Murder in Montmartre

Friday Evening

DARKNESS HAD FALLEN OVER the wet street filled with buses and taxis. Passersby gripped shopping bags and hurried, their coat collars raised against the frigid air.

Aimée was stumped, didn’t know where to turn, where to look. She called Strago. No answer. Then she had an idea.

Sebastian, her cousin, knew the club scene. She reached him at his framing shop in Belleville. The pounding of hammers in the background told her that her little cousin was working late.

“Sebastian?”

The pounding ceased, replaced by the slow whir of a table saw.

“Rush order, Aimée,” he said. “Twenty prints to frame and hang for a resto opening tomorrow. No time to climb roofs tonight.”

His business had taken off. She felt proud of him. And he’d been clean, drug free, for four years now.

“One question, I’m looking for a DJ spinning vinyl, Lucien Sarti. Got an idea where I could find him?”

“What’s his moniker?”

“DJ moniker? No clue. He’s a Corsican musician, plays a blend of techno and polyphony.”

In the pause, she heard grinding and the punch of metal.

“He could spin in a style totally different from his own music.”

“What do you mean?”

“Trad, cyber, synth, eighties industrial, trance. You name it,” he said.

She didn’t have all night. How could she ever find him?

“Sebastian, please narrow it down.”

“DJs cater to the club crowd, that’s how they make a living. The good ones create a style and guard it. Lead double lives. I know a flic who spins vinyl near République, but you’d never know it. A down and dirty place full of goths, punks, metal-heads, and transients.”

Hadn’t Yann said Lucien slept rough?

“What’s it called?”

“Gibus on rue du Faubourg du Temple,” he said.

“Gibus . . . argot for a flip-flop cap?”

“The same. Everyone spins there at one time or other.”

She could start there. And with a little work, she had the perfect outfit.

DOWN A PASSAGE under the railway lines she found Gibus. There was no name outside, only a scuffed graffitied door, where a few goths stood smoking. She heard the flutter of wings as pigeons swooped from the rusted rafters above.

The roofed passage once had been occupied by depots and warehouses for goods arriving by train. Now freshly painted signs proclaimed it to be a future site for an Internet and software hub dubbed “Silicon Alley,” sponsored by the government. Judging by the peeling walls and dilapidated buildings, they had a long road ahead of them.

Aimée walked through the door, passing twenty francs to a skinhead with several gold teeth.

“DJ tonight?” she asked.

He nodded and unlatched the worn velvet entry rope, leading to a corridor with fluorescent pink walls. “It’s goth night, mind the stairs.”

Goth. She wouldn’t look too out of place with her long black net dress and matted black hair extensions. If Sebastian had steered her right, someone in the DJ network would know Lucien. She descended in the dark, holding the metal banister of a thin spiral staircase, and felt her way along the damp wall of the stone vaulted underground passage that was vibrating to the thrum of heavy metal. Her hands came back moist with an oily patina.

The passage widened into a cavern redolent of papier d’ar-ménie, the old-fashioned dark rose strips, folded accordion style, burned to freshen rooms, which left a distinctive aroma behind. A smell she associated with her piano teacher, an old Russian woman who burned it to hide the fact that she cooked on a hot plate and lived in the same single room she taught in.

Aimée sniffed something else. Cats, she figured, to keep down the rodent population. Fine by her.

Her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light given off by black candles burning in niches in the walls and lining the bar. The goth crowd, male and female, wore black lipstick and nail polish. They congregated against the moisture-laden walls or sat on what looked like prayer benches, presenting a tableau reminiscent of a medieval tapestry, updated with a twentieth-century twist. Several goths clustered deep in conversation, over a leather-bound volume whose cover bore a gold-embossed cross. Some après-club Black Mass negotiation?

She heard voices raised in an argument. Someone was being sick in the corner. In this kind of place, one kept moving to avoid a fight. She lifted her trailing hem and headed toward the bar.

Her second dive that night.

She ordered a Belgian beer laced with framboise—raspberries— from the barman. A row of silver rings curved up his ear and glow-in-the-dark bracelets shone up his arm like twisting fluorescent green snakes. She paid but stopped him from pouring the beer into a tall glass as she noticed the sink filled with scummy water. She took the bottle. Hygiene, she realized, was not a priority here.

