Murder in the Bastille

“Who’s there?”

No answer. And then footsteps moved away. Was it a nurse, the doctor, or a volunteer?

Or . . . ? That tar smell near the broom closet? For an awful moment she was struck by the thought of the attacker, lurking, waiting to finish his task. It would be so easy to don a uniform, wear a mask, and search the corridors. Her heart clenched with fear. She took a deep breath.

“Call me curious, Morbier,” she said. “Please, we need to talk.”

“I’m tied up,” he said. “Staff meeting in five minutes. The unit has to come up with some answers. And I still haven’t read the file.”

“Answers to why Patrick Vaduz was released due to incorrect procedure? And why a woman got murdered in the passage? Well France 2 news put it together and blamed the bungling on . . .”

“Got to go,” Morbier interrupted. In the background, chairs scraped the floor, murmuring voices rose.

“But they’re wrong. I don’t think Vaduz killed that woman,” she said. “Meet me in room 312, l’hopital Quinzes-Vingts.”

“Investigating something?” he said. “Leave the serial killers to us, Leduc. Stick to computers.”

“I can’t, it’s personal.” She wanted to confront him face to face.

Morbier’s voice betrayed no surprise. “Leduc, you know hospitals bother me.”

True. He hadn’t even come to see her after the terrorist bombing in Place Vendome, the one that killed her father and put her in the burn unit. She’d been lucky; the skin graft on her palm was the only visible scar.

“I can help you,” she said, lowering her voice. “But not over the phone.”

“Tiens! We know Patric Vaduz did it.”

She had to make Morbier interested enough to come. This needed to be said in person. “Well, there’s a witness who thinks otherwise.”

A siren wailed below Aimee’s window as an ambulance pulled into the hospital courtyard.

“So this witness has proof?”

She heard an edge of interest in his voice.

“You might say living proof.”

Wednesday Noon

“ATTENTION, PETIT !” SHOUTED A perspiring delivery man wheeling a dolly loaded with beer crates. “Didn’t see you.”

Rene, carrying Aimee’s bag, sidestepped the man on the pavement. He ignored the stares from passersby in rue Fau-bourg St-Antoine. Born a dwarf, now just four feet tall, he was used to people staring. Most of the time.

He’d heard Aimee’s message on his voice mail and gathered things from her apartment. Now he turned into the Passage de la Boule Blanche, a narrow half-covered alleyway lined with old storefronts and doorways to courtyards housing craftsmen, upholsterers, and furniture makers. Wide enough for a small car. Once the site of the crimes of the notorious poet-criminal, Lacenaire, guillotined in 1836.

Rene retraced his steps to the place where he’d found Aimee sprawled on the cobbles. Not far from the metal waist-high barricade with a Pietons barres sign. He wondered if there was anything he hadn’t found last night.

Green garbage bins, emptied and waiting, hugged the narrow stone wall. Too bad, anything left behind would have been cleaned up by the ebouers. Nothing there to indicate the horror of Aimee’s attack last night. What had she said . . . she remembered a light?

He looked around and in the October sunshine saw the imposing entrance of the Quinze-Vingts hospital at the end of the passage. The Quinze-Vingts—fifteen times twenty—was the number of beds the hospital’s founder, Louis XV, had needed for his knights blinded by Saracens on the Ninth Crusade; the name had endured. Had she meant a light from the hospital?

The Passage de la Boule Blanche, in the throes of construction, lay deserted. The young designer’s shop was closed. Ahead on the right lay the courtyard of the Cahiers du Cinema, their former client. He walked over but the gate was chained. On it hung a sign saying CLOSED FOR REMODELING. Too bad, he would have felt comfortable asking questions of people he knew there. He could have ferreted out whether anyone had been in the office late.

He gazed up. A mossy stone wall lined a good part of the passage. The network of passages in the Bastille once connected the wood shipped down the Seine and the woodworkers and furniture makers in the faubourg’s courtyards. After Louis XI licensed craftsmen in the fifteenth century, this Bastille quartier grew into a working-class area; cradle of revolutions, mother of street-fighters and artisans, home of the Bastille prison.

Later tinsmiths, blacksmiths, mirror-makers, gilders, and coal merchants joined them, occupying the small glass-roofed factories and warehouses. Now, many of these were gentrified, and the rest had been bulldozed.

Then he heard hammering from the nichelike entrance on his left.

Rene didn’t feel much like a detective even though the sign where he worked read LEDUC DETECTIVE. They shared the computer security jobs, but only Aimee had a criminal investigation background.

Now he had to take up the slack. Help figure this out. Aimee, his best friend, had suffered a brutal attack outside this atelier; maybe someone inside had seen or heard something.

He walked into a small, damp courtyard. A sign, styled like a coat of arms, read CAVOUR MASTER WOODWORKERS, EST. 1794. Low strains of a Vivaldi concerto floated through the doorway.

“Pardon,” Rene said, raising his voice. He walked through a narrow entrance opening into a large atelier illumined by skylights. The sharp tang of turpentine reached him. “Anyone here?”

A middle-aged man, wearing a blue workcoat, glasses pushed up on his bald head, stood at a work table. With delicate strokes he rubbed the gilded legs of an antique lacquered chair. Small and exquisite, it looked to Rene as if anyone sitting on it would snap it in pieces. In the middle of the large room stood a heater, its flue leading to the roof, a water cooler, and more worktables filled with furniture in various stages of repair. From the walls hung every type of antique wooden chair Rene had ever seen—and many he hadn’t.

“Forgive me, monsieur,” Rene said, “for disturbing your work.”

The man looked up, took in Rene’s stature, but showed no surprise. He had dark pouches under his eyes and a sallow complexion. His pursed mouth gave him a harried look.

“Tiens! I’ve done all I can with this,” the man said, setting down a mustard-colored chamois cloth. “I’m Mathieu Cavour. How may I help you?” he asked Rene, picking up several cracked Sevres porcelain drawer knobs, and slipping them into his pocket. “My showroom’s in the front, off the other courtyard, if you’d like to see our finished work.”

Should he show him the detective badge, the one Aimee left in the drawer, that he’d slipped in his pocket?

“Monsieur Cavour,” he said, flashing the badge. “A woman, my friend, was attacked outside your shop last night. Were you here?”

Rene thought Cavour cringed. But maybe it was just his silhouette shifting under the skylight as Rene looked up.

“Attacked . . . here?”

“I found her outside in the passage,” Rene said. “Did you see or hear anything unusual?”

“I live above the shop. I have trouble sleeping,” Cavour said. “Music helps me. I wouldn’t have heard anything outside.”

“So your light was on?”

Cavour’s brow creased. “Is this woman, your friend, all right?”

Why didn’t Cavour answer his questions?

“The attack was so vicious it blinded her,” said Rene.

“Je regrette . . .” he said.

Rene saw sadness in Cavour’s eyes.

“Do you remember if you had your light on?” he asked again.