clip.

Not only was he a crack shot, René had a black belt in judo. She’d always said he should register his fists as lethal weapons.

René climbed into the car, brushing a soggy brown leaf from the shoulder of his wool overcoat.

“Since when do you carry this loaded?”

“The last time I was shot made me cautious.” A grim smile. “You never know what you’re up against.”

True. Yet it didn’t ease her worry that René might go vigilante. She put the Glock on top of his car registration and shut the glove compartment.

“Ching Wao understood when I said Meizi’s name.” He readjusted the height of his adjustable seat. “The rest was in Chinese. But we’ll go to his address on rue de Saintonge.”

He gunned the Citroën up the ramp and over Pont d’Austerlitz.

“René, you’ve known Meizi less than two months.”

His jaw set in a hard line. She’d never seen him so upset. “You’re thinking she’s illegal. I don’t care. But I know she’s terrified, Aimée. And there’s nothing more to say until I get the truth from Ching Wao.”

They drove into the honeycomb of narrow streets edging the Marais. Years ago her grandfather had told her the street names reflected the professions of the ancient quartier: rue des Cordelières, road of the rope-makers; rue des Arquebusiers, musket-makers; Passage de l’Horloge à Automates, watchmakers and windup machines. He never tired of reminding her that rue du Pont aux Choux—Bridge of Cabbages—was named after a medieval bridge spanning the open sewers. Or how he’d investigated a case on rue des Vertus—road of the virtuous—where hookers plied their trade.

Traffic crawled, almost at a standstill.

The image of the man’s body in the light of the red lantern came back to her. Her stomach clenched. His gnawed flesh, those vacant eyes.

René parked near Cathédrale Saint-Croix des Arméniens, the small Armenian church. No. 21, their destination, sported chipped dark-green doors and a Digicode. Aimée tried to stifle her rising suspicions that Meizi was part of an illegal ring that preyed on Frenchmen. But that was ridiculous; she cleaned toilets.

“Doubt your dental floss will work here, Aimée.”

Wrong type of door. Damn, why didn’t she carry that casting putty anymore? The universal postman’s key, which she still hadn’t given back to Morbier, wouldn’t work either.

“We’ll have to wait until someone comes out,” René said.

“I don’t like waiting.” Aimée took her LeClerc face powder and makeup brush out of her bag and brushed the keypad with powder. She compared the congealed fingerprint oil to locations on the keypad.

René blinked. “Giving the Digicode a makeover?”

“Utility chic, René,” she said. “How many combinations can you get out of the numbers 459 and letter A?”

“Two hundred fifty-six,” he said, a nanosecond later.

Amazing. She’d need a calculator.

He reached up on his toes peering closer. “Given the alphanumeric proximity and location …” His voice trailed off. “Let’s try this.” He hit four keys.

The small door in the massive one clicked open. “Impressive, René. You got it on the first try.”

He stepped over the wooden doorframe and into the damp courtyard of what looked like an old metal foundry. Inside was a glass-roofed atelier, and ironwork everywhere. Beside the dilapidated townhouse on the left stood a Regency-era theater, complete with pillars and arabesque stonework. Amazing what lay behind the walls, she thought.

“Ching Wao? Never knew the name. Never spoke with them,” said the white-haired man who met them inside the atelier. “Chinese moved out. Gone.” He set down an iron rod, picked up his cup of steaming coffee. Thought for a moment. “Yesterday. Or maybe today.”

Aimée scanned the weedy courtyard. “Where’s his office?”

“I wouldn’t call it an office,” he said.

“So what did he do there?”

“Like I know?” he said. “Back on the right by the rear entrance.”

A narrow dripping stone-walled passage led to a door labeled Wao SARL Ltd. Through dirt-encrusted windows she saw an empty desk, chairs. She tried the door. Locked. But the window yielded to a push. A few shoves and she’d opened it enough to reach in and grasp the door handle.

“Try his number, René. I wouldn’t want to break in while he’s on the toilet.”

René shook his head. “Number’s disconnected.”

A grim look settled on his face. “Let me do the honors.”

She noticed the bulge in his overcoat pocket. The Glock.

René kicked the door open.

In the high glass-ceilinged room, half-drunk cups of tea sat on the metal desk. Chinese newspapers, a pink plastic hair-band, and a black telephone lay on top. The tea was warm.

“We just missed him,” René said.

