Murder in Montmartre

Thursday Evening

ONCE OUTSIDE , AIMÉE BELTED her leather coat. Zoe’s words haunted her. No wonder she avoided the authorities. Her story didn’t seem to help but at least she’d admitted hearing words spoken in Corsican. Aimée scanned the alleylike street. No Cloclo. No mec with a down jacket.

How could she warn Cloclo her “station” was being watched?

Aimée climbed the stairs to Place des Abbesses. There, CRS teams in blue jumpsuits cradling Uzis strolled the streets. This signaled a definite terrorist alert. She felt a tightening in her chest. What was going on?

She entered a warm café and picked up a paper to see if she could find out. She sat at the window overlooking the steps leading to the alley, a perfect vantage point from which to watch for Cloclo.

She rubbed her gloved hand over the fogged-up glass. More worries assailed her. Cloclo bore a grudge against the “crude” mec, the one Zoe Tardou had just described. She might say something to get rid of him. Yet if Cloclo did speak to him, Aimée would be ready and only seconds away.

Several young men, unemployed judging by the time of day, played at the Fussball machine. Aimée ordered a croque-monsieur from a waitress with red rose tattoos up her arm.

Outside, passersby scurried through the gray evening light just sinking behind the eroding stone buildings. Mist lingered over the steps. Aimée tried to avoid the predatory gaze of a man in black denims and a blue turtleneck near the Fussball machine. She tapped her feet to the beat of the radio’s techno station and opened the newspaper to the headlines to read: COUNTERTER-RORISM POLICE DISCOVER EXPLOSIVES TRACED TO ARMATA CORSA.

Her shoulders tensed. That accounted for the CRS presence outside in the square. And for a moment, she was afraid. Another building mined with explosives?

She read the article: “Today a special counterterrorism unit, acting on a tip, found a cache of detonators and explosives in a government building.”

A grainy photo showed a dismantled detonating device.

She read further.

Corsica has been plagued since 1975 by almost daily machine-gunnings and other attacks by a small but active, nationalist movement. Favored venues for Separatist attacks have been on the island of Corsica, and rarely in France until now. Most bombings have been designed to minimize risk to human life but maximize material damage. Explosions occur in the early morning hours when buildings are unoccupied. Corsican terrorists have targeted police stations, French government buildings, and the property of non-Corsicans on the island. They extort funds from outsiders through the imposition of a “revolution tax,” and punish those who fail to pay. Sources would not reveal the government building in Paris just targeted, only that the tête de Maure—a Separatist symbol pic- turing a black face with a white bandanna—was discovered. Links to a known Armata Corsa terrorist cell operating in the eighteenth arrondissement are being pursued. Ministry insiders indicate this was an attempt to embarrass the French government and pressure it into negotiations with fratricidal Mafia-style gangs that have jumped on the Separatist bandwagon.

The tête de Maure, like the poster she’d seen somewhere. And Yann had said Lucien was a member of the Armata Corsa.

From what she knew, Corsica had to stay French not only for the security of the holiday homes lining its pristine beaches, but also as a convenient military outpost. A strategic sentinel in the Mediterranean, home to the Mirage-4, the jet that carried an atomic bomb.

Her mind raced into high gear. She took her notebook and wrote down what she knew so far. Zoe Tardou had recognized a man on the roof speaking Corsican about the planets and streams, before Jacques, who was half-Corsican, was murdered. Jacques had an affiliation with Zette, the murdered Corsican bar owner. Laure’s hands had borne traces of gunpowder residue with a high tin content. And she’d found a bullet that she hoped would match the tin content of the residue on Laure’s hands. Plans of a foiled plot on the Mairie in the eighteenth had been found near the place where Jacques was murdered.

Nothing fit! And yet it reeked, worse than sour milk. Had Jacques enmeshed Laure, his unknowing partner, with a gang of Corsican Separatists? If only Laure were to regain consciousness. But what answers would she have if she did?

The newspaper article indicated that a Corsican Separatist cell was operating in Montmartre. She pulled the hairbrush, containing a minirecorder in the handle, from her bag. One of René’s toys; he loved gadgets.