State-of-the-art speakers blared from niches in stone coves. A woman leaning on the pewlike benches nodded to the beat, her black-ringed eyes like dark holes in her face, her chains clinking against the spiked dog collar on her neck.

“Who’s spinning?” Aimée asked, sidling next to her.

“MC Gotha, my boyfriend,” the woman said, pride in her voice. “Grooves, non? Zero le Crèche, he calls it.”

At least that’s what Aimée deciphered; the woman’s tongue stud garbled her words. The DJ bent over a turntable, big hair and tight black tank top, his silver-ringed fingers catching the reflection of the flickering black candles.

“I thought he’d show tonight,” Aimée said, as if to herself. “I promised to return his mix.”

The woman shrugged, shifting on her chunky platform boots.

“That other DJ, you know, the Corsican musician?”

The woman’s black eyes narrowed. “Tonight’s goth.”

Aimée scanned the crowd. “He spins all over. I really have to find him.” She paused. “Bet your boyfriend knows him. Introduce me?” Unacquainted with the protocol, she figured it was wise to ask for an introduction, after noticing the pointed black nails and vial of garnet liquid, like blood, hanging from the woman’s neck.

“He’s busy,” she said. “Can’t you see?”

“Trouble, I’ve got trouble, if I don’t find the Corsican,” Aimée said. The Stella Artois bottle the goth held was empty. “Ask him for me, eh? I’ll get you a beer while you do.”

Hesitation painted the woman’s face as the DJ announced a break. By the time Aimée returned, they were standing together. Aimée handed her the beer and the woman rewarded her with another shrug and passed it to her boyfriend.

“Corsican? I know the one you mean,” the DJ said, reaching out his ringed hand. “He’s not here. I’ll give him the mix.”

She didn’t know what to do. She hesitated. What if she gave him a disc and he played it? Though she doubted one DJ would handle another’s mix—wasn’t it their signature, their stock in trade—? There was something about a man with black nail polish and a better manicure than hers that she didn’t trust. The only things in her bag were empty floppy discs.

“Dark hair and eyes, a musician who mixes polyphony and techno. We’re talking about the same one?”

“You’re the second one tonight.” The DJ made a face.

Second one?

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s goth time, not laid-back time,” he said, “That one’s a lightweight.” He looked bored, gave a dismissive sigh. “Better luck in the chill room.”

So she wasn’t the only one looking for Sarti.

Chill room . . . was that here or at another club? She made her way back toward the bar and followed a couple into the dark cavern behind, crowded with milling goths. Their black attire was like a uniform. The smoke and the rotting smell from the walls not masked by the papier d’arménie was getting to her. And in the humid, swamplike air her hair extensions had begun to droop. Already the temporary adhesive had melted into telltale glop on her neck. If she didn’t leave soon they’d come off in big clumps. She pulled a net scarf over her head and hoped they’d stay attached.

Drum and bass with a few sampled jazz riffs drifted from somewhere. She followed the beat into another cavern where a mixed crowd lay sprawled on sofas or danced with closed eyes.

The man unpacking his coffin box—a hard plastic carry case for turntables—nodded at her question. “DJ Ketlogic, a chill-room man for sure,” he said. “Good trance mix.”

She smiled, as if she understood what he meant. “Where is he?”

“You missed him.”

BACK IN MONTMARTRE she found a third club. At least she could take off the fake hair and stuff it in her bag now. Anything that didn’t kill you made you stronger. Wasn’t that what they said?

She entered the smoke-filled club now pulsing with techno located in a once elegant hotel particulier with high ceilings. The yawning marble fireplace was piled with alternative newspapers. There was a tarnished fin de siècle mirror above it and a theatre space up the stone stairs, so worn they had almost melted.

“DJ Ketlogic spinning tonight?” she asked.

“Check the bar,” said a man with a shaved head and dead brown eyes.

Lucien himself stood there by the brass-handled beer pulls. Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. Just when she’d found Lucien.

“Allô?” she said, impatient.