The only decoration was a world map tacked on the wall. Aimée studied it, and saw circles drawn around cities: Canton, Bangkok, Trieste, Bucharest, Zurich.

Some kind of trade route? Or smuggling stations?

She opened the desk drawers. Nothing.

Aimée didn’t know what to think, but it didn’t look good.

Back at the car, René shook his head. “There’s something wrong.”

More than wrong.

“We’re going to the luggage shop.”

Unease filled her. With René carrying a loaded Glock, things could go very wrong. She thought quickly. “Give me your phone, I’ll call the shop and we’ll clear this up.” She hit the number. She pressed END after ten rings.

“No answer,” she said. “Bien sûr, the Wus are at the commissariat giving a statement.” She sighed. “That could take hours.”

“So we’ll go, find them, and tell Prévost—”

“Forget it,” she interrupted. “Right now, they’re with interpreters in a back room. Besides, he’ll call us in later. Better we hear from them first.”

René punched the steering wheel.

“You don’t know that, Aimée. I have to talk to Meizi.”

She needed to buy herself time, get to Meizi first. “More important, we need to know what this Ching Wao’s up to, René,” she said. “He rented a space, has a business, employees. Someone has to know about him. There are records. Go look them up.”

“That’s your game plan?”

“The flics and Prévost will keep their mouths shut, but we have a stake in this,” she said, wrapping her scarf. “Get on the computer, sniff around. It’s the best way to find out.”

But René gunned the engine, turned into the narrow street. “I know she’s there. They open early for deliveries. Meizi works in back.”

Trucks clogged the street. The luggage shop shutters were rolled down.

“I told you, René.” She bit her lip. Had the Wus done a runner like Ching Wao? She had to find out.

René peered at the shop front. “Merde!”

“I’ll sit on this and let you know when she arrives. No reason to wait in the cold street or in the car,” she said. “See what you can find out on Ching Wao.”

Keep him busy.

“My former hacker student works in records at the mairie,” he said. She saw the wheels spinning in his mind.

“Brilliant.” Impatient, she stared at the traffic on rue de Bretagne. “I’ll get out, grab a coffee and wait. I’ll call you the minute they show up.”

She jumped out before he could protest. The snow had melted to gray slush on the cobbles, spattering her boots.

Twenty minutes later, after a steaming espresso at a nearby café, she found the luggage shop’s shutters open. Men unloaded boxes from palettes in the back of a truck double-parked in front. She shivered, remembering the man’s body on the palette last night.

“Bonjour,” Aimée called out as she entered the luggage shop. But no bonjour in response. Were they in the back?

Aimée fought her way down a narrow aisle stacked with roller bags of every size and color. Knockoff faux-leather handbags hung like streamers from the walls above piles of boxes. The smell of incense from a red-lacquered wall shrine competed with the synthetic plastic aromas of the merchandise.

“Allô?”

The only answer was the grunting from the martial arts movie playing on the small télé behind the counter.

Scraping noises came from an open side door. She peered into the dank hallway running alongside the shop toward the open courtyard. A young woman, wearing a white cap over her black hair, was stacking cartons of sweatshirts against the wall, her back to Aimée.

Meizi.

“Meizi, René’s so worried.”

A carton toppled.

“Aiiya!” The young woman looked up, her cheeks flushed. A round face, uneven teeth, thick black eyebrows. Not Meizi at all.

Aimée hit the light switch, a yellowed enamel knob protruding from the wall. “Excusez-moi, where’s Meizi?”

Fear filled the young woman’s face. She backed away.

Determined, Aimée stepped over the uneven stone pavers. Something crunched under her boots. Spilled pumpkins seeds. “Can we talk a moment?”

“No speak Français,” the woman called out, and pointed back in the shop.

Aimée had to talk to her somehow. “Let me help you,” she said.

She lifted up the carton of sweatshirts. Heavy, like a sack of potatoes. She wondered how a small woman could lift all this. And at the diversity of the enterprise.

“Non, merci.” The girl bit her lip.

She wanted Aimée gone. Now.

Rapid-fire Chinese came from the shop. Footsteps. The Wus had returned. Aimée stepped back inside, to more overpowering synthetic smells. Her nose tickled. Two grunting men in parkas carried stacks of cardboard cartons in from the truck parked out front. Order upon order was arriving.

A middle-aged man, the fluorescent light shining on his bald spot, looked up from behind the counter. He switched off the télé. “Oui?” From his arm hung several fuchsia faux-leather handbags.

