Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

Monday Night

AIMÉE ANSWERED THE door, her hands shaking. The Chanel dress she wore was now caked with clumps of beige formula.

“About time, René!”

Her partner, René Friant, a dwarf, all of four feet tall in his tailored Burberry raincoat and custom-made shoes, stared at her.

“Interesting fashion statement. Sorry I’m late,” he said, hanging his coat on a chair. “They cordoned off the bridge because of some MondeFocus demonstration.” He sniffed. “Did Miles Davis have an accident?”

“I need your help, René,” she said.

“System up and running, right? Is this about tomorrow’s meeting . . . ?” He paused, his eyes searching hers. “Don’t tell me you missed the deadline.”

“Come here.” She took his hand and led him down the hall.

The baby’s mauve-hued eyelids were closed, the small chest rose and fell. She was at peace, asleep on the duvet.

“A baby? Instead of playing house, we need to monitor Regnault’s security update.”

Miles Davis cocked his head at the baby’s gentle breaths.

“René, it’s not like that.”

He took a step back. “Did I miss something during the past nine months?”

She shook her head. “No cracks about the Immaculate Conception either.”

“Shouldn’t her mother come for her?”

For once she agreed.

He sat, his eyes intent on the screen. “What’s this ‘system down for maintenance?’” he asked. “You didn’t get the system back online.”

“I indicated we had maintenance issues because I needed to buy more time. Everything’s up and ready. I checked.”

“We can’t use that delaying tactic again, Aimée. We have to get the system admin done in time, every time. Our clients have to have confidence that we’ll get the job done. Otherwise we’ll lose our big account because you’re babysitting. Have you gone soft in the head?”

Soft in the head . . . never. “I got a mysterious phone call, I went downstairs, and found this baby.”

He turned in the chair, his legs dangling. “What?”

“Sssh, it took forever to get her to sleep.” She pointed to the second laptop screen displaying the system program. “Tell you later. Once I go back in, we’ve got seven minutes. Ready?”

Her fingers ached by the time they’d checked the last user configuration but they finished with two minutes to spare.

“Close, Aimée. Too close.”

“Just listen, René.”

“It better be good.”

And she told him.

He frowned. “Somehow the woman found your name and your phone number,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact. “It’s some scam. Now she’ll demand money.”

Aimée doubted it. The desperation in that voice had been real.

“Wait a minute,” she said, running her hands through her spiky hair. “I didn’t have time to check earlier, too much was happening.” She dumped out the diaper bag’s contents, spread them on the parquet floor: diapers, wipes, another tin of powdered Lemiel formula. She turned the bag inside out and noticed stains. Earlier, she hadn’t paid attention to the rust-colored smears on the lining. She leaned down and sniffed.

“Dried blood, René.”

René sat back, open mouthed for the second time.

“The woman said someone was trying to kill her. And they may have threatened . . . the baby.”

She stared at the duvet. The infant’s tiny nose crinkled, and the little mouth yawned, revealing a glistening rose tongue.

Almost two hours had passed since the telephone call that had summoned her to the courtyard. She had to do something.

“You still have that friend in Centre d’Écoute Téléphonique, René?”

“Martin?”

She handed René her cell phone. “Ask Martin to locate the public phone booth from which my land line was called. The number was 01 33 68 42 18.”

“Look, Aimée . . .”

“Talk to him nicely, René. Tell him you’ll owe him big-time.”

Ten long minutes later, René handed her the address scribbled on the back of an envelope.

“Alors, asking him didn’t hurt, did it?”

“My promise to overhaul his motherboard helped.”

She looked at the address: 5 Boulevard Henri IV, only two blocks away, near the tip of Ile Saint-Louis. “But that’s close by. She could easily have been here by now unless . . .”

René blinked. “Isn’t she coming to get the baby?”

“This bloodstain’s in the baby bag. . . . She may have been hurt. What if she can’t?”

“I don’t like this, Aimée,” he said.

“René, it’s just two blocks away. Do me a favor. Watch the baby a few minutes.”

“Me?”

She handed him a bottle of formula. “All babies do is pee, cry, eat, and sleep.” She remembered this line from a late-night program on the télé.

“But what if she wakes up?” Alarm showed in René’s eyes.

“You’ll figure something out, René.”

AIMÉE SLID INTO the warm night. She saw white wavelets hitting the opposite bank of the Seine. Flooding threatened if the thaw kept up.

She’d lived here most of her life, yet the neighbors in her building were only nodding acquaintances. Not one was someone to go to for help. Of course, she was aware, as they all were from the concierge, that a retired doctor of L’École de Médecine lived on the first floor with his dog. An actor and his family resided on the second floor. An old aristocrat owned the top-floor pied-à-terre, handed down through the generations. Hers had been inherited from her grandfather. God knows she couldn’t have afforded to buy a place on the Ile Saint-Louis on her earnings from Leduc Detective.

