Murder in Clichy (9 page)

Wednesday Early Evening

THE RINGING OF THE phone woke Aimée. She must have nodded off at her desk at Leduc Detective while finishing the stats. On the green computer screen her eyes focused on the bright cursor blinking by her face. Familiar and reassuring. She’d promised herself never to take her eyesight for granted again but of course she had, more and more, as she recovered and tried to forget.

“Oui . . . allô?”

“We’ll give you forty-eight hours
,”
said a hoarse voice.

She rubbed her eyes and sat up. Yellow rays from rue de Louvre’s streetlights slanted across her legs. The old station clock above her desk read 6 P.M.

“What? Who’s this?”

“Then we start sending you the dwarf. In little pieces.”

She froze.

René.

“What do you want?”

“Thadée’s backpack.”

Aimée stared at the flickering cursor, trying to think fast. They hadn’t mentioned jade. Did they know what was inside?

“Who are you?” She glanced at René’s untouched desk. “How do I know you have my partner?”

A sound like the muffling of a receiver came over the line. Choking.

“Aimée, don’t. I’m OK—” said René.

The line went dead.

She panicked. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Let them have all her money, the jade . . . anything to get René back.

How could this be happening? Thadée shot to death, then the jade stolen, the RG tracking her, and now René, kidnapped! She hit the call back number. It was René’s own cell phone. No answer. Smart.

Her head whirling, she had to figure something out and rescue René. She thought of his hip and . . . didn’t want to think of what they could do to him.

Calm down
. She had to calm down.

They’d call back. And she’d arrange to meet them. Try and convince them to accept the fifty thousand franc check and call it quits.

They’d let her stew before calling to give her the “drop.” But what if they never handed René over? Terror clutched her.

Never rely on criminals to do the expected.

She thought of Louis; “Nut,” as she and René had nicknamed him since he kept bags of nuts in his pockets at all times, saying he was determined to eat healthily in the radar infested world he worked in. They’d met him at an electronics seminar when they’d skipped out of Sorbonne classes.

He worked at France Télécom. He’d know a way to trace the kidnappers, if anyone did. She dialed.

“CPMS division.”

“
Bonsoir
, Nut?” she said, pulling on jeans and a worn cashmere sweater from the office armoire.

“Aimée . . . hold on,” Nut said. She heard beeping in the background. Clicks. “
Ça va?
I’m the night network supervisor, so I need to monitor transmissions and take calls.”

“I’ll make it quick,” she told him, keeping her voice steady with effort. “Triangulation, can you do it?”

“To a land line or cell phone?”

“René’s cell phone. He’s been . . . kidnapped.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish,” she said. ”Listen, no time to explain but. . . .”

She heard him take a deep breath.

“Only in Paris within the service antenna’s or tower’s range,” Nut said. “No suburbs or outlying districts. Paris maintains multi-antennas. Even so we’ve had only limited success. Montmartre and the Butte Chaumont hill give us trouble.”

“Will you try?” she asked, turning off her computer, switching off the lights.

“Picking through voluminous CDR records and verifying the data from the base stations which pick up calls to reconstruct and pinpoint the whereabouts of phone users, that’s worse than dental extraction. And more time-consuming.”

“I can give you the number to trace,” she said.

“That lessens it a bit but not enough,” Nut said.

She heard beeps and clicks in the background.

“Talk to a ham radio operator,” he advised. “They monitor cell phone transmissions all the time.”

“René needs help, right away. There’s no time to lose.”

“Go to Club Radio, 11 rue Biot,” he said. “Tell Léo I sent you. That’s the best I can do, Léo helped another friend last week. And don’t forget, Aimée.”

“That I owe you?”

“René’s a black belt. Give him some credit.”

Nut clicked off.

Fear rippled through her as she stepped into her boots and grabbed her knee-length suede shearling coat in the hallway. She ran down the stairs, onto rue du Louvre and found a taxi letting out passengers.

“Eleven rue Biot,” she said to the taxi driver.

“Clichy’s out of my way.” The driver shook his head. “They were my last fare. Sorry, I’ve been working since six a.m.”

Lights glittered on the Seine below. A passing barge churned the black, sluggish water. No other taxis in sight.

