Murder in Clichy

Wednesday Morning

AIMÉE SAW TWO BLUE and white police cars parked on the pavement of rue de Chazelles in front of Guy’s office.

“Not a professional job,” the flic was saying to Marie, the receptionist.

She saw the broken door lock and overturned chairs. Heard the static of police walkie-talkies.

“I don’t understand,” Marie said, shaking her head. “The small narcotic supply we keep under lock and key wasn’t touched. Dr. Lambert and his partners have just renovated this office. New cabinets, redone the examining rooms . . . tout! ”

The flic nodded, writing in his notebook. “Knocking off a pharmacy makes more sense. There’ve been several break-ins this month.”

“Excuse me, I’m Dr. Lambert’s patient and I forgot my bag. I’ve come for it.”

“There’s nothing here,” Marie said. “We’ve had a robbery.”

Aimée felt guilty. She should have stashed it somewhere else. “May I just check the examining room?”

“We’re dusting for fingerprints,” the flic said. “You’ll have to wait.”

Just then Guy walked into the office, his coat beaded with rain. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw her.

“Dr. Lambert, I’ve already called the insurance company,” said the receptionist. “The claims adjuster’s on the way.”

“Good job, Marie,” he said, taking in the damage with a glance. “I left at six-thirty. I was on call and had rounds at l’hôpital des Quinzes-Vingts. They must have broken in after that.”

“Thank you doctor, I’ll talk with you in a moment.”

Aimée took Guy aside.

“I feel sick that this happened.”

Guy’s eyes softened.

“Does your arm hurt?”

Aimée shook her head. “Not much.” Only when she breathed. The fingerprinter, carrying his metal case, edged past them into the reception area.

“Didn’t you go to the police last night?” he asked.

“Guy, I left something in that room . . .”

“What? ”

“I have to get in there,” she said edging toward the examining room. “Please!”

“You don’t mean . . .”

“Just block the door. For one minute.”

She slipped past him into the antiseptic white room. A rain of stainless steel instruments and surgical gloves littered the linoleum floor. The cabinets lay open and gaping. She bent down. Under the sink, the bacterial soaps had been pushed aside, the particle board was askew. The backpack with the jade was gone.

She stood up. Stumbled. Guy grabbed her arm. Concern and anger warred in his eyes.

“You owe me an explanation,” he said.

“I meant to tell you. It’s my fault, I thought it would be safe here.”

She looked around the trashed office, sick. Patients arrived and Marie ushered them into the hallway.

“Of course, I’ll pay you for all the damage,” she said. “Guy, I’m so sorry.”

“What hurts, Aimée, is that you didn’t tell me.” He shook his head. “Even after. . . .” He stared at the examining table. “Why didn’t you go to the police? ”

“Guy, I knew you wouldn’t want me to keep it, and I couldn’t turn it over to them. . . .”

“Why not?”

Guy had never broken a law in his life. She doubted he’d even gotten a traffic ticket: A rare Frenchman who never parked illegally, drove too fast, or cheated on his taxes. He didn’t know the other side, the world outside the law, where things didn’t work like that.

“Last night, the RG were waiting outside my apartment,” she said. “They threatened me that I’d never work again if I didn’t turn the bag over to them. They had ransacked my place, too. There’s a lot more behind this than I suspected.”

He shook his head. “I thought you had changed, that you wanted a new start, not a job that endangered your eyesight and your life,” he said, his gray eyes hard. “But you haven’t changed. You never will.”

“Please, Guy, it’s not like that. Try to understand!”

“Dr. Lambert, we’ll take your statement now,” the flic said, as he entered the examining room. “If you’ll come with me, please.”

“Of course,” he said.

The policeman’s back was turned and she put her finger over her lips, then mouthed “Please” to Guy. But she couldn’t read his expression.

Out in the reception area, she heard Marie. “Dr. Lambert, the adjuster’s here to estimate damages.”

Aimée edged past the policemen to Marie’s desk. “Please tell Dr. Lambert I’ll call him later.”

She left the office, emerging into rue de Chazelles. What had she done? She called the temple, left a message for Linh that she was en route, and took the Métro to the Cao Dai temple.