“Aimée,” Saj said. “You had a good idea. I burrowed around and discovered a connection between the central listening center at Les Invalides and the Big Ears.”

“You did?” Never mind how—Saj had taken her idea and run with it. And found a connection! “Go on, Saj,” she said, watching Lucien gather up his music case.

“They’re monitoring Montmartre from a flat in the quartier, right there! Sounds like a sweet setup. Cozy, they just ordered Chinese takeout. Bet they’ll hear us tomorrow or whenever when they decrypt this.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Sixteen, rue Nicollet. Watch out.”

“Superbe, Saj.”

She’d better get there before they shut it down. But, having finally found Lucien, she couldn’t just leave empty-handed. As if he sensed her presence, he turned. His black eyes glittered in the dim light of the bar as he looked her up and down.

“Your usual attire?”

She’d forgotten her goth outfit. No wonder people had given her a wide berth in the Metro.

“Makes life interesting,” she said. She moved toward him and took his arm.

“Like to live on the edge, don’t you?” he said.

“They’ve mounted an operation and you’re it,” she said in his ear. “I’m supposed to turn you in. I’ll have to unless you guide me to Petru or help me find him.”

“You just don’t give up, do you?”

“If I do they’ll land you like a fat fish. Tonight, tomorrow, or the next day. Your choice.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know where the salaud went.”

“Right now, I believe you. But you can help me find him. Let’s catch a taxi.”

THE STEEP stairs of rue Nicollet, a dark narrow seam on the less fashionable side of Sacré Coeur, loomed overhead. Strains of African music floated from an open window. Green plastic garbage containers stood by a gate on the steps; tree branches cast sticklike shadows over number 16’s small walled courtyard. Before Aimée could ask Lucien to wait, she heard groaning in the shadows. Human moans. Embarrassed, she wondered if they’d stumbled on an amorous couple. Or . . . the groaning escalated . . . were they the sounds of someone in pain?

She skirted the garbage containers and stood on the dark wet pavement leading to a back building. A figure huddled against the rear wall. She shone her penlight on it to reveal a man, his black leather coat torn, bleeding onto the brown, sodden leaves. Petru.

“Salaud, bastardo,” Lucien swore, followed by more words in Corsican she couldn’t understand. He’d pulled out a knife and thrust it at the shaking Petru.

“Stop!” She never thought she’d protect this mec but now she pulled at Lucien’s arm. “Wait, I have to talk to him.”

“It’s going down now,” gasped a white-faced Petru. “The guns, the rocket launchers. I have to tell them. . . .”

“Tell the DST?”

He nodded, slumping further. His face creased in pain.

So Petru was an informer for the DST.

“Liar, you framed me,” Lucien accused, shaking Aimée off.

“Why did you pay Cloclo?” Aimée asked.

“To keep tabs on you,” Petru gasped. “What you found out. I played along, trying to find the real villain, but the DST thinks it’s you, Lucien. I have to tell them. . . .”

“Who’s behind it?” She knelt, ripped off the hem of her black net dress, and used it to stanch Petru’s leg wound. Lights blazed in an upstairs flat. Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket once again but she ignored it. She heard doors slam, footsteps. The DST. Not the folks she’d care to meet on these dark stairs.

“Who, Petru?”

His eyelids fluttered. “Conari’s site . . . the hospital . . . tunnel.”

Conari . . . the hospital. Think, she had to think. She pulled Lucien back.

“Give me half an hour before you tell them, do you understand?” But Petru’s eyes had closed, his head slumped forward.

“I’ll take care of him,” Lucien said, elbowing her aside.

“The DST will take care of you if we don’t leave now,” she said, alarmed.

Comprehension dawned in his eyes.

“Quick!” She ran up the steps two at a time, panting and wishing to God she hadn’t gained that kilo. When she reached the summit by an école maternelle, she heard Lucien behind her.

Her cell phone vibrated again. She caught her breath and hit Voice Mail. Two calls, both of them just static, then someone breathing. A heavy breather. Then the sound of the phone crashing on the floor and “Nurse, the patient . . .,” then a buzz.

Her heart jumped. Was Laure trying to phone her? She steadied her shaking hands and hit Call Back.

“Oui?” said a low voice.