She reached for her wallet. “Fifty francs extra for your trouble.”

“Must have a hot date.”

Little did he know.

The taxi driver hit the meter switch. “Get in.”

NUMBER 11 RUE Biot, between the old Café-concert L’Européen, where Charles Trenet had sung in the thirties, and an Indian restaurant, was a cobblestone’s throw from Place de Clichy. She pressed the buzzer, the door was buzzed open, and she stepped into a small courtyard. Against the night sky, a row of antennas poked from the rooftop like twigs: a good sign. She passed the old stables, now garages, and mounted the back stairs to the second floor.

The door stood ajar. She walked inside to what she figured had once been two rooms that had been opened up into a large space. Bare putty-colored walls, a wooden farm table, a bag of potting soil on the floor. Instead of the buzzing and static she expected, she saw a plump woman in her forties wearing an apron, sitting at a scanner by several radios. She wore headphones.

“I’m looking for Léo. . . .”

“Short for Léontyne,” she said, smiling. “My mother loved opera and Léontyne Price.”

“Nut sent me.”

“I know,” she said. “Can you hurry up? Sorry but I’ve got to add forty-five megahertz in about seven minutes.”

She gestured to a large red clock, and pulled off her headphones.

Aimée nodded. “I don’t know if my friend’s in Paris, but he’s in trouble. I’m desperate. Can you help me find him?”

Léo hit several switches and adjusted a black knob that caused a needle to quiver on the volumeter.

Aimée wrote René’s name and cell phone number on a pad of paper by Léo’s elbow.

“
Parfait!
Most people don’t even have that much. Now we can tap into the ocean of dialogue, ignore the police bandwidth, firefighters, ambulance drivers, paramedics, sanitation workers, and infant monitors and pinpoint it. Like they say, it’s an electromagnetic jungle out there.”

Aimée was out of her depth. “How does it work?”

“I set up a system for this phone’s ESN and MIN code, its serial number and identification number. So each time,” she paused, rubbing her neck, “René . . . that’s his name, René?”

Aimée nodded.

“So when René makes a phone call, my scanner picks up his ESN and MIN numbers, my computer, hooked up to my scanner, recognizes his cell phone, and tunes in to his conversation and records it.”

“Sounds easy. But I’m sure it’s not.”

“So far there’s no encryption in the radio spectrum,” she grinned. “When it happens, we’ll figure something else out.”

“And if the phone’s not on?”

“I can only monitor what’s out there.”

Aimée paused looking around the room filled with radios. She clenched her fists, trying to keep her hands still, to keep her nervousness in check.

“His kidnappers used his phone once. To call me on my cell phone.”

Léo’s smile vanished. “Kidnappers?”

“How closely can you track, Léo?”

“Well, during the Occupation the Nazis found hidden British crystal radios transmitting from cellars. This operates on the same basic principal. But the Nazis had roving trucks with tracking equipment to follow the signals and triangulate. Primitive, but it did the job. Stationary antennas have limitations; it depends on the signal and relay time. Keep them talking.”

“What if I can’t?”

“You must. If he’s in Paris—and we don’t have an electrical storm—the longer the phone call, the closer I can pinpoint. If the gods smile, not only the street but the building.”

“
Merci,
Léo,” she said. “I’ll owe you.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Léo said.

On her way out, Aimée noticed the wheelchair folded by the door, and end of a metal hospital bed peeking from behind a draperied alcove. Aimée wondered when Léo’d last been out of this apartment. But then, she traveled through Paris every night. Riding the airwaves.

EARLY EVENING quiet had descended over the shadowy, intimate, crescent-shaped square near Clichy. Strains of an accordion mingling with a guitar wafted from somewhere above her. Familiar, an old working-class song her grandmother had played. Aimée looked up to see the silhouette of a couple dancing behind a lighted window.

And for a moment, she forgot the drizzle on the pavement and it could have been the countryside. Low stone buildings, a cat slinking around the corner, the church clock pealing the hour. But she couldn’t get away from the awful sound in her head of the bullets’ ricocheting by the phone cabinet where Thadée had been shot. The sickening scene replayed over and over.

Why kill Thadée?

If she couldn’t meet the kidnappers’ demand, René would be next. She looked at her watch . . . already an hour had passed! She willed her fear down; it wouldn’t help her find René.

