Murder in Montmartre

Friday Morning

AIMÉE TWISTED THE WHITE porcelain knob of her claw-footed tub. The water heater had fired up, thank God. She poured in lavender essence. Steam rose as she sank her cold legs and aching feet into the hot water.

As she inhaled the citron-tinged lavender, her mind wandered. René’s recounting of Paul’s mother’s story, the names of planets, the phrase “searching the stream,” Bordereau’s mention of a data-encryption leak, and the computer printout in Nathalie’s files whirled in her head. Five minutes later, with the water still only up to her hips, the gas flame sputtered and died.

Great.

She toweled herself dry, pulled on her father’s worn flannel robe and woollen socks. With the printout, she worked on her laptop in bed, searching and culling encryption sites. Without success. She needed Saj.

As orange dawn streaked the sky, she curled up under the duvet and slept, exhausted. She was awakened by the phone ringing in her ear and opened her eyes to see the cursor on the laptop screen blinking by her face.

“Allô?”

“Aimée, big problem,” René said. “Maître Delambre’s gone to a hearing in Fontainebleau. Isabelle’s having second thoughts.

She says she can’t give evidence. What should I do?”

She couldn’t let their witness get away.

“Meet me at 36, Quai des Orfèvres,” she said. “Bring her with you, any way you can.”

She filled the sink with ice cubes and stuck her face in, to wake up. Holding her breath, she kept her face immersed until her cheekbones went numb. She pulled on black tights, a woolen skirt, and a black cashmere sweater and zipped up her knee-high boots. At the door she grabbed her coat and ran down the worn marble stairs, swiping Stop Traffic red lipstick across her lips.

She called La Proc as she ran along the quay. She was their only hope. Eight minutes later she met René and Isabelle huddled by the guard post. Gunmetal gray snow-filled clouds threatened above. Around her ankles, a flurry of wet leaves gusted from the gutter.

“Bonjour, we have an appointment,” she said, showing her ID to the two blue-uniformed guards.

She herded René and a hesitant Isabelle inside the courtyard of the Préfecture, turning left under the arcade to the wide brown wooden doors.

“Where’s Paul?” Aimée asked.

“At school.” Isabelle glanced at René. “Where’s her computer? You said she works on a computer.”

“Sometimes we have to do things the old-fashioned way,” René said.

They climbed several flights of the brown-tiled stairway. Aimée remembered counting them as a little girl. Five hundred and thirty-two steps, still the same. When she got to the top, if she’d counted right, her father would give her a Carambar. At the Enforcement Section, she showed her ID again.

Isabelle pulled back, staring at the group of policemen standing by the head of the stairs.

A uniformed flic ushered them along a high-ceilinged corridor, past open-doored offices. Their footsteps echoed on the polished wooden floor. A few heads looked up as they entered the long arched corridor of the procureur général’s wing. Aimée heard laughter, a snatch of conversation—“Barring the miracle of the loaves and fishes, her sighting puts the mec in the boulan-gerie at the time of the murder”—and smelled the aroma of coffee.

She paused. Isabelle had come to a halt and was buttoning her coat, her mouth tight. “I’m leaving.”

“What’s the matter, Isabelle?”

Isabelle shook her head. “Forget it.”

Dread hit Aimée. Too late now, she wanted to say. So much depends on you. Instead, she nodded. “This place makes me nervous, too.”

“Stupide, I’m leaving, I can’t get involved.”

“It’s a lot to ask of you, I know,” Aimée said, perspiring. “We wouldn’t impose, René wouldn’t be so persistent, unless we had to. Remember, it’s not about you and Paul.”

“Easy for you to say!” Isabelle turned away.

Frightened, nervous probably, needing a drink. Aimée had to reach her, to convince her. She put her arm around Isabelle’s thin shoulders. “You’re right, Isabelle, easy for me to say. You can walk away right now, go down the stairs, and leave. However, a man was murdered and you were the unlucky one who witnessed the shots. And if you don’t speak up, the killers will get away with it. They’ll probably do it again. And then someone’s looking for Paul—”

She paused. Isabelle wouldn’t meet her gaze. So close, and yet . . .

“I’ll pick Paul up,” Isabelle said. “I’ll take him to my sisters in Belleville.”

“Can you tell me this won’t go through your mind when you’re out on the quay, or taking Paul to a new school? Won’t you constantly wonder if the mec who was looking for Paul will turn up at your door? And worry that this time he’ll find him?”

