Murder in the Bastille

Wednesday Noon

“ATTENTION, PETIT !” SHOUTED A perspiring delivery man wheeling a dolly loaded with beer crates. “Didn’t see you.”

René, carrying Aimée’s bag, sidestepped the man on the pavement. He ignored the stares from passersby in rue Fau-bourg St-Antoine. Born a dwarf, now just four feet tall, he was used to people staring. Most of the time.

He’d heard Aimée’s message on his voice mail and gathered things from her apartment. Now he turned into the Passage de la Boule Blanche, a narrow half-covered alleyway lined with old storefronts and doorways to courtyards housing craftsmen, upholsterers, and furniture makers. Wide enough for a small car. Once the site of the crimes of the notorious poet-criminal, Lacenaire, guillotined in 1836.

René retraced his steps to the place where he’d found Aimée sprawled on the cobbles. Not far from the metal waist-high barricade with a Piétons barrés sign. He wondered if there was anything he hadn’t found last night.

Green garbage bins, emptied and waiting, hugged the narrow stone wall. Too bad, anything left behind would have been cleaned up by the ébouers. Nothing there to indicate the horror of Aimée’s attack last night. What had she said . . . she remembered a light?

He looked around and in the October sunshine saw the imposing entrance of the Quinze-Vingts hospital at the end of the passage. The Quinze-Vingts—fifteen times twenty—was the number of beds the hospital’s founder, Louis XV, had needed for his knights blinded by Saracens on the Ninth Crusade; the name had endured. Had she meant a light from the hospital?

The Passage de la Boule Blanche, in the throes of construction, lay deserted. The young designer’s shop was closed. Ahead on the right lay the courtyard of the Cahiers du Cinéma, their former client. He walked over but the gate was chained. On it hung a sign saying CLOSED FOR REMODELING. Too bad, he would have felt comfortable asking questions of people he knew there. He could have ferreted out whether anyone had been in the office late.

He gazed up. A mossy stone wall lined a good part of the passage. The network of passages in the Bastille once connected the wood shipped down the Seine and the woodworkers and furniture makers in the faubourg’s courtyards. After Louis XI licensed craftsmen in the fifteenth century, this Bastille quartier grew into a working-class area; cradle of revolutions, mother of street-fighters and artisans, home of the Bastille prison.

Later tinsmiths, blacksmiths, mirror-makers, gilders, and coal merchants joined them, occupying the small glass-roofed factories and warehouses. Now, many of these were gentrified, and the rest had been bulldozed.

Then he heard hammering from the nichelike entrance on his left.

René didn’t feel much like a detective even though the sign where he worked read LEDUC DETECTIVE. They shared the computer security jobs, but only Aimée had a criminal investigation background.

Now he had to take up the slack. Help figure this out. Aimée, his best friend, had suffered a brutal attack outside this atelier; maybe someone inside had seen or heard something.

He walked into a small, damp courtyard. A sign, styled like a coat of arms, read CAVOUR MASTER WOODWORKERS, EST. 1794. Low strains of a Vivaldi concerto floated through the doorway.

“Pardon,” René said, raising his voice. He walked through a narrow entrance opening into a large atelier illumined by skylights. The sharp tang of turpentine reached him. “Anyone here?”

A middle-aged man, wearing a blue workcoat, glasses pushed up on his bald head, stood at a work table. With delicate strokes he rubbed the gilded legs of an antique lacquered chair. Small and exquisite, it looked to René as if anyone sitting on it would snap it in pieces. In the middle of the large room stood a heater, its flue leading to the roof, a water cooler, and more worktables filled with furniture in various stages of repair. From the walls hung every type of antique wooden chair René had ever seen—and many he hadn’t.

“Forgive me, monsieur,” René said, “for disturbing your work.”

The man looked up, took in René’s stature, but showed no surprise. He had dark pouches under his eyes and a sallow complexion. His pursed mouth gave him a harried look.

“Tiens! I’ve done all I can with this,” the man said, setting down a mustard-colored chamois cloth. “I’m Mathieu Cavour. How may I help you?” he asked René, picking up several cracked Sèvres porcelain drawer knobs, and slipping them into his pocket. “My showroom’s in the front, off the other courtyard, if you’d like to see our finished work.”

Should he show him the detective badge, the one Aimée left in the drawer, that he’d slipped in his pocket?

“Monsieur Cavour,” he said, flashing the badge. “A woman, my friend, was attacked outside your shop last night. Were you here?”

René thought Cavour cringed. But maybe it was just his silhouette shifting under the skylight as René looked up.

“Attacked . . . here?”

“I found her outside in the passage,” René said. “Did you see or hear anything unusual?”

“I live above the shop. I have trouble sleeping,” Cavour said. “Music helps me. I wouldn’t have heard anything outside.”

“So your light was on?”

Cavour’s brow creased. “Is this woman, your friend, all right?”

Why didn’t Cavour answer his questions?

“The attack was so vicious it blinded her,” said René.

“Je regrette . . .” he said.

René saw sadness in Cavour’s eyes.

“Do you remember if you had your light on?” he asked again.

Cavour rubbed his brow with the back of his hand, “Sorry, I drift in and out of sleep, I can’t remember.”

Did he have some medical condition?

“Lived here long, Monsieur Cavour?”

“Long? I was born upstairs. But the quartier has changed. The conniving developers want to take over.”

“More and more,” said René, nodding in sympathy.

The telephone rang. No one answered and Cavour looked flustered, as he ignored it.

“Here’s my card. In case you think of something that might help,” René said. On his way out, he saw a broom and rusted dust pan by a full garbage bin. Might Cavour have found something of Aimée’s?

“Did you sweep this morning?”

“As always. The shop, the courtyard. Some of these people don’t care if the quartier’s run down, no pride.”

He stood, René thought, like a stubborn island in sea of slick renovation.

In Cavour’s waste bin, topped off by sawdust and Malabar candy wrappers, René saw a crumpled sheet of music, the black notes faded on the yellowed page.

“Look at what they leave in the passage, even in my courtyard,” he said, following René’s gaze. “That’s not the half of it. Condoms. Once a broken guitar.”

And René heard voices, a chorus. Then a lone soprano. Their timbre softened by the stone. Timeless.

“Where’s that coming from?” René asked.

“Opera rehearsal,” said Cavour. “We’re behind the Opera, you know. A chorus from Le Barbier de Seville, would be my guess.”

Cavour was an interesting mix, René thought. A blue collar craftsman with a knowledge of opera who worked on antique furniture. He liked Cavour, and yet, without knowing why, he felt uneasy about him.

As he walked down the passage, he realized this detective business was harder than he’d imagined. He’d gotten no real information from Cavour. Cavour hadn’t answered his questions. Would Cavour have told him if he had seen anything? He wished he had Aimée’s knack for getting information out of people.

And then René realized he’d forgotten to pack all of Aimée’s things. The cell phone.