Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

Monday Midnight

AIMÉE PUSHED OPEN the gleaming green door of the Chambre Professionelle des Artisans Boulanger-Pâtissiers, the bakers’ union and academy, and rushed past bread sculptures, ancient kneading tables, and a turn-of-the-century wooden bread cart in the foyer. Woodcuts of bread ovens lined the walls. The door clicked shut behind her. Now if she could just . . . The door buzzer sounded and she jumped. Her hands trembled. To get in, you had to know the door code, like she did; few buzzed unannounced at night. The buzzer sounded again, echoing off the stone-paved foyer. She leaned down, trying to catch a glimpse of the person who was buzzing for admittance through the crack in the four-hundred-plus-year-old door. But no one was visible in the dim sodium yellow of the streetlight. A car engine started, and she heard the the motor idling on the quai. She hoped it was the person who had followed her, about to drive away. Then a muffled cough came from right outside the door. She had to hurry and get out of here.

Pungent warm yeast smells filled her lungs. In the rear, she saw a group of men in the kitchen wearing white cooks’ shirts buttoned on the side, like a culinary military uniform, she always thought. Indeed, the baking master ran the academy with precision rivaling the nearby Arsenal’s cavalry exercises.

A row of bullet-like moist white baguettes sat on the marble kneading table, poised for insertion into the wall oven.

“Escaped again, eh?” Montard asked, measuring cup in hand, his wide brow and flushed face beaded with perspiration.

The buzzer sounded again. Montard shot a look over his flour-dusted shoulder. “Another man who wouldn’t take no for an answer? This one’s persistent.”

She’d used the academy’s back exit before. It came in handy when a date turned sour. She shrugged, sticking her shaking hands in her pockets.

“The espresso is on me, Montard.”

“Someday . . . you’re always asleep when I’m working.”

The oven timer beeped and Montard sprang into position, reaching with a long wooden paddle to hoist the baked loaves onto cooling trays. She walked past the industrial-sized aluminum mixer and hundred-kilogram sacks of flour and bins of Maldon sea salt to open the fire exit door. Threading her way through the courtyard, past a dormant rose trellis and hedges winding by an old well, she emerged by her own courtyard’s old carriage house. She paused until she was sure that no one was following her. Shining her penlight in the corners, she checked her courtyard again. And then trudged upstairs. In her apartment bedroom, René, his sleeves rolled up, sat on the floor working on his laptop. The baby cooed on the duvet.

She pulled the gauze draperies aside and peered out the window. Shadows wavered on the quai below.

“Someone followed me.”

“So you led them here?”

She pulled a crisp, warm baguette from her pocket. “I took a minor detour at the baker’s.”

She needed a cigarette. Too bad she’d stopped smoking last week. Again.

“Did the mother call yet?” she asked.

René shook his head, grabbed the nub end of the baguette, and chewed while he scanned the computer screen. His flexed his toes in their black silk socks. “You might want to put the tabs right.”

Curious, she sat next to him cross-legged, scanning the report displayed on the screen of the laptop, and asked, “Didn’t I?”

“The diaper tabs.” He pulled the blanket away to show her the cooing baby’s legs.

She stared at the now properly arranged diaper.

“You put the diaper on backward,” René said.

A kitchen towel wreathed the baby’s neck like a bib. Aimée’s large lime bath towel propped her on her side.

“I checked with my friend, a pediatric intern. He said it’s better for their digestion for them to lie like that. I’d say she’s ten days to two weeks old.”

Surprised, she bent forward, scanning the baby’s face.

“How can you tell?”

He shrugged. “See.” He lifted some sheets of paper covered with blurred black-and-white images. “He faxed these photos of umbilical cords from his textbook. And told me to check the soft crevice on her head, the fontanel. It’s much too early for it to close so don’t drop her on her head.”

René pulled on a corner of the blanket and the baby stiffened, her arms shooting out, fists clenched.

Like a fit, or a convulsion. Aimée’s mind raced ahead to the emergency room, huddled doctors, forms to fill out. Inconvenient questions.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, worried.

René thumbed through the faxed pages.

“Let’s see, I read about it . . . here, it’s a Moro reflex, it says here. It’s normal. If she didn’t have reflexes then you would worry.”

“How can you—?”

“Stroke the sole of her foot,” he interrupted. “From heel to toe.”

She brushed her fingers across the warm foot. The baby’s toes flared upward and then her foot curled inward like a wrinkled peach.

“Eh voilà, the plantar reflex,” he said. “They’re just little bundles of reflexes when they’re not poop machines. My friend said they even have an en garde fencing reflex.”

She stared, amazed. There was so much to know. And it was such a responsibility.

“Notice her perfectly shaped head?” The baby’s nose crinkled in a yawn and her eyelids lowered, and a moment later they heard her little snores of sleep.

Every baby was cute, she thought.

“They don’t all come out like that, my friend said. Probably a C-section.”

René put the faxed sheets down on the parquet floor.

“How do you know you were being followed?” He didn’t wait for her answer and shook his head. “It’s your overactive imagination as usual.”

“I didn’t imagine a tire iron!” she said. “Or ruin a good pair of silk Chantal Thomas stockings for fun. Hold on, I’ve got to change.” She went into the bathroom, peeled off her shredded stockings, and wiggled out of the Chanel. By the time she rejoined René, she’d put on leggings and a denim shirt.

“It doesn’t make sense, René, unless someone’s watching for her outside.”

“What do you mean?”

She told him about the shuttered garage, the figure with the tire iron chasing her across Place Bayre.

René’s eyes widened.

“That’s why the mother hasn’t come back—she’s afraid.” She paused. “Or more than afraid. She may be injured. Or worse.”

“Call the flics,” René said.

Aimée had to make him understand. “I don’t know how, but this woman knows me, René,” she said. “And I believe her; she was fearful for a reason. Would you feel better if the baby was at social services when she shows up? Then she would be hauled into jail for abandoning her infant, all because she begged me to watch the baby and I wouldn’t help her for a few hours.”

“Did I advise that?” He averted his eyes.

That’s what he’d meant.

“I’ll tell her—non, convince her—to speak to the flics once she turns up.”

“But you don’t know how to care for a baby.”

Like she needed him to remind her!

“I’ll do what I can.” The rest, well . . . she stared at the phone, willing it to ring.