“It’s Aimée Leduc, I have several messages on my phone.”

“Our patient, Laure Rousseau, is agitated. It seems she’s trying to get a message to you. She’s able to use a keyboard.”

Was Laure OK? Trying to communicate with her?

In the background Aimée heard a garbled noise.

“She can’t speak, but she can tap letters and numbers on a keyboard.”

“What has she said—I mean, tapped?” Aimée asked, wishing the nurse would hurry.

“Your name, number, and what looks like, ‘Remember . . . men saying Breton.’ That’s all.”

“Men on the roof? Ask her if it was the men on the roof.

Please, nurse.”

Aimée heard the nurse ask.

“She blinked yes.”

Laure had remembered something from the roof.

“Does she mean Bretonneau, the hospital?”

“She looks tired—”

“Please, it’s vital. Ask her,” Aimée said, trying not to shout.

“Yes. She tapped yes.”

“Tell Laure I’m en route.”

She stuck her cell phone in her pocket.

“Is Conari behind it?” Lucien asked.

“Things point to him but I’m not sure.” She had doubts. Yet he could use Lucien’s music contract to launder arms money. He had Corsican contacts and a construction company. But his ties to the government, evidenced by the man from the Ministry they’d seen with him at the church, confused her.

“Let’s find out.”

TOO BAD she hadn’t looked closer at the construction trucks parked inside the Hôpital Bretonneau courtyard. “Conari Ltd.” was painted on them. It all fit together. The place had been vacant for six years, since 1989, according to the demolition permit on the wall. The year Jubert said her father had been given a contract to work on the stolen arms case.

She had been careless and now it would cost her. Again. No time to think of that. She had to get inside. They climbed over the locked gate, past the squat, which was dark and partly boarded up. She punched in Morbier’s number.

Busy.

She had to reach him. Tried again. Gravel crunched from a side building.

She tried another number.

“René? No secrets, right? I need your help.”

“Aimée?” he said, his voice sleepy.

“Call Morbier, keep trying to get him to alert the flics, not the DST. . . . Only flics, you understand?”

“What? Why?”

“I’m at the Hôpital Bretonneau in Montmartre, by the cemetery,” she said, breathing fast. “There’s an Armata Corsa arms cache underneath it, somewhere in the tunnel past the squat. No DST or RG. Make sure Morbier understands. Just the flics.”

“Mon Dieu,” René said. “Don’t tell me you’re there!”

She heard a clinking, like keys, over the phone.

“Hold on,” he said, awake now. “Wait right where you are until I get hold of Morbier, Aimée.”

“I can’t. I have to settle some business.”

“Business. You’re crazy! Does it have anything to do with clearing Laure?”

“Everything. Jacques’s killers are inside. I promised her I’d nail them. One more thing. Call Chez Ammad, the bar on rue Veron, and ask for the bricklayer, Theo. Find out from him which day Dumpsters by his building site on rue André Antoine are emptied.”

“Eh, a Theo . . .?”

“Please, René, right now!”

She clicked off before he could protest further.

In the shadows, Lucien pulled her close. She could see the mist of his breath in the cold air. He cupped her chin with his warm hands. A silhouette of black curls ringed his face.

“What did you mean? Is Conari inside?” he asked.

“He’ll use your contract as a way to launder money from gun sales,” she said. “He’s been providing arms, for a price, to those who made bomb threats under the guise of the Corsican Separatist movement.”

Lucien’s grip stiffened. “How can you be sure?”

“It’s a theory; you have to test it, eh, like a scientist? Use the empirical method and find out.”

In this instance, barge right in and hope to God her hunch was right. At least partly right. Whoever handled the stolen arms had to be stopped. She figured Jacques had been trying to do so. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have involved Laure.

Clouds obscured the moon; a single street lamp glowed over the cemetery wall. Cold air cloaked her legs. In the rafters above them, a nest of pigeons fluttered and cooed, disturbed by their noise.

“I need a sign,” he said.

“What? You’re worried about the evil eye?”

Before he could answer, she kissed him hard. Long. Her lips melting on his. Responding, his arms crushed her to him.

She pulled back and caught her breath. “Will that do?”

