Murder in Montmartre

Late Wednesday Evening

“BONSOIR,” AIMÉE SAID. “Lucien Sarti, s’il vous plaît.”

“Who’s calling?” a woman asked.

“Aimée Leduc.”

“He’s gone. Left a few days ago.”

What could she say now? Think fast.

“Doesn’t he work at a club? I’m Félix Conari’s associate. There is a big snag with his music contract,” she said. “I must contact him.”

Pause. A sizzling sound came over the phone. Was the woman cooking?

“Give me your number. If he calls . . .”

“06 57 89 42. Please, as soon as possible.”

She clicked off. A hungry musician should bite at that. She hoped so.

A moment later her phone vibrated in her pocket. Hungry all right.

“Allô?”

“Sorry to call you so late. Yann Marant here,” a voice said, loud conversation buzzing in the background. “I just finished work, but I found something, although maybe it’s nothing, to do with your investigation.”

A break, finally?

“Can we meet? My phone’s acting up,” she said.

“Café Noctambule,” he said. “It’s noisy but I’m unfamiliar with the area.”

No problem.” “

YANN S TOOD in the Café Noctambule, a dive with seventies-era smoky mirrors on the walls. On the small stage, a bouffant-haired man crooned chansons. The place was packed and couples revolved to the accordion and the beat of the snare drum.

Yann waved. “Over here.”

Next to him, two women argued, snarling at each other like cats in an alley. A smallish mild-mannered-looking man grinned at their show.

Yann covered his ears. “I’m sorry, no place to talk here. Hungry?”

Aimée nodded. She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten.

A few doors away, they found a cigarette-box-sized bistro, five tables crowded into a dark room with a coal-burning stove. Warm as toast, but full. Reluctant to leave, Aimée suggested that they stand at the zinc counter and order a jambon-beurre.

“I appreciate your calling, Yann. Anything might help.”

“Now I feel silly. I read too many suspense thrillers,” he said, twisting his hands. “It’s probably nothing, but you said . . .”

“Go ahead.” She hoped she hadn’t made the trip for nothing. Patience, she had to have more patience.

Despite Yann’s wrinkled black pants and loosened ponytail, he exuded more appeal than most computer geeks she knew. And was better looking. Had he really recalled some vital detail or was he using this as an excuse to meet? But the warm bistro held more allure than her cold, empty apartment.

“Tonight, after I left Félix’s, I threw a water bottle into the construction’s Dumpster, the one parked in front of the building being renovated,” Yann said. “Everything fell out, a mess. I know it’s forbidden but, well, I scooped it up, climbed up to throw . . .” He paused. “Sorry to bore you, you’ll think I dive Dumpsters at night but I don’t.”

“Bon appétit,” said the white-aproned bistro owner, setting a plate of ham and buttered baguette sandwiches in front of them.

“Please continue,” she said, taking a bite. As crumbs from the bread crust fell, she caught them in her palm.

“Trying to make space, that’s when I found these.” He reached into his pocket, set down several crumpled, blurred black-and-white photocopied papers smelling of plaster dust, and smoothed them out. They showed hand-drawn floor plans with thick arrows and Xs inked in. “I figured these came from the site, and I was about to throw them back when I noticed this.”

Curious, she leaned forward, following his finger. A diagram bore a notation: rue du Mont-Cenis and rue Ordener.

“So there is a building at the intersection of these streets,” she said. “But this isn’t a blueprint. What is it?”

“That’s what I wondered. With all these Separatist bombings . . . well, perhaps I’m reading too much into this.” He exhaled. “Sorry, at least I feel better. But stupid. Forgive me? Maybe it was kind of an excuse to meet you again.” A small smile played at the edges of his mouth. “I don’t know many people here.”

She returned his smile but her mind focused on the diagram.

He folded the papers. “Now you’ll think I’m a nerd, joined at the hip to my computer. And you’re right.”

“Wait, Yann,” she said, pulling out her pocket map and thumbing it open to the Eighteenth Arrondissement.

“The Mairie is on that corner,” she said, her voice rising. The City Hall was the only building at that location. “May I see that diagram again?” Her heart beat faster.

Along the side, in smaller script, was written: (2) 18:00 change (1) 23:00 change. Arrows pointed to the symbols for entrances. She thought back to the newspaper, the article describing bomb threats to an unnamed government building.

She stared closer. “It could mean that two guards man the main entrance until the 18:00 shift change, then one guard takes over.”

Yann blinked several times. “Who would leave such incriminating papers in a Dumpster?”

“Exactement,” she said. “But they could be old plans, outdated, and their implication forgotten.”

She chewed on the baguette, thinking.

“I guess it doesn’t link to that flic’s murder,” Yann said, his face reddening. “Real life’s not like a thriller where it all connects.”

Was he right?

She studied the diagram more closely. Saw Atlas, the name of an alarm company, an X on what appeared to be a service entrance. More Xs on rue du Mont-Cenis. The placement of a car or truck bomb?

She should direct Yann to turn the diagrams over to the authorities. Stay out of it. Not dirty her hands with the Ministry’s military wing. They’d clamp down on this so fast. Just thinking of dealing with the security sector made her palms sweat. She should . . . but did she ever do what she should?

