AL05 - Murder in Clichy

bandanna around his head, jumped back in surprise.

“Where is this place?” Rene said.

“Senor, no habla Francais,” he said, alarm in his eyes.

Rene crawled across the floor to pull himself up by the wall. Black smoke billowed up from the staircase. The worker yelled and grabbed a bucket of water.

Rene made his legs move. Step by step, past an open door and into a garden courtyard. Birds sang by a low ivy-covered wall. He’d never noticed the sweetness of the tang of wet leaves or realized how beautiful a gray sky could look.

Keep going, he had to keep going, follow the narrow lane past the parked vans, and get to the street. Get away. The arched porte cochere lay just before him and he heard a car slow down, shifting into first. He ducked behind a van as the car turned in. A black Peugeot.

Hurry, he had to hurry. Despite the searing ache in his thigh, he had to keep walking. The car pulled behind him, a door opened and shut. He panicked, knowing it would only be a few minutes before they discovered he’d escaped. He heard someone yelling to call the sapeurs- pompiers, the firemen.

He edged past the van, keeping close to the walls, and made it through the arch. Saw a narrow cobbled street lined with parked cars.

He looked up, wiped his brow and saw the street sign: rue Lemercier, a one-way street. He reached into his pants pocket for his cell phone.

“Aimee?” he said. “I’m on rue Lemercier, wherever the hell that is.”

“Near Clichy. Go to your right Rene. Walk.”

He heard honking. And there she was, jumping out of a taxi and running toward him.

For once in his life the earth and stars aligned: He’d done something he never thought he could do, and with arms opened wide she was running to him.

Somehow he walked, he didn’t know how.

“Rene!” Tears spilled from her eyes as she grabbed him.

“What took you so long, Aimee?” he said.

Thursday Afternoon

GASSOT, PICQ, AND PORTLY Nemours sat in the back of the Laboratoire de Prothese Dentaire in Passage Geffroy-Didelot, Picq’s nephew’s denture-making shop. Acrid adhesive smells and sounds of running water came from the front.

“We’ve taken the matter into our own hands,” Picq said.

Gassot hoped his comrades hadn’t done anything stupid yet, but it sounded like they already had.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Gassot said. “Let’s wait and see.”

“We didn’t discover anything in the art gallery,” Picq interrupted.

“What do you mean?” Gassot asked, alarmed “Too cautious, as always, Gassot,” Picq said. “And considering your softness toward natives, dogs, and small children, well, we took care of business.”

Fools. “You broke into the gallery? Thank your stars you weren’t caught. Did the woman tell you anything?”

Gassot couldn’t fathom Picq’s steel-blue gaze.

“We’d have told you,” Picq said.

They hadn’t told him about anything else.

“What about Tran?”

“He’s going to the maison,” Gassot said.

“It’s time for action!”

Gassot expelled a breath of disgust and shook his head. “Always the hothead, aren’t you? It’s folly.”

The telephone rang.

Picq leaned over the counter next to a sealing machine. His frizzy white hair poked out from his cap. He was there to answer the telephone for his nephew, who’d gone to lunch.

“Oui, allo?” he said. “The dentures are ready for you, monsieur.”

He hung up and turned back to them. “The Castorama store off Passage de Clichy had everything we needed,” Picq said. “Fertilizer, plastic plumbers’ pipe,” he said, tapping the counter. “All under here. No one suspects us, even though it’s what they watch for now. Don’t you read the papers?”

Gassot read the PMU racing forms when he got his monthly pension, but that was it. He shrugged, “Et apres?”

“We now have everything we need to make a simple pipe bomb,” Picq said.

“I don’t like it. C’est fou. We want the jade in one piece!” Gassot said.

His comrades had always preferred action to planning. Nothing had changed since Indochina.

“We have to open the safe in the house,” Picq said. “I was in the demolition unit, remember? I can do this with my eyes closed.”

“Never.” Gassot stood up. “If the jade’s in there, you’ll ruin it. I won’t have anything to do with this crazy scheme.”

A buzzer went off.

“Calm down,” Picq said, “I can coax a newborn from a ton of steel. Tran’s in place, right? He lets us into the house and then—”

“But we don’t know the jade’s in there,” Gassot interrupted.

Nemours waved Gassot’s remark aside. “Where else, eh?”

Picq switched on an industrial dryer for enamelware and slid in a small tray of gleaming teeth. An even heat emanated from it, warming the back of the lab. Comfortable and safe.

But Gassot shuddered. It reminded him of the false teeth of an old Vietnamese woman at Dien Bien Phu. Her grandson had been caught in a tunnel with French rations. The fire bombing had left her burnt and naked. “Ivory,” she’d said pulling the teeth out and offering them, since she’d had nothing else to barter.

The corporal had shot the old woman and her grandson anyway. The next day the elite Parachute troops found out they’d been innocent. Years later he’d seen the photo of the Vietnamese girl burnt with napalm with the same expression on her face.

Gassot knew he had to reason them out of this.

“Listen, Picq, it’s just a feeling but I think they stashed the jade in a safe place, somewhere. After the old man died, Thadee must have discovered it.”

“Stands to reason,” Nemours said. “According to Albert, he talked big, but he didn’t deliver.”

“You think he was killed because he didn’t hand over the jade?” Gassot said. “But that makes no sense. He was the key, the connection.”

“You don’t kill a connection,” Picq said. “You kill a failure.”

So why did this ring false, Gassot wondered.

“Instead of blowing up the man’s safe, we should be searching for Albert’s killer, and the jade.”

“And you think we’re not? At least, you concede Albert was murdered?”

Gassot pulled the folded napkin out of his pocket. Showed them the threat scribbled on it: “We’re going to roll your pants leg up, too.”

Nemours’s face paled. “It’s all connected. Ever since we found out the jade’s in France—”

“Since it’s in the wrong hands, bad luck has followed it,” Gassot said.

Picq and Nemours exchanged a look.

“You’re not going native on us again, eh?”

Gassot’s eyes flashed. “Remember the officers, they ate the best . . .”

“And we ate the rest,” finished Picq.

Gassot walked toward the glassed-in front of the shop, wondering what more he could say to persuade his comrades to hold back. If they lay low they would be led right to it—and avoid whoever meant to kill them.

He pushed away the thoughts of Bao that crowded his mind. More and more he wondered about Bao. The