By the temple’s storefront window, Linh came into view, her eyes bright under a hooded burnt orange shawl, her hands placed together in greeting. Aimée’s heart sank. There was no way around it; she had to tell Linh the truth. She took a deep breath and even though she wanted to run in the opposite direction, said, “Linh, I’m sorry. There’s no other way to say it,” she said. “The jade’s been stolen.”

“What do you mean?” Linh stepped back, shocked.

“Forgive me. I hid the pieces of jade, and someone broke in . . .”

“But Thadée gave them to you, non?”

Aimée nodded.

“Everything’s gone?”

Aimée reached in her pocket. “Here’s the envelope you gave me for him.”

“How do I know you’re not lying?”

“Someone must have followed me and stolen the jade after I hid it in my doctor’s office.”

“Why hide it there?”

“I needed stitches. I knew the doctor. I’m sorry, I thought it would be a good hiding place.”

“Stitches . . . why?”

“From a bullet’s ricochet,” she said. “Linh, I’m all right, but Thadée Baret . . . was shot and killed.”

Linh closed her eyes, fingering her amber beads.

Aimée felt sick with guilt. “My mistake.” Then she remembered. The jade disk! She reached into her coat pocket.

“I do have this.”

Hope, then sadness, filled Linh’s eyes. “So you did have the jade.” She nodded. “You must find the rest and get them back for me.”

“Forgive me,” Aimée said. “But . . . why didn’t you warn me? Why did you entrust such things to me, almost a stranger?”

“I had no choice.” Linh’s eyelids fluttered in the nervous mannerism Aimée remembered. “The Communists’ grip has loosened. Next year or the one after, the country will open up to foreign trade. We should be able to return too. But to legitimize and rebuild our congregation, we must have the jade.”

“Legitimize in what way?”

The wind rose and whipped around them. “If we want to return, we must give the jade to the government. It’s a national treasure that was in our care. The Cao Dai safeguarded it. Then just before the French left, it was stolen from us. It must be returned to my country.”

“This jade was looted during the battle of Dien Bien Phu?”

Linh nodded.

“But how did Baret come to have it in his possession?”

“We’ve searched for a long time. We don’t know how he ended up with the jade. All I know was that he needed money, quickly, and promised to deliver the jade in return.”

“We should go somewhere and talk,” Aimée said.

Cockleburs fallen from the row of chestnut trees littered the wet pavement. Ahead, steam billowed from the Métro grill vents. Passersby pulled their collars up and fastened their winter coats tighter.

Linh looked behind her. “It’s not safe,” she said. “Keep walking while I explain. There’s a whole culture of jade,” Linh told Aimée. “The ancients revered jade’s durability and luminous quality. Jade was believed to be a sacred embodiment of essential vital forces; it was used for ritual objects with cosmological and religious meaning.”

“Used how?” Aimée asked.

“To channel supernatural powers, to communicate between the mortal and celestial worlds.”

Aimée recalled the aura she’d felt radiating from the pieces.

Buses shot past on the wide boulevard. A siren resounded in the distance. In front of them, two women with wheeled shopping carts met and exchanged bisous on each cheek.

Linh pulled Aimée closer. “The vital force, the power of jade to channel the spirits of the other world, still exists.”

She gave the envelope containing the cashier’s check back to Aimée. “You’re my only hope. Keep this and the disk you still have. Find the rest for me.”

“But I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Gassot, a French engineer, saved my father’s life at Dien Bien Phu. I never was able to thank him. He knew about the jade.”

Gassot . . . that name. He’d written the article she’d found online, about jade looted from the Emperor’s Tomb.

“Do you know if he’s still alive?”

“I have no idea.”

“How did you meet Baret?”

“I didn’t,” Linh said, pulling her robe’s hood closer about her head. “He contacted the temple. He knew we’d been searching. We’d heard a rumor that the jade was in Paris.”

“What rumor?”

“Something about an auction catalogue?” Linh asked, shaking her head. “I don’t know about these things. I understand your country less and less every day. Bloodshed. . . that’s not our way. We don’t believe in taking life, not even an animal’s.”

Yet, Linh came from a country that had been at war almost continuously for the past hundred years. Aimée had to keep her on track. “Linh, what about Baret?”

“He telephoned and said it had to be arranged quickly, but as we were the rightful owners, we could have the jade for a small payment. Somehow, I felt that he had a good heart.”

A good heart?

