Murder in Montmartre

Friday Morning

AIMÉE HANDED THE FRANCS to Pascalou, her local butcher, who wiped his hands on the red-smeared apron straining around his rotund figure.

“I threw in a little treat,” he said and grinned. “Something Miles Davis likes.”

“You spoil him, Pascalou,” she said.

“Time for him to have a special friend, Aimée,” he said, wagging his finger.

And what about me? She just smiled.

“Merci.” She pocketed her change and hefted the white waxed-paper packet of Miles Davis’s lamb shanks. The bells tinkled on the butcher-shop door as she shut it.

Not thirty minutes ago, she’d listened to Jubert’s description of the terrorist cell concealing arms somewhere in Montmartre. She had kept quiet regarding Lucien Sarti. She couldn’t figure him out. Suspicion of Jubert still nagged her. Would he keep his end of the bargain concerning Laure?

She had to find Petru, more and more convinced was she that he, rather than Lucien, was the key. There was no reason to inform Jubert yet. She would deliver a terrorist to him, but it wouldn’t be whom he expected.

First, she had to work on Frenchelon to find out how they’d traced the terrorist network back to Lucien Sarti.

She called Saj, ordered Indian takeout from Passage Brady, and booted up her laptop at home. By the time Saj arrived, in a flowing Afghan embroidered shearling coat, the pakoras and vegetarian thali sat on the fireplace mantel, the steam escaping and fogging the tarnished mirror behind it. Cumin and the scent of coconut curry filled the salon that doubled as her home office.

“Smells wonderful,” he said.

“Ready for overtime?” she asked. “I think you’ll like this project.”

Saj eyed the laptop screen. “Frenchelon, hmmm. So we’re working on satellite netspionage?” he asked.

“Netspionage? I like that,” she said, her fingers clicking over the keys. “Digital dead-letter drop, heard of that?”

He nodded, hung his coat behind the chair, and kicked off his sandals. “Do it all the time. Where’s René?”

“At his place,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “Working.”

“So they’re watching your office like last time, eh?”

Saj was quick.

“Who is it this time?”

“Supposedly Corsican Separatists, or else the local mafia under the guise of the Armata Corsa. Charming mecs, either way.”

Saj paused, holding a garlic naan midair. “Talk about a bad-boy magnet! I don’t get it. You and René do computer security. How come you keep getting involved with thugs?”

“Nice segue,” she said. “It’s all related. And something smells way off. That’s why I called you.”

“I need to center, Aimée,” Saj said, wiping his hands and settling cross-legged on her threadbare Savonnerie carpet.

She groaned inside. Why couldn’t he center before he came?

“Why don’t you join me? It’s been a while for you, non?”

She’d made a stab at meditation at the Cao Dai temple in November and failed at mindful breaths. Her legs had cramped, her mind run rampant, yet she had experienced one brief shining moment when the world fell away and somehow she’d breathed with the universe.

“Right now I can use all the help I can get.”

She sat cross-legged beside him, touched her thumbs to her middle fingers. Tried to clear her mind.

“Deep asana,” Saj said. “Breathe in through the nostrils, hold it, good, now a long exhale.”

Conscious of the leafless tree branch slapping her window, the crackle of the logs in the fire, and the hardness of the wood floor, she waited. The other “state” remained elusive. Yet after ten minutes her mind had cleared.

Saj stood up and helped himself to the Indian food.

Bordereau of the DST had mentioned a data-encryption leak in the same sentence with Corsican Separatists. “Look at this,” she said. “Data-encryption leaks and one link relating to Frenchelon. What do you know about a connection to the satellite Helios-1A?”

“The satellite has a stowaway on board, the Eurocom, an interception cartridge that picks up Inmarsat and Intelsat signals so it can read microwave and mobile phone communications. My friend at Dassault Systèmes worked on the Eurocom’s manufacture.”

“Impressive,” she said. “A great tool with which to find terrorists.”

“They call it searching the Bitstream; it’s like sifting sand to find a coin most of the time.”

“Say that again,” she said, drumming her chipped nails on the space bar.