She remembered the door closing yesterday in the Olf office foyer, her
frisson
of fear. If she’d been the target and escaped, and now they’d gone for René, it was her fault.

Darkness blanketed the narrow street, the furred glow of dim streetlights the only illumination.

She had to find Sophie, the woman Thadée had named with almost his last breath, his ex-wife. She had to try to figure out where Thadée had gotten the jade—and who might have it now.

She walked past the glass awning to the rear of the courtyard. Under the stone lintel, by an ancient water spigot, a nicked metal sign in old formal French forbade children to play in the courtyard. She wondered when was the last time any children had lived here.

She passed the back stairs, wrapped her scarf around her head, belted her shearling coat tighter, and thanked God she’d worn her good boots. Only a three-inch heel.

Adjoining the old tire factory, beyond the fence, she saw an eighteenth-century limestone townhouse. Preserved, with an air of neglect at the edges. Was this where Thadée had lived? She hit the two buzzers. No answer. Only darkened windows.

Galerie 591 was locked. But a dim light shone through the mottled glass. She called the gallery telephone number. The phone rang and rang.

Aimée knocked on the service door. No answer. Looking in the window, she saw a dimly lit office with state of the art computers on several desks. Beyond lay a room with metal sculptures and paintings strewn across the floor. Curtains blew from an open hall window. Glass shards sparkled on the floor.

Someone had broken in.

She turned the knob of the door. Locked. She pulled out her lock-picking kit, inserted a thin metal skewer into the bronze cylinder-like Fichet lock. A few turns and she heard the tumble of the chamber and the lock snapped open.

Inside, a 1920s-style lamp with beaded fringe cast a reddish glow over the gallery.

“. . .
Ohé
, someone here?”

She caught a faint whiff of classic Arpège emanating from a damp sweater flung over a chair.

Glancing out the open window overlooking the adjoining townhouse, Aimée saw a woman going out the door. In the glare of the streetlight, this woman, a pint-size Venus, was applying lipstick as she crossed the desolate square, her heels clicking on the cobbles. She wore a vintage mini-dress over beat-up jeans. A chic, downplayed look.

A chainsmoking, Vespa-riding thirty-something man puttered by, idled the engine, and stopped. Aimée noted the woman’s black hair with purple braids. Could she be Asian? But her face was turned and it was too far away to tell. After exchanging a few words, she swung her leg over the man’s Vespa and they rode away.

Aimée chewed her lip and listened. She pulled out her penlight and shone the beam on the wood floor.

“Sophie Baret?” she called out.

The only response was the rushing of water and creakings of the old warehouse mingling with the flushing of pipes and the sound of water from the roof gutters hitting the street.

Flushing? Or something else? The sound of water in the background continued.

She crouched, grabbing what seemed to be a shovel leaning against the showcase. She realized it was an artwork inlaid with a mosaic of blue glass and ceramic tile tesserae. A fairy dust-like glitter sparkled as she carried it. Making hard contact was all she cared about. The floorboards creaked. Dampness permeated her bones and she shivered.

As she kept walking, the sound of gushing water grew louder. Inside a dank hallway lined by old showcases from thirties millinery stores, lay more
objets d’art
: sculptures and installation pieces. Aimée recognized several of the artists from the current art scene. An older Jean Basquiat painting hung on the wall.

The dim, gray streetlight worked its way through the grime-encrusted windows. Aimée heard a tapping noise.

By the time she reached the rear bathroom, her boots were soaked. She raised the shovel as a weapon and opened the door. A rush of water streamed over her feet.

She gasped. A woman, tied by her scarf to the snaking water pipes of the Turkish style squat toilet, her body oddly twisted, writhed and kicked. Her brown knee-high leather boots beat a pattern on the dirty tiled floor. Only the whites of her eyes showed. Her eyes had rolled up in her head.

Aimée rushed to lift her up, loosening the scarf from her neck and shoulders. Had she been tied up, tried twisting to free herself, but enmeshed herself further?

As the handle was released, the water slowed to a trickle. But the woman’s flailing arms knocked Aimée into the mirror. It shattered, splintering. Bits of glass studded Aimée’s coat.