Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

“What’s wrong with your wrists?” Rene asked, looking at her bruises.

It all came back to her—the panic, struggling to breathe, her bound hands, biting at the plastic, rubbing her face against the sharp glass shards, crawling in the wet walkway. She knew if the couple hailing the taxi hadn’t frightened the killer off she wouldn’t be here now. She stilled her shaking hands and told him.

“Samour’s murderer attacked you?” Rene’s eyes widened.

The memory of the thread from his coat stuck in her fingernail came back to her. “I’m close, Rene.”

“Too close,” he said. “Have you told Prevost?”

“Not yet,” she rubbed her wrist, “but I will, and I’ll discover when the raid’s planned.” She had to move on. “But how’s Meizi?”

A little smile painted Rene’s face. “Safe.” Then it disappeared. “For now, Aimee.”

Right now Saj’s discovery of Pascal’s encryption was more important.

“Ready, Saj?” she asked.

He hit a key on his laptop, projecting an image of a bordered manuscript. Her mouth dropped open. Tight lines of black-ink script, ancient-looking and illegible to her, marched across the page, reminding her of the tiny, sharp curls of a monk’s illuminated manuscript. Accompanying the script was a drawing that looked like a primitive blueprint, for what she didn’t know.

“But that looks like Latin.” Not her strong point.

Saj bit into a potato pakora. “Latin’s the standard, the lingua franca. Samour encrypted a recipe.”

“Like a medieval Paul Bocuse?” Rene stared at Pascal’s encrypted attachment under the chandelier, enlarged on the damask tablecloth. “Cookbooks in the fourteenth century? That looks like an oven.”

Aimee peered closer. “But what is it?”

“I’d say an alchemical formula,” Saj said.

“Alchemy?” Aimee sat up. “You mean wizards, Merlin, eye of newt and mad monks?”

“Why not?” Saj’s eyes gleamed.

Rene frowned. “It could as easily be a poison. Or a machine.”

“Saj, let’s forget the woo-woo.” Aimee pulled Samour’s book on medieval guilds from her bag and opened to the chapter he had marked. Glassmaking—a coincidence? “To me it’s more concrete.” Her gaze caught on a subchapter heading. “Listen.”

She read out loud, “ ‘Glassmaking guilds guarded secret alchemical formulas and techniques used in the prized leaded-glass-paned windows of cathedrals.’ ”

Rene’s eyes widened. “He lived in a tower, didn’t he?” Rene lifted up the diagrams he’d scanned from her digital camera. “Drew these. We just don’t know the connection.”

Aimee grabbed a pakora. “And we need to connect the dots.” Cho’s words came back to her: alloy, glass, formulas. “Look at the elongated swirls, Rene. They’re symbols, part of an equation or formula. For an alloy, or glass …”

“A machine or a concept,” Rene interrupted, his voice rising. “Lost in the past, misfiled in the archives. Why didn’t we see it before?”

She nodded. Saj clicked the brown beads around his wrist. A sign his chakras were aligned, or were out of alignment, she could never remember. “But the formula’s incomplete,” Saj said, moving the cursor down. The page ended in what was obviously the middle of the text. “I found corresponding alchemical symbols and phrases,” Saj said, “in Nicolas de Locques’s Les rudimens de la philosophie naturelle.” He patted a thick leather-bound volume under the curry takeout container. “Published in 1655.”

“That tail of newt, eye of toad nonsense again?”

Saj expelled air. “This explanation of the symbols cut my work in half, let me tell you. Samour used de Locques’s book as a guide. The same Latin words appear here in Samour’s incomplete segment.”

Her excitement mounted. “Pascal searched for the missing part of the formula. He knew there was more, and where better to find it than in the museum’s archives.”

“Formula to what? Alchemical stained glass?”

“Why not? This connects somehow,” she said. “I’ll comb the museum holdings, Saj. I’ll find it.”

“Et alors, so we know everything Pascal knew?”

She paused in thought. “But not the formula’s significance,” she said. “Something so important that Pascal was murdered for it.”

This added up. But how?

“A nerd who grew up in the museum’s shadows,” Saj said, “an engineer who’s obsessed about a lost alchemical formula?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t add up.”

“As Rene pointed out, he lived in a tower,” Aimee said. “His former classmate spoke of his obsession with the fourteenth century.” At her desk, she downloaded Saj’s enhanced encryption, then powered off her laptop. But Saj’s words raised more questions.

“Picture Samour, tech-savvy, skilled at encrypting, spending time and energy on a lost formula.” She shook her head. “What would it get him, Saj?”

Saj stretched. “Bon, in academia he’d publish a paper, write a treatise. Or a book,” he said. “What about Becquerel?”

His last professor. “Dead in a nursing home at ninety last week.”

“So another blind alley,” Saj said, looking at the remembrance pages Aimee had copied.

“Or the usual academic battle,” Rene said. “Say Pascal tried to garner department funding after discovering a lost medieval stained-glass formula.”

People killed for less. But that held less water than their poorly functioning radiator.

“It’s more than just that if the DST wants me to monitor Samour’s activity at the museum.”

Saj whistled. “So any ideas?”

“Besides checking my horoscope?” She rubbed her bandaged wrist. “Keep monitoring Coulade’s computer.”

So far all that they’d discovered put her back in the dark.

“The conservator mentioned that the Archives Nationales used the museum’s storage during the war,” she said, racking her brain. “They don’t know half of what’s in it, either.”

“Pascal programmed a dead man’s switch to e-mail this encryption,” Saj said. “He insisted Becquerel be contacted. Becquerel’s role was pivotal to Pascal, yet …”

“Well, everyone talks about Becquerel’s innovation.” Rene pointed to the copies from the remembrance book. “ ‘A pioneer who knew no boundaries in the field of optics and technology.’ ” He looked up. “Thinking what I’m thinking?”

Aimee nodded. “Fiber optics?”

“It’s an avenue to explore,” he said.

Saj grabbed his laptop. “Let me see what I find.”

BEFORE GOING TO the museum, Aimee hoped to find answers in the stained-glass atelier in her cousin Sebastien’s damp courtyard. Disappointed, she stared into the darkened windows. Knocked. No answer, nor at Sebastien’s atelier either.

Great.

She pulled her coat tighter and in the porte cochere scanned the mailboxes. Listed under Atelier J, Stained Glass was an alternate delivery address at a Galerie Juno on rue des Archives. A place to start.

Three blocks away she found Galerie Juno, with a sign in the door that said Open by Appointment Only.

Merde. Before she met Prevost she needed answers. And a game plan.

She punched in Galerie Juno’s number on her cell phone, and heard a recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and a voice saying, “Leave a message, s’il vous plait.”

“Bonjour, I’m interested in the stained-glass artist who has an atelier on rue de Saintonge,” she said, hoping that the gallery would answer. That she wasn’t speaking to the wind. “I’m at your gallery and want to make an appointment.”

The message clicked off. Full.

Lace curtains moved in the window next door.