“Bonjour, would you tell Monsieur Wu I’m here?”

“We only sell wholesale,” he said.

Odd. “Is Monsieur Wu in back?”

The man straightened up. “Oui, how can I help you?”

But he wasn’t Meizi’s father, whom she’d eaten dinner with last night. Impatient, she made an effort to keep smiling. “Non, I mean the man who owns the shop with his wife,” she said. “His daughter Meizi works here.”

The man shrugged. “My wife’s in China.”

Her skin prickled. This didn’t make sense. “Wait a minute.” She struggled toward the back counter. “You’re Meizi’s uncle, non? I’m looking for her father, the older Monsieur Wu I met last night.”

“Last night, we closed six o’clock. See nothing.” He smiled. “I tell flics this morning, too.”

Had she entered some alternate universe?

“What the hell’s going on?”

“No problem,” he said. “I show you my business license.”

“Where’s the couple who owns this shop?”

“You see my sales permit, export lading and bills of sale,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken.

Was he worried about the tax unit, infamous for swoop investigations?

“Monsieur, I asked you a question.”

But he turned—not easy in the aisle crowded with stacked and open boxes—and pointed to the framed business license by the cash register. He pushed a worn binder at her and opened it. “All in order.” He smiled. “You check. I work here. I Monsieur Wu.”

“Then I’m Madame Chirac.”

“You look here.” He jabbed his ink-stained finger at the sales permit printed with the name Feng Wu.

Why did he pretend not to understand? He played a game and she didn’t know the rules.

“I busy. Unpack shipment.” His French deteriorated the more he spoke. His face remained a smiling mask. “Wholesale clients only.”

She scanned the dates on the license. The sales permit was dated 1995. “Did you work here in 1995?”

He nodded, and glanced at the cell phone vibrating among the papers strewn over the counter. He ran his finger over a payment log.

“I open business in 1995. Work here every day.”

A blast of cold air rattled the cardboard. Voices signaled arriving clients.

“The man murdered last night behind the shop knew Meizi Wu. He had her picture.”

This Monsieur Wu looked down. “I don’t know. I never see him.” He folded his hands over his chest. Defensive.

Aimée stared at the business license. The forms in the binder. Everything matched.

But he’d given her an idea. She’d play his game, whatever it was.

“Mon Dieu, I can’t find anything in here,” she said, rummaging in her shoulder bag, pulling out mascara, her checkbook, keys. “Mind holding this just a moment?” She thrust her rouge-noir nail polish bottle in his hands. “Désolée. Glass, you know, wouldn’t want it to break.”

The surprised Monsieur Wu held it, his thin black eyebrows raised.

She smiled, gave a little sigh. “Et voilà,” she said, pulling a card from the collection in her bag. Imprinted with a Ministry logo. Generic. She had one for each ministry.

“You from tax office, no fool me. I cooperate.”

She smiled. “Not quite, but that’s good you’re cooperating, Monsieur.” Her smile widened and she plucked the nail polish bottle from his hand, slipping it into a plastic bag in her purse.

“Merci.” She handed him the card. “We at the office d’habitation et domicile take details seriously,” she said. “Your residence isn’t listed on the permit. That’s because you live upstairs, illegally. We checked that room last night and found illegals, sleeping men. Lots of them. We think you’re subletting.” She shook her head. “Illegal according to the statute AB34, unless your business permit includes a residence permit.”

He blinked. For a moment she thought she had him.

“So my team will need to investigate the premises. Write up our report. Say this afternoon?”

She’d stirred the pot. If he’d hurt the Wus, or was in cahoots with them, this would flush them out.

He reached in the drawer and produced a ledger, which he set on the counter. He opened it and ran his finger down a column. “I live Ivry. Suburb. See rent in this column. My shop pay from my earnings. All here. All correct.”

She’d rather see the other set of books she figured he kept. He was prepared. He’d expected a visit.

“Zut! You leave me no option. We’ll run your fingerprints in our database, and check them against the prints on file for identification.” She smiled and held up the plastic bag with the nail polish bottle from her purse. “Glass shows prints so well. Unless you’d like to tell me where you’ve hidden the Wus?”

He glanced at his cell phone. Then at her. Deciding. “Come back later.”

“Why? So you can check with Ching Wao?”