Along the quai, a few lit windows, like eyes peering into the darkness, showed in the hôtels particuliers, narrow limestone-facaded town houses with delicate wrought-iron balconies and high arched entrances. Most, like hers, were attributed to Le Vau, the architect of Versailles. She knew other worlds existed behind the massive carved entry doors leading to double-and triple-deep courtyards and gardens that could never be glimpsed from the outside. Life on this island took place in the courtyards, in the hidden back passages that had changed little since medieval times. The Ile Saint-Louis was a feudal island fortress, its fortifications the town houses built for the aristocracy. Five bridges spanned the comma-shaped island, which had once been a cow pasture in the Middle Ages. It was eight blocks long and three blocks across at the widest, yet so self-contained that longtime Ile Saint-Louis inhabitants—Ludoviciens—still referred to the rest of Paris as “the Continent.” Stubbornly reclusive, the inhabitants ignored the tourists, aware that they inhabited the most desirable streets in Paris, keeping themselves to themselves. They were proud of having allowed a post office to open only a few years ago, of having neighbors like a minister or two and like the Rothschilds, whom one was unlikely to visit to borrow a cup of sugar. Who was she to criticize? She’d never live anywhere else.

A woman in trouble wouldn’t knock on the Rothschilds’ door in the middle of the night. Was that why she’d been chosen?

She reached Pont de Sully, the bridge connecting Ile Saint-Louis to the Left and Right Banks, just as a lighted, half-empty, Number 87 bus passed her, then made a U-turn to avoid the looming police barricade. An ambulance siren wailed and she saw its red light streaking down the quai across the river. The demonstration must have gotten ugly, she thought.

She located number 5, Boulevard Henri IV. It was the garage next to the fly-fishing shop that had been patronized by Hemingway. A black-lettered sign reading STATION DU SERVICE DE PONT SULLY stood above a blue-and-white metal representation of the Michelin man. A yellow gas pump stood on the pavement, an incongruous object for an island in the middle of the Seine with no Metro stop, no cinema, no police station, and only one café-tabac.

The garage lay dark, doors locked, windows semishuttered. Puzzled, she took out her penlight and shone it through a crack in a shutter. Before she could knock, she saw the blinking red light of an alarm system and stopped. With her penlight she examined the garage, seeking a side entrance, without success. The premises were shut tight as a drum, yet the woman had called her from here.

What if the woman had been part of the nearby demonstration? Aimée filed that possibility away. But if the woman was hurt, and being chased, it seemed unlikely she’d run across the bridge to reach this island. Too exposed.

Aimée strode over the zebra-striped Pont de Sully crossing to Place Bayre, the one green space on the island. Miles Davis’s favorite walk. And a good place to hide among the chestnut trees, deserted gravel paths, and slatted benches. In its center, a stone statue of a naked man straddling a lion replaced the original bronze animals melted down by the Germans during the Occupation. Diffused light from green metal street lamps filtered through the branches of the trees, casting sticklike shadows on the gravel. She flicked on her penlight. And then she noticed scattered gravel; it looked as if it had been kicked. Or as if there had been a scuffle. She followed the scattered gravel behind a tree trunk. Her foot stepped on something soft. She stopped.

Please don’t let it be . . . ! She didn’t want to finish the rest of her thought.

Cautiously, she shone the penlight in an arc, poking the leaves with her high heels, expecting to find a human hand or foot. She ground her teeth. Non, only soft mud.

A twig crackled behind her. The baby’s mother? She spun around.

The path lay deserted.

“Allô?”

The only response was the flapping of a seagull’s wings overhead. If the woman was here, surely she’d show herself. Hiding from Aimée made no sense.

She had to calm down. The noise could have been made by squirrels or chipmunks or even a less desirable member of the rodent family.

She walked toward the path and heard the crunch of gravel. She stopped in her tracks. An assignation? In the seventies this spot had been notorious for cruising gays waiting for cavalry soldiers from the nearby Arsenal. Maybe they were still active? But the footsteps padded on, keeping pace with her. Stupidly, she’d left the Beretta in her spoon drawer.

She speeded up, then took cover behind an ivy-draped tree on her right. She inhaled, wishing her heart wasn’t beating so hard.

Something moved. She parted the glossy green ivy leaves and peered around the trunk of the tree. Behind her, bushes rustled and she froze, holding her breath. Silence.

And then she saw . . . a shadow, the silhouette of a raised arm holding a bar with a hooked end. As quietly as she could, she backed away until a branch snapped beneath her feet. Then, behind her, more rustling noises in the bushes.

She slipped off her heels, stuck them in her pockets, and sprinted through the bare trees, her heart thumping. If she could make it to Boulevard Henri IV, people might be standing at the bus shelter. At least there would be passing cars.

Sharp pebbles cut her feet but she kept going, past the stone wall, and made it out to the street. She didn’t look back as she ran across it, despite flashing headlights, a car swerving, brakes squealing, and blaring horns.

She kept close to the buildings, rounding the curve into Quai d’Anjou, passing the red wall tile marking the height of the 1910 flood that had devastated Paris.

Now her apartment was just a few doors away! She leaned against a carved stone portal, her shoulders heaving, trying to catch her breath. Perspiration dampened her dress; her black stockings torn to shreds.

Yellow light from the street lamp filtered through the budding branches of a plane tree onto the deserted pavement. She could see no one.

She counted to ten, then walked on.

The footsteps came again, this time closer. The baby. Was there a threat to the baby? She tried to recall the mother’s words. Whoever was after her, Aimée couldn’t lead them to her doorstep and the baby.

She started to run.