Murder at the Lanterne Rouge

“This leads to the tower in the remaining bit of Templar wall, Aimee.” Rene pointed to the mildewed wooden door. “Try Samour’s keys.”

She felt in her bag for the keys she’d taken from under the geraniums, inserted the largest, old-fashioned one, like the key her grandmother used to the cellar on her farm. She heard a tumble as the well-oiled lock turned.

Winding stone steps, deep and narrow. No handrails but uneven walls to feel their way upward. Like entering the Dark Ages.

On the first landing stood a hinged wooden door with a beaten metal clasp. Original, no doubt. She inserted the key again, turned it, and pushed the door open to a mustiness laced with chocolate.

Rene hit a wall light switch, flooding the circular tower room with light. Aimee saw a blackboard covered with formulas in blue chalk, and an open laptop with a blinking green light on a long trestle table. Next to it, a distilling apparatus. Test tubes, glass flacons, and copper wires. An alchemist’s lab down to the medieval walls. Then she saw what looked like a small, industrial, high-temperature stainless-steel oven.

She gasped.

“That’s it, Rene.” She ran forward, excited. “The drawing in the encryption.”

She sniffed the contents of the cellophane bag by the laptop. Chocolate. Popped one in her mouth. “Dark- chocolate espresso beans. Pascal had good taste.”

“Thinking what I’m thinking, Aimee?” Rene asked.

“That Samour distilled his own absinthe? Not quite.”

But Rene had opened up the screen on Samour’s laptop.

“Look, it’s the same alchemical formula Saj deciphered. Why did he hide this, yet …”

“More than why, Rene, from whom,” she said. “Trawl around and see if you find more.”

She stared at the formulas in intricate blue chalk. Meaningless to her. A funnel of white sand, technical magazines, a fiber optics newsletter on an Aeron chair. An incongruous collection until de Voule’s words came back to her.

“He told his classmate no one has invented anything new since the fourteenth century. What if he tried to prove that here?”

Rene rolled his eyes. “By making stained glass in an ancient alembic? Melting the contents in that machine?”

She remembered the preliminary autopsy report. “He had burn marks on his hands,” she said. “It could have come from this heater. The guilds worked with little more than sand, potash, and fire.”

Rene put his camera in her hands. “Check out the real masterpiece, from the church. The camera captures little of the star’s clarity. But you get the idea.”

The stained-glass window images conveyed bright, streaming light. “Such radiance. Amazing.”

Perplexed, she picked up the magazines. “It’s all here, but we don’t understand.”

“Think where we are.” Rene’s finger traced the diagram. “Inside the fortified walls of an old Templar enclosure.”

“Et alors, I took that history class, too, Rene.” She ran her fingers over the smooth glass alembic. “But it proves what?”

“We’re in the last remaining Knights Templar tower.” Rene grinned. “It’s part of the prison where Marie Antoinette and her children were kept.”

“Not all that Holy Grail business.”

Rene snorted. “Think of the Templars as investors in startups,” he said. “They had more money than kings, or the Pope.”

“So you took Medieval Studies 101 at the Sorbonne?”

“Fundamentals of Economics, second semester.” Rene went on, “So the Templars were venture capitalists, this tower was their Silicon Valley. Instead of developing microprocessors, the Templars built cathedrals, castles, a whole series of industries. They employed the guilds for research and development in architecture, weapons, communication.”

Pascal would have appreciated Rene’s enthusiasm for his project. Rene got to work on the laptop. Pulled his goatee. “No wonder there’s been no more activity, his laptop’s frozen.”

“Try mine. See if you can unfreeze and network.”

Rene stood engrossed at the trestle table, comparing Aimee’s backed-up work from the Musee. She checked the magazines, the newsletter. Nothing jumped out at her. She tried to make sense of this, put things together.

Finally, Rene broke the silence. “Samour’s search prints show all over the Musee files you digitized today, Aimee.”

So Samour had been looking. “That’s what I’ll tell the DST.”

“Make sure that’s all you tell them. We found this tower on our own.” Rene plugged a cable from Aimee’s laptop to Samour’s. Hit several keys. “I’m rebooting his laptop and will network it to ours.” He tugged his goatee again. “Why didn’t Mademoiselle Samoukashian tell you about this tower?”

“Pascal protected her,” she said. “Considering his diagrams and secrecy, it’s like he wanted to discover something here.”

“Or prove it before he showed anyone,” Rene said.

She picked up the newsletter, thumbed through it until an article caught her attention. “Aren’t fiber optics made of glass?”

Rene looked up, nodding. His eyes met hers and widened.

She lifted a slim, colorless strand, little thicker than a hair, from the drawer. “Like this?”

Rene blinked. “Fiber optics is a hot market in telecommunications these days,” he said. “Bundle that up with more strands and it will carry up to ten million messages, using light pulses.” He shot her a look. “Not chump change either.”

“Bon, I’ll ask my dinner date about it,” she said, applying Chanel Red to her lips. “He runs one of those things.”

“The same mec from last night?”

Odd, she could have sworn Rene sounded … non, not jealous, he had Meizi. But concerned.

“How’s Meizi?”

His brow creased. “I’m worried. She’s at the hotel, but doesn’t answer the phone.”

Aimee buttoned her coat. “You’re staying until I come back?”

“Until I find something,” Rene said, a grim set to his mouth. “I’ll have Saj bring what he finds over and we’ll work on this together.”

A quiver ran down her spine. “Whoever murdered Samour didn’t find this place, Rene. The murderer is still looking.”

“Then make sure you’re not followed, Aimee.” Rene pulled out the diagram. “According to this, if you go left in the courtyard there’s an exit to rue de Picardie.”

Her heeled boots clicked down the tower’s steep, damp staircase. And then she missed a step, lost her balance. She caught a rusted ring in the wall and held on for dear life. No broken bones, no fall, but a scuffed leather heel and a pang in her sore wrist. Damn medieval towers.

Her phone beeped. One new message. Prevost.

“Give me Clodo’s phone and I’ll tell you when the raid’s scheduled.”

Nothing else.

She hit callback. Tried to leave a message, but his voice mail was full.

She had to find Clodo’s phone.

“WHAT’S THE WEATHER report tonight, Monsieur?” She smiled at the homeless man on the grate at Carreau du Temple.

“Radio’s broken, ma chere.”

“This should help,” she said, laying twenty francs on his sleeping bag. “How’s your daughter?”