A horn tooted on the street. “Big shipment.” And before she could press him, he’d hurried after the delivery man out the door to the waiting truck. But instead of unloading, he jumped in the passenger seat and the truck roared away.

Great. René would have done better getting answers with his Glock. All she’d done was shake the tree, and now the birds had flown.

But frustration wouldn’t get her answers. Aimée ducked behind the counter and explored the back of the shop. Boxes, cartons, a cracked, stained porcelain sink. Dark, empty cupboards. Wet mops leaning against the cobwebbed, padlocked back door. No one had used this door in a long time. Barred windows filmed with dirt looked onto the narrow walkway. The place reeked of damp and mildew. No one hid here, or would want to. She followed the cartons into the side hallway. The young woman looked up from the carton she was taping.

“Why are you afraid?” Aimée asked. “Did they tell you to keep quiet?”

The young woman dropped the tape dispenser. Perspiration beaded her lip. “Why you bother me? Why you make problem?”

“Problem? I think you’ll have a problem when the flics ask to see your ID, your residence permit. Or don’t you have one?”

“You no understand.” The girl’s lip trembled.

“Understand what?” Aimée said. “Look, if Meizi’s in trouble, I can help her. So can my partner.”

She could tell the girl understood more than she let on. Aimée’s scarf fell from her arm. “It’s hard feeling alone and afraid. I want to talk with Meizi. Won’t you help me, tell me where she’s gone? S’il vous plaît?”

The girl stepped closer, picked up Aimée’s scarf. Met her gaze and pressed the scarf into her hand.

“No good to ask questions. People watch you. Understand?”

AIMÉE PAUSED AT the walkway behind the shop, still blocked off by orange-and-white striped crime-scene tape. She wondered what evidence besides the wallet the crime-scene techs found. Wondered if the evidence had degraded in the melting snow. Or with the rats. Could the flics identity Meizi from the picture? It would be almost impossible if Meizi were illegal.

LIKE FINDING A single snowflake in a gray snowpile in the gutter.

Dejected, she walked, glad to get away from the synthetic smells hovering in the street.

Fake. Like everything else here, in this conspiracy of silence.

The feeling she’d been beaten dogged her.

So far she’d learned the Wus didn’t live above the shop. Meizi cleaned toilets, Monsieur Wu was a different Monsieur Wu. And things stank.

But she had someone’s fingerprints on her rouge-noir nail polish bottle. Five minutes later, she’d reached Benoit, a fingerprint analyst in the crime-scene unit on 36 Quai des Orfèvres. He’d gone to school with her cousin, liked heavy metal. And with the promise of highly coveted concert tickets, agreed to meet her.

With two hours until their rendezvous, she needed to keep busy. Sniff around.

Where rue au Maire elbowed right, she noticed a small hotel, the one-star variety. A hôtel borné, her father had called them, a fleabag demi-pension with rooms rented by the hour, typically by working girls, or old men who couldn’t afford anything else rented by the month.

The hotel’s open door led to a booth, then winding stairs. The smell of turmeric and onion mingled with the sweetish odor of tobacco.

A North African man in a red-and-green striped djellaba smoked a hookah in the cubicle of a reception booth. “We’re full, complet,” he said. “Try later.”

Aimée wanted information, not a room. She saw hotel business cards on the chipped counter. Sophisticated for a one-star hotel. “Hôtel Moderne, proprieter Aram,” she read. “You’re Aram?”

He shook his head.

“Did you know the man who was murdered last night? Or his girlfriend Meizi, from the luggage shop?”

The man shook his head again. Gave a big, gold-toothed smile. “Better you ask Aram. Knows everybody. Here a long time. But he’s at le dentiste.” He pointed to his teeth.

Good chance, then, Aram knew the street talk. Or saw something. At least she figured he didn’t buy into the Chinese wall of silence.

“Mon dentiste. Très bon,” he was saying. “You need dentiste?”

“Non, merci.”

Did she have something stuck in her teeth? She ran her tongue over her teeth to check. But she’d speak with this Aram, the hotel proprietor, later.

In her heeled boots, she picked her way over the melted slush and puddles, avoiding the cobble cracks. She felt eyes on her back. Visiting the luggage store had set off her sensors. The awareness that she was being watched sent a frisson up her spine.

She noticed the quick looks from shop merchants. Everyone here had something to hide. How would she ever find Meizi when she couldn’t even find anyone willing to talk?

The address listed on the dead man’s library card was only a block away. She didn’t know if he lived alone or had a family, but she’d find out. She’d discover his connection to Meizi.