“Eh, searching the Bitstream . . . .”

“That’s it!” Hadn’t Zoe Tardou heard “searching the stream” from the men on the roof speaking in Corsican to cloak their meaning? She’d found the connection at last.

Saj grinned, pushed a dark blond dreadlock behind his shoulder. “All things to all people, I’d say. One juicy intercept was Brezhnev’s phone call to his mistress from his limo. Another, the Rainbow Warrior scandal with Greenpeace, via ARABSAT and Gadhafi’s conflict with Chad. But NATO’s the prime target for Echelon and a real sieve. Of course, it’s also used for rampant corporate espionage.”

Her ears perked up. She sat forward in her chair. “Can you crack it?”

“Now why would I do that?”

“To show you can,” she said. “How difficult would it be for you or anyone else?”

“Get real, Aimée. We’re talking big boys with big toys.”

“Say someone hired you to intercept a satellite feed.”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “I’d need special equipment.”

“Like what?”

She could tell she’d sparked his interest by the way he’d already clicked on the Net and brought up some sites.

“Like a satellite,” he said. “And say I had a satellite, the Faraday cage poses a problem.”

“Like a cage for tigers?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” he said.

“Where’s this Faraday cage?”

Saj tied back his dreadlocks with an elastic band. “Far as I know, it’s at the same facility as the parabola satellite dishes. Would have to be to access the feed.” He pointed to his screen. “See, e-mails, land lines, cell-phone conversations, and faxes are beamed in a stream of data. Satellites in a geosynchronous and a polar orbit receive this data, then transmit it back in a continuous sequence of bits, downlinking the raw stream of data to a dish or to antennas on land. This data feed’s piped from the antenna into the Faraday cage for deciphering. Inside the cage, a program picks out key and sensitive words and encrypts them, then sends the encrypted info on, via fiber optics, a protected radio network, or a disc.”

“Why not by e-mail?”

“Not safe, unless you use a cipher and have a key at the other end.”

Plucking words out of the ether, then sorting them and making sense of them. She stood and paced in the room. A suffused weak winter light shrouded the pear tree below in the courtyard.

“Rumor has it Frenchelon processes two million phone calls, faxes, and e-mails worldwide each month,” she said. “Maybe more. It even tracks individual bank accounts. Or so they say.”

Saj nodded. “The genius lies in the Faraday cage’s banks of computers that are programmed to recognize key words.” He rolled his neck from side to side.

“Like addresses, phone numbers surveilled by the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure; embassies, foreign ministers, multinational corporations, and suspected agents?”

Saj nodded. “The system records and transmits them for analysis. La routine, they call it. What doesn’t turn out to be relevant is thrown into the information garbage can.”

“So Frenchelon transmits encrypted data of these e-mails, faxes, and phone conversations, filtered and sorted by key words, to where?”

He shrugged. “The analysis hub could exist anywhere.”

She leaned forward, deep in thought. His explanation made her determined to get an Inmarsat satellite phone, which would be harder to intercept since it used its own three satellites. She had known about the Central d’Écoute Téléphonique central listening center under Les Invalides where tapped phone lines were monitored by the judiciare and military. But only under authorization by the president at Matignon Palace. Or so the story went. This was far more all-encompassing.

“How would a criminal get into Big Ears?” she asked.

He paused. “Easiest thing would be to get the cipher key, depends how often they change it—once a day, once a week on Thursday, or whatever—tap into the microwaves, and—”

“Sell the feed and the key to the highest bidder,” she said, her eyes lighting up, “like a renegade terrorist group.”

What if Jacques had stumbled onto the cipher key involving the Corsican Separatists? But how would Jacques, a flic in the eighteenth, have access to a high-security agency leak?

Thoughts whirled through her head: Jacques gambled, he moonlighted for Zette—who operated illegal gambling machines in his bar—escorting “VIPs”. Maybe VIPs did slum in Montmartre at Zette’s. Maybe Zette had told her the truth and it was some security dweeb whom Jacques had squired around who had info to share. But why would he spill his guts to Jacques, a flic? Correction, a bent flic. But selling classified encrypted data to Corsican Separatists was another league altogether, a whole other division. The connection to Jacques remained muddled at best.