Turning over information wasn’t her style. Yet information given might earn a favor in return. That’s how they operated.

“If this diagram’s for real, it would be criminal not to report it,” she said, deciding to take a gamble. “Mind if I show this to a contact at DST?”

“The terrorist brigade? Of course not,” he said. “You don’t think—”

“Yann, did anything strike you about Lucien Sarti?”

Yann smiled. “My first impression? You’ll think it . . . well, he seems to be a sort of wandering troubadour, he lives rough, but his music drives him.”

“How do you mean?” she asked, surprised.

“Wedded to Corsica, the land and people, an idealist telling stories through his music,” Yann said. “Somehow he found Félix and sent him a tape of this entrancing blend of traditional polyphony and techno.”

“Would you describe his music as political?”

Yann’s brow furrowed. “I’d say it was about freeing Corsica and returning to nature. Félix can’t say enough about his music but . . .”

She nodded. Waited. A couple passed them, letting a gust of winter air enter.

“Enthusiastic, that’s Félix. A huge heart,” Yann said. “Then he discovered that Lucien’s a member of the Armata Corsa. That made it difficult for him to push a contract through.”

The diagram, this linkage of Lucien Sarti to the Corsican Separatist movement. Did it add up to Jacques’s murder? Had she read Jacques wrong? Had he met with Lucien Sarti to discover a plot, or to prevent a terrorist bombing? Was the musician his informer?

She had to find Lucien Sarti. A long night stretched ahead of her.

In the restroom she took a deep breath and called Bordereau, a contact at the DST, on the public phone. Always the public phone with the DST. They could trace calls within three minutes.

Bordereau answered on the first ring. “Unit 813.”

“Aimée Leduc,” she said. “Got something you might like to see.”

“Always interested in your little gifts,” Bordereau said. “Twenty on my favorite,” he added.

She glanced at her Tintin watch: she would have to hurry. “Make it twenty-five.” And hung up.

T WENT Y- F I V E minutes later she nodded to Bordereau, who was waiting inside the gate of the offices of the Archdiocese of Paris, a seventeenth-century building a block from the Ministry of Interior where he worked. One day, if she came to know him better, she’d ask him why he didn’t work at the DST on rue Nélaton. He looked no more than thirty, but he was well past forty. Bordereau’s en brosse short hair glittered with beads of rain. She’d first met him at the Reuilly pool during lap swim when his waterproof pager caught on the filter and she’d recovered it for him. The numbers had displayed a ministerial access. She knew at once that he worked intelligence and at a high level if he wore a pager in the pool. A useful man to know. And not bad in a Speedo.

A band of light crossed the pocked stone entrance as the porter, a grizzled, bent man, opened the tall wood door.

“Entréz, Monsieur,” he said.

Bordereau nodded. Together they stepped inside the bas-relief-lined vestibule permeated with a smell she remembered, the smell particular to a Catholic school at least during the two years she’d attended. An atmosphere she associated with hanging tapestries in high-ceilinged halls, the cattle stampede of students on wooden stairs, and nuns in full habit, their wimples and veils blocking all peripheral vision.

The porter disappeared. She pulled the diagram from her bag, kneeled, unfolded it, and spread it on the waxed parquet floor.

“This was found in a Dumpster,” she said. “I can’t vouch for authenticity or much else. On a nearby rooftop above the site, a flic was murdered Monday night.”

“It’s dry.” Bordereau said, his eyes scanning the diagram. “Was it at the bottom?”

“That’s my information,” she said. “According to my map, it shows the Mairie in the Eighteenth.”

He didn’t whistle but she thought he wanted to.

“I think it ties in with the flic’s murder and the garroting of a Corsican bar owner, Zette, on rue Ronsard. That was made to look like a vendetta killing, but I think it’s connected.”

Bordereau was quite still. His economy of movement struck her.

“Your rationale?”

“The dead flic moonlighted on and off for Zette,” she said. “Too much of a coincidence, I think. Now I have some questions for you, OK?”

He nodded, his eyes still on the diagram.

“Did this attack take place?”

“Almost. Sunday night. It was thwarted; the bombs were defused.”

The night before Jacques’s murder, a failed bomb threat.

“Was it related to the Armata Corsa?”

“Rumor has it,” he said, getting back to his feet, folding the plan, and slipping it into his coat pocket. “But we had no proof. Your source?”

“Yann Marant, a programmer, threw trash into an overloaded Dumpster near 18, rue André Antoine. When the trash fell out he tried to shove it back and found this.”

“Merci.”

Even if it’s outdated, it must have some value, she thought.

“Anything interesting about Corsica I should know?”

His blond eyebrows shot up. “Besides mafiosi under the guise of Armata Corsa using arms from Eastern Europe to rob armored truckloads of sensitive documents? And a data-encryption leak from Big Ears?” He grinned. “No, I don’t think so.”

She returned the grin. “A data-encryption leak—what do you mean?”

“Keep it coming. And forget I said that.” He stood up. “Haven’t seen you at lap swim this week.”

“Busy.”

On the Metro, she tried to make sense of it all: sensitive documents, a data-encryption leak, a failed bomb threat rumored to be connected to Corsicans? The implications gnawed at her. A rooftop murder in a snowstorm, Laure charged and in a coma. Events were spiraling out of control.