Murder in the Bastille

Tuesday night

“A FLIC’S WAITING TO speak with you,” the nurse said to Aimée. The nice nurse who rolled her r’s and tried to hide her Burgundian accent. Typical of new arrivals in Paris. “He’s waited a while. Do you feel up to it?”

Aimée fingered the bandages on her neck. She didn’t want anyone seeing her like this. How could she speak with someone she didn’t know and couldn’t see? She wanted to burrow into a hole and die.

“I told Sergeant Bellan you might be up to it,” the nurse said. “He mentioned he was a family friend.”

Loïc Bellan . . . a family friend! That lowdown snake who had accused her and her father of graft. Calling them dirty and accusing them of being on the take!

Before she could answer, the nurse’s footsteps clattered away.

“We meet again, Mademoiselle Leduc,” Loïc Bellan said, his steps on the linoleum accompanying his words. His voice sounded low and gravelly, as usual. He’d been a protegé of her father’s, until her father left the force. Once, Bellan had idolized him.

The last time she’d come across Bellan, he’d been reeling drunk and abusive, in front of the Commissariat. But she’d turned the tables in the Sentier, proving him and the others wrong. She learned his wife had given birth to a baby with Down Syndrome. Last month she’d heard from her godfather that Bellan was falling apart.

“Care for a Gauloise?”

“I quit. Smoking’s not allowed anyway,” she said. “But I’m sure you know that.”

She smelled a stale whiff of Paco Rabanne cologne and tobacco on his clothes. He must have lit up in the hallway.

“There are just a few questions I need to ask you about the attack.”

No mention of the baby, just born when he’d last seen her, nor any word of sympathy for Aimée’s condition. And no apology for the drunken abuse he’d heaped on her the last time they’d met.

She wished she knew where he was standing. Most of all she wished she could see him, fix him with a steely stare. And then she had a semblance of coherent thought.

“Wait a minute, Bellan, you’re stationed in the second arrondissement, not the Bastille,” she said. “Off your turf, aren’t you?”

“Good memory,” he said. “I’m racking up overtime. But I appreciate your concern. Now, tell me what happened,” he said, his voice businesslike.

“You must be on special assignment if you’re out of your arrondissement.”

“I can’t say anything about it,” he said. “But if you cooperate, I’ll take your statement.”

Flics didn’t travel between arrondissements. At least they hadn’t before.

“Something else going on, Bellan?”

Silence again.

“Or does it have to do with my father? Guilt by association.” He must enjoy seeing her blind and squirming.

“Like I said, take it easy,” Bellan said.

Feet shifted on the linoleum. Good, she made him uncomfortable.

“You don’t believe anything I say. My father crumbled from the pedestal you put him on. But he wasn’t dirty, I proved it. The rest is in your head, Bellan.”

“I’m harsh sometimes,” he said, “That was a bad time for me.”

“You mean when your baby was born,” she said. Tactless again. “Sorry . . .”

“Can it,” he interrupted, his voice rising. “I am on special detail, if you need to know. Feel better?”

“Concerning what?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

And she did for the most part. Even her stupidity in going down a dim passage. But this was Paris, and it was a passage she’d walked a hundred times. She’d never felt afraid before. Not like now.

“So would you say someone might have followed you from the resto?”

“If so, I didn’t hear him.”

“This client, Vincent Csarda, did he know where you were going?”

“Csarda left before me,” she said.

Though vindictive in business, she doubted Vincent would physically attack her. He’d coerce her and René in other ways.

“The person behind me was tall; Vincent’s shorter than I am.”

“Just checking all leads,” he said.

A slow throbbing achiness filled her head. All this thinking and concentrating hurt. At least it took her mind off the stinging bruises ringing her swollen neck.

“Someone strangled me and smashed my head against the wall. But I’m no retard, Bellan.” As soon as she’d said that, hot shame flushed over her. She remembered the baby.

Silence.

“Look, I didn’t mean. . . . That woman was the target, not me,” she said.

“Want to explain that to me?”

“I was meeting a man . . . to give him a woman’s cell phone. She’d left it behind and I answered it. . . . It’s too complicated.”

“Take it easy; you’ve been hit on the head,” he said. “Hard.”

From Bellan’s tone she sensed mockery. But she couldn’t be sure. If only she could see his face.

“Well, we could tell more if we had this phone,” he said. “Check the numbers.”

Of course, her bag . . . she’d forgotten about that. What happened to her laptop and the Populax file?

“Where are my things?”

“The nurse said your papers showed you were admitted with no personal belongings,” said Bellan.

So the attacker had stolen her bag. Everything was gone. Thorough, Bellan was a thorough flic. That’s what she remembered her father saying about him. He and some young Turks had been brought in to fight corruption in the department.

She felt something being wedged into her clutched fist. “My number’s on here,” said Bellan. “Have the nurse help you call me if you think of anything else.”

Long after he’d gone, she fought back tears of frustration.

LOÏC BELLAN went to the parking lot, his head down.

“I’ll walk,” Bellan said to the driver in the dented police Peugeot awaiting him. He walked down the narrow rue Char-enton hoping his mind would empty. But it didn’t.