“Bad luck curses those who have evil intentions,” Linh said. “You will find the jade. I count on you.”

Guilt warred with Aimée’s promise to steer clear of this kind of thing.

Linh paused at the temple door. “Follow where this disk leads you.”

And Aimée knew she would. Not only to restore the jade to Linh and subvert the RG’s agenda, but also because, somehow, the trail might lead back to her father.

AIMÉE STOOD in yet another café-tabac in the Clichy quartier, drumming her chipped boa-blue nails on the zinc counter. So far, in the six she’d visited, no one had seen or remembered Baret. If she had to drink yet another espresso she’d sprint down Avenue de Clichy and never fall asleep again.

“Une tisane, s’il vous plaît,” she said, ordering an herbal tea. She caught the owner’s eye during a lull between commuters buying Métro passes and Lotto tickets. She pulled out the PMU betting receipt, handed it to him, and he ran it through the machine.

She was about to engage him in conversation when he slapped one hundred francs on the counter. “You won.”

Aimée had never won anything in her life. But she took the hundred francs. Thadée didn’t need it now.

“Monsieur, it belongs to my friend Thadée Baret. Maybe you remember, I called last evening and you passed him the phone?”

“Not me,” he said, ringing up a sale. “Too busy. Me, I work the early shift.”

“Bon, who would have answered?”

He shrugged and turned to another waiting customer.

“Monsieur, it’s important. Do you know who worked last night?” she asked, determined to discover more about Baret.

“Ask Gérard,” he said. “He’s stocking the beverage shipment.”

Aimée wound past the curved zinc and old streaked bubbled mirrors lining the café. Mechanics in jumpsuits, workers in blue smock coats and an old man with his dog at his feet sipped a morning espresso or un demi de bière blonde. This was a working class pocket of the old Paris like the one she had known growing up.

“Pardonnez-moi, Gérard?” she asked a thirtyish man, buff but bulky, in a T-shirt and stovepipe jeans, lugging a crate of Stella Artois beer.

“Did you work last night?” she asked, her feet crunching sugar cube wrappers littering the floor.

“Why?”

She pulled out the PMU racing receipt and twenty francs. “Maybe you sold my friend Thadée the winning ticket. If so, I owe you a little thank you.”

“Congratulations, but I was at the gym,” he said.

“So, who should I talk to?” she said.

Gérard jerked his thumb at a middle-aged man, tying an apron around his waist, by the orange juice squeezer.

“Alors, Jojo, something to brighten your morning,” he shouted.

Aimée smiled at the man. “Did you answer the phone last night when I called for Thadée Baret?”

“Eh? Speak up,” Jojo said.

She noticed the calluses on his hands.

She held out the form. “Did you sell this to Thadée?”

“I sell a lot of those,” he said, “more than a hundred yesterday.”

Great. “Of course, but when I called around 5:30 you passed the phone to Thadée. Remember, a mec with glasses, no coat?”

He nodded. “Comes in here almost every day. A nice guy.”

Heartened, she grinned. “Here’s twenty, he wanted to share his winnings with you.”

“So I brought him luck!” Jojo squeezed another orange on the spinning machine. Juice trickled through the thick orange pulp.

Aimée didn’t want to inform him just what kind of luck.

“Know where I can find him, now?”

“At work, I’d guess,” he said.

“Where’s that?”

Jojo’s eyes narrowed. “How’d you get his ticket anyway?”

“He gave it to me,” she said. “Said he moved. And I’ve got to give his money to him.”

Despite the reluctance in Jojo’s eyes, he wiped his hands and pocketed the twenty francs. “He lives above the art gallery on rue des Moines. The chichi place.”

Elated, she buttoned her coat.

“Merci,” she said.

Now she had somewhere to start.

AIMÉE KNOCKED on the closed door of Galerie 591, a renovated warehouse. Rain pattered on the cobblestones. She wound her black wool scarf tighter against the chill, trying to figure out what she’d say. Posters advertised an upcoming British collage exhibition. She peered inside the darkened gallery: framed oils, collages, and metal sculptures filled the space. Upscale, and with prices to match, no doubt.

The gallery lay one street over from where Thadée had been shot. She figured he’d cut through a back courtyard or passage to rue Legendre. Didn’t most of these warehouses have rear courtyards?

