Murder in Clichy

Tuesday

IN THE STOREFRONT CAO Dai temple under the red lanterns, her foot asleep, pins and needles up and down her legs, Aimée Leduc struggled to keep her spine straight, thumb and pinky together, in the half-lotus position. Her partner René, a dwarf, sat with a look of total concentration, in perfect Lotus posture, in the men’s section. But Aimée’s brain flashed with lines of computer code and throbbed with an ache for an espresso. No blank slate of tranquility for her with sirens hee-hawing on the quai and the Seine fog curling over the skylight. As the blue-robed priest struck the gong, the sigh of relief she exhaled mingled with the mindful breaths and musk of incense surrounding her.

“Three weeks, René,” she muttered, “and I still can’t meditate!”

She’d tried and failed breathing exercises, a new practice she’d begun with René Friant, her business partner, after her optic nerve had been damaged the previous month during an assault. It had seemed like a good time to begin to live healthily.

The ten or eleven women in yoga pants, from the nearby Université de Paris, grabbed their books and headed for the door. Ripe fruit scents from the tiered altar offerings clung to the velvet curtains that kept out the cold. The swish of a broom wielded by Quoc, the temple custodian, an older Vietnamese man, filled the foyer.

“Mindfulness,” René said, rolling up his meditation mat, “think of it like that. Try to concentrate. Don’t give up, Aimée.”

René was right, of course. But the calmness and tranquility she sought remained as elusive as a wisp of smoke, even though her bouts of blurry vision had receded. She had her sight now, most of the time.

From the rear came Linh, a slender Vietnamese nun, in a Mandarin collared white ao dai tunic with matching trousers, smiling, her palms together in greeting. Middle-aged, her black hair in a bun, crows feet lines fanned from her eyes as she smiled.

“Forgive me, we’ve worked on this before,” Linh said, an undertone of sibilance just perceptible in her accented French. “Next time, Aimée, be open to the divining board; that’s a form of meditation.”

Like a large wooden ouija board, the divining board stood near the all-seeing divine eye, the Cao Dai’s symbol, a huge globelike eyeball suspended over the altar. Mediums used it to communicate with the spirit world in séances and in prayers to a pantheon of divine beings, including the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Jesus Christ. Crystal candelabras, brass drum bowls, yin and yang symbols, and peacock feathers adorned side altars.

“Merci, Linh,” she said, grateful for help from the nun she’d met only last week.

Pictures of Victor Hugo and Sun Yat-sen lined the walls. They were venerated as saints in this esoteric sect, whose philosophy was a potpourri of Hinduism, Christianity, Taoism, Islam, and Buddhism. A sign reading VAN GIAO NHAT LY, meaning “All religions have the same reason,” faced her. Aimée inhaled the peacefulness of the small, makeshift temple, wishing that tranquility would stay with her.

She paused with René at the table littered with leaflets describing meditation courses and a solicitation for signatures to a petition.

“We’re hoping to build a real temple,” Linh said, watching Aimée. “Our lands were confiscated in Vietnam. Members of our sect were executed.”

“We’d like to help, of course,” Aimée said, after signing. “I’ll pass around your petition.”

“But there’s something more important,” Linh said. Her face crinkled in worry; there was a slight tremor in her eyelids. “Your application says you have a detective agency. Can you contact someone for us?”

“On a good day we contact encryptions, viruses, and hackers invading computer systems,” René said, grinning.

Linh pulled a creased paper from her sleeve. “What about this man?”

Aimée saw the scribbled name Thadée Baret; no address, just the 17th arrondissement, and a phone number.

“He’s sympathetic . . . he helps our cause. Can you give him something from me?”

“As I said, we want to help,” Aimée said. “But Linh, you don’t need us to telephone him or to meet him . . .”

“Politics,” Linh interrupted, shaking her head. “My father was a judge years ago in Saigon. The regime denounced him and blacklisted our family, which still remains under surveillance. My younger brother’s in prison for ‘political dissent.’ His children have been denied visits to him. Even here, in Paris, they watch me.”