Silence except for the backfire of a car.

“For now.”

Did she hear amusement in his voice?

“Over there,” Lucien said, pointing to a crumbling brick building, a diffused light now radiating through the barred windows. “Careful, there’s someone there.”

She saw the orange tip of a cigarette and nodded. They crept toward the building’s sagging brick pavilion, careful to step around the gravel and wood piled by the trucks. Lucien had hitched his music case onto his back. He edged ahead. She heard a loud thump and an ouf, as someone expelled air and crumpled.

Lucien had caught the mec from behind, sat him down, and ground out his cigarette.

“Nice touch,” she said. Testing a hunch with a strong guy at her side wasn’t a bad idea, though she’d never admit it to him.

Only one guard? Why not more? Unless the rest . . . .

“You have a plan?” he asked.

She nodded. “We take them by surprise. Figure out where the arms shipments leave from and barricade it.”

Lucien shifted the scuffed metal door, slid it open, and she followed him inside the half-gutted building, past concrete mixers and old hospital gurneys turned on their sides. She flashed her penlight around them. No holes or openings leading to a tunnel. Just broken light fixtures, piles of crumbled lath and plaster, an old crucifix tilted against the remnant of a sagging green wall. Had she got it wrong?

She kept going, past exposed brick and arched iron beams. Saw a yellowish glow ahead. Plastic construction tape labeled DANGER WORK SITE UNSAFE STRUCTURE hung from wooden sawhorses.

She reached for her spray can of Mace and with her other hand picked up a metal rod. And felt herself sinking. “Lucien!” she called. But the only answer was the cracking of floor boards and the swoosh of shifting grains of sand. Under her feet, the floor was tilting, crumbling, throwing her off balance. Petrified, she grabbed for something, anything, as the floor gave way under her. Her hands came back covered with grit and tangled in an electric cord. And then she was dangling in cold air, swinging, her knees hitting against heaps of dull white stones. She heard the loud rumbling of a generator and saw the hewed-gypsum-walled cavern floor far below.

Terror paralysed her. Her hands slid; she couldn’t hold on. She smacked against a conical mound and grabbed at plaster that flaked under her fingernails.

Bumping and clutching at rough ridges and crumbling, gouged surfaces, she slid several meters to a subterranean dirt floor. Scattered gypsum mounds gave it a lunar-landscape look. Dizzied, she gazed up to see the layers of Fontainebleau sand and glistening travertine, packed sandwichlike over the compressed off-white and yellowish pinnacle of gypsum she’d slid down.

She’d landed in an old quarry under the hospital, part of the galleries webbing the underground that had been mined to build Sacré Coeur. There was not much to commend the sturdiness of their foundations to those living overhead in buildings resting on them. Amazing that Sacré Coeur didn’t tumble on its head.

Pounding came from the other side of the huge white flaky mound.

Where was Lucien?

Earsplitting blasts from a generator had masked her descent. On all fours, covered in caked white gypsum, she crawled around the mound, crouched behind rolls of abandoned chain-link fence and hollow metal poles, and then gasped.

A stone’s throw away, men in camouflage fatigues, Eastern European by the look of them, stacked ammunition and dull gray machine guns in metal boxes emblazoned with the slogan ARIEL, SPARKLING LAVAGE POUR TOUTES LES VÊTEMENTS!

Like the washing-machine detergent box on Zette’s table. The killers’ calling card? Worry about that later. She had to stop them. But how?

To the side of the cratered gypsum quarry were split, rotted wood coffins, hoes, shovels, and a forklift. A storage area for grave diggers and their equipment from the adjoining Mont-martre cemetery. Gruesome. The men, intent on loading the boxes, ignored them.

A small open-platform train car sat on tracks leading to a tunnel. She figured the tunnel snaked under the street and went to the cemetery. If she could short out the wires connected to the generator’s battery she’d plunge the cavern into darkness. That would stop the men and allow her to escape through the tunnel. At least, she’d have a shot.

Fear coursed through her. Several feet away from her stood the throbbing industrial generator with rusted wires protruding from it. Cans with funnels were lined up next to it; it ran on gasoline. Even with the men engrossed in their work, she’d have little time to play with the wires. Or to flip the circuit breaker she saw, protected in black housing on the control panel.