Why did Aimée’s words make it all come back? All the past; how her father, Jean-Claude Leduc, left the force and later received a pardon. But the rumors in the Commissariat were never silenced. How Jean-Claude had called one day, asking to meet for coffee, “For old time’s sake,” he’d said. Loïc had spit into the phone and refused. Two days later Jean-Claude had died in a terrorist explosion in Place Vendôme. Sometimes, at night, he’d lay awake imagining what Jean-Claude had wanted to say. And all the things he could have said.

He pushed it away. And all the questions he couldn’t answer about the attack on Aimée. Yet his gut feeling bothered him. He’d check the file at the Commissariat once more, even though the Préfet wanted to close it. Somehow he felt he owed that to Jean-Claude.

But he couldn’t push away Marie. No matter how he’d tried.

He remembered his wife Marie’s blonde hair on the pillow, hearing his older daughter Danielle’s snoring from her room and the rumble of the hot water heater while he shaved.

That terrible day. And he asked himself why it had happened like it had. Why he hadn’t controlled himself.

But it all came back. Vivid. And his fault.

How he’d tried squirting Teracyl tooth gel on his toothbrush. Not even a dribble. He’d squeezed again. Nothing. Why hadn’t Marie gone shopping? He’d worked overtime every night that week.

Funny how small things could build up, cause an explosion.

It cried from the bassinet . . . the blot of life they’d made that wasn’t right, stained with its need for constant care. Their trisomique Down Syndrome baby. Its mewling, a feeble demand for help. More of an aberration than a baby.

Loïc’s first son. His only son.

He always noticed the flattened back of the baby’s head, the slanting of his eyelids, and the gap between the baby’s first and second toes. Such tiny pink toes. Like perfect small rose pearls.

“Marie,” he’d said, “Alors! The stakeout took half the night, I’ve got piles of work on my desk and the Commissaire wants a meeting first thing. Can’t you at least get toothpaste?”

Marie stirred and batted an eye open. Small cries continued from the bassinet.

“Cheri . . . didn’t even hear you come in last night,” she said, her voice groggy.

The baby’s cries mounted.

“Pass me Guillaume,” she said.

She called it Guillaume, after his English relative, William. Insisted they christen it in church with the family, invite some men from the force and their close friends. Loïc noticed the single, deep transverse crease on the tiny palms.

“Guillaume had a rough day yesterday,” she said cradling the baby who quieted immediately. “We went to the médecin, but he said it was just a cold.”

Loïc bristled. He’d put in a twelve-hour shift. Half of it wasted in a dank abandoned warehouse on a stakeout, aggravating back pain from his old injury. These days, it seemed Guillaume was all she focused on. Surely she could have stopped for tooth gel? Marie’s gaze never lifted. All she had eyes for was the bundle in her arms.

“But Marie . . .”

“Shhhh,” she whispered, pointing to the closed eyes of the baby.

Loïc had thrown the toothpaste, and then a dresser, against the wall. Danielle and Monique had run from their rooms, rubbing their eyes. The baby wailed. Loïc’s mind had blanked out the hateful things he’d screamed.

But it was the look in Marie’s tired brown eyes that warned him. Fool that he was, he’d ignored it. That night he’d come home to an empty apartment. She’d packed up, hauled the children to her parents in Brittany, and told him to get therapy if he wanted to see them again.

He’d tried. She’d come once to Paris. But no matter how much they discussed it, Marie refused to put Guillaume in an institution. She’d chosen her mongoloid son over him. Though she told him, over and over, the opposite.

Now he was back in his apartment. His bloodshot eyes took in the packed boxes in the bare rooms. He needed to move to a smaller place, so he could send them more money.

He thought back to when he and Marie were happy here. He remembered Danielle’s first steps in the kitchen one Sunday. The yellow parakeet from the quai de la Mégisserie he’d bought late Christmas Eve, rushing home from the Commissariat, and how Danielle and Monique’s eyes sparkled. For once, Daddy’s coming home late brought magic. They’d hung the cage in their bedroom, now empty except for the pink-bordered wallpaper.

He thought back to Marie’s excitement about his promotion; her proud smile and the fancy bottle of St. Émilion they shared on the roof after Danielle and Monique finally fell asleep. The wonderful time they’d had making a son. Marie’s warm skin and how her hair curled over the sheets.

The son who emerged, wrong, nine months later. Loïc couldn’t stomach it. The psychologist said he suffered from guilt for chromosomes he had no control over, and grief for passing on the defect. Loïc had told the psychologist to stuff his psychobabble up his ass where it might do him some good.

In Loïc’s village, there’d been Hubert the Mongoloid, as they’d called him. Harmless, he’d worked in the laundry. Worked hard. The mongoloid’s father, an out-of-work prizefighter, drank away his winnings and beat Hubert up regularly on Saturday nights. And after the village mill closed, others beat him, too.

Loïc knelt down and found a broken pink barrette in his daughter’s room. The movers found him sobbing, cross-legged on the floor, the barrette clutched in one hand and a bottle of cheap whiskey in the other.