Diesel fumes lingered like a fog in the narrow canyon of street between the blackened stone facades. Aimée walked along the medieval gutter, a worn groove puddled with melted slush, down a passage to the next street. Here, roll-down aluminum shuttered the shop fronts. The old, faded sign of a printing press appeared above a wall plaque commemorating a member of the French Resistance, Henri Chevessier, shot by the Germans in 1943. A lone pigeon pecked at soggy bread crumbs near a drain. A forgotten islet of quiet.

Rusted metal filagree covered the dusty glass in the water-stained door. Aimée located No. 14 and read the nameplate. Samour/Samoukashian lived on the third floor. A married couple? Dread filled her as she thought of a grieving widow.

She kept her leather gloves on as she climbed the steep, unheated steps. Chipped plaster, scuffed baseboards, and sagging landings in between floors in the old tenement testified to the passing of centuries. Her breath frosted in the air. She needed to swim more laps in the pool and forego macaroons, she realized, breathless.

The third-floor door stood ajar. Alarm bells sounded in her head. She wished she had her Beretta, but it was home in her spoon drawer. Then smells of frying garlic reached her. Her stomach growled.

“Allô?”

“Entrez,” a woman’s quavering voice answered. Polished honey-wood floors gleamed under the high, dark-beamed ceiling. Oil portraits and landscapes hung on the whitewashed walls over fragrant pots of paperwhite narcissus. Not what she’d expected. The man had an exquisite apartment. Like a page out of Elle Déco in the “Makeover—what you can do to a historic flat” section.

“MADAME, excusez-moi.”

“It’s Mademoiselle,” said the quavering voice. “Come to the kitchen.”

Aimée followed the paprika and garlic smells down the hall. Warmth emanated from the toasty floor. She wanted to take off her wet boots and go barefoot.

A tiny, trim woman, with hair as white as the blooming narcissus, chopped carrots and swept perfect orange circles into a bowl. Leeks and greens tumbled from a string shopping bag on the wooden table.

“My knees.” The woman looked up. Sharp brown eyes in an unlined face, a small scar running under her chin. She set down the knife and rubbed her hands on an apron with what looked like scientific equations printed on it. “At eighty, I only do the stairs twice a day now—not like before.”

Aimée blinked. She felt winded at one go.

“I’ve told you flics, I’m tired of questions,” the old woman said. “So if you don’t have answers, quit wasting my time.”

“I’m sorry, but you don’t understand, Mademoiselle Samour …”

“It’s Mademoiselle Samoukashian, can’t you people remember?”

Aimée handed the woman a card. “But I’m not a flic. I’m a private detective.”

Interest sparked in the woman’s brown eyes.

“Then sit down. Café turc?”

Turkish coffee? Aimée nodded. “Merci. Please accept my condolences.”

The woman turned her back on her.

“That doesn’t bring my great-nephew back.”

Nothing would. At a loss, Aimée hesitated. She needed to plow on and find out what she could.

The little woman slipped the chopped carrots into a longhandled brass pot of boiling water, then adjusted the blue flame. “Drumming up business? But you don’t look like an ambulance chaser. Why visit me?”

A sharp-eyed old bird who got to the point, this octogenarian. Aimée draped her leather coat on the thatched cane chair and sat, unbuttoning her vintage checked-wool Chanel jacket, a church bazaar find.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she offered again, the words sounding trite. She took a breath and continued. “But I presumed Pascal Samour lived here.”

“Then you saw my address on Pascal’s old student library card, like the flics did.” She nodded. “Bon, I figured you were smarter than you look.”

Aimée dropped her bag, but caught it in time before her mascara, encryption manual, and nail polish scattered across the warm floor.

“Pascal lives … lived near Square du Temple,” said Mademoiselle Samoukashian. “He taught at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.” The engineering school a few blocks away.

“I saw … found his body last night.”

“But how is it a detective just happens to find his body?”

Aimée couldn’t let the old bird intimidate her. She had to find out why Pascal had Meizi’s photo in his wallet.

“That’s why I’m here, Mademoiselle,” she said.

Mademoiselle Samoukashian handed Aimée a Limoges demitasse and saucer. Into it she poured frothing brown liquid, then crowned the coffee with a lip of foam. “Armenian style, with cardamom.”

“Merci.”