She felt in her pocket for a lighter. In the worst-case scenario, she’d knock the gasoline cans over and . . . no, that would be stupid. Live ammunition boxes were stacked by the Ariel cartons!

What could she do? She eyed the corroded metal sprockets and debris in her escape path, memorizing her route. If she got that far!

The generator had a revolving fan, its blades encased in a rusted tan metal frame to cool the exposed motor. She had an idea. She scrabbled her hands around to find something, anything, long enough for what she needed. Found it.

The generator’s noise muffled shouts and swearing in Corsican. She saw Lucien, his arms behind him, thrown to the ground, then shoved behind large metal cable spools. She peered around the side of the generator. Conari, his shirt bloodstained, sat behind the forklift, tied up. She couldn’t make out another figure partially obscured by Lucien. Wait! His shoes. She knew those shoes.

Someone walked toward the generator. A hand leaned down to pick up a gas can. She had to do it now.

With all her might, she shoved a long metal pipe across the dirt, cramming it into the revolving fan. There was a deafening squealing of shredding metal jamming the motor. Then a grinding and crunching, emitting a shower of sparks and spitting shards of metal as the motor ate the pipe. A hail of metal shrapnel rained off the rail car. The man was screaming.

The light wavered. The generator coughed and screeched to a halt, plunging the cavern into darkness. Her whole body tingled and shook. There were shouts and more screams of pain. Twenty seconds had passed but it felt like twenty minutes. Then, a sickening odor of burning oil from the generator. So rank she could taste it. A voice whimpered in pain.

“What happened? Idiots, go to the backup generator!”

Beams of flashlights swept the grayish white smoke-filled haze. She heard an echoing loudspeaker, incomprehensible words. The flics? Morbier? Then short staccato bursts, the thuds of bullets. Mon Dieu. Lucien was exposed to a rain of bullets! She ducked and saw the shoes, running over the gravel toward the tunnel.

He was getting away! She struggled to her feet, coughing, her ears ringing, as she grasped the rolled-up chain-link fence for support.

She caught herself, then ran, hoping she’d memorized a clear path, and took off down the tunnel, following the train tracks. Footsteps pounding ahead guided her. The frigid tunnel narrowed. And then there were no more footsteps.

She stopped, gasping, leaning against the earth wall. She was in the cemetery, its mausoleums silhouetted against the now clear sky, with just a thin tissue of cloud skirting the pearly white fingernail of a moon.

How could she find him in this necropolis?

Crunching sounds of broken glass came from her right.

She tripped on tree roots snaking over a gravestone, tried to still her shaking hands, wipe the damp vegetal humus from her face. She made her legs move but had no clue as to where they were taking her.

Center, she told herself. Focus on the sensations surrounding her, as she had done when she’d been blind: sounds, currents of air, the feel of disturbed earth. The jade bangle on her wrist, an opalescent green, glinted in the thin moonlight.

Her thoughts cleared. A stillness came over her. She guided her feet around the uneven graves without tripping. Then she paused.

She sensed him, hovering. She smelled the sweat of his fear. The scent Laure had caught on the scaffolding.

“Yann, I know you’re there,” Aimée said. “Your jogging shoes gave you away.”

A covey of startled night birds erupted, flapping their wings.

“But you’re brilliant, Yann,” she said. “From me, that’s high praise.”

Ahead, an elongated shadow moved through the damp air.

“The bricklayer from the construction site confirmed that the Dumpster’s emptied on Wednesday. It was impossible for it to have spilled over the night you ‘found’ the diagram. But that’s minutiae, a minuscule detail. Maybe your military service was in Corsica.”

“You knew that?”

She hadn’t. Guessed. Like she had about the Dumpster.

“No wonder you spoke Corsican and discovered the arms cache. My father was hired to find the stolen armaments six years ago.”

“You’re like a ghost,” he told her. He stepped into view.

She realized she was covered in white powdery plaster. A ghost, at home here, with all the others.

“Conari got involved. You threatened him, so he went along. Jacques demanded more money, and Zette knew too much.”