She opened the file on her laptop that she’d copied from STIC and combed through Jacques Gagnard’s data. Two minutes later she’d found it. Stupid. She should have checked before. He’d served in the military at Solenzara and been discharged for misconduct. Gambling? It had been six years ago. Selling the missing arms? But those infusions of cash to his bank account were recent.

“What’s going on in that spiky-haired head of yours?”

“Illegal thoughts.” She gave him a big smile. “Finish up the pakoras and show me the Frenchelon sites.”

“Look, I hack and crack, do encryption. What kind of job is this?”

“A big one. Can you highlight the possible hubs in France or, better still, refine the target to the Paris area?”

“Check this out,” Saj said. “Outside Paris, in the suburb of Alluets-le-Roi, the DGSE have a big installation of parabolas and antennas,” Saj said, pulling up an e-mail. “But according to my friend, they handle intercepted communications right here in Paris, too.”

“Where?” Aimée stood up.

“La piscine,” he said.

“At a pool?”

“That’s what they call it. It’s on Boulevard Mortier, right behind the public pool.” He meant the military caserne in Belleville bordering the Périphérique ring road, a nineteenth-century barracks once, the home of the 104th corps of Le Mâns.

“So, in theory, a data-encryption leak would come from there?”

Saj gave a small smile. “Bound and determined to connect this, eh?”

They were getting closer, she sensed it. Smelled it. Not just smoke, but sparks she could fan into a fire.

“Put it this way,” she said. “What would you do, Saj, if you had skills and access to this encrypted data and a hidden agenda, say, selling military and ministerial documents, plans for Corsica? Or stolen arms?”

“The best plans, the ones that work, are real simple,” he said.

“Simple? So tell me simple.”

An idea formed in her mind as he spoke. Had Jacques known who was furnishing the arms? Or how?

“The ideal? A hardware guy, probably an outside consultant, since the military hasn’t trained enough of them yet. Or maybe he’s part of the team that set up the system, or installed a satellite communication fiber optic line, for example. He knows the hardware since he’s installed it or designed it. He knows the vulnerabilities. One day something fizzes and, doing repairs or system analysis, he realizes this whatever is a back-door access to valuable data. Maybe for only so many hours, or period of time, or maybe he can engineer an open door for an hour once a week. And he sells this stream.”

A genius, Saj was a genius!

“A back door, of course! What about the cipher key?”

“Good point. No one can read the data without the key. That’s the money part, reading it. Say he provides the cipher key for a price, but it’s only good once. They change them constantly.”

If Saj could think like this, chances were someone else had, too.

She handed Saj the printout from Nathalie’s file.

“Like this?”

Saj scanned the printout, gave a low whistle. “Let me work on this. You’ve got a devious little mind, Aimée,” he said, clicking away nonstop.

“As they say, ‘Takes one to know one.’” She picked up her bag. Time to do the footwork. “Call me when you find something.”

AIMÉE TOOK the Metro to station Guy Moquet, named for a seventeen-year-old Communist Résistance fighter. She paused on the platform and saw the copy of his last letter, dated 1943, from prison, behind a glass plaque. Seventeen years old. The lines that stuck in her head were his only worry being that he might have died in vain. What would he think now, if he’d lived?

She tried Cloclo. No answer. She climbed the Metro steps into the bone-chilling air. She bent against the wind climbing rue Lamarck, passed a parking garage, a funeral parlor, a small instrument shop from which a man was carrying a violin case, a shoemaker with miniature porcelain shoes filling his tall window. Reaching Place Froment, she confronted six small streets intersected by a kidney-shaped island facing a café under a red sign reading TABAC. Opposite nestled a motorcycle riding school, a bakery, its glass panels painted with fading belle époque threshing scenes, a hip resto, and a pharmacy with a lighted green neon cross above its window. A bourgeois enclave. Had Conari been wrong? Had she wasted a trip?

