Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

Rene’s green eyes blazed. “Meizi’s parents hide in the back of their shop if a customer comes in.”

“They don’t speak French.”

“Exactement. Few Chinese here do. Fewer have papers.”

Rene’s words were filled with implications she didn’t like to think about. “The Wus operate an illegal business?”

Rene shook his head. “Like we’ve talked about that during the little time I’ve had with Meizi and her parents?” He waved his short arm. “This street’s full of sweatshops. Hear that?” In the dark street, she heard a low thrum. “Buildings tremble at night, Meizi told me, from machines in basements and attics. Sweatshops full of illegals working in secret. The last thing anyone wants to do is draw attention. Didn’t you see how everyone ran away? They’re scared.”

Or guilty. Aimee’s boot heel caught in a drain. She couldn’t let it go. “Yet someone tipped off the flics,” she said. “Ask yourself who, if no one wants to draw attention. The word got out, the old woman gave the warning in the resto. If Meizi already knew, or—”

“Somebody wanted the body found, Aimee,” Rene interrupted.

She kicked an iced cobble, regretted it right away. “After she opens your present, serves the soup, Meizi takes a phone call. Disappears.”

Rene ran his fingers through his hair, then knotted his scarf around his neck. “I know she’s in trouble.”

“An understatement, Rene. Her … friend was murdered behind her family’s shop.”

“Meizi’s my soul mate. She never talked about anyone else,” Rene said. “Zut, you met her parents. Strict and traditional. Something’s happened, don’t you see?”

Why couldn’t he get it? “Rene, the victim carried her photo in his wallet.” She wanted to sit him down in the snow, make him understand. “Prevost regards her as a suspect.”

He shook his head. Denial. “Bon, I don’t need your help to find Meizi. Not that you offered, Aimee.”

He took off down the iced cobbles, favoring his right leg. He usually tried to hide his slight limp.

Her heart ached. She didn’t want Rene hurt. Her mind raced with scenarios—Meizi, illegal, maybe owing a debt, finding Rene, a dwarf, thinking him an easy mark. A vulnerable man, due to his stature. What if Meizi had been playing cat and mouse, giving and withholding? Using her parents as a chaperone tactic to ensnare Rene into marriage for residence papers?

She caught up with him at the corner. Took his arm and stared at him. “I could have told Prevost. I didn’t, did I?”

He shrugged her off.

“Mais, you’re my best friend, Rene,” she said. “I’m in this with you.”

Aimee followed his gaze to the Wus’ shuttered luggage storefront, the scattered wet plastic bags in the gutter. He flipped open his phone and hit Meizi’s number. He shook his head, his brow creased. “Her phone’s off.”

A light flickered on in a floor window above the shop. Had the Wus returned? The back walkway was blocked by orange-and-white-striped crime-scene tape labeled Police Zone Interdite. But on rue Volta, she saw a side door to the building, grillwork with a lion’s face at its center.

Too bad she’d left her lock pick set at the office. She took out her mint dental floss.

“Flossing your teeth?” Rene quirked an ironic eyebrow at her.

“Stand in front of me.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, Rene.”

He stood in the snow caked in the doorway as she knotted the floss and slipped her finger inside the ornate, rusted grillwork. The knot caught on the brass handle, which she knew came standard in these seventeenth-century doors. She tugged, heard a click, and pushed the creaking door open.

“Hurry, Rene.”

AIMEE HIT THE light switch, illuminating a narrow staircase winding upward like a corkscrew. The timed light clicked in eerie counterpoint to their footsteps on the cracked, upturned linoleum. Fried garlic and sesame oil odors clung in the shadowy corners.

No answer when Rene knocked on the shop door.

Aimee studied the ancient gas fixtures poking from the hallway ceiling, the metal spigot dripping into a pail. Just like many an old tenement. She imagined more than a hundred people living in this building, one sink per apartment and a communal WC between the floors.

A hum grew louder as they ascended the stairs, like cicadas in Provence at summer twilight. But in this decrepit hallway, cut by sharp drafts, the hum issued from something else.

“What’s the noise?”

“Sewing machines,” Rene said, his voice low.

Sweatshops.

On the first-floor landing, Rene pointed to an unpainted door. “This one’s above the shop.”

He knocked. Footsteps sounded behind the door, then muffled Chinese.

“Meizi, it’s Rene.”

Aimee’s fingers clenched. Now they’d get an explanation, maybe not the one Rene wanted.

The door opened halfway. A young Chinese man in an undershirt peered from behind. Smells of sleep, of too many bodies and kerosene from a heater wafted out. Behind him she caught a glimpse of a room lined by rough wooden platforms where ten or so men slept. A bared slit of a window, flaking stucco walls. Like a narrow cell. Alarm bells went off in her head.

“I’m looking for the Wus and Meizi,” Rene said.

The young Chinese man shook his head. With an abrupt movement, he waved his hands as if shooing them away. “Cuo wu!”

Shaken, Rene stepped back.

“We mean from the shop downstairs,” Aimee said, pointing below. “The Wu family?”

He shook his head again. Fear in his eyes. “Wu, non.” He shut the door. She heard the bolt slip from inside.

Aimee’s stomach sank. She realized this was the only room above the shop. “I don’t like this, Rene.”

Heads peered over the banister, figures above them watching.

“Excusez-moi,” she said, looking up, trying one more time, “we’re looking for Monsieur and Madame Wu. Meizi Wu.”

Suspicion and fear emanated from the darting shadows; the figures began stepping back and closing doors. She sensed quiet despair in the lives crammed on each floor. Door latches bolted.

An eerie quiet filled the hallway. The Wus didn’t live here. She doubted they ever had. “Let’s go.”

Out in the icy street, Rene put his gloved hands in his pockets. They walked the block toward Rene’s car. His mouth was tight, holding something back.

“Talk to me, Rene.”

“Those men do the jobs no one else will, work like slaves.”

Another side of Rene, whom she thought she knew so well. The fighter for the underdog. But wasn’t he one himself?

He shook his head. “Meizi’s in danger.”

“What if she’s staying with a friend from the dojo?” Aimee said.

Rene’s eyes pooled in anguish. “Already left messages. No one’s returned my calls.” Suddenly he snorted in disgust. “Look at that!”

His snow-dusted Citroen DS sat wedged, bumper to bumper, between a Renault and a dented blue camionette. A too common occurrence these days, with tight parking in medieval streets.

After a twelve-hour day, all she wanted was to get warm and sleep. “Skin tight,” she said. “Start the engine. I’ll push.”

She put on her leather gloves, hitched up her coat in the cold. Rene started the engine and hit the windshield wipers, sending sprays of snow. Aimee tried to push the parked camionette so Rene could pull out.