“Jacques wanted to pull out, the fool,” Yann said.

The cold metal of an automatic was pressed against her temple. His breath panted in her ear; her arms were grabbed and twisted behind her. He pushed her forward.

Keep him talking. Anything. Hadn’t René said the Ministry required construction firms with Ministry contracts to use systems analysts? “So ingenious. You’d worked on Ministry contracts. Was that how you tapped into Big Ears?”

“Tap into them?” He rolled his eyes. His ponytail hung over his shoulder. His suit jacket was studded with irregular bits of metal. The tang of burnt oil clung to him. “As it turned out, after all my preparation, I didn’t need to. I installed the communications in Solenzara where I worked with those guys. I just shared a bottle of Courvoisier with them and caught up. Easy.”

And simple. That’s how it worked with old comrades in the military. No wonder she’d kept running into dead ends.

“So you listened in on Conari’s line at the DST flat and knew they were monitoring your ‘operation.’”

“Just like the old times.” Yann’s breath frosted and faded into vapor trails over the uneven headstones. “Even then, in Corsica, Jacques gambled. He blackmailed me, until I had no choice.”

“Jacques threatened to inform after he’d discovered the cipher key? The cipher key only you could access. The one thing proving you were involved. So you quieted him for good?”

She heard the trigger pulled back. Where were the flics? Her hands trembled. Get him talking.

“Didn’t it go like that? You realized Petru was working undercover for the DST. You knew they were closing in,” she said, her words coming out in a rush. “I got too close, so you threw suspicion onto Lucien.”

He twisted her arms so tight her circulation was cut off. “A little late Wonder Girl.”

Perspiration beaded her upper lip. Had the flics missed Yann’s escape in the confusion?

“Why now? Why move so many guns now?”

“Conari and his construction trucks. A little here, more there, he didn’t care to know as long as he got paid.” Yann’s eyes gleamed. “Amazing how it all comes down to money. No one ever has enough.”

He pressed her down to her knees over a sagging iron-fenced grave. She gasped as the rusted iron bit into her ribs. She forced herself to go on. “But you’re a perfectionist. The snowstorm, the party, luring Jacques up to the roof, knowing he’d bring backup. Everything worked until you got to the skylight. You’d forgotten to arrange for gunshot residue on Laure’s hands.” She panted, the blood rushing to her head. “In your hurry, you put your gun in her hands and fired. Your one mistake.”

“I liked you,” he said, leaning down, his hot breath in her ear. He stroked her cheek with the gun’s cold muzzle. “Didn’t you get it? That night in the café? But I was nothing to you; you weren’t interested. If only . . .”

His words made her skin crawl. “You’re not my type.”

He whacked her with the back of his hand, slamming her against something pointed. A cross? She grabbed at the ground, her hands filled with dirt.

“Give up, Yann, it’s over.”

Then he kicked her and she crumpled onto a flat, smooth slab. Her eyes registered the letters: François Truffaut 1932–1984, carved in granite in front of her nose. Was she going to be shot on the gravestone of Truffaut, the Montmartrois who had immortalized the quartier in his films? Not if she could help it.

“You’re like all the rest!”

“Second mistake.” She kicked, connecting with his thigh, and he yelped. Somehow she got to her feet, then he pulled her down.

“Bitch!”

She swung, throwing dirt in his face. A shot pumped by her ear, deafening her. A burning sensation creased her arm. She rammed into him with all her might and his head landed with a crack on the granite next to her. Scrabbling and raking her fingers through the wet leaves, she found the gun as Yann, stunned, lay beside her, groaning.

She felt a spray of pebbles on her hand, looked up, and saw René. The ringing in her ears hadn’t stopped.

He reached down and helped her up, then took rope from his pocket and bound Yann’s hands.

“Thanks, partner,” she said, clutching her bleeding arm and the gun.

He dusted off his jacket, eyeing her outfit, plastered with mud and wet leaves. “A new look?”

“Eh? Look at me when you talk until I can hear again.”

“Fashionista all the way.” René rolled his eyes. “You said you wanted the flics to wrap this up.”

She sagged against a tree, saw a blue uniform rounding the gravestone. “About time.”