Murder in Belleville

He poured them both large shots of the amber apple brandy. Tongues of light danced from the dim chandelier.

“Salut.” They toasted each other.

Computer applications clicked across her computer screen, a greenish light haloing her terminal.

“I’ve got a long night ahead of me,” she said.

He grinned, glancing at his watch. “I hope I do too.”

Early Friday Morning

DAWN CREPT WITH TINY footsteps over the Seine. Aimee watched rose slashes paint the cloudless sky. Below her window the black iron boat moorings on quai d’Anjou glistened, beaded by last night’s rain.

She remembered her father, in his old bathrobe, making coffee on mornings like these. He’d throw on a raincoat, nip around the corner to the boulangerie, and bring home warm, buttery croissants. They’d stand at the counter, the Seine glittering below them, and talk. Talk about a case, the price of dry cleaning, or a film she’d seen—all the small threads of life’s fabric, a fabric she’d lost when her father died.

Tired but jubilant, she’d matched 80 percent of the gray paper. Enough to know these were Sylvie’s bank statements from an account at Credit Lyonnais. Finding a pattern to her withdrawals, her spending, and her habits would take time. Miles Davis stirred on her lap.

“Alors, furball,” she said. “Time for your walk and for me to clear my head.”

She hit Save, then Print. Her printer whirred into action. For backup she copied it to her hard drive and made a disk for Rend.

She slipped Miles Davis’s tartan plaid sweater over his head. In the hallway she grabbed her faux-leopard fur and laced her red hightops. Forget the fashion police this early in the morning.

With her laptop in her bag, she and Miles Davis scampered over the grooves worn in the marble steps. By the time they reached the quai, the sky had lightened to a faint lick of blue.

YELLOW-AND-BLUE PROVENCAL curtains softened the stark lines of the stainless-steel terminals in this Internet cafe.

“Fifty francs per hour,” said the lavender-scented woman owner to Aimee, setting down her cigarette.

According to Rene, for hide-and-seek on the Web the best location was a cafe ceehair, cybercafe She got to work with Miles Davis settled by her feet, sipping a bowl of water. After logging onto their computer, she accessed a university address in Teheran, from there she logged onto another address in Azerbaijan and worked her way, via Helsinki, to Barclays Bank in London.

As Edwina Pedley, a Barclays Bank alias she’d used before, Aimee accessed the Credit Lyonnais accounts page in Paris. She typed in Sylvie’s account number. The screen immediately came up “Password Required.” Aimee sat back, feeling a glimmer of hope. Now, she knew, as she’d suspected from the bank receipts she’d pieced together, Sylvie banked on-line.

Guessing and trying passwords would be futile since banks generally tripped an alarm after four attempts, thereby freezing entry to the account. Aimee sipped her grand cafe crime and downloaded a password encryption program from the Web. By the time the program decrypted Sylvie’s password, she’d finished her second croissant.

Beur was Sylvie’s password.

She remembered in the street slang verlan, beur inversed became erabe, or what was pronounced as “Arabe.”

Puzzled, Aimee hit Save.

Arabe.

Aimee accessed Sylvie’s account. She saw that Sylvie’s withdrawals and an active carte bancaire hadn’t disturbed the five-figure balance in her account.

More puzzled, Aimee sat back in the cafe chair. A woman with a fondness for Prada shoes and Mikimoto pearls should have a healthier bank balance. More like in the six-figure category.

Around her early-morning cafe” life buzzed: the whine of the espresso machine steaming milk, the delivery man heaving plastic crates of bottles onto the tiled cafe floor.

She signed out of the decryption program, printed out Sylvie’s Credit Lyonnais balance, then paid for her coffee. What had Montaigne said … then she remembered: “So it happens as it does with cages: the birds without try desperately to get in, and those within try desperately to get out.”

The access word beur stuck in her mind. She also had to figure out why Sylvie Coudray had used that apartment building. The Fichier still hadn’t ID’d Sylvie or discovered her primary residence, but she’d have to ask Rene to try again.

SHE STOPPED at her neighborhood bibliotheque and began checking the database for beur. Every entry that wasn’t culinary came up cross-referenced with Algeria. She searched microfiche files for articles on Algeria. An avalanche of current articles existed.

Overwhelmed, she sat back and patted Miles Davis on her lap. Could the current events in some way have affected Sylvie?

She refined her search, narrowing articles to recent ones, and found an editorial from he Monde dated the week before: Algeria plunged into violence in early 1992 as the regime—headed by the military—cancelled a general election in which the FIS, a fundamentalist group, took a commanding lead. The FIS was banned shortly after the polls were scrapped. Much of the fighting was fueled by ‘les Barbes,’ evangelical preachers, so named for their long beards and adherence to Islamic traditions. The FIS countryside support and the agitation of returned ‘beurs’ from France with patriotic leanings stimulated the continuing unstable political climate.

Aimee thought of les Barbes whom she’d seen in front of a mosque in Belleville. Engrossed, she read further: More than 50,000 people—rebels, civilians, and members of government forces—have been killed, according to Western estimates. The military, plagued with budgetary problems since few countries venture to buy oil and fill the coffers of an unstable country, has wrested control only to lose it periodically. Without the arms, unnamed government sources say, the military’s ability to enforce order is in jeopardy. Massacres of villagers in the countryside remain commonplace.

She leaned back in the creaking library chair, chewed a paper clip, and thought. She knew the reputation of the network of North African immigrants, the Maghrebins, in Belleville.

Ruthless.

She remembered an incident where a pute and her pimp strayed out of their territory into a housing project off rue de Belleville. They hadn’t lived to regret it.

She wondered what connection Sylvie, a minister’s mistress acting as Eugenie in Belleville, could have. What had Anais said? Sylvie was “sorry the situation had escalated.” A chilling thought occurred to her. Instead of an illicit affair, could Sylvie have been referring to something else? Did it have to do with the Arabes who’d hung around her place… the hand of Fat’ma … had she upset someone in the Maghreb system … had they come after her?

Aimee hunched forward, chewed the paper clip some more. She also wished she’d found the laptop.

These thoughts were a leap, but worth exploring.

Outside the wind whipped the budding branches as they thumped the rain-spattered glass.

A Maghrebin would know. Not that any one of them would tell her.

Another thought bothered her: Why hadn’t Anais returned her calls?

She pulled out the paper and punched in the phone number 01 43 76 89, written above the smudged name Youssef.

“May I talk with Youssef?”

Someone shouted in Arabic and hung up.