Murder in the Bastille

bordering the medieval chapel and hospital courtyard. The Quinze-Vingts had functioned as the Black Musketeers’ barracks in the 1770s. Later, under Cardinal Rohan, it had become the central eye hospital in Paris.

The throbbing in her head subsided in the warm, fresh air. Fresh for Paris, anyway. Didn’t they say more people got sick in hospitals than got better?

Maybe it was all the concentrating, striving to hear, to understand, to remember, but something troubled her, troubled her more than she cared to admit.

The whoosh of a swinging door, stale air on her face, and the aroma of unwatered dried-out house plants greeted her.

“We’re going down the hallway, then to the right.” Chantal pushed open another door. “Things are chaotic. I’ll help them find you a room. Take a seat,” Chantal said, guiding her several steps forward. Aimee felt warmth again and found herself on a stiff plastic chair.

She didn’t want to be stuck in a blind people’s home. She wanted to see, she wanted them to test her until her eyes worked.

She heard a buzzing fly hit the glass window then rebound with a ping. Its wings were silent momentarily, then it buzzed, striking the glass again. And again. She felt like the fly, blinded by glass invisible to her, beating her wings in futility.

Right now, she needed to be sure the phone she’d picked up belonged to the victim of the assault. And to discover why the woman had been lured into the passage, then killed.

Aimee remembered the woman seated beside her on the banquette, murmuring into the phone. Her frightened eyes and her chain smoking.

Had the victim known the killer would be in the passage and refused to meet him? Was that why he’d called back when Aimee had answered?

But Aimee still had a sneaking suspicion that she had been the killer’s target. She thought back to the odd sense she’d had that there was someone lurking in the hospital corridor. A foreign presence. Was it the killer, checking up to see if she’d survived?

She needed Rene’s help. Help from a sighted person she trusted. And her vulnerability overwhelmed her again. Stuck depending on others, hating every minute of it. She’d be a sitting duck if the killer wanted to attack her again. And if the rest of her life panned out like this, she didn’t know what she’d do. Lying in a hospital bed when there were things to find out . . . she had to do something concrete.

She remembered the woman’s Violet Vamp nails, in contrast to her own, chipped Gigabyte Green. The dress and jacket with mahjong tiles for buttons . . . her pulse quickened. The same jacket she’d worn. She had to go to the boutique and question the owner. But how?

Aimee heard snoring, a slow wheezing grunt, from somewhere on her right.

“Time for dinner yet?” a gruff voice asked, snorting awake.

Was this a blind resident?

“We’ll soon find out when Chantal returns,” she said.

“New resident?” He didn’t wait for her reply. “Food’s awful. We regulars pay a little extra and get curry on Thursdays from Raj. He runs the South Indian hole-in-the-wall across the street. His papadams reign supreme. As good as I remember in Pondicherry.”

The mention of food made her realize she hadn’t eaten this morning.

“I’m Aimee Leduc, and I would shake your hand if I could see it.”

“Follow my voice,” he said. “Turn toward the warmth, lean, and stretch your hand.”

Bingo, she thought, as a large, warm paw gripped hers. And for a moment she felt connected. Connected to others like her, for the first time since the attack.

“Lucas Passot,” he said. “I lodge here courtesy of a close encounter with the #86 bus on my way back from the cleaner’s last year. Ruined a good suit, too! The salopes tell me I’m lucky my gimpy leg wasn’t reinjured. At least my left eye has some peripheral vision.”

“The doctor keeps running tests on me,” she said. “But a vein in my head burst. . . .”

“Don’t let the jargon throw you,” he interrupted. “They don’t know what they’re talking about. They keep our medical dossiers and tell us what they like.”

Disturbing, but she knew the dossier part was true.

“I’m temporary,” said Passot. “When my skills come up to snuff, so says the mobility teacher, I’m back in my apartment.”

“They do that here?”

“The main residence takes independent tenants only,” he said. “But here we have a small mobility program. Of course, it all depends on funding.”

Aimee felt ignorant but figured she might as well ask. “What kinds of things do they teach?”

“Exhilarating stuff: dressing, calling 36 99 for the time, caring for clothes, how to shake hands, how to hear the newspaper read by a telephone service, and cane skills.”

Overwhelmed, she sat back.

Would she have to use a white cane?

“They like those regular paychecks, these overeducated and overfed lemmings . . .”

“Running your mouth as usual, Lucas!” Chantal’s voice cut through his words. “Tiens! Do something useful for a change, eh?”

Aimee wished she could have something to eat and then a rest. Following a conversation between people she couldn’t see felt as if she were tracking the ball at a tennis match, an invisible ball.

“Why not relax, mademoiselle?” Lucas said, his voice near her ear. “Right now you’re bobbing like a cork. That much I can see, and you’re making me dizzy. Don’t worry about following with your head. Most people think you’re enthralled with their scintillating conversation if you just close your trap and listen. Relax. And wear dark glasses. That way you’ll be mysterious and captivating.”

Instead of blind and mistrustful?

“Trust me.”

“Why would she trust a blind old fart like you, Lucas?”

And for the first time since the attack on the passage, Aimee laughed. Deep and from her gut.

“See! See Chantal . . . I’m good for something,” Passot said.

“Forget yourself for a moment, Lucas, if that’s possible,” she said. “First, this TGV disaster, and now I hear that flics have taken Mathieu Cavour to the Commissariat.”

“Did he forget to pay his quarterly taxes or a parking ticket?”

“It’s about the woman they found murdered outside his atelier,” she said.

Aimee’s ears tuned in. “Tell me.”

“I met poor Suzanne, his office manager, when I was buying rabbit at the Marche d’Aligre,” Chantal said. “She told me that Mathieu had to close the shop. The flics took him in for questioning.”

Aimee wondered if he had witnessed something, or if he was a suspect.

“Where’s his shop, Chantal?”

“Where it’s been for two hundred years, in Cour de Bel Air.”

“By the Passage de la Boule Blanche?”

“You might say that,” Chantal said. “They connected once.”

Aimee tried to keep the excitement out of her voice. What if the man had attacked her, realized his mistake, then dodged into the next passage where the other woman had gone to escape him? Or something like that.

“But rumor says it’s the Beast of Bastille,” Lucas said. “So, has Mathieu been leading a double life?”

Chantal made a phfft sound of disgust. Then air whooshed by Aimee: Chantal had probably thrown up her arms or fanned herself.

“Mathieu Cavour and I were at the ecole maternelle together on rue Sedaine,” she said. “The men of his family have been craftsmen for hundreds of years. He’s no more the Beast of Bastille than I am. It’s ridiculous.”

“I don’t know how old Mathieu Cavour is,” Aimee said. “But the man who grabbed me was strong and had wine on his breath.”

And the memory came back to her, his wrist . . . what was it . . . cufflinks?