Isabelle’s eyes clouded. “I did time in prison. Years ago, but still, they won’t take what I say seriously.”

“That’s past. You know how prison feels. My friend will go there if you don’t help us,” she said. “René’s arranged a place for you and Paul to stay. A safe place. Please.”

“Mademoiselle Leduc.” The flic cleared his throat, beckoning to them. “May I remind you, La Proc’s got a tight schedule.”

The lines at the corner of Isabelle’s mouth had relaxed a fraction. “Today?” she asked Aimée. “We can go today?”

“Right after you speak with La Proc. You’ll do fine, just tell her the truth. La Proc’s fair. Remember that.”

After a single sharp rap, a woman’s voice called, “Entréz.”

The flic opened the door and gestured them inside. Tall ceilings, windows overlooking the Seine, a framed photo of Mitterrand wearing the blue, white and red ribbon of Le Président. A coveted corner office indicated Edith Mésard’s status.

La Proc wore her blond hair coiffed sleekly behind her ears. In her tailored dark green Rodier suit, holding a dossier, she looked formidable. It was the word Morbier had used to describe Mésard’s prosecutorial skills. A white-haired man sat next to her desk.

“Bon, make it good, Mademoiselle Leduc. You’ve got fifteen minutes,” La Proc said.

“Thank you for making the time, Madame La Proc,” Aimée began.

“You won’t mind if a consultant to Internal Affairs stays?” Edith Mésard asked. “He’s interested in what might transpire.”

The white-haired, ruddy complected man filled out his double-breasted navy blue suit. His eyes flicked over them, calculating. Who was he?

Aimée cleared her throat. “All the better. This is my partner, René Friant; Isabelle Moinier, and you are Monsieur . . . ?”

“Ludovic Jubert,” he said. His eyes locked on hers.

She felt the color drain from her face and a leaden sensation in her feet. She’d finally flushed him out. Yet she was filled with fear.

“Monsieur Jubert, you worked with my father, didn’t you?” She paused, searching for the words. “I’ve been wanting to speak with you.”

“So I gather, Mademoiselle Leduc.”

Concentrate! She had to concentrate on his reactions as well as to make sense to La Proc.

“You can catch up later, I’m sure,” Edith Mésard told her in a calm tone underlaid with steel. “You indicated urgency, Mademoiselle Leduc? I’m listening.”

“On the night of Jacques Gagnard’s murder, Mademoiselle Moinier, who lives on rue André Antoine in the adjacent building, saw three flashes. I think that means there were three shots fired. I believe that a high-tin-content bullet, presently undergoing tests in the police lab, was responsible for the gunshot residue on Laure Rousseau’s hands, not her Manhurin.”

“So you’re saying what?”

“Laure didn’t shoot her partner.”

“I don’t understand,” Edith Mésard said. “Where did this ‘bullet’ that’s being tested come from?”

“The rooftop. I dug the bullet out of the chimney.”

Ludovic Jubert hadn’t said a word. His eyes hadn’t even blinked. Behind him, flecks of snow fluttered outside the window, drifting over traffic moving at a snail’s pace along the quai. And disappeared into the sluggish pewter Seine below.

“Who do you suggest shot Jacques Gagnard?”

“Another apartment resident heard men speaking Corsican on the scaffold that encircles the roof.”

Edith Mésard looked at Ludovic Jubert. Aimée saw his shoulders move in a slight shrug.

“If you and your partner would wait outside, please,” Edith Mésard said.

“YOU LOOK like you saw a ghost,” René said.

She nodded and sat beside him on the wooden bench. The hall radiator sputtered, emitting ripples of heat. “I did. In the flesh.”

A metal trolley with several coffees stood by a potted palm.

“Tell me about it over coffee?”

She nodded.

He edged off the high bench, slipped some francs into the tin with “two francs s’il vous plaît” pasted on it, filled two plastic cups with espresso, and handed her one.

“It’s about my father. And Jubert.”

“Your father?”

“And a cover-up.” She sighed, leaned back, and told him about Laure’s hint that her father had been involved in some cover-up and Jubert’s supposed connection to the Place Vendôme explosion that had killed Aimée’s father.

“You could have told me before.” René’s large green eyes flashed in anger. “But, Aimée, Laure’s disjointed ramblings don’t prove anything.”

She rubbed her eyes. “Jubert knows I broke into STIC. That’s why he’s here. He probably found out I used his name to request an expensive ballistics test. He wants to see what I’ve discovered.”

René shook his head. “How can he prove it? You covered your tracks, right?”

