Two men in overalls hauled an antique harp through the doorway of No. 32. She followed the grunting men and paused in the courtyard. Pots of geraniums lined the damp butterscotch stone walls. Upscale and bourgeois. Not what she figured for a sweatshop.
“Up here, Messieurs, top floor.” A gray-haired woman smiled and beckoned from an upstairs window.
“Up yours, Madame,” muttered one of the men under his breath. Had Aram steered her wrong?
Aimee closed her eyes and listened, distinguishing the sounds of the movers mounting the creaking staircase, the rush of water in courtyard pipes. And then she heard it. A faint, continuous clicking.
The clicking grew louder as she followed them to the back of the courtyard. Behind it a coved walkway nestled into the remnants of an old wall. The clicking drifted up from a grilled vent set in cracked stone. She lowered her head to duck into the dark stairway, treading over the uneven dirt to find herself in a humid warren of caverns. Vaulted stone arches supported the low ceilings. It was positively dungeon-like. She remembered a school field trip to an old chateau where, during the Terror, revolutionaries chained aristocrats to metal rings on the walls. Not too different, she thought.
Bare white bulbs dangled from the ceiling, illuminating squatting young Chinese women surrounded by red silk flowers—hundreds of them, exploding with color in the dank cavern. She scrutinized the young women’s faces as their fingers worked nonstop, twisting bright red flowers onto green wire stems. By an arch she saw a ponytail bent down over a pile of flowers.
“Meizi?”
A few women looked up with questioning eyes.
“Lunchtime?” an older woman said. She made a gesture of eating, and several others laughed.
Aimee stepped around the flowers and bent down. “Meizi, are you okay?”
The young woman looked up. Glasses, brown birthmark on her cheek. “Boss eat lunch. Back soon.”
Shaken, Aimee sat back on her haunches like everyone else. The women watched her with curiosity, not fear.
“Beautiful flowers,” Aimee said. “Do any of you know Meizi Wu?” She pointed to the woman’s ponytail. “Hair like hers?”
A few smiles. The women kept twisting the stems.
Didn’t they understand? Did they think she was crazy? Or both?
But she had an idea.
She rooted in her bag. Found the red velvet jewelry box she’d forgotten to give back to Rene. Held it up.
“Meizi forgot her birthday present.” She cleared her throat and sang, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Meizi …”
More smiles. One woman nudged the pixie-haired woman next to her, who smiled.
“Meizi Wu,” she said, pointing to herself.
A joke? But no one laughed.
“I mean Meizi Wu, who worked for Ching Wao.”
She nodded. “Me.”
Another idea flat on the dirt. Aimee shook her head. “
“You look.” In her silk-stained hand, the woman held a
Startled, Aimee leaned forward. As Aram had said, no one was who they said they were. Yet she could work this for information.
Aimee took out the luminous pearl ring. “
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t know, or don’t want to tell me?”
“Boss call him.” Her face was blank now, no longer smiling.
But she had to get information. Something. “Where do you sleep?”
She pointed to the address.
“No, you don’t. Tell me the truth.” Aimee set the ring back in the box.
“You say you give me.” Her eyes teared, and Aimee’s heart clenched.
“We live at Chinese evangelical church,” said the woman next to her in accented but proficient French.
“Who are you?”
“Nina’s my French name,” she said. “We’re Christian. We study and pray with a pastor, who gives us a dormitory. No one works for Ching Wao, if they can avoid it.”
“But these flowers—”
“Bad times now,” Nina interrupted. “We do piecework. Have to.” She paused. “Ching Wao’s contact gave her this card yesterday. Our families pay lots of money in China for this. We don’t ask questions. You’ll give her the ring?”
“Cash is more useful.” Aimee pressed a hundred francs into the girl’s hands. “But she got a raw deal with that card. The
Nina spoke rapidly in Chinese to the increasingly frightened-looking girls.
“Something bad might have happened to the other Meizi,” Aimee said. “I need to find Ching Wao.”
“No one knows where he goes.”
Great.
“Can’t you think back, remember something, anything? What if she’s hurt, or being held prisoner?”
Nina shook her head. “Bad people. Better stay away. You’re a French woman. You don’t know.”
Like that made a difference to Meizi? Aimee wanted to shake this woman.
“But Ching Wao pays all of you centimes while he makes thousands of francs,” she said, her voice rising. “A man extorts money from this girl’s family for the
Her speech was met by silence, broken only by the clicking of wire and shushing noises of silk. A chill went up her spine. She turned around.
A Chinese woman stood with Styrofoam containers of takeout food, glaring at her.
“Private business,” she said. “You better leave. We have a permit to work here.”
Aimee doubted that. But she was tired of seeing fake papers and arguing with people who would disappear.
She left another hundred francs by the girl’s leg, then stood and made her way out.
In the dank passageway, she felt a tug on her coat sleeve.
Nina pulled her close. “Ching Wao gets girls from Tso, a snakehead. Bad teeth. Everyone knows him on rue au Maire.”
And then she’d gone.
“TOUGH GOING, RENE. The two sweatshops I checked out were dead ends,” she said into her phone. She pulled her collar up against the damp chill. “But I discovered Meizi’s
“Sweatshops?” Rene said. “Start at the beginning, Aimee.”
She gave him a brief account, told him about Aram and Tso, the snakehead.
“Breaking bread with a dealer who sold drugs to your cousin?”
“He’s a source, Rene.” One of the reasons she hated criminal investigation. Yet, down and dirty resulted in leads and information, her father always told her. You just take a long, hot shower later. “Not that I’d do it again, though he does serve a mean couscous.”
“You believe this Aram?”
“I believe he dislikes paying Chinese protection money,” she said. “Let’s call it a mutual non-admiration society.”
“So he’d know this Tso,” he said. “We have to prove my Meizi’s innocent.”
Silver rivulets of rain snaked down the apartment windows overlooking Passage du Pont-aux-Biches. Aimee’s shoulders slumped. Why couldn’t Rene get it?
