MURDER
in CLICHY
Cara Black
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
Copyright © 2005 by Cara Black
All rights reserved.
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
My heartfelt thanks go to so many for their patience and knowledge to fan the spark into a fire!
Deep appreciation goes to Li He, Chinese Department, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Musee Cernuschi, Paris; Dr. Terri Haddix, MD, Renee Slon, RN, Dr. Jan Gurley MD, and to Beatrice Trang, a huge debt; Carla Chemouni, who made it happen; Thien Ly Buu Toa and the Cao Dai Temple, the lady in Vientiane, Barbara Serenella, Marion, Warren, Bill, Don Cannon, on computer patrol, Erick Gilbert; Grace Loh, Jean Satzer, Dot Edwards, Barbara McHugh. In Paris, the generosity, wisdom and
“The true heroes stay anonymous . . .”
“. . . there is always something absent that torments me.”
NOTE:
The Clichy quarter referred to in this work
is the area surrounding Place de Clichy, not the suburb.
PARIS NOVEMBER 1994
IN THE STOREFRONT CAO Dai temple under the red lanterns, her foot asleep, pins and needles up and down her legs, Aimee Leduc struggled to keep her spine straight, thumb and pinky together, in the half-lotus position. Her partner Rene, a dwarf, sat with a look of total concentration, in perfect Lotus posture, in the men’s section. But Aimee’s brain flashed with lines of computer code and throbbed with an ache for an espresso. No blank slate of tranquility for her with sirens hee-hawing on the quai and the Seine fog curling over the skylight. As the blue-robed priest struck the gong, the sigh of relief she exhaled mingled with the mindful breaths and musk of incense surrounding her.
“Three weeks, Rene,” she muttered, “and I still can’t meditate!”
She’d tried and failed breathing exercises, a new practice she’d begun with Rene Friant, her business partner, after her optic nerve had been damaged the previous month during an assault. It had seemed like a good time to begin to live healthily.
The ten or eleven women in yoga pants, from the nearby Universite de Paris, grabbed their books and headed for the door. Ripe fruit scents from the tiered altar offerings clung to the velvet curtains that kept out the cold. The swish of a broom wielded by Quoc, the temple custodian, an older Vietnamese man, filled the foyer.
“Mindfulness,” Rene said, rolling up his meditation mat, “think of it like that. Try to concentrate. Don’t give up, Aimee.”
Rene was right, of course. But the calmness and tranquility she sought remained as elusive as a wisp of smoke, even though her bouts of blurry vision had receded. She had her sight now, most of the time.
From the rear came Linh, a slender Vietnamese nun, in a Mandarin collared white
“Forgive me, we’ve worked on this before,” Linh said, an undertone of sibilance just perceptible in her accented French. “Next time, Aimee, be open to the divining board; that’s a form of meditation.”
Like a large wooden ouija board, the divining board stood near the all-seeing divine eye, the Cao Dai’s symbol, a huge globelike eyeball suspended over the altar. Mediums used it to communicate with the spirit world in seances and in prayers to a pantheon of divine beings, including the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Jesus Christ. Crystal candelabras, brass drum bowls, yin and yang symbols, and peacock feathers adorned side altars.
“
Pictures of Victor Hugo and Sun Yat-sen lined the walls. They were venerated as saints in this esoteric sect, whose philosophy was a potpourri of Hinduism, Christianity, Taoism, Islam, and Buddhism. A sign reading VAN GIAO NHAT LY, meaning “All religions have the same reason,” faced her. Aimee inhaled the peacefulness of the small, makeshift temple, wishing that tranquility would stay with her.
She paused with Rene at the table littered with leaflets describing meditation courses and a solicitation for signatures to a petition.
“We’re hoping to build a real temple,” Linh said, watching Aimee. “Our lands were confiscated in Vietnam.
