AL06 - Murder in Montmartre

As his thin beam illuminated the chimney pot, a light went on in a courtyard window opposite and they heard someone struggling with a window. “Quick, Sebastian. Time to go.”

She felt him tug at the rope and her feet slipped on the slick ice.

“We’ve got company,” he said, pointing below. “The flics.”

Two cars had pulled up in the street, their blue lights casting a glow over the snow-laced courtyard. Had someone heard them and called the flics? She peered around the chimney, saw more rooftops and the pale moon’s reflection glinting on more skylights, a few feet away.

“Grab the bag, come join me,” Aimee said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Hurry up. We can jimmy open a skylight.”

She felt the rope tug.

“How many skylights do you see?” he asked.

“Three. Two side by side, then one some distance away.”

“Bon. One of them must be over a hall. I’m right behind you.”

She tucked the Baggie in her jumpsuit pocket, climbed, then gripped the chimney edge and let herself down on the other side.

Her feet scrabbled and she landed on all fours. And then she was sliding down the slick wet roof surface. Panic gripped her. Only the gutter ledge was between her and a drop of several stories. She grabbed and her hand caught the metal. She pulled herself up toward a rectangular flat area.

Sebastian landed behind her. By the time they reached the furthest skylight she was panting. The cold air hurt her lungs.

“Here,” he said, handing her the pliers. “Work the skylight lock open.”

She was startled to find that it was already broken. Sawtooth-edged shards of glass, knife sharp, jutted from the frame. Deftly, she eased her hand past them and grasped the lock from inside. Within seconds, with Sebastian’s help, she’d lifted the skylight. She held onto the metal rim and let herself down, hoping her feet would find the ladder usually attached to the wall of a communal hallway, that she wasn’t about to land in someone’s bedroom.

Her toes hit ladder rungs, and she climbed down to a level surface, a musty carpet, wet with footprints. Odd.

“Quick, take the bag,” said Sebastian, handing it down to her. He made a perfect tiptoe landing and they found themselves in what appeared to be the entry of a sixth-floor chambre de bonne, a maid’s room converted into an apartment.

“Look at the footprints.”

“My feet aren’t that big,” he said, about to rub them out with his boot.

“Leave it, let’s go,” she told him.

They crept down the flights of creaking wooden stairs, past a glass entry door and into a covered courtyard area. Several doors fronted the coved stone alcove. Large green trash containers stood by a concierge’s loge. Sebastian thumbed a button on the side wall and within the huge vaulted door a small door clicked open.

They found themselves outside on the street opposite their parking place. Lucky!

Back in the van, Sebastian switched on the ignition and turned on the heater.

“All that for a geranium twig! Satisfied?”

“In more ways than one,” she said. “Think back to the broken glass, the open skylight.”

He nodded, taking a curve, then gunning his engine as they climbed the steep street.

“We might have discovered an escape route.”

Hot air shot from the floor vents, warming her frozen legs.

“Escape route?”

“The killer’s escape route.”

Later Monday Night

LUCIEN CLOSED HIS EYES. His mind flooded with childhood memories: his grand- mere’s high-pitched funeral chant as his uncle’s body lay stiff and waxen on the dining-room table. The women, all in black like a row of crows, wailing and the men pounding their rifle butts on the floor. The terrible rhythm had echoed off the stone walls. Sadness, borne on the dry wind, scented by the lavender and myrtle, had chilled him to the bone.

As long as he could remember, funerals had been the social gatherings in the village. Beyond it, the rutted road rimmed a turquoise sea whose waves beat upon the granite of abandoned Roman quarries. The stones were gouged as if the Romans had departed yesterday, not centuries ago.

That day, he and Marie-Dominique had taken to the mountain path, unseen, to escape the malaise clinging to the village, home of the old and infirm, like so many villages decimated by vendettas. They found the cave by a half-ruined shepherd’s hut nestled in the crag of a sheer granite face where graphite and mica crystals caught the copper sun. Every moment was still imprinted in his mind. Marie-Dominique’s long tanned legs ending in faded blue espadrilles. The fight her cousin Giano picked with him later in the bar, accusing him. . . .

“If you don’t mind asking your guests to form a line, Monsieur Conari?” the commissaire was saying. “Each must show us a carte d’identite, and answer a few questions. Just a formality, of course.”

With a start, Lucien opened his eyes. He was in Felix’s salon and Marie-Dominique stood somewhere in the crowd, not nestled warmly beside him in the cave. He felt for his wallet, looked inside, and panicked. It held only his Carte Orange pass and a dirty cough drop. He’d forgotten his ID. By law, anyone without ID was subject to arrest. That law was rarely enforced. But for Corsicans like him, the flics exacted revenge for the Separatist threats and applied the rules strictly. In his village, men evaporated into the mountains when a police car rolled into view. That was what he wished he could do now.

And the contract Conari had spoken of? Later. Now he had to take cover someplace in this flat and think what to do. Lucien tugged at the waiter’s sleeve as he passed. He had looked familiar. . . . “Compadre, where’s the restroom?” Lucien asked.

The waiter gestured across the long room in the same direction as the flics.

“Any place closer?”

Understanding showed in the waiter’s eyes. “Follow me.”

He showed Lucien to a water closet by the kitchen.

By the time Lucien emerged from the bathroom, he’d decided to ask Felix to vouch for him. He was already late for his DJ gig.

But in the hall, Marie-Dominique blocked his way. “Something wrong, Lucien?”

Wrong? That she was married, that he couldn’t take her warm brown shoulders in his arms? But he didn’t say that. He searched for words.

“Marie-Dominique, seeing you again after all this time . . . there’s so much to say.” For four years he’d dreamed of her but his words came out flat and inadequate.

“Lucien, you still make music and that makes me happy.” Her words hung in the air, full of the unspoken emotion.

A gardenia floated in a bowl of water on a table, a thin strand of diamonds around her wrist caught the light. Candles flickered, casting shadows on the moire silk-patterned wallpaper above them. He longed to have time to watch her, to inhale the rose scent that surrounded her. The old thirties Tino Rossi song, “O! Corse, Ile d’Amour,” looped in his mind; it was the tune that had been on the radio that afternoon.

“It had to happen this way,” she said, as if reading his thoughts.

Startled, he clenched his hands into fists. “How can you say that? You know what we had, what I felt.”

“My family was opposed.” She looked away, her low voice almost a whisper. “My father knows the Armata Corsa for what it is. Terrorism.”

“When we all joined we were ignorant. But I never participated in any actions.”

Fool! He’d been a fool to join with his drunken friends, hoping to free Corsica from French rule. Free? Not with middle-ofthe-night bombings and the kidnappings for ransom, which the Armata Corsa used to buy guns. He shook