The old woman uncovered a plate of crescent rolls smelling of apricot. “Dziranamahig. We’re Armenian, Mademoiselle,” she said. “My grandparents sought refuge here from the Turkish genocide. And then we were only rounded up again here during the war, that time by French police. Since the last war, I don’t trust the flics. And I don’t trust them now. Neither did Pascal.”

The war? “But that was fifty years ago.”

“More. I’m hoping you’re better at math than that.” She shook her head. “Drink. Then I read your grinds. Then we see.”

See what, Aimée wondered.

“Please, first hear me out,” Aimée said, determined to leave out the horrific details. “Last night, my partner and I were eating dinner nearby in Chinatown when an old woman came into the resto shouting about a murder. We followed the crowd behind the luggage shop, and your … and we found Pascal. Everyone ran away, but I picked up his wallet to learn his identity. There was nothing in it but his library card.”

“That’s all you know?” Sadness pooled in Mademoiselle Samoukashian’s eyes.

“Meizi Wu’s picture was on the back of his card.” Aimée took a sip. “Can you tell me about their relationship? Anything you know about Meizi?”

“Ask her.”

“Meizi’s disappeared.”

She nodded, matter of fact. “Bien sur, she’s illegal, terrified.”

Like a steamroller, this little woman. “So you know Meizi?”

“Never heard of her. But that’s most everyone in this slice of the quartier. Alors, it never changes—immigrants, illegals. Roundups just like in ’42.”

“Roundups?” Was she really comparing Chinese sweatshop workers today to French Jews deported to extermination camps?

“I know the feeling. Hunted, hiding, moving all the time.”

Surprised, Aimée leaned forward. “You do?”

“I was part of the Resistance, you know,” the old woman said. “History forgot us: immigrants, political exiles, Communists. A ragtag bunch of Poles, Jews, Hungarians, Italians. Guerilla fighters. Our last names and politics didn’t fit in with de Gaulle’s myth of la grande Résistance Française. My cousin Manouchian, the Armenian poet, led thirty successful attacks against occupying Germans. But do schoolchildren learn this?” She shook her head. “His group was betrayed, branded as criminals by the Vichy collaborators—you’ve heard of the infamous Affiche Rouge poster? Those were the Communist Resistants. And they were all executed. No one talks about it.”

So the old woman related to Chinese illegals. Did she know Meizi? Was she trying to protect her, hide information?

“Meizi must feel so alone. Lost.”

“But there are always places to hide, to meld into the woodwork, like we did.” Mademoiselle Samoukashian shrugged, her eyes far away. “Pascal was a funny boy. Sweet but odd.”

From the sound of it, the woman would tell the story in her own way. Aimée needed to be patient. She took a sip of coffee, a thick mixture like silt with a cardamom aftertaste.

“His parents had him late in life,” Mademoiselle said, glancing back at the pot before continuing. “My nephew, his father, was held in a Siberian POW camp until the sixties. Never was the same, but don’t get me started. Pascal’s mother died from TB in a sanatorium.” She shrugged. “He came to live with me until he passed the exams for Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers.”

The prestigious grande école of technical engineering. “Quite an accomplishment,” Aimée said, wondering how this fit in.

“But Pascal still lives … lived nearby. Always fixed this, took care of that.” Mademoiselle waved her hand around.

Aimée took in the recessed halogen lighting, felt the warmth from the floor, surveyed the high-tech console of buttons labeled Heat 1, Hall, Boiler.

“Pascal did all this. You’ve noticed, eh?”

And lusted for a renovation like this for her own seventeenth-century flat. Right now Aimée would settle for consistent heat in their office.

“Beautiful and innovative,” Aimée said, noticing the high-tech chrome laptop, a model that their part-time hacker Saj kept mentioning. The woman was more tech-savvy than most people half her age. “I imagine, a small repayment for devoting yourself to his upbringing.”

She snorted. “Not so much. No one called me the nurturing type, but I provided. I managed stage sets at Théâtre de la Gaité Lyrique, the wardrobe. Pascal used to play back stage sometimes, but he grew up across the square in the Musée des Arts et Métiers. After school I’d find him there. The machines, gadgets stimulated his mind. Too much.”

Aimée turned this over. “By that you mean …?”

“He loved making ‘inventions.’ Obsessed.” The old woman rolled her eyes affectionately. “Following the beat of a different drummer, as they say. Never played in the park with the other boys. He told me, when he was still a boy, that one day he’d work at the Musée. Because the Musée still kept alive the spirit of science, art, and invention of the medieval guilds that built the cathedrals. Can you imagine a teenage boy saying that?”

