AL05 - Murder in Clichy

Members of our sect were executed.”

“We’d like to help, of course,” Aimee said, after signing. “I’ll pass around your petition.”

“But there’s something more important,” Linh said. Her face crinkled in worry; there was a slight tremor in her eyelids. “Your application says you have a detective agency. Can you contact someone for us?”

“On a good day we contact encryptions, viruses, and hackers invading computer systems,” Rene said, grinning.

Linh pulled a creased paper from her sleeve. “What about this man?”

Aimee saw the scribbled name Thadee Baret; no address, just the 17th arrondissement, and a phone number.

“He’s sympathetic . . . he helps our cause. Can you give him something from me?”

“As I said, we want to help,” Aimee said. “But Linh, you don’t need us to telephone him or to meet him . . .”

“Politics,” Linh interrupted, shaking her head. “My father was a judge years ago in Saigon. The regime denounced him and blacklisted our family, which still remains under surveillance. My younger brother’s in prison for ‘political dissent.’ His children have been denied visits to him. Even here, in Paris, they watch me.”

Watch her?

“Please understand,” Aimee said, wariness intruding. “I want to help, but what our firm does is computer security.”

“How much?”

“Non, Linh, it’s not a question of money, it’s simply not my field,” Aimee said, feeling awkward. Linh had helped her, a novice, in her struggle with meditation, and now. . . .

“But I read about you . . . how you found a killer in the Bastille while you were blind.”

Embarrassed, Aimee wished the newspaper articles had never appeared.

“It’s complicated . . .” Linh continued, eyelids once more fluttering nervously.

“In what way?” Aimee said. The meditation room was becoming chilly.

Linh pulled an envelope from her robe and said, “In my country we suffer anonymous denunciations by a network of informers, detentions without trial. Priests and nuns from our sect, or anyone with a political agenda that could threaten the government, live in fear. Please, just give him this from me.”

Aimee tried to catch Rene’s eye, but he’d bent down to tie his shoes.

“I’m new to Paris,” Linh continued, twisting the amber prayer beads on her wrist. “Mostly I fund-raise at Cao Dai meditation seminars. And I am petitioning the International Court of Justice and Amnesty International for my brother’s release.”

“Doesn’t that conflict with your vocation?”

“Not at all,” she said. “As the Dalai Lama says, ‘There are many paths all leading to the same place.’ My mission and our practice glide together.”

Aimee heard sincerity in Linh’s voice. But corporate security was the bread and butter of Leduc Detective. After last month’s incident when she’d been assaulted, she’d vowed to steer clear of anything else.

“Think of it as our donation, Linh,” Rene said. He gestured to the envelope. “May I take this? We will deliver it for you, gladly.”

Surprised, Aimee shot Rene a look.

“No problem,” Rene continued, “we’ll make the phone call . . .”

“And you will arrange to give this envelope to him? He will have something for me.” Linh put her palms together again, a gesture of greeting and farewell.

Rene returned her gesture. “We will try.”

* * *

“WHY GET us involved, Rene?” Aimee asked as soon as they were outside on the narrow street, lychee seeds crackling under their feet. She hitched her bag onto her leather-clad shoulder. “Trying to earn good karma?”

Rene pulled on a Burberry raincoat, tailored to his height. In the weak afternoon light a flurry of windswept brown leaves and Chinese candy wrappers swirled from the gutter. “What’s a half-hour to meet this man, Baret, to give him this envelope? Et alors, you’re going to the seventeenth to check on the Olf project anyway. And a little good karma wouldn’t hurt, would it?”

She nodded. Maybe he was right. All she ever did was over-tip taxi drivers, hoping to earn late rainy night taxi karma.

Apart from the oasis of the nearby Buddhist temple, in the midst of a mind-numbing sea of concrete tower block buildings, in this polyglot quartier of Vietnamese, Chinese, Laotians, and Cambodians, the thirteenth arrondissement had little charm. It was impersonal, its gray uniformity punctuated only by bright red Vietnamese pho noodle restos, Asian video shops, and hairdressers’ salons.

She paused at the bus stop by Armee du Salut, the ferroconcrete Salvation Army building, designed by Le Corbusier: a treasure trove of cheap, used armoires.

“See you back at the office, Rene,” she said, and caught the bus.

RAIN PATTERED on the windows as dusk descended over Avenue de Wagram. The chic quartier, off one of the streets radiating from the Arc de Triomphe, lay in the seventeenth arrondissement. Hopeful, Aimee wound the black wool scarf around her neck, signed in, and mounted the stairs spiraling up to Olf’s state-of-the-art corporate headquarters, located in a wood-paneled hotel particulier. A mixture of steel and curved aqua glass-walled offices constituted the mansion’s top two floors.

But the project management staff dealing with her proposal had left for a trade show outside Paris. A wasted trip! She wrote a note and left it in the chef des operations box.

Downstairs, the concierge’s post was vacant. Where was the security man she’d seen? Shadows from the pillars crisscrossed the black and white floor. As she wrote her initials by her name on the sign-out log, the timed lights shut off.

In the darkness, she felt her way, her boot heels echoing on the tile, her shoulders tight with apprehension. She sniffed. Only the smell of cold stone and floor wax.

Then a rustling and the click of a door closing.

Is someone there?” she called. “

Silence.

She felt a frisson of fear. And for a moment it was as if she were blind again, groping in darkness, her only guide sounds, odors, and the currents in the air. Panicked, holding her breath, she kept going and felt the cold, smooth marble of a pillar. Seeing the dim glow of the streetlight, she let out a sigh of relief.

With a quick step, she made her way through the door to the street. She looked back but saw no one following her. A few blocks away, she turned into rue de Levis, glad of the bustling street market marking the tony quartier.

In the chill dusk, horns beeped. “Crevettes, un kilo!” shouted a fishmonger standing by the tubs of bright pink shrimp, frost framing his words in the evening air. Lighted stalls with every kind of cheese and produce filled the narrow pedestrian rue, an old Roman road once used by Jeanne d’Arc and her army. Shoppers jostled Aimee on the rain-slicked pavement.

She punched in Thadee Baret’s number on her cell phone which rang and rang. She was about to hang up when someone answered.

“Allo? ”

“Monsieur Thadee Baret?”

“Un moment. ”

She heard what sounded like the tele, the whoosh of an espresso machine in the background.

“Oui?” A man asked, “Who’s this?”