Murder in the Bastille

Thursday Morning

RENÉ BACKED HIS CUSTOMIZED Citroën into a vacant sliver of space on boulevard Richard Lenoir. Never mind that it consisted of several zebra crossing stripes. A Parisian parking spot—you got in where you could.

Red-brown leaves fluttered from the trees, crackling under his feet. A weak, late-morning sun was framed by the bare plane tree branches overhead.

Opposite stood the Bataclan theatre. Once a pagoda-style folly built by Napoléon III for Empress Eugénie, then un caf’ conc’, café concert hall, where Maurice Chevalier sang for the Germans, later a cinema. Now the marquee read “Limited run only . . . Viva Zapata, the musical!”

The chance to do something, work in the field like Aimée, excited René. Their roles were reversed, finally. But his stomach churned. The burden was on him to investigate a murder and the attack on Aimée. He’d made an appointment with Miou-Miou, the woman who answered the first number on Josiane Dolet’s speed dial.

“Monsieur Friant, ça va?” said a woman with blonde ringlets who skated up to him in front of the Bataclan. She flashed a card: “Astrology readings by Miou-Miou—day or night, I rollerblade to YOU.”

“Thanks for meeting me. Let’s have a drink,” he said, indicating the dim café.

“Bon, my next client’s the numbers man upstairs.”

René wondered if that boded well for the Bataclan’s finances. He struggled to keep up with her. The curse of short legs, he thought, as he had a thousand times. Boulevard de Temple, known in the eighteenth century as the notorious “Boulevard du Crime,” bordering the Marais and the Bastille, lay ahead of them.

The café, once the Bataclan lobby, looked overdue for a renovation. At least a cleaning, René thought. Remnants of Chinese temple-style pillars and red lacquer beams, paint peeling off in places, arched above them. The circular zinc bar, a 50s island in the sea of café tables and rattan chairs, beckoned with a rainbow display of liquor bottles.

“Taurus . . . Scorpio rising,” Miou-Miou said, with a big grin. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

René nodded.

She sat down, crossed her rollerblades, and pulled her shoulder bag onto her lap. She opened it, and drew out a pile of astrological charts. “First consultation costs two hundred francs. Then I prepare your chart, which I keep with me. You can call anytime and I’ll give you a reading on the spot or come to you with a detailed horoscope. For fifty francs more, I do important events or weekly forecasts.”

René pulled out five hundred francs, signaling the waiter.

“I’m sorry but I didn’t make myself clear. I want information about Josiane Dolet,” he said. “Your number was on her speed dial.”

“My client’s charts are confidential.” She shook her head, returning the charts to her bag as if to leave.

“Not any more,” he said, forcing his eyes to move past the lime tulle ribbon around her blonde curls, the pink lips, red- and-white-striped tights, pink leggings, and green denim jacket. “Hear me out, first,” René said.

A waiter old enough to be his father, bald and earringed, appeared. He wore a long white-apron and skinny black T-shirt and stood, tapping his foot.

“Un Cardinal,” René said.

“What’s that?” Miou-Miou asked.

“Here we call it the Communard,” the waiter said, writing down the order.

“Red wine, crème de cassis, and juice,” René said. “It’s the same drink, but the name lines up at the other end of the political spectrum.”

The waiter shrugged.

“And you, mademoiselle?” he said, tossing a bowl of salt-encrusted cacahuètes on the ring-stained table.

“Une feuille morte,” she said. “I like the fallen leaf autumn color of Pastis mixed with menthe and grenadine.”

After the waiter moved away, René leaned forward. The table’s rim hit his chest. “Josiane Dolet was murdered in a Bastille passage. Your number was on her speed dial.”

“You’re a detective?” Miou-Miou’s eyes widened. “No wonder she didn’t show for her reading. Such a shame. Josiane was a free spirit. But her chart indicated tumult. A storm brewing since August. Tempestuous relations. But I never imagined. . . .”

And I’m the Rhône ranger, René thought.

A paunchy, middle-aged man waddled into the café. He kissed the harried cashier, who paused and returned his bisous, then leaned over the zinc to the shaven-headed, earringed barman, a younger version of the waiter, who was polishing glasses.

“Attends,” Miou-Miou said, “That’s my client. I’ll be right back.” She glided over to the man, whose glasses glinted, reflecting the flickering neon sign advertising Picon.

Frustrated, René picked at the peanuts. Stale and oily. He looked around.

In the far corner, as if supporting the Chinese pillars, sat a pale-faced trio: a couple and a midget wearing a fedora. An aura of time suspended, surrounded them. Most cafés were lively places where people conversed or went to see or be seen.

Not here. It was like a railway waiting room.

René’s radar picked up on it at once. Circus people. He hated the old fug of sad-eyed clowns and freaks away from the big top. They looked familiar, probably from the nearby Cirque d’hiver. Perhaps cronies of his mother. Unemployed. Or waiting for a casting call.