Watch her?

“Please understand,” Aimée said, wariness intruding. “I want to help, but what our firm does is computer security.”

“How much?”

“Non, Linh, it’s not a question of money, it’s simply not my field,” Aimée said, feeling awkward. Linh had helped her, a novice, in her struggle with meditation, and now. . . .

“But I read about you . . . how you found a killer in the Bastille while you were blind.”

Embarrassed, Aimée wished the newspaper articles had never appeared.

“It’s complicated . . .” Linh continued, eyelids once more fluttering nervously.

“In what way?” Aimée said. The meditation room was becoming chilly.

Linh pulled an envelope from her robe and said, “In my country we suffer anonymous denunciations by a network of informers, detentions without trial. Priests and nuns from our sect, or anyone with a political agenda that could threaten the government, live in fear. Please, just give him this from me.”

Aimée tried to catch René’s eye, but he’d bent down to tie his shoes.

“I’m new to Paris,” Linh continued, twisting the amber prayer beads on her wrist. “Mostly I fund-raise at Cao Dai meditation seminars. And I am petitioning the International Court of Justice and Amnesty International for my brother’s release.”

“Doesn’t that conflict with your vocation?”

“Not at all,” she said. “As the Dalai Lama says, ‘There are many paths all leading to the same place.’ My mission and our practice glide together.”

Aimée heard sincerity in Linh’s voice. But corporate security was the bread and butter of Leduc Detective. After last month’s incident when she’d been assaulted, she’d vowed to steer clear of anything else.

“Think of it as our donation, Linh,” René said. He gestured to the envelope. “May I take this? We will deliver it for you, gladly.”

Surprised, Aimée shot René a look.

“No problem,” René continued, “we’ll make the phone call . . .”

“And you will arrange to give this envelope to him? He will have something for me.” Linh put her palms together again, a gesture of greeting and farewell.

René returned her gesture. “We will try.”

“WHY GET us involved, René?” Aimée asked as soon as they were outside on the narrow street, lychee seeds crackling under their feet. She hitched her bag onto her leather-clad shoulder. “Trying to earn good karma?”

René pulled on a Burberry raincoat, tailored to his height. In the weak afternoon light a flurry of windswept brown leaves and Chinese candy wrappers swirled from the gutter. “What’s a half-hour to meet this man, Baret, to give him this envelope? Et alors, you’re going to the seventeenth to check on the Olf project anyway. And a little good karma wouldn’t hurt, would it?”

She nodded. Maybe he was right. All she ever did was over-tip taxi drivers, hoping to earn late rainy night taxi karma.

Apart from the oasis of the nearby Buddhist temple, in the midst of a mind-numbing sea of concrete tower block buildings, in this polyglot quartier of Vietnamese, Chinese, Laotians, and Cambodians, the thirteenth arrondissement had little charm. It was impersonal, its gray uniformity punctuated only by bright red Vietnamese pho noodle restos, Asian video shops, and hairdressers’ salons.

She paused at the bus stop by Armée du Salut, the ferroconcrete Salvation Army building, designed by Le Corbusier: a treasure trove of cheap, used armoires.

“See you back at the office, René,” she said, and caught the bus.

RAIN PATTERED on the windows as dusk descended over Avenue de Wagram. The chic quartier, off one of the streets radiating from the Arc de Triomphe, lay in the seventeenth arrondissement. Hopeful, Aimée wound the black wool scarf around her neck, signed in, and mounted the stairs spiraling up to Olf’s state-of-the-art corporate headquarters, located in a wood-paneled hôtel particulier. A mixture of steel and curved aqua glass-walled offices constituted the mansion’s top two floors.

But the project management staff dealing with her proposal had left for a trade show outside Paris. A wasted trip! She wrote a note and left it in the chef des opérations box.