Mademoiselle Samoukashian gave a little shrug, sipped her Turkish coffee.

“Yet as a youngster he wore the dunce hat in the corner of the classroom, a tête de Turc.”

Aimée nodded. “Me, too, for daydreaming.” She took another sip. But she wondered at the point of this fable. What agenda lay behind this, other than reminiscing about her murdered great-nephew? Maybe this woman just needed to vent. “But what an accomplishment, that Pascal entered a grande école,” she said.

“Mais oui, but only after two years of competitive prep to pass the mathématique supérieur,” Mademoiselle Samoukashian said, a hint of pride in her voice. “Another exam with a technology component for Arts et Métiers. Of the two thousand who pass the test, they accept six hundred.”

“Sounds grueling.” She was painting a picture of Pascal, Aimée realized.

“It was only the beginning!” she scoffed. “Then, a grande école. Before his first year, their assignments included figuring out how to write verses of Gothic script on matchsticks with a Rotring pen nib. He needed a magnifying glass to even see what he was writing, never mind figure out how to write it.” She shook her head. “The bizutage, the ritual hazing, got worse in his first year. A strange group, if you ask me. Medieval.”

Aimée needed to steer this back to Meizi. “Mademoiselle, the investigating flics suspect Chinese in your nephew’s murder.”

“You’re the detective,” she said without skipping a beat. “You found his body. What do you think?”

Aimée had thought a lot of things, all related to Meizi. Hoped to God she wasn’t involved in his murder. Thoughts, like air, came cheap. “That’s not my job. I’m looking for Meizi.”

“Pascal never drank, hated gambling. He was so shy and awkward around women,” said Mademoiselle Samoukashian. “No Chinese would kill him. No one here, young or old, trusts the flics. Alors, he spent all his free time volunteering at the Musée.”

Whatever his involvement with Meizi, he had kept it from his great-aunt. Aimée had a thought. “Mademoiselle, with Pascal’s grande école credentials, I wouldn’t have thought he’d teach at an engineering trade school. Couldn’t he have had any job he wanted?”

Mademoiselle Samoukashian bristled, her eyes sparkling with anger. “Aimed higher, you mean. Command a top salary. Serve and sup with the elite.”

Aimée wanted to kick herself. Tactless again. “Desolée, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“Of course you did.” She shrugged. “You’re not the first. Blame my Bolshie upbringing, but Pascal did me proud. He wanted everyone to benefit, not just a sliver of the top crust.”

Mademoiselle Samoukashian took Aimée’s demitasse, studied the dregs coating the sides. Nodded.

“I see a road. A long road. A wall, rounded like a tower. You are going to see a person. A place.”

Foreseeing such a vague future in coffee grinds, Aimée thought, was less than helpful.

“Weren’t you the one in the paper?” Mademoiselle Samoukashian said suddenly. “A kidnapping, murder case before Christmas?”

Aimée cringed at the memory—her godfather, Morbier, had been a suspect in his girlfriend’s murder; then there were the high-profile repercussions of recovering a Spanish princess who had been kidnapped by Basque terrorists. Aimée had hated the reporters besieging the office, the new flood of calls for help from distraught families of murder victims. She had promised herself all that was over. She’d never do criminal work again. And she’d kept that promise for all of a month.

“My firm does computer security,” she said.

“But you’re also a licensed private detective,” Mademoiselle said, looking at Aimée’s card. “According to this.”

Aimée could learn nothing else here. She stood, slid her arms in her coat sleeves, and took a step toward the old woman. “Wonderful café, Mademoiselle.”

“But this woman, this Meizi, you said there’s a connection to Pascal?”

Aimée nodded, hoping this had jogged her memory. “Maybe you remember something Pascal said?”

Mademoiselle Samoukashian clamped Aimée’s hand in an iron grip. “But you’re looking for her. You think she saw who murdered my Pascal.”

“I don’t know,” Aimée said.

“God shouldn’t let a child die before his parents,” Mademoiselle Samoukashian said, her voice small. “But I don’t qualify; I just raised him.”

Aimée leaned down and hugged her where she sat in her thatched chair, felt the thin shoulders, the heaving chest of this tough little old woman. Like her own grandfather, who’d stepped in to help raise her when her mother left. He’d pitched in when Aimée’s father was on a stakeout, taken her to piano lessons, the auction gallery, supervised her homework.

