Krzysztof sat hunched in the sidecar. The engine revved as they passed shadowy Place Bayre. She caught the whiff of green vegetation, of damp grass, wet from the rain. A now dark Hotel Lambert went by on her left.
Every pot has a lid, as her grandmother had phrased it. Meaning life was about finding the right mate. The right fit. She was attracted to bad boys in leather jackets. Ones who had been hurt, who were fierce inside. The ones mothers warned their daughters against. But in her case, there’d been no warning. And for a moment, Aimee wondered what it would be like with Claude, sitting in front of her fireplace, Stella taking her first steps. Together.
Stop. She’d gone soft, just as Rene had accused. She had more to think of than Stella and this man who’d once been abandoned, too.
She prayed Morbier would make good on his agreement. That they’d nab Gabriel, link the bombings to Halkyut, and find Nelie.
The Brigade Fluviale’s Zodiacs were trawling below the Pont de Sully. She shivered, thinking of the silt-laden, churning water below. And of Orla’s waxen face in the morgue.
Claude slowed and turned into fourteenth-century rue du Petit Musc, the street of the strolling hookers. No working girls had lingered there for a long time but the name clung, though now only media types and the
Claude downshifted by Ecole Massillon’s side entrance, the rumbling of his motorcycle engine reverberating off the walls of the blackened stone buildings. Aimee removed her helmet as Krzysztof climbed out of the sidecar.
“I’m coming, too,” Claude said, taking her arm.
A dark figure stood in one of the doorways of the narrow street. Another figure sat in a parked car. Big mistake. Morbier’s men were making their presence too obvious.
“It’s the
“They’re backup; it’s all right,” she said, looking for Morbier.
“I get it,” Krzysztof said. “
“You’ll be given immunity from prosecution. I worked out a deal for you.”
But Claude gunned the motorcycle engine and Krzysztof jumped on behind him, holding tight as Claude turned the bike around.
“We can’t stay,” Claude said, his eyes narrowed. “No
She couldn’t leave. She had to see this through, alone if need be.
“It’s all right! Listen to the deal I made.”
“A deal?” Krzysztof said. “I’ll never risk a deal with the
The motorcycle sped off down the rue du Petit Musc. The red brakelights’ reflection wobbled across the stone walls of buidlings. The motorcycle turned the corner, peeling rubber. Krzysztof and Claude were gone. They had deserted her.
What had she been thinking, she wondered. She’d been fooling herself, intoxicated by playing house with the baby and sleeping with this gorgeous, sensitive man. She shook herself and called Morbier, afraid now that his men would chase away Gabriel, too, if they hadn’t already done so.
“Call off your dogs, Morbier. They’re so close I can smell them.”
“What do you mean, Leduc? We’re on rue de l’Hotel-de-Ville crossing rue de l’Ave Maria.”
She heard a car door open, saw a man getting out of the car. Her hands trembled.
“Get prepared for a reception committee.” She clicked off before she dropped the phone. And stood there alone, with her supposed backup blocks away.
Her heart skipped. The only thing she could think of was to press 34B51 on the digicode of the next building.
The massive carved seventeenth-century door opened. She slipped inside, into former stables that were now a delivery bay for school supplies. A ramp led to the lower playground gate, which could not be glimpsed from the street. She tugged at the door and it clicked shut behind her.
A few years ago the junkies had discovered this enclave but she didn’t see any discarded needles among the tufts of overgrown grass. She followed the border of the enclosed playground to a back door where she counted on finding a key. From time immemorial, janitors had left one here for deliverymen, always in the same place. She slid her fingers over the wall, located the loose stone, and pried it out. In the dirt-encrusted space she found the janitor’s key where he’d always kept it. She and Martine had used it on occasion when they’d been late to class.
She unlocked the door and put the key back. Inside the school, she ran down a narrow low-ceilinged hall lined with bulletin boards laden with notices of class schedules and after-school club meetings. The smell of paper, the dull luster of the linoleum floor—nothing had changed since her day. No doubt the cracked ceilings upstairs still leaked puddles onto the marble floors.
This was formerly the residence of the first archbishop of Paris. Later it had been an outpost of Charles V, then Marie-Therese’s chancellor’s quarters. It had became a sugar refinery and then, in the last century, a high school.
Perspiration dampened Aimee’s collar. She had to figure out what to say to Gabriel when she found him.
Using the stairway, she descended into the bowels of the Ecole Massillon, to the blackened boiler room. The fourteenth-century foundation emitted a dank chill, barely combatted by the heat radiating from huge soot-stained boilers abutting the wall. They must recently have been stoked. The boilers were firing at full blast, and charcoal dust lay everywhere. Carved out of the thick wall was the half-oval window she remembered. It was not glassed in; it was needed for ventilation. This window was level with the sidewalk and looked onto rue du Petit Musc. Quai des Celestins lay beyond it, then came the Seine, and, across the river, the Hotel Lambert on the Ile Saint-Louis. The Hotel Lambert, again.
She leaned against the window’s rusted bars. She could see a pair of brown walking shoes and the bottom half of khaki trousers passing by on rue du Petit Musc’s pavement. The man was so close she could have reached out and untied his shoelaces.
“Gabriel?”
The legs turned and retreated. The streetlight illuminated a
“I don’t see Nelie,” she said.
“And I don’t see you. Why’d Krzysztof leave?”
She had to keep him talking until Morbier arrived.
He hunched over and peered down and inside.
“Don’t you have something for me?” Gabriel asked. His gravel-edged voice was the one she had heard over the phone.
The light from the boiler illuminated her coat sleeves but she didn’t think he would be able to get at her through the chipped and rusted iron bars. But her certainty was wrong.
With two swift kicks, he dislodged them.
She jumped back but thick fingers reached in and grabbed her, encircling her neck. Her face was wrenched hard against the gritty stone. She tried to bite his fingers but couldn’t turn her head so that her teeth could find a purchase. Her hands were free, though, and she scratched his and tried to get away. His pressure on her throat increased and as she struggled, her face was thrust against the wall again. Where were Morbier and his men?
“You don’t . . . have Nelie, do you?” she sputtered, her fingernails scraping against the stone as she sought something, anything, to fight back with.
Her hand caught the metal poker used to stoke the furnace that hung from the boiler door. Choking, she wrapped the tail of her tuxedo jacket around her hand, seized the hot poker, and slammed it against his thick knuckles, his hands, his arms. The air filled with the smell of singed hair and burning cloth.
