Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

stood around smoking, instead of venturing into the chill, moss-carpeted courtyard outside.

And the feeling of being watched hit her. She shuddered. But among all these milling students? Had she grown paranoid?

She passed a classroom and peered in the open door. Heads bent down over wooden desks built in the last century. She remembered those small desks. Murder on her long legs.

“Time’s up,” said a clear male voice. “You’ve earned a five-minute break.”

She peered inside at Coulade’s replacement. A tall, blond man gathered papers from the podium. If she hurried she’d manage a few words with him.

Shoulders jostled her. By the time she’d negotiated the stampede of outgoing students, she no longer saw him.

“Mademoiselle, you dropped this.”

The man held up Samour’s book.

Azure-blue eyes, a grin. Muscular shoulders under his denim jacket. Good-looking in a Nordic way, and an engineering genius to boot, she figured.

“Merci. I heard from Coulade you took over the seminar.” She thought fast. “You’re Pascal Samour’s colleague?”

“Pascal’s my old Gadz’Arts classmate.” His eyes flickered in pain. “Such a tragedy. I still can’t understand it.”

“Gadz’Arts?”

“Silly term.” He shook his head. “It’s from gars des arts, guys from the arts. Just what we call ourselves. But we graduates remain close. Our training and traditions bind us like family.” He shrugged. “That’s why I wanted to help out.”

“So this adult school and your grande ecole are connected?”

“Confusing, I know,” he said with a small smile. “This school was originally charged with collecting inventions and gradually became an educational institution, a grand etablissement, a loose affiliation to us at Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Arts et Metiers. Liken this to an adult trade school granting doctoral degrees.”

She wondered at an engineer from an elite school teaching in an adult trade school. Service to the community?

But he knew Samour. This man was no doubt a source of information. And he had a test to give.

She smiled. “Do you have time for a aperitif later?”

If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. He handed her his card, a slow smile spreading over his face. Jean-Luc Narzac, Communications Division, Frelnex.

The telecom giant.

“Not that I’d turn down an apero with a woman like you, but why?”

“It’s regarding your classmate, Samour.”

“You work in the Conservatoire, Mademoiselle?”

Not yet. But it gave her an idea. “A consultant. I’ll explain. Tonight?”

The hall buzzer sounded. Students tramped and engulfed them. He checked his watch.

“Let’s say nine P.M.”

In the ten minutes it took to reach Pascal Samour’s street, Aimee came up with a plan and made three phone calls, one of them to the Musee des Arts et Metiers. She scanned Pascal’s building on rue Beranger. The dark-blue doors hung open, revealing a long, cobbled courtyard. The concierge was making a half-hearted attempt to sweep the slush to the gutter. The scraping noise grated in Aimee’s ears.

A typical late Saturday afternoon on rue Beranger, the inroads of les bobos, the bourgeois-bohemes. Families braved the crisp cold to guide toddlers on tricycles; middle-aged women in long down coats with shopping carts returned from the market. Newspaper delivery trucks double-parked mid-block outside Liberation’s headquarters, near an indie art gallery. A leashed dog sniffed a lamppost, and a mufflered child laughed and ran ahead of his parents. Another world from Chinatown only a few blocks away.

Inside the cavern-like portal, she glanced at the mailboxes, high-security tungsten with each resident’s name in neat, black capital letters. SAMOUR, PASCAL, she noted. Escalier C, 3eme etage.

The concierge, trim for his fifties, set the shovel against the mailboxes with a thump. He squinted curiously.

“Looking for someone, Mademoiselle?”

In all the wrong places, she almost said.

No reason to share her goal of a murdered resident’s apartment. Sooner or later, she hoped much later, the flics would affix the notice with telltale red wax signifying a deceased resident and seal the apartment.

“Why, I just found my friend’s apartment … Escalier C.” She flashed a bright smile. “Bonne soiree, Monsieur.”

She stepped past him into the courtyard. Escalier C, the last on the left, was a circular, tower-like outcrop with a dizzying climb of seven stories. The polished brown stairs, sagging from wear in the middle, wound upward like a snail shell. This rear area around the courtyard had to be seventeeth-century if not older, she thought. And not remodeled since then.

On the third floor she caught her breath, found the longhandled key under the flowerpot. Anxious, she let herself in. In contrast to his great-aunt’s flat, Pascal’s was a cold room with a high-timbered ceiling.

Ransacked too.

She gasped. An IKEA bookcase overturned, a drawing table upside down, an armoire open, shirts and jackets littering the floor.

She reached for her keys, bunching them between her fingers, and scanned for an intruder. But the door had been locked, she remembered.

In the galley kitchen, emptied spice bottles and spilled pasta were strewn over the counter. Iron sconces on the stone walls held broken candles. Behind a battered bamboo screen she found an overturned iron bed frame, sprinkled goose feathers from a ripped duvet, a slashed mattress with ticking bulging out.

Living in a tower didn’t appear comfortable. Even the destroyed furniture gave off an unlived-in feel.

For twenty minutes she searched every nook and cranny in the single, cold room. No laptop. No green dossier.

She needed to put the little she knew together. Yet what good would that do, if the killer had the laptop or whatever Pascal wanted her to find? Non, she needed to think as Pascal would. Or at least try to.

A geek with searing intelligence, a highly trained technical engineer from a grande ecole, a loner. A man who taught at an adult trade school when his fellow graduates took jobs in high positions at companies like Frelnex.

Pascal, afraid for his life, had left a message two weeks ago instructing its recipient to find a green file, come to his apartment, and talk to Becquerel. But Becquerel had died. Hence, she figured, his repeated messages to Coulade yesterday.

And no green file. Or fourteenth-century document.

But why make it all so mysterious? Why not give concrete details? Unless …

Something happened yesterday. Unable to update Coulade, he’d seeded info in several locations. Pieces of a damned puzzle.

Yet, to find what?

A project his great-aunt had mentioned—concerning a museum file he’d told Coulade he’d discovered.

Frustrated, Aimee righted a chair by the window and noticed blue dust on her fingers. She smelled it. Chalk dust.

She paused at the lead-framed window and, with her gloved hands, opened it and pushed the shutters back. The view gave way to scattered low buildings, the crescent edge of a courtyard, a glass-roofed atelier below. The approaching dusk darkened exposed patches of earth. Unusual to find open space in a dense quartier like this, where every meter was utilized.

But more unusual were the diagrams in blue chalk on the curved stone wall below. Blue chalk lines