“Jubert’s not a good adversary to box with. But if I’m going down, he’s joining me.”

René took her hand. “You’ve found the eyewitness you needed to clear Laure, and the lab report. Hell, you’ve even found the bullet.”

“If they’ll accept it as evidence and credit Isabelle’s account.”

“How can they not?”

“I hope so,” she said. Looking down at her wet boots, she told him, “You won’t like this, but it’s better you work at home. Don’t go to the office.”

He rolled his eyes. “Giving it to me piecemeal, eh. What else haven’t you told me?”

“I can’t pin it down but there is a thug named Petru mixed up in this, too. He’s Corsican, but he doesn’t fit in with the Separatist movement. And he—or his friends—were on my tail.”

René handed her a box from his briefcase. “This arrived this morning.”

The return address was Dr. Guy Lambert, Hôpital Quinze-Vingts, Opthamaligie Department.

Something she’d forgotten at his office? She slit the tape with her keys.

Inside lay a six-month supply of her eye medication, a referral to an eye specialist, and several lines of Lord Byron’s poem “Fare Thee Well”:

And life is thorny; and youth is vain;

And to be wroth with one we love,

Doth work like madness in the brain.

She crumpled the paper.

René stared at her.

“Guy’s parting gift. Conscientious, as always.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s gone to Sudan to work with Doctors Without Borders.”

“Sudan?”

“To save the blind of Africa,” she said. “To get as far away from me as he can, and still work medical wonders.”

René kept staring. “He saved your vision, Aimée.”

Her lip trembled. If René didn’t shut up she’d burst into tears. She lowered her gaze.

“Like I didn’t know that, René!”

“Another thing you didn’t tell me,” René said, hurt and something else mingling in his voice.

“Isn’t it enough that I burden you with my love life . . . or my nonexistent love life, most of the time?” she asked. “It would be selfish. You’ve found someone and seem so happy; it’s not fair to dump on you.”

Instead of the acknowledgment she expected, more anger flashed in his eyes. “I thought we were closer, Aimée.”

“You’re my best friend! But do I have to reveal the squalid details of how I let Guy down?”

Pride, yes, her pride prevented her from revealing that Guy had left her. Left her because of who she wasn’t.

René shook his head in disgust.

All wrong, she got everything wrong with René whichever way she turned.

“Didn’t you throw yourself into this investigation to fill the void, Aimée? As usual?”

She slumped in the chair. Was he right?

He stood up, brushed off his black wool jacket, and handed her a card with the address of the Convent des Recollets. “Paul and Isabelle’s accommodation. The convent offers assistance to families in transition.”

He took his briefcase and walked down the hall.

What had she done now?

She called after him, “René, you’re so happy, I didn’t want to—”

He turned. “So I gather.”

How could it all go so wrong and all at the same time? René upset, Laure in a coma, Guy on another continent leaving Byron to console her: three thin lines. And Jubert with his gray snake eyes, now high up in Internal Affairs. The list grew. And the gnawing fear that Jacques’s murder was part of something bigger. The tape in her head replayed Lucien Sarti’s voice, the sensation of his thigh brushing hers, and his warm lips’ imprint on her cheek.

The door opened, and the floor creaked under Isabelle’s feet.

“Ça va?” Aimée managed a small smile, handing her the convent’s address. “They’re expecting you. Ask a friend to bring your things over. Stay until things get sorted out.”

“Merci,” she said.

“Mademoiselle Leduc, a moment please.” Edith Mésard spoke from her office.

Aimée crunched her plastic espresso cup and tossed it into the wire trash bin.

Edith Mésard and Jubert stood by a grouping of wingback chairs. A cigarette butt smoldered in an otherwise clean ashtray on the windowsill.

“No need to sit down, Mademoiselle. I’ll make it brief and to the point,” Edith Mésard said. She buttoned her tailored jacket. “Besides the municipal code infractions I could charge you with, not to mention a misdemeanor charge of evidence tampering and some hijinks with the police intranet system—” she paused. “You’re compromising a joint Renseignements Généraux and Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire undercover operation.”

Aimée was startled. She hadn’t expected this.

“What do you mean?”

“As Monsieur Jubert pointed out, it’s too late in the game. The covert operation is too far advanced for us to switch directions.”

“You’re asking me to cease trying to clear Laure Rousseau? I won’t. I’ve handed you exculpatory evidence on a plate. Heaping full. There’s no way to ignore it.”

“I’d suggest you listen, Mademoiselle,” La Proc said. “For a change.”