A wrought iron fence closed off a long courtyard leading to the gallery entrance. Further on stood more warehouses, some converted into lofts. Aimée opened the creaking gate, and used the house phone to call the gallery’s number. As she stood under the eaves by a leaf-clogged gutter, she heard the echo of the gallery phone ringing. Her call went unanswered.

A dilapidated tire factory crumbled under a soot-encrusted glass roof at the rear of the couryard, the faded sign bearing the letters PNEUS in blue type. Huddled next to it was what looked like an old car parts warehouse from the thirties.

She crossed the courtyard from the art gallery to a door- way under the sign GRAPHIX. Strains of jazz came from inside. She pushed the door open and saw a space divided into red cubicles, each containing a drawing board.

“Is anyone here?”

“You lost?” asked a man wearing a black ribbed turtleneck sweater. His shaved head glinted in the light focused on his desk. Rain beat a murmur on the dirty glass roof.

“Does Thadée live next door?”

“You mean the gallery owner?” Irritation shone in his eyes. “I imagine he did.”

Aimée thought it best to feign ignorance. “Did? What do you mean?”

“Far as I know, he’s at the morgue. His ex-wife made a scene this morning when the flics came.”

So she’d found his home. Now the next step. Try her hunch.

“You mean Sophie?” she asked. If that name didn’t ring a bell she’d try the other one.

He nodded, bent over his drawing. An uphill battle, this conversation. He had the personality of wallpaper paste. Lumpy, and sticking in all the wrong places.

“Did Sophie go with the flics or . . .” She hesitated to say to identify the body.

“The last I heard was her screaming for everyone to leave her alone,” he said. “Then I shut the door and went back to work. Look, my firm rents this space and I’m on a deadline.”

“Sorry to disturb you,” she said, backing out. “You won’t mind if I poke around back then?”

But his head was bent over his work as he mumbled a reply.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, closing the door.

She rang another doorbell. No answer. The rest of the courtyard lay deserted. If Sophie had to identify her ex-husband’s body she’d be gone a while. It would make more sense to come back to interview her later.

Aimée left the way she’d come in, avoiding the fluttering yellow crime scene tape by the boulangerie. The busy life of the village-like quartier streamed around her. She walked down rue des Moines, her boots wet from the slush, her heart as leaden as the gray sky above.

What else could she check? She remembered what Linh had said about an auction catalogue. But no auction house opened this early.

The only other lead she had was the name Gassot and the Sixth Battalion. She stepped into a phone cabinet, checked the phone book listings. The anciens combattants center was nearby. No better place to locate an old soldier like Gassot or someone who knew him. Or knew something. She was clutching at straws. But, until she found Sophie she had nothing else.

“C’EST DOMMAGE, ” said the middle-aged man behind the anciens combattants reception desk. He puffed at a cigar hanging from the side of his mouth. “Not my war. But the Dien Bien Phu vets meet on the second Sunday of the month. You just missed it.”

Merde!

Regimental plaques and blue, white, and red banners lined the wall of the center. Black and white photos of troops from the first and second World Wars, the Indochinese and Algerian conflicts, accompanied them. She searched the photos, but none showed the Sixth Battalion.

“Monsieur, I’m looking for Hervé Gassot or the number of the group’s secretary.”

“Let me see,” he said. He ran his tobacco-stained finger over a directory. “Voilà! Hervé Gassot himself’s the secretary now; he saw combat at Dien Bien Phu.”

Her hopes rose. “There were rumors that a cache of jade was looted from the Emperor’s tomb near Dien Bien Phu. . . .”

“Gassot spent time in Indochina. He knows all the stories, that’s for sure. But he keeps to himself. There’s only one number listed for him.” He scratched his grizzled head of hair. “Non, here’s another one, not sure which is which. Maybe a contact number. Not all of the members have telephones.”

He wrote them both down on paper and passed it to her.

“Merci.”

“We’ve got a symposium tonight,” he said, heading toward a stack of folding chairs. “I need to set up, if you’ll excuse me.”

She tried one number on her cell phone. After ten rings she gave up. She tried the second. Again, the phone rang and rang. Disappointed, she hung up.

She walked toward the Batignolles church and then, under the brown awning of the boulangerie, she saw him: the hawk-nosed flic from the RG visit. The one from the team involved in the Place Vendôme surveillance where her father had been killed. She had never known his name or rank. The whole project had been hush hush. Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Defense, they all peed in the same place, as her father used to say.