Downstairs, the concierge’s post was vacant. Where was the security man she’d seen? Shadows from the pillars crisscrossed the black and white floor. As she wrote her initials by her name on the sign-out log, the timed lights shut off.

In the darkness, she felt her way, her boot heels echoing on the tile, her shoulders tight with apprehension. She sniffed. Only the smell of cold stone and floor wax.

Then a rustling and the click of a door closing.

Is someone there?” she called. “

Silence.

She felt a frisson of fear. And for a moment it was as if she were blind again, groping in darkness, her only guide sounds, odors, and the currents in the air. Panicked, holding her breath, she kept going and felt the cold, smooth marble of a pillar. Seeing the dim glow of the streetlight, she let out a sigh of relief.

With a quick step, she made her way through the door to the street. She looked back but saw no one following her. A few blocks away, she turned into rue de Lévis, glad of the bustling street market marking the tony quartier.

In the chill dusk, horns beeped. “Crevettes, un kilo!” shouted a fishmonger standing by the tubs of bright pink shrimp, frost framing his words in the evening air. Lighted stalls with every kind of cheese and produce filled the narrow pedestrian rue, an old Roman road once used by Jeanne d’Arc and her army. Shoppers jostled Aimée on the rain-slicked pavement.

She punched in Thadée Baret’s number on her cell phone which rang and rang. She was about to hang up when someone answered.

“Allô? ”

“Monsieur Thadée Baret?”

“Un moment. ”

She heard what sounded like the télé, the whoosh of an espresso machine in the background.

“Oui?” A man asked, “Who’s this?”

“Aimée Leduc here. I’m trying to reach Thadée Baret. The nun Linh gave me this number.

“About time,” said the man, urgently. “I’m Thadée. You have something for me?” His suspicion had vanished.

“An envelope, we should meet . . .”

“How long will it take you to get here?” he interrupted.

“Where’s here?”

“Near Place de Clichy.” He spoke fast. His breath came over the phone in gasps.

“Say ten minutes, by the Métro. But can’t we meet at my office?” Aimée asked.

“No. Come here. Stand in front of the boulangerie,” he said. “Across from Sainte Marie des Batignolles church.”

Odd. But she knew it was a crowded, busy place. It should be safe. Easy to melt away in the crowd if this man turned out to be even more strange than he sounded.

“How will I know . . . ?” she began.

“I’ll find you.”

Why all the mystery? she wanted to ask. But he’d hung up.

She knew Clichy, the less-chic part of the many-faced seventeenth, a district containing two worlds: Aristocrats with de la before their name, whose children attended the local école primaire and later ENA, school of the elite, before nabbing a government post. And immigrants with -ski, akela, or khabib at the end of their names, destined for the short BAC exam, a trade school, and a factory job. The seventeenth was an arrondisse- ment of elegant consulates and the best closet-size Turkish kebab shops this side of the Seine. Now, noticing the Mercedes parked between trucks on the street, Aimée became aware of a newer cross-section of moneyed bourgeoisie and hip médiathèques added to the traditional working-class population of Clichy.

Clichy? Only a few called it Clichy these days: the flics, kids, and old gangsters who’d gone to the Gaumont cinema palace and thought it was classy. It was the area Henry Miller had tramped through, fringing the Place de Clichy, with its Boulevard des Batignolles and its boules players and narrow streets. Nowadays, the kids who sold drugs called Clichy and its boulevard bleeding into Pigalle their place of business. From the chic Avenue de Wagram and Arc de Triomphe quartier to the double wide Boulevard Pereire, nicknamed the maréchaux, lined with foreign sex workers, the seventeenth now held something for everyone.

Aimée ascended the Place de Clichy Métro steps, slipping on her leather gloves against the chill November wind. Late afternoon commuters surged around her. Darkness descended before six this time of year. The Café Wepler, a Wehrmacht soldiers’ canteen during the German Occupation—(earlier immortalized in Vuillard’s painting)—glowed in the dusk. Its awning sheltered a stall displaying Brittany oysters on ice to passersby.