Aimée felt as if she were back at school being reprimanded for talking out of turn. Jubert watched her without a word.

“If Laure’s off the hook,” she said. “I’m all ears.”

“Do you forget, Mademoiselle, we operate in the real world according to regulations, Le Code Civil, and the judicial system?”

“So you’re saying you won’t—”

Jubert spoke for the first time, his voice calm and even. “She’s saying, Mademoiselle, all pertinent and legally obtained evidence will be presented at the hearing of the charges against Officer Rousseau.”

Right. She trusted him no further than she could spit.

“Do you agree that the bullet I obtained will be accepted into evidence?”

Jubert pulled at his chin with his thumb and forefinger.

“Mademoiselle, I see you don’t mince words,” he said. “Refreshing, I’m sure, in your line of work.”

Her line of work? Like she strong-armed witnesses? While he worked the old-boy network of favors asked and granted, shrouded by payoffs, implied and unspoken.

“We’d like your assistance,” he went on.

“My assistance?” She blinked.

“Your persistence has been noted. Instead of compromising our operation, which you seem bent on doing, we want you to work with us.”

Right. Her father had worked for the RG and it got him killed. She hated their everyday world of lies, deceit, and cover-ups.

“My report card said, ‘Doesn’t play well with others.’ I haven’t changed,” she told him.

But she had the sinking feeling that working with “them” was the price for Laure’s vindication. A complex RG and DST sting operation, orchestrated by the Ministry, was the last thing she wanted to be involved in. Her dealings with the secret world had blown up, literally in her face, in Place Vendôme and taken her father’s life.

“You’re thinking of your father. A tragedy, yes,” Jubert said. “Nothing to do with this operation or this branch. The circumstances were totally different.”

“I’d like to know who was responsible,” Aimée said, her gaze fixed on Jubert.

“That branch closed down. If any files exist, they’re classified,” Jubert said. “Live in the present; think of this as your contribution to guarding and preserving the security of France.”

Appealing to the patriot in her with their hollow jingoism? Think again, she wanted to say. Their offer smelled, but they didn’t leave her many options.

“Will you guarantee that Laure Rousseau’s suspension will be lifted and she’ll be cleared of all charges?”

“Under the law, in Internal Affairs investigations, officers charged with a crime remain suspended until the hearing officer reaches a decision.”

They would do nothing for Laure.

“You can’t ignore the witness who saw figures on the roof, the three flashes, the high-tin GSR content.”

“Duly noted, Mademoiselle,” Jubert said. “Of course, by using my name you prioritized a test—a fancy, expensive one, I believe—but I will authorize it after the fact, given your cooperation.”

Aimée stared at Edith Mésard with her perfectly applied makeup, a hint of blush, not too much.

“That’s all you can say?”

Edith Mésard returned her stare, reaching for her overcoat. “I will see justice done, Mademoiselle. Count on it. My record speaks for me. It’s why I serve.”

Edith Mésard clutched her Lancel briefcase. “I believe, in the Sentier case, our dealings proved that?”

In that case, Mésard had gotten parole for Stefan, an old German radical who’d known Aimée’s mother.

“Now, do I need to charge you with infractions of the code and a serious misdemeanor? Under the Security Services Protective Act, a consultant under contract in an ongoing investigation is exempt from prosecution.” She paused, clipping her cell phone to her side pocket. “But you tell me.”

Mésard was good. Still, she’d revealed how much they needed Aimée. Needed her like the country needed butter if Mésard was willing to invoke the Security Services Protective Act on her behalf.

Could she work with people who had links to the surveillance that had killed her father? Once she got involved with them, there would be no walking out. On the other hand, connections meant everything, and the closer she edged to the secret world, the more opportunities existed to find out about her father’s contract with the RG, and why he had died.

And maybe it would explain why Jacques was killed, too.

Doing business with the devil she knew seemed better than doing it with the one she couldn’t identify. And it was the only way she’d get Laure off. She nodded.

“Good,” Edith Mésard said, as if it was all in a busy morning’s work. “Monsieur Jubert will give you the details.”

Her heels clicked across the floor and the door shut behind her with a whoosh of cold air.

“Sit down, Mademoiselle,” Ludovic Jubert said. “I know you’re quick so this won’t take long.”

She sat down in the wingback chair, crossed her legs, and prayed she could do this.

“Before we start I need to know about the report,” she said.

“Report, Mademoiselle?” Jubert raised a thick white eyebrow.