She walked by a small Arab grocer’s with bins of fruit and vegetables outside under a canopy. Across the way stood Hôpital Bretonneau, once a children’s hospital, now inhabited by squatters, judging from the graffitied LIBRE ART, LIBRE ARTISTES sign. Huge and taking up most of the block.

She turned on rue Carpeaux. Entered the corner café with its smell of wet dog. A spaniel lay behind the counter next to the owner, who had a cell phone cupping his ear. From the look of it, the café had last been decorated in the fifties.

The owner nodded to her, the phone still cradled on his shoulder.

“Monsieur, I’m looking for the Turkish grocery store,” she said.

He jerked his thumb out the window toward the blackened stone hospital wall bordering Montmartre cemetery.

“Merci.”

How had patients felt about the view from their windows, a tree-speckled cemetery bordered by a high wall containing the final resting place of Émile Zola, among others?

Aside from the vineyard, and the cemeteries, the hospital occupied one of the largest sites in the area. A demolition and renovation approval sign dated 1989 was posted on the wall but the place still hadn’t been rebuilt.

Then she spied the Turkish grocery, a storefront with bins of fruit, packaged Parmalat tomato sauce, and a dusty hookah in the window. Inside, Turkish music whined and two men played cards on the counter by the cash register. The narrow store was crammed to the old roof beams with canned food, rubber sandals, oddments, Turkish tapes and videos.

“Bonjour, Messieurs,” she said, picking up a bottle of Vittel and laying a few francs on the counter. “Salaam Aleikoum.”

“Aleikoum salaam,” said the older of the two men, returning her greeting.

“If I may interrupt you for a moment,” she said, “my friend Petru used to live upstairs, but he’s moved. Any idea where I can find him?”

“Petru?”

“A Corsican. He changes his hair color more often than I do,” she grinned. “You know who I mean, eh?”

“Haven’t seen him for a while,” the man said. His companion said something in Arabic. “I’m sorry, my friend said since yesterday.”

She thanked him and went through the open door to a small apartment foyer that smelled of pine soap. A young woman in a blue smock, her hair in a thick black bun, mopped the cracked tiles.

“Pardon, Madame, I’m looking for Petru, a Corsican. Did he leave a forwarding address?”

The woman set her mop in the metal pail. “Gone.” She paused and wiped her brow. “Here people don’t leave addresses when they move,” she said. Her accent was Portuguese. “Clean, all clean, the place is vacant.”

A glittering earring hung from the woman’s pocket. It seemed familiar. Aimée stared at it. “How beautiful. It’s pink Diamonique, non?”

The woman clutched the earring and backed away.

“Madame, did you find this on the steps, or in Petru’s apartment?”

The woman shook her head.

“A prostitute came here looking for Petru, didn’t she? She wore costume jewelry like this,” Aimée said.

“I do my job, clean the halls, mop down the stairs and—”

“When was she here? Yesterday, last night?”

The woman made the sign of the cross. “I don’t steal.”

“Of course not. But did you see—”

“She’s saying I stole it?” The Portuguese woman’s eyes blinked in fear. She repeated, “I clean good. Verra, see. No lose my job. She’s hurt. Black eye, big, swollen. She come after me?”

“Bruised, you mean she’d been beaten up?”

The woman nodded.

“I tell her God will forgive her this life,” the woman said. “Tell her, go to Bus des Femmes. Get rest. They help women like her. She laugh at me. Then I find it this morning.”

She put it in Aimée’s hands. “Take it to her. No trouble. I make no trouble.”

Worried, Aimée wondered if she’d get there in time.

AIMÉE FOUND the Bus des Femmes, the mobile unit offering medical, legal, social, and practical support to working prostitutes, parked near Porte de St. Ouen. A long motor home, painted purple, emitting steam and the fragrance of coffee from its open door. Inside, a coffeemaker and leaflets covered a small table. A straw basket of rainbow-colored condoms hung from a window with “Take me, I’m Yours” printed on it. Lists of clinics were pasted on the windows. Two women chatted as they sat on long benches drinking coffee. Another woman was doing a crossword puzzle.