She rushed to a taxi stand, anxious to get her errand over with. But Place de Clichy traffic was at a standstill. Klaxons honked and the Number 95 bus shot diesel exhaust at the Maréchal Moncey monument, commemorating peasants who defended Paris at the end of a Napoleonic campaign. She gave up on a taxi, left the busy Place fronted by cinemas and brasseries, and hurried through the narrow Clichy streets.

She passed la Fourche, the fork, that divided the quartier into the “good” seventeenth and the “bad.” More than in any other part of Paris, the architect Haussman had stamped his signature here in the last century. The image the world thought of as Paris: broad tree-lined boulevards riven by the classic gray stone five-storied buildings with metal filigreed balconies and chimney pots like organ pipes on the rooftiles.

She reached Batignolles Park with its rolling lawns and black swans gliding across the small lake. The fretwork of plane trees, puddles, and clumps of wet leaves faced real estate offices and antique shops. A gunmetal sky threatened; she hoped Thadée Baret wouldn’t be late. Beyond lay the derelict train yards, part of the 19th century ceinture, the railway belt circling Paris. Their walls were bright with silver graffiti.

She entered a cobbled crescent that had a village feeling. Two-story buildings lined the street and old people congregated on the green slatted benches beneath the clock tower of the columned church: a pocket of “old” Paris.

Aimée saw a thirtyish man, wearing black pants, his thin white shirt whipping in the wind, scanning passersby from under an awning over the boulangerie. He had a pale face, wore thick black-framed glasses, and held a backpack by its strap. An arty or political type . . . Baret?

She waved and saw recognition in his eyes. And what looked like fear.

Around him on crowded rue Legendre mothers pushed strollers and old women walked their dogs by the acacia trees. Fresh-baked bread smells wafted from the boulangerie. As she approached, she saw how thin his arms were, and how he kept picking at something on his wrist and wiping his nose with his sleeve.

She waved again, wrapping her scarf tighter as she hurried toward him. Coatless, wasn’t he cold? An old woman huddled under an umbrella near the glass phone cabinet by the blackened stone buildings.

“Monsieur Baret?” she asked. “I’m Aimée Leduc. We talked on the phone.”

He reached out and grabbed her arm.

“Do you have it?”

She nodded and handed him the envelope Linh had entrusted to her. He put the strap of the backpack in her hand.

“For Linh. Sling it over your shoulder.”

She did.

“They’re following me,” he said in his breathless way.

“Who?” She looked around. She saw only busy shoppers. Slush from car tires rolling over the cobblestone street sprayed her boots.

“But you must know,” he gasped into her ear.

“Tiens, wait a minute,“ she said. “I don’t understand what’s going on here.”

He registered her surprise. His eyes darted around the crowd; he glanced across the street. “They’re here.” He clutched her coat, a wild look on his face. “But Nadège and Sophie depend on me . . . if I don’t. . . .”

“What do you mean?”

She saw his terror as a motorcycle gunned its engine, drowning his answer.

“Look, I’m just helping a nun . . .”

The words disappeared in the crack of rapid gunfire. Baret’s body jerked. Someone yanked at the backpack on her shoulder. But she grabbed the strap and held on to it. A motorcycle engine whined. The sound of a bullet’s ricochet echoed off the stone buildings. Then there was the screech of tires.

“Get down!” Aimée yelled.

Little balloons of stone dust grit burst on the pavement ahead of her. She ducked, pulling open the nearby phone cabinet door for shelter. As she pulled at Baret, he collapsed onto her, his shattered glasses red with blood mist. An exhalation, smaller than a sigh, escaped his lips.

Panic flooded her as she saw that red-black holes peppered the back of his white shirt.

He sprawled on top of her as she heard the roar of the motorcycle engine gunning away. Her arm stung. She saw blood and realized it came from her. Shouts and cries erupted around her.