When Aimée looked up, she saw tears pooled in those dark brown eyes. A look of despair.

“I don’t trust the flics,” Mademoiselle Samoukashian said. “Won’t you help me?”

“I’d like to, but …”

“How much?” She reached under the piled napkins, pulled out a rubber-banded wad of francs. “Never mind, take it,” she said, and thrust it into Aimée’s hand.

“Mademoiselle, I can’t take your money.”

“My rainy-day money? What good’s it to me now? You’re already on the case.” She squeezed Aimée’s hand. “Find who murdered him.”

Aimée looked away, torn. How could she investigate the murder for this old woman when her best friend’s girlfriend might be the culprit? A bad feeling seeped in her bones. She was fraught with worry that she’d find Meizi involved.

“I can’t guarantee you satisfaction. Or that we’ll find his murderer. These cases … you don’t want to know.”

“Pascal was murdered behind a building, and I don’t want to know?” The old woman leaned toward her, her eyes sharp. “I want justice.”

“I’m truly sorry, but …” She paused. Pascal could have had a double life. Better to save his great-aunt from knowing. “Unless there’s something pointing to—”

“But he was afraid.”

Aimée blinked. “Afraid? You must tell the flics.”

“You think I didn’t? Did they want to listen to an old woman, clouded by grief, ranting about his project?”

“What project?”

“I don’t know, but he kept a safety deposit box. In the Crédit Mutuel on rue Réaumur.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A month ago, he told me if anything happened to him—his words—to open the safety deposit box.” Mademoiselle Samoukashian rose. “Of course, this Meizi’s hiding and scared. You find her, discover what she knows. I’ve got an appointment with the bank manager to open the safety deposit box today. Then I’ll show you.”

Aimée’s heart tugged. She felt for this old woman.

“Don’t do this for me, please. Do it for my Pascal.”

Aimée’s mind went back to the plastic-wrapped body dotted with snowflakes. That mouth opened in a silent scream. Those eyes frozen in terror.

She nodded. “No promises, Mademoiselle, but …” She hesitated. “Call me and we’ll meet.”

In the hallway, Aimée paused, loath to leave this grieving woman, her warm and inviting apartment.

Mademoiselle Samoukashian took her black purse from the coat rack by the door. She opened her wallet, a Fendi knockoff, and rifled through photos. “Here’s Pascal in the school play. Oh, here’s a science project based on a Knights Templar gadget. This one was taken at graduation.”

Saddened, Aimée glanced at the thumbed and faded schoolboy photos, the progression as Pascal grew up.

“The Arts et Métiers campus at Cluny,” Mademoiselle Samoukashian said, flashing a photo of a group of young men on the ramparts of a castle. “Horrible place, in a medieval abbey. He hated it there,” she said. “Let me give you one. So much better to remember him by than …” Her voice trailed off and she handed Aimée a photo of Pascal, wearing glasses, standing in what appeared to be his office. The Pascal Aimée preferred to visualize: big eyes, wild red hair, smiling.

“Oui, merci.”

A green carry-all bag hung under a jacket from the coat rack. Faux reptile, just like one she’d seen in the luggage shop. Her heart skipped. Here was a connection to Meizi.

“Pascal’s bag?” Aimée asked.

Mademoiselle Samoukashian gave a tired shake of her head. “Force of habit.” Her gaze looked faraway.

What did that mean? But if this belonged to Pascal, she wanted to examine it.

“May I look?” she said, not waiting for a reply.

Aimée’s hand came back with a carnet of Métro tickets, a Eurostar ticket to London, a wad of francs. This put a new spin on Pascal’s murder, only she didn’t know how.

“Pascal planned a trip?” Maybe escape with Meizi?

Mademoiselle Samoukashian shrugged. “That’s my middle-of-the-night bag,” she said. “Pascal bought it for me. The ticket’s got my name on it, if you notice. Also shoes, a change of clothes. We always kept a bag ready. You never knew when they would come. If we’d be warned in time.”

Aimée stared at this little woman. “You prepared for roundups? But the Occupation’s over, Mademoiselle.”

“Not for some of us.”

Aimée’s heart churned. And it made sense.

Aimée kissed the woman’s paper-thin cheeks, a smell of Papier d’Arménie clinging to her. “No wonder Pascal loved you so much.”