Had it recorded?

She took a toothpick from the ceramic holder standing on the white paper covering the table and stuck it in the rewind pinhole: a low whirr. Then she stuck the toothpick in Play. Zoe Tardou’s voice mingled with the shouts of the Fussbol players. Aimée rewound and replayed the conversation: “stream . . . searching,” the names of the planets. What did it mean?

She’d copied it all in her notebook by the time her croque-monsieur arrived, a frugal bistro invention. Day-old bread was dipped in egg, fried with a slice of ham, melted cheese, and béchamel sauce, a filling meal on a winter day. She set her map of Zoe Tardou’s building and the courtyard and scaffolding and rooftop of Paul’s on the paper tablecloth. She added in the Dumpster where Yann Marant had found the diagram.

Her cell phone rang.

“Allô?”

“That mec passed by me,” Cloclo said. “Twenty minutes ago.”

Too late. Aimée hadn’t seen her arrive.

“Where are you, Cloclo? I don’t see you on the street.”

“House call for an old client,” she said. “I’m in Goutte d’Or. On rue Custine where it meets rue Doudeauville.”

Or, as one politican commented, “where the bourgeois bohemian bobos met the boubous, colorful African immigrants’ robes.”

“So he’s gone!”

“Not if his kabob’s still grilling,” she said. “He went into Kabob Afrique. There’s a big line trailing out onto the street.”

“Cloclo, you’re being watched,” Aimée said.

“Men pay me for that, you know.”

“I’m serious. Be careful. Work another beat for a few days.”

“Vraiment?” Aimée heard a throaty laugh. “I could use some sun. Cannes, Menton, or do you suggest Cap Ferrat?”

“Can you describe the guy?” She threw some francs onto the table.

Just then the man who’d been ogling her walked over and took Aimée by the elbow.

“Care for a drink?” he asked. “I’m partial to big eyes and long legs.”

She knew his type; any encouragement and he’d be all over her like a rash.

“Desolée, I feel the same,” she smiled. “But I’m partial to a brain between the ears.”

She grabbed her coat.

“Oooh, letting the skirt get away?” one of his friends sniggered as she left the café.

She ran, the phone to her ear, into the wet street.

“Like a . . . ,” Cloclo said, her voice wavering, “. . . that lizard that changes color.”

A chameleon changed to fit its background, she thought.

“Why do you say he’s a chameleon, Cloclo?”

“. . . black hair, sideburns today, leather jacket . . .”

“Careful, Cloclo, I mean it . . .”

The line went dead.

At least Cloclo was working somewhere else now and she had given Aimée a description. She ran down the Metro stairs, slid in her pass, and joined an older woman reading Le Figaro, waiting for the train. If she made a quick train connection she might get to the kabob place in time.

She changed lines once and exited from Château Rouge station in seven minutes.

Under a weak setting sun filtering through a break in the clouds, she saw awning-covered stands selling all types of bananas: short, thick, green, yellow, red, as well as stubby plantains. Men wearing long djellabas stood by upturned cardboard boxes on which tapes and “used” VCRs were displayed for sale. Laundry flapped, hanging from chipped metal balcony railings above, suspended from fissured buildings. As she walked by, women in colorful boubous shouted “Iso, iso,” hawking barbecued corn in plastic bags. Several discount travel shops advertised flights—Paris-Mali, for two thousand francs—on hand-lettered signs.

The quartier reminded her of an Arab medina with its tangle of threadlike alleys, the perfume of oranges, and the cries of hawkers everywhere. She stood in the Goutte d’Or, “the golden drop” on the other side of Montmartre, named for the vineyards that once covered the slope. North African soldiers recruited for the First World War had found cheap lodgings here overlooking the Gare du Nord train tracks, after 1918. And the tradition continued; it was still cheap and even more rundown, teeming with Africans and Arabs and other segments of the “third world” according to conservative rightists and the encroaching bobos.

Aimée scanned the street and spied Kabob Afrique midblock.