Crows cawed, their nest above the boulangerie doorway disturbed.

The old woman ran, then tripped; her baguette launched onto the glistening cobbles in a slow motion arabesque. Aimée tried to pull Baret into the shelter of the phone cabinet but his hand caught on her pocket. Someone screamed. And screamed.

Aimée’s knees trembled as she felt for his pulse. None. Her fingertips traced ribbed scars and scabs, the needle tracks on his arm. Bluish purple, old marks. Blood trickled down his pale chin onto the rain-slicked cobbles.

“Mon Dieu . . . call the flics!” She couldn’t reach the pay phone. Where was her cell phone? In the silence someone was sobbing, and a child howled.

Then there were voices. “Terroristes!”

“Non, she did it . . . she fought with him,” Aimée heard someone say. “She pulled him down!”

“That one,” the old woman sprawled on the wet pavement whimpered, pointing her out. Someone pulled the body off Aimée, and tried CPR.

Aimée struggled to her feet. A man grabbed her shoulders. “Hold on, Mademoiselle, we saw what you did,” he accused.

“What do you mean?”

The old woman was shaking her, grabbing at her scarf. A dog barked. Aimée looked around in panic.

“Let go! Don’t you understand . . . someone on a motorcycle shot him!” Aimée said.

Aimée saw a woman’s face in the tall window opposite, her mouth open in a silent scream. And then she heard the approaching police siren. Warm blood dripped from her arm.

A large green and white garbage truck had stopped in front of them, blocking the street. She saw the motorcycle at a distance, stuck in traffic.

“Stop that motorcycle,” she shouted, but no one listened. She broke past the throng and tried to run, the backpack bobbing on her good shoulder, the bloodstained envelope she had tried to give Baret now clenched in her fist.

The motorcycle shot down a narrow street on the right, weaving between the cars. Aimée ran, trying to keep up, for half a block. The helmeted, black-leather-clad figure looked like every motorcyclist on the street. She collapsed against a dented Citroën, panting. Tried to catch her breath.

“Stop her,” someone shouted. Then the motorcycle turned, jumped the curb, and aimed for her.

The hair rose on the back of her neck.

She scrambled to her feet, slipped as her heel caught in a cobble, got up again and ran into an open courtyard. Panting, she raced down a narrow slit between buildings. No exit, just doors. All locked. She pounded on several until one opened.

“We don’t let patrons into the laundry this way,” said a woman, plastic hangers in her hands. She eyed Aimée’s black fishnets, boots and black-leather-belted coat. Behind the woman were steamed-up windows and the roar of industrial dryers.

“My ex-husband’s on a rampage.” Aimée said the first thing she could think of. “Please, I need to come inside before he sees me.”

Another woman, bent over a pressing machine, glanced up. “Eh? This isn’t a public thoroughfare,” she said.

“Just this once, please.”

The woman shrugged and stood aside.

Aimée edged past the crisp white sheets piled on the counter, careful not to let the blood from her arm drip on them.

“Next time, use the front entrance,” said the woman.

But Aimée had pulled on a wool cap over her spiky rain-drizzled hair and gone out the front door. She wrapped her wool scarf around her arm. An ambulance and police cars came to a screeching halt by the boulangerie. She headed over to the next narrow street, her heart thumping. Keeping her head down she walked close to the buildings. On rue Boursault she huddled in a doorway until the Number 66 bus disgorged riders, then entered it by the rear doors. Trembling, she pulled her coat close around her and sank into the seat, thrusting the envelope into her coat pocket.

The few passengers on the bus read or sat with eyes closed, ignoring her. She set the backpack down on the next seat and felt inside it. Her hands touched something hard. A gun? She felt again, rummaged within, touching soft silk and hard smooth carved surfaces. She located a small, intricate object.

She peered inside. The absinthe-green of a jade monkey’s face stared back at her.