From their heavy makeup, miniskirts, and bustiers, Aimée figured most of the women were just taking a break from work. The close, warm air, filled with cheap scent, made for a relaxed atmosphere, the feeling of a safe haven.

“Like some coffee?”

Aimée paused before a young woman in a tracksuit with a folder under her arm.

“No thanks,” she said. “I thought Cloclo might be here.”

“I’m Odile, on-site legal aid.” She smiled and extended her hand. “Cloclo’s your friend?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she said. “I think Cloclo was beaten up.”

Odile nodded. “We see it more and more. Many have moved off the main boulevards into more secluded spots: car parks, massage parlors, trying to avoid the Brigade des Moeurs, the morals squad. Or they work late nights, from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m., when most people are at home, sleeping. But driving them underground makes them an easier target for violence.”

Of course.

“Is she Eastern European?” Odile asked. “Those girls do twenty to thirty clients a day to avoid a beating from their pimps.” Aimée hoped Odile hadn’t seen her wince.

“She’s older and works on rue André Antoine,” Aimée said. “She’s a chandelle,” she said, a prostitute who waits under a lamppost. “Have you seen her?”

“You understand we respect a woman’s right to privacy. No johns, no flics, or anyone else gets information. If you don’t see her here, I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

“If she’s with the doctor, could you tell her I’m here? She’s in danger.”

Odile shrugged. “That’s true for all of our women.”

Aimée saw the pamphlets on sex trafficking and hostels for women in crisis, the worn platform heels of the woman doing the crossword puzzle and the purple bruises on her legs that makeup didn’t hide.

“I haven’t seen her,” Odile disclosed.

Disappointed, Aimée crossed the boulevard toward the Metro. She figured Cloclo had been looking for Petru, too. Maybe she’d found out where his new place was but she’d disappeared. Probably she’d given Aimée the runaround.

She peered in several fogged-up café windows, hoping to find Cloclo, but didn’t see her. At Café le Rotonde, the last one before she reached the Metro station, she looked inside. No Cloclo at the counter. But as she was about to give up, Aimée saw Cloclo, huddled in a black coat, her feet up, at a far back table standing flush against the tobacco-stained wall.

Aimée ordered and paid for a brandy. “You look like you could use something strong,” she said, setting it down in front of Cloclo. The café decor looked unchanged from the thirties except for the télé blaring above the bar.

“Not you again,” Cloclo said. Yet her hand shot out and took the small balloon-shaped snifter.

“Did Petru do this?”

Cloclo snorted. “Him?”

“Weren’t you on the way to the Bus des Femmes?”

“They don’t have this,” Cloclo said, downing the brandy.

“Bus des Femmes has a doctor, Cloclo. You should be examined,” she said. “Where’s Petru?”

“Why?”

And then the centime dropped. Hurt and anger flared inside. “Petru’s your pimp, right? You lied, even after I warned you of the danger.”

Cloclo waved Aimée away with her costume-jewelry-be-ringed hand.

“My head’s splitting. Listen, he paid me to tell him when I saw you,” she said, rubbing her temple.

Paid her? “I’ll double it. Where the hell is he?”

And for the first time Aimée saw fear on Cloclo’s made-up face. “I have to go,” she said and scrabbled for her purse.

Aimée reached over and clamped her hands on Cloclo’s shoulders. “Not until you tell me where I can find Petru.”

Cloclo’s eyes darted around the café. “It’s not safe. And he’s not my pimp.”

“You’re not leaving until you tell me.”

Cloclo downed the brandy.

“They took him.”

Aimée stiffened. “Who?”

“A van pulled up; some mecs grabbed him and drove off.”

“Mecs with black caps and down jackets, one with bad teeth?”

Cloclo nodded.

“Where?”

“They sped off, I don’t know where.”

Aimée noticed the red welts on Cloclo’s neck, pictured Cloclo’s bleak future. She threw the earring and fifty francs on the water-stained table. “Go see the doctor, Cloclo.”