Excited, she kept going. After twenty hops, it landed.
243ms 246ms 239ms head.rambler.ru ru . . . the origin of the message was Russia.
She sat back, surprised. And tried several more. Every time it went back to the same server in Moscow. That made sense. Even though the Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union disintegrated, she knew Big Brother in Moscow still looked at all email. They probably hadn’t enough money to change their system.
Yet.
Now she had to figure out why Vincent was getting spam-like e-mail from Russia that he kept encrypted. Was he the intended recipient? Was it going first to someone else?
The phone rang. Josiane’s phone.
She hesitated then answered.
“I’ve just got a minute,” Lieutenant Egerie said. “This came across my desk.”
She picked up an unusual, tense note in his voice.
“I appreciate it.”
“In the process of being charged, a man became ill,
That was the name Yann Remouze had given to Rene. She held back her excitement.
“Where’s he now?”
“Hotel Dieu, but he’s due to be charged with drug trafficking in the 11ieme.”
The Hotel-Dieu, on Ile de la Cite between Notre Dame and quai des Orfevres, supposedly dated from Druid times. However, Aimee’s lycee teacher had insisted it was only from Emperor Julien II’s era. And her parish priest had cited Saint-Landry, the bishop of Paris in A.D. 600, as the builder of this hospital for the needy.
Any of them were good enough for her.
She knew how to circumvent the Hotel Dieu switchboard, archaic, but still functioning.
“
The woman at the other end of the line coughed; papers rustled. “Let me transfer you to the ward nurse.”
Clicks and buzzing accompanied her call.
“Ward 13C,” said a brisk voice.
“Checking on prisoner Dragos Iliescu. The Commissaire’s interested in his health status.”
“So he’s a doctor now, your Commissaire?”
“Not in this life,” said Aimee, trying to inject a world-weary tone in her voice as if she did this every day, “but he wants to know if this Iliescu’s healthy enough for arraignment.”
“Let me check,” she said. “Aaah, that one. Transferred from CUSCO to intensive care.”
CUSCO was the prison section of Hotel Dieu.
“Can you elaborate? Why?”
“He needs twenty-four hour care and supervision,” she said.
What was wrong with him?
“Sounds serious. Want to share it with me so I can give my boss a time-frame here? Two days, a week, or . . .”
“Third degree burns, high fever, nausea,” the sister said. “Hard to say.”
“Burns?” she asked, perplexed.
“Like he’d been on vacation, but only his arm got sunburned. Bizarre, eh?” she said. “Time for rounds, excuse me.”
Bizarre.
From the window, Aimee felt the Seine-scented breeze waft inside. If only she could take Miles Davis for a walk right now along the quai.
But food and rent weren’t paid with
And then she thought about what Rene had recounted to her after his conversation with Mathieu, the
“ I APPRECIATE your taking me, Chantal,” Aimee said.
“No problem,” said Chantal, “It’s on my way to the Braille library on Avenue Parmentier. I work there this afternoon.”
“Work?”
“What people do to earn money, yes,” she said. “I supervise the reading room.”
Aimee felt Chantal’s dry hand on her elbow, guiding her. And the uneven cobbles beneath her feet. She didn’t want to admit how afraid she felt. How vulnerable to attack.
But talking with Cavour could give her information about Josiane.
Or not.
But she had no one else to ask.
“You know, there’s a Braille beginning class starting next week. Two nights a week, an accelerated class.”
Aimee thought about all the CDs she wanted to hear. And how if she put off learning Braille, it would just get harder.
“Sign me up, Chantal,” she said, anxious to arrive.
“Fine. We’re almost there,” said Chantal. “Feel the wall, how it curves; it’s the way medieval entrances were built.”
Aimee’s hands, guided by Chantal’s, felt the pocked, cold stones, the crumbling pebblelike mortar in between. Grayish film swam in front of her eyes, coarse and grainy. Like ground pepper. Her heart skidded. Was she seeing what she was feeling?
“Dr. Lambert’s referred me to a retinologist,” she said. “Why couldn’t the geek have done it in the first place?”
“Geek . . . are you kidding?” she said. “Everyone says he’s . . .”
“
Aimee slid the sunglasses up on her head. And for a moment, a glint of silver hair flashed in front of her, superimposed on the pepperlike film. But there was no depth. No distinction between close or far.
The world tilted. Dizziness overwhelmed her. She grabbed at the wall, pressed her forehead against the cold stone, gray and furred with lichen. Ecstatic to see, and yet so dizzy.
“
“But Chantal . . .”
“Mathieu, Mathieu!” said Chantal, interrupting her, pulling Aimee along.
She felt as though she’d stepped into a Dali painting. No depth of field, everything pasted together. Colors colliding. Weaving and wonderful and surreal and sickening.
She picked a point and tried to focus, but every stone, each bar of woven grille work, disoriented her. Her nose brushed the wall, yet she’d had no idea how close she was.
Her head ached. She wanted so much to see and so much to close her eyes.
And then it began fading. Fading. Images of a hammer, and a man in a wavy, blue workcoat, coming in and fading out . . . a gauze-like haze hovered, never quite lifting.
The man’s mouth was moving in the haze, he was saying “Chantal . . .” The granular film descended, succeeded by gray mist.
“No, no,” she said, rubbing her eyes, trying to rub the film away.
But Chantal didn’t answer. Nor did the man. Silence, except for the birds singing in the distance. She realized they’d entered Mathieu’s atelier. And there had been large chairs hooked on the walls and gilt frames stacked against tables. She’d seen it. Work-worn, real. Good God, she’d seen it!
She felt a tentative hand on her shoulder.