Had he been following her or was he nosing around for the jade on his own?

The man buttoned up his rain jacket and strode past the crime scene tape. She tailed him down rue Legendre for several blocks to a small two-story café-tabac: one of those she’d already visited this morning. She followed him inside, smiled at the owner, and bought some cassis-flavored gum at the cigarette counter as he mounted the back stairs.

A minute later she, too, went upstairs to find a smoke-filled rectangular room, the restroom beyond. Cracked leather banquette seats lined the wall, mirrors above them. The room was deserted, except for several tables and chairs. At one, three men played belote, a card game similar to bridge, a game she’d never had the patience to learn.

She sat down at the hawk-nosed man’s table, nodding to the heavy-lidded owner/waiter taking his order for an espresso.

“You know my name,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Did I ask you to sit here?”

She heard more annoyance than surprise in his voice.

“I invited myself,” she smiled. “Sometimes I do that. But we already know each other.”

“How’s that?”

“Last night your group searched my apartment without a warrant, remember?”

He looked away. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

She bit back a remark about short-term memory loss, and got to the heart of the matter. “Think back to five years ago, Inspecteur. . . ?”

“Pleyet,” he acknowledged, shifting away from her.

In the mirror she saw the belote players look up, then go back to their game, slapping cards on the table. From below came the sound of the télé with its replayed horse races.

“I’m in the traffic division, Mademoiselle.”

And if she believed that, she’d believe anything. He didn’t look like a meter maid. Or act like one.

“Then where’s your ticket book?” she asked. “You were with the RG last night.”

He shrugged. “They called me.”

“You were involved in the Place Vendôme surveillance five years ago.”

“Never.” His eyes narrowed. “Why do you keep bringing that up? Such persistance is rude.”

“Remember one of your old colleagues, Jean-Claude Leduc, my father?”

“Guess he forgot to send you to charm school,” he said.

She felt the wooden floor vibrating as his foot began tapping.

“Is the man who works with the RG your evil twin?”

No smile answered her back. “Traffic’s my job,” he insisted. “Since 1992.”

The heavy-lidded owner returned with two steaming espressos and two glasses of water, and set them on the water-ringed table together with a glass carafe. Aimée handed him a ten franc piece. Light from the wall sconce caught and danced on the carafe’s thick rim. Around them rose occasional exclamations, then the shuffle of the belote players’ cards.

“Looks like you’re on duty,” she said.

“The traffic bureau closed early,” he said, yawning. “Just a quick cup of coffee, then the train home.”

She doubted that. “How is the jade tied to the RG, Inspecteur Pleyet?”

Anger flickered in his eyes and he gripped her elbow in a steely hold.

For a moment the card game stopped. The only sounds were the rumble of the milk steamer machine below. She looked up. One of the men said “Fold” and the others threw their cards on the table.

Pleyet relaxed his grip. In one movement, he pulled on his windbreaker jacket and stood.

“You didn’t answer my question, Inspecteur. Were you on assignment in postwar Indochina?” she asked, taking a gamble. “You look the type.”

“Why do you say that?”

She might as well probe deeper. “After Dien Bien Phu a lot of archeological treasures went missing, didn’t they? There were several incidents of looting. Did the Sixth Battalion have anything to do with that?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He threw some francs on the table and left.

She gulped her espresso and watched him from the window as he walked down rue des Batignolles. Pleyet was lying. She smelled it. She could understand him not revealing his cover in a café. But would he tell her more somewhere else?

She figured Pleyet was the type to have been airlifted into a pre-dawn Lagos when things got sticky, or infiltrated into an aborted revolution that needed suctioning out. The “gleaners” were what some called them. “Mopping up” was the other term she’d heard. Guess it depended on how big a mess they found.

One of the card players, a man with a silver-white tonsure of hair, brushed past and bumped her table, spilling her glass of water.

“Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle,” he said, his wide grin exposing several gold-capped teeth. “So clumsy. May I buy you a drink?”

She didn’t fancy a tête-à-tête with this old mec or his cronies, but he’d been civil.

“Pas grave, don’t worry, monsieur,” she said and made her way downstairs.

She checked her Tintin watch. The doors of the auction houses would be open now.