He felt again the trials his mother, a normal-sized juggler, had endured. The drafty circus tents, tears coursing through her makeup when money was tight, and the love she had borne him. The determination that he’d never perform as a freak.

And he hadn’t.

Her amazing good fortune in becoming the old marquis’s housekeeper in Amboise had helped. The marquis had attended her performances every year. He’d loved René’s mother’s unique juggling act and her wit.

A circus aficionado, the marquis had maintained a private museum of mechanical toys from the 1700s up to the 1930s. When she’d grown “ready for the pasture,” as the circus owner termed it in his delicate way after a flaming arrow severed the tendon in her left hand, the marquis invited her to oversee his “little collection.” She’d ended up running his château. And probably more, but René didn’t dwell on that.

An odd but sweet man, he’d financed René’s clinic bills during his stretching therapy. It hadn’t worked. His hip displacement had gotten worse. The marquis helped with his education. Paid for extras at the Sorbonne. And the car.

René never told Aimée any of this. He wasn’t sure why. He liked the fact that Aimée had never asked, had never wanted explanations. She’d simply introduced herself one afternoon at the Sorbonne café, saying “Rumor says you can access a mainframe in twenty minutes.”

She’d shoved a laptop across the table.

“You heard wrong,” he’d told her, rolling up his sleeves and establishing a net connection. “Twelve minutes is the longest it takes me.” And using the number his friend had given him he’d accessed the mainframe and done it in ten.

Her big, kohl-ringed eyes had lit up. Right there, she’d offered him a job on a project she’d undertaken. The work grew and when he ended up spending more time on computer security at Leduc Detective than at the Sorbonne, he quit classes. And she did, too.

His confused feelings about her surfaced: her terrible driving, her unconventionality, the passion she brought to things and the fierce loyalty she showed him. And glimpses of the raw inner hurt he’d seen exposed a few times. Like the hurt he’d so often felt.

He thought about her huge eyes and the funny way she hid her feelings for Morbier yet yearned for his approval.

Never mind that she didn’t provide tickets for restaurants or a Carte Orange pass for the Métro like some employers, she made sure she paid into his seçu, the mutuelle for medical insurance, and his prévoyance. When bills were paid and lucrative contracts signed, they celebrated with champagne and sushi. The odd thing was, his mother and the marquis had seemed pleased.

Would Aimée let him take care of her now that she was blind? Or would she push him away? Should he team up with Rajeev? Join him and form a software business, as Rajeev was urging him to?

He repressed his feelings. As always. But the thought that though she was his best friend, sometimes that wasn’t enough, kept rising up. He wanted more. More of her. He pushed that away.

He drank the Cardinal/Communard and half of another, then stared at the old chrome coffee machine topped by a winged eagle and at the special VIEILLE PRUNE ARTISANALE 4L.- 45 FRS. written in white on the beveled mirror until Miou-Miou returned. Breathless. She grabbed her drink and downed it three long gulps.

“That bad?”

She nodded.

“Another?”

He caught the waiter’s eye, pointed to their glasses.

“Does your client cook the Bataclan’s books?”

“He’s the comptroller,” she said. “And since his sun crossed Virgo . . . very auspicious . . . he’s decided to ask for the hand of his plumber’s sister who lives three houses down in the same Batignolle banlieue.”

“At least he’ll be able to fall back on his brother-in-law if the theatre business gets tight,” René said. He handed the waiter several hundred-franc notes.

“Vraiment, I was worried about Josiane’s chart,” she said, reaching for her new drink. “The one I never completed. Of course not, it got stuck under . . .”

“The comptroller’s?” René interrupted.

She nodded. The tulle ribbon bobbed in her curls. “Look,” she said, setting down a chart. The spheres of planets were crossed by red, aqua, and orange lines. “I hadn’t finished the alignment of the houses and the dominant planets . . . but Josiane called, wanting to meet. She said I could finish later, but she had an important question to ask first.”

All this astral plane talk unnerved him. “And you said . . . ?”

“Clients call my hotline or hit my website with questions all the time,” she said, noting disbelief in his eyes. “I’m very good.”

René grew aware of the sounds of conversation and the clink of glasses around them. Tables filling with the café clien- tele, the waiter rushing to fill orders and barking new ones to the younger look-alike barman.

“Sometimes I’m so good, it’s scary,” Miou-Miou confessed.

René avoided her eyes. He shifted on the rattan chair and wished his dangling legs could touch the floor. Just once.

“If I finish the orbit of her ruling planet . . . see how the sun line intersects . . . that shows warning. ‘Tread lightly on the rungs of life’s ladder.’ But here,” she slapped the chart, rustling the paper. “The lifeline was cut.”

“When?” If she was so good she’d know.

“11:40 p.m. last Monday night,” she said, glancing at her watch. She stood up, hefted her bag across her chest and snapped her green denim jacket closed.

“How do you know that?”

“She was going to call me. She didn’t,” said Miou-Miou. “I have to go. I’ve got another appointment.”

Josiane’s body was found Tuesday midday, René thought. But the morgue would have an estimate of the actual time of death.