Murder in Belleville

angle occured to her. Had Sylvie been killed for the pearl?

“Won’t you help me?” she asked.

He shrugged.

Aimee leaned forward and stared at Roberge.

“Japanese numerology has its own rules.” He gave a thin smile. “Mademoiselle, the pysche is not an exact science like your science of criminology.”

She stood up. “So you’re saying rich people are superstitious?”

“More so than most,” he said. “And Sylvie Coudray belonged to that category.”

At last! Without missing a beat, Aimee sat down. “Tell me about Sylvie.”

“I never asked about her bank account,” he said. “Or her profession.”

“According to my client, it was the oldest one in the world,” Aimee said. “But I’d guess that could be said for a portion of your clientele.”

“My services don’t require accounting,” he said. “But Sylvie loved good things. Especially pearls. And against her flawless skin …” He let the sentence dangle.

Had Roberge secretly desired Sylvie? Or had they been intime?

“She had a good heart,” he said.

A whore with a heart of gold—such a cliche!

“She came to me several years ago with a single strand of black pearls,” Roberge said. “Of the kind I’d seen only once before. After my credentials were established, she let me restring them. An honor.”

“Did she mention a woman, Eugenie? Or perhaps bring her?”

“Always alone,” he said. “Sylvie had a rare appreciation of beauty. Something shared by so few people. I will miss her.”

Aimee could see in his eyes that he would.

“Where did she obtain such pieces, Monsieur? Surely you wondered, non?

“At first. But that’s not my business. As I told you,” he said. “Beauty attracts beauty. A pearl’s essence is of life—a once living coral, ossified into a grain of sand, enveloped and loved by the oyster and reborn as a pearl. An irritant transformed. Like Sylvie.”

“Like Sylvie?” she asked.

Roberge waxed poetic concerning pearls, but she hadn’t seen the connection to a highly paid mistress. A murdered mistress, she reminded herself.

Roberge didn’t answer. His gaze riveted on the pearl still lying on the black velvet, he seemed lost in thought.

“Monsieur Roberge, I’m not sure I follow you,” she said, trying to coax him to speak.

“Pearls are to the ocean’s geology as gems are to the igneous strata in the earth.”

“How does that relate to Sylvie, Monsieur?”

“We only talked of pearls. And such discussions we had,” he said, his tone wistful.

“How does Sylvie remind you of pearls?”

“A rare woman is like that,” he said and shrugged. “What more can I say?”

His desk buzzer sounded. “Your next appointment’s arrived, Monsieur Roberge,” the clipped voice of the receptionist announced.

Aimee left. She doubted Sylvie had been murdered for her pearls, but experience had taught her not to discount anything. Most of all, she wondered why it had happened in Belleville.

As she passed through Place Vendome on the way back, she felt different. As if she was pursuing justice as her father would have, but in her own way. Step by painful step. And for the first time in a long time, she remembered her father’s laugh with dry eyes.

She’d be floundering in the dark, until she saw the police report of the explosion. Time for answers. Her next stop was the morgue.

YOUSSEFA PULLED THE BLACK chador over her head. The long draping wool felt hot and heavy. She found it ironic, having worn one rarely in Oran, she wore it almost every day in Paris. But it made the perfect cover. Too bad it couldn’t disguise her limp.

Youssefa prayed Eugenie would show up this time. She had to. Everything depended on it. Over and over in her mind Youssefa replayed Eugenie’s instructions: Meet Monday in the grotto at Pare des Buttes Chaumont. But Eugenie hadn’t showed. Failing that, the back-up plan had been to meet at the Pare de Belleville summit same time on Tuesday.

If only Eugenie would use a cell phone, she thought. But Eugenie didn’t trust them. She told Youssefa the encrypted channels weren’t secure; France Telecom just liked everyone to think they were.

Youssefa shivered in the doorway, scanning rue Crespin du Gast. France was so cold. Did the sun ever shine? She waited for the old woman walking her well-clipped terrier to pass. Then Youssefa followed the narrow street, clutching her packet tightly.

She kept her head down, passing the chanting protesters in front of the church.

“The AFL protests for your rights, mon arrde” a dreadlocked young man said thrusting a flyer into her hand. “Take one. Come to our vigil.”

Youssefa scurried by, afraid to touch it. Where she came from, such protesters would have been mowed down like wheat before the harvester.

Keep to yourself, Eugenie had instructed. Trust no one.

At the Pare de Belleville summit, the Paris skyline, dimmed in fog, was lost on Youssefa. She paced rue Piat, which crowned the park. No Eugenie. Fear mounted inside her.

Three hours later her sense of dread turned to despair. Youssefa had been in Paris only five days. Her contact, Eugenie, was gone. The link severed—she’d be next.

INSIDE THE CHURCH BERNARD paused under mullioned windows catching and refracting the green light. The whites of people’s eyes caught the gleam from dripping wax candles. Murmured conversations echoed off vaulting pillars supporting the nave.

Bernard’s credentials were checked at the damp vestibule door by a woman wearing a yellow Mali cloth headress. A thumbed copy of Frantz Fanon’s book, The Wretched of die Earth, was crooked under her arm. Beyond her Bernard saw mattresses lined along the Gothic stone walls.

“Mustafa Hamid represents us,” she said. Her other arm swept over the wooden pews where children played and men lay on mattresses. “We speak as one. As French people, not as beurs,” she said, using the word applied to second-generation North Africans, French born. Beur, the masculine form of butter, was used in verlan, the language developed in the suburban housing projects.

Doomed already, Bernard thought. The ministry had a plane waiting for these immigrants of Algerian and African descent, without papers.

Under the nave the uneven mosaic tiles were covered with muddy footprints. The glass-framed paintings of saints reflected sputtering votive candles and blue gas burners with huge pots simmering on them. The scent of melted wax and the sweat of many bodies hung over the pews.

Appalled, Bernard realized the church had by necessity become a day-care center and campground for the hunger strikers. If the French press described this scene, the whole cause would backfire on these people. Even as a lapsed Catholic, he knew church sanctity struck a chord with Christians—fallen-away Catholics most of all. And the real issue of the hunger strikers would tumble aside.

He felt an insistent tug on his trouser and looked down. A bug-eyed toddler, no taller than his knees and with a runny nose, was pulling himself up. His diaper hung loose, his small chest labored under a skimpy shirt. It was food stained and not warm enough for this dank church, Bernard thought, feeling the chill radiating from the stone.