She pulled out the photo of the four of them—Morbier, Georges Rousseau, her father, and Jubert—on the steps by Zette’s place and set it on the windowsill. The snow was still falling outside, like scattered feathers.

“Aaah, I had a flat stomach then,” Jubert said.

“I think you know what I want,” she said.

“I am clueless, Mademoiselle. Mind if I smoke?” he asked, as if they were in a café instead of La Proc’s office.

She pulled a Nicorette patch from her bag, then threw it back in. “Not if you offer me one.”

He handed her a pack of filtered Murati Ambassador, a Swiss brand. She took one and he lit it with a silver lighter. She inhaled, and the smooth kick slid to the back of her throat.

“Now try not to think of this as the dentist’s chair, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Enjoy this little guilty pleasure and let’s get started.”

“You’ll have my full cooperation,” she said, leaning back and savoring the Murati. “But first I need to know if you, or all of you, and my father were involved with a gambling scam in Montmartre. One Georges Rousseau took credit for stopping it though it’s still going on in Zette’s bar. And all over the quartier, I imagine.”

“That’s what you’re worried about? This secret?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

“Tell me and it will go no further than this room.”

His gray eyes flickered as he weighed his answer.

“Corruption’s a serious charge,” he said.

“I don’t believe Papa was involved in a cover-up of corruption. I think you were and saddled him with your crime. You stigmatized the rest of his life.”

“Your mother did that, Mademoiselle,” Ludovic Jubert said without missing a beat. “She tainted his career prospects.”

Her American mother who had left them and joined a group of radicals in the seventies. “That’s your opinion.” She took a drag to cover the jolt Jubert’s words had given her.

“Jean-Claude paid for that many times over,” he said, looking out the window. “A good flic. He had a nose, as they say, for the odor of crime. No getting past that. And I see you do, too.” He sighed. “Georges Rousseau liked the odor. He didn’t mind running informers and giving them too much leeway.”

“Are you saying Georges Rousseau was the corrupt one? He died a decorated—”

“And valorous commissaire,” Ludovic Jubert interrupted.

“We had to cover for him. He’d compromised too much in Montmartre.”

Was that what Morbier was hiding? Why did Laure think it was Aimée’s father who was implicated?

“Some of Rousseau’s informers played by the rules,” Jubert continued. “Still do. We turn a blind eye to their little operations and they reciprocate with information on more serious matters. Matters affecting national security. All flics depend on informers; we wouldn’t get far without insider information.” He ground out his cigarette, impatient. “But you know this. You know how the system operates.”

She’d been raised on it. Her father hated it and left to join her grandfather at Leduc Detective. One doesn’t touch pitch, he’d said, without being blackened.

“Then you’re saying Georges Rousseau took bribes and became corrupt,” she said, “but was decorated and promoted because his network of informers was needed? Then why does Laure believe my father was corrupt and the proof’s in a report?”

“Use your imagination,” he said.

“You’re implying Laure’s father fingered mine, shifted his own guilt onto my father?”

“Close.”

“Where’s the police file?”

“The RG deep-froze most of them.”

She shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”

“Mademoiselle, it’s in your interest to do so.” He stood. “Still the little firebrand, I see,” he said. “Daddy’s little girl. Your father wanted a boy, you know.”

Bastard! That stung. How would he know?

She clutched the edge of the chair, white knuckled. She wouldn’t let him see how his words had rocked her. She recalled Laure’s mumblings and Morbier’s comments scrawled on the newspaper.

“This all ties to the investigation of Corsican Separatists six years ago, doesn’t it? The question of where they were getting arms. That’s the secret report. My father worked on it, didn’t he? With you?”

Ludovic Jubert stabbed out his cigarette and nodded.

“Your father always said you were sharp,” he said.

“Did this involve the explosion in Place Vendôme that killed him?”

“Not at all. It is as I told you. Let’s move to the present, shall we?” He opened a drawer in the desk and took out a file.

“We believe this man’s running a Separatist network in Montmartre. We count on you to find him.”

He handed it to her. “Look inside. He’s a Corsican terrorist, a member of the Armata Corsa, responsible for bomb threats to the Mairie and for holdups using the arms that were stolen six years ago.”

“Eastern European arms—?”

“Taken from Croatia, stockpiled by our military in Solenzara, at least until they disappeared six years ago. This past year they’ve been turning up in Paris with disturbing regularity.”

“How do you know this?”

“We have big ears, Mademoiselle.”

Big Ears . . . Frenchelon?

She opened the file. Lucien Sarti’s image stared back at her.