funeral.”
The pitiful affair she’d organized with his colleagues and neighbors in attendance.
Morbier blinked, caught off guard. A rare occurrence.
“That long?” Morbier said. “Well, Ile Saint-Louis is my turf, too, Leduc.” No need to remind her he was a commissaire in the fourth arrondissement who worked at the Prefecture one day a week, keeping the nature of his duties there close to his chest. “The Brigade Fluviale found a female student in the Seine by Pont de Sully early this morning.”
“I’m sorry for her family,” she said. “A suicide?”
“You’re local, Leduc. Trouble’s never far behind you. I wonder if you saw anything?”
Now he was getting to the real reason he was here.
“You’re asking me for help?”
A good
“We know about that.”
They’d worked fast. Unusual. They had discovered Orla’s identity, but how had they traced Nelie to the hostel so quickly?
“So she lived in the hostel . . . then you know more than I do.”
“She—I don’t know where she lived.” He shrugged. “Her friend’s hostel laundry receipt was found in her pocket.”
“Who is she?”
“More important, what’s her angle? That’s where I hoped you’d help.”
That didn’t make sense. Unless Morbier knew Aimee had already been at the hostel.
“Me? Don’t you even know her name?”
“Orla Thiers. It’s her friend at the hostel, Nelie Landrou, we’re interested in now. She was involved in a theft from a nuclear fuel processing site in La Hague.” He retucked his napkin into his collar. “She’s on the wanted list.”
“What?”
“That’s all I can say.”
Wanted. No wonder she was hiding.
Wanted like Aimee’s own mother, a seventies radical, who’d disappeared years before, gone into hiding, or on the lam. Only Aimee’s mother had been imprisoned, then deported, before she vanished. The only trace of her mother she had discovered years later was a letter in a faded envelope with a blurred U.S. postmark. Her hand clenched and unclenched.
“Leduc? You with me?”
She had to control her nerves.
“Does that strike a chord? Hit close to home?”
Cruel, he would hurt her deeply and then feign ignorance.
“Students stealing nuclear secrets, Morbier? Unlikely.”
“Did I say that, Leduc?”
Or maybe he was casting a wide net, unsure. Fishing.
“Wait a minute—was she one of those MondeFocus protesters at l’Institut du Monde Arabe? The article in
“Those reporters . . . climbing the wrong tree as usual, Leduc. No truth to that report.”
If she believed that, she’d believe the earth was flat.
“Do you deny that students were beaten?” She tore the dark crust off the bread and chewed.
Morbier shook his head. “Their permit was revoked, the CRS found weapons, warned the crowd twice, did their job. Only one was hospitalized. But they never approached the Seine.”
“Only one? Guess that makes it OK.”
“The brigadier’s been called on the carpet by the minister. He’s chewing nails, insisting the CRS was set up.” Morbier tore off a hunk of bread. “I think he’s right.”
“How’s that, Morbier? Sounds to me like you’re toeing the party line.”
A bowl of steaming mussels in garlic butter broth with a side order of crisp golden fried potatoes appeared.
She wouldn’t let him wiggle off the hook. “The CRS squeals when its brutality’s exposed.”
“Who said they’re ballerinas?” His thick eyebrows rose up his forehead. “The brigadier is Ciel’s kid, Viktor, the one who used to chew his lip so it bled. Remember?”
She did. Remembered a fifteen-year-old Viktor’s short woolen pants and thin white legs as he delivered his father’s lunch to the Commissariat. He’d been teased mercilessly. An odd choice for the CRS, or was the agency getting in touch with its sensitive side?
Morbier speared a mussel. “Because of Alstrom’s high profile, the CRS was careful to adhere to regulations. They did everything by the book. Last thing they’d do would be throw a body in the Seine.”
“Face it, Morbier, they’d deny it anyway.”
“You’re interested in ecology, global warming, and all that kind of thing?”
Where did that come from?
“I recycle,” she said, going along with him. “The haze of pollution clinging over La Defense bothers me as much as the next person. What’s the connection?”
“There’s more to it, Leduc.”
Her shoulders tensed. The baby? She tried for a casual tone. “Like what?”
He set his fork and knife down on the tablecloth and pulled out a pack of unfiltered Gauloises. He lit one with a wooden match.
“It’s about cooking a wolf, Leduc.” He blew smoke out the sides of his mouth.
One week, three days, four hours, and thirteen minutes since she’d quit. Not counting, was she? She pulled a pack of stop-smoking patches from her bag, stuck one under her blouse.
“A wolf?”
He set his burning cigarette in the Ricard ashtray, deep in thought, his fingers on his lip, removing a flake of tobacco.
She stared at Morbier over the steaming plate of mussels. He’d gone mystic . . . cryptic remarks, first about ecology, then wolves. “Getting philosophical in your advancing years, eh?”
He cupped the cigarette, ignoring her comment. “Winter of 1943, the wolves in the countryside outside Paris descended on the Bois de Vincennes.”
“Wolves in Paris? Not since the Romans. Tell me another one, Morbier.”
“Aaah, but the wolves were starving, they smelled fresh meat. The zoo animals, the city’s pigeons and cats were, let’s say, depleted.”
She’d heard those stories. Rationing during the Occupation had reduced Parisians to hunting what lived in the city.
“We heard them howling at night and my father kept saying wolf tasted like venison. We hadn’t had meat on the table for a year. Hungry, we were hungry for that taste.”
She waited, tapping her fork. Morbier never talked about his childhood or his life, for that matter. “There’s a point to this story, I gather.”
“I figured you’d skin a wolf like a rabbit. Concocted plans with my schoolmates. But when I asked my father, ‘How do you cook a wolf?’ he paused and grinned. ‘First,’ he said, ‘you have to catch the wolf.’”
“The moral escapes me, Morbier.” She forked a succulent parsley-laden mussel into her mouth.
“Sounds like there’s a wolf out there.” He stubbed the cigarette out. “We heard it; now we’ve got to catch it.”
“We?”
