Murder on the Champ de Mars (4 page)

“I don’t have time to stand in the street and argue.” She jerked her thumb toward the entrance and said to Nicu, “Coming?”

She took off, counted on him to follow. She realized she only knew the woman’s first name, Drina.

The hospital, laid out in the form of two crosses connected by a chapel, radiated eight courtyards with gardens. Large signs informed the public that next year the hospital, which specialized in treating lung diseases, would be shut down. Aimée recalled from her one year of med school that Dr. Laennec, the nineteenth-century physician who invented the stethoscope and for whom the hospital was named, had his medical career cut short after diagnosing himself with TB too late. Ironic.

Hurrying over the worn pavers, past age-darkened courtyard walls, she reached the hospital door. The vaulted entrance—a mélange of architectural styles from several centuries—reminded her of women of a certain age, whose wrinkles and crow’s-feet hinted at their past.

Nicu, his uncle and the rest of the retinue joined her at the desk.

“
Désolée
, visiting time ended an hour ago,” said a nurse.

Great.

“But we’re family,” said Nicu’s uncle. “My sister needs us.”

“Come back at nine
A.M.
tomorrow.”

The uncle gestured to the old woman and the girl. The woman set down her pot and burst into loud wailing.

“How can you tell us to leave?” The uncle spoke over the woman’s crying. “She’s family. It’s better we bring her home. Prepare her our way.”

Aimée tried to catch Nicu’s eye. He was staring at his uncle, transfixed. She tapped his arm and saw him startle in fear and clutch the messenger bag hanging from his shoulder.

Had she broken some Gypsy taboo?

“Nicu?” she said.

His shoulder twitched. A nervous tic, stress? For a moment he looked lost, adrift. Or maybe hurt. And younger than she’d thought.

After asking René to babysit and coming all this way, she wasn’t going to leave now. She had to find out what the woman had wanted to tell her.

“Let’s not waste time,” she said, keeping her voice gentle. “Which ward, Nicu?”

Another nurse had joined the fracas at the desk.

Nicu pointed left. Made a C with his thumb and forefinger.

She nodded meaningfully, and they stepped back, slipping behind the noisy group and past the distracted nurses.

She followed Nicu through the arched corridor, fluorescent light panels buzzing above the scuffed green linoleum. It was almost cave-like. The layout of the public wards looked as if it hadn’t changed since the seventeenth century—halls bookended by spiral staircases and nursing stations. As they passed closed wings stretching into shadowy recesses, Aimée wondered whether Nicu’s confused expression, that twitch, was due entirely to his mother’s illness; she sensed there was something else on his mind.

Ward C contained ten curtained partitions, a bed in each, some open, some closed. It smelled of disinfectant. Chipped white enamel bedpans hung from the wall, reminding her of
men’s starched shirts. She heard beeping machines; a snore rose from behind the curtains.

Nicu looked around, put his finger to his lips and then pulled back the curtains on the left.

Over his shoulder Aimée saw an empty hospital bed; on the rolling table sat a food tray with an untouched cup of bouillon, a skim of congealed fat floating on the surface.

“Maman?”
He pulled at the blanket as if there might be a woman hidden under it. “Where is she?”

At a glance Aimée took in strewn sheets, an abandoned respiratory machine and a blank heart-rate monitor with wires trailing from it. Disconnected tubes dangled to the tiled floor.

“You’re sure we’re in the right ward, Nicu?”

Nicu held up a menu slip with her name, Drina Constantin—a check marked next to the clear liquid menu. “I don’t understand. She was here an hour and a half ago. Less.”

An emergency operation? Her breath skipped. Maybe they were too late.

“Gone for tests?” she said. “Or maybe a procedure?”

“They ran tests all afternoon,” said Nicu. “Her fever spiked. She was gasping for breath. I thought the end was coming. She rallied somehow. Tonight she was so tired, the doctor wanted her to rest. Why would they move her?”

Worried, Aimée didn’t know what to believe. It was all so strange—the young man waiting for her in the dark, the angry relatives, the missing patient. She still didn’t know why she was here. Could René have been right, was this some kind of scam? Or had this frightened boy just lost his mother? Even if he had, what did it have to do with her?

The nursing station wasn’t the hive of activity she expected. Two nurses sat, their pens clicking as they filled in charts.

A middle-aged nurse looked up, her twist of hair held in place by a chipped green hair clip that matched the walls of the well-worn facility. “How did you get in here?”

“Has my mother gone for an operation?” Nicu asked.

“I’ll have to ask you to leave. Visiting hours are over,” she said, her voice firm.

“After I see her,” said Nicu, his eyes flashing. “Please check on Drina Constantin, Ward C. Was she sent for more tests or a CAT scan?”

“I remember you,” the nurse said, her mouth pursed. “She’s taken her medication and is resting for the night.”

“My mother’s gone.”

“Monsieur, please leave before I have you escorted out.” She shot a look at Aimée and added, “Both of you.”

“Don’t you understand?” Nicu said. “Her bed’s empty. She didn’t leave on her own—she can’t walk.”

“
Ce n’est pas possible
, Monsieur. You’ve made a mistake.”

“No mistake,” said Aimée, glancing down the dimly lit corridor. One empty gurney. A tight knot of dread was forming in her stomach. “Call security. Find her doctor.”

“Attendez,”
said the nurse, sounding unhappy and picking up the phone. “Let me verify with the staff.”

Judging by the murmurs and looks passing between the nurses, something was off. Aimée sat on a cold plastic chair and watched the hands of the wall clock move. She tapped her sneaker on the green linoleum. Nicu paced, then sat down on the plastic seat next to hers.

“Nicu, what’s so important that your mother has to talk to me now, after all these years? What was this about?”

Nicu shook his head, his eyes clouded with worry, or maybe fear. “All she said was that it had something to do with the murder of a detective named Leduc, who’s your father,
non?”

The mystery behind her father’s death, in a bomb explosion in Place Vendôme, had never been solved. Just another dust-covered file in the bowels of the Brigade Criminelle. Over the years, the only lead had been a rumor; a plane crash
in Libya took care of everyone involved, and there was no one left to ask.

Aimée felt her heart pounding. “Your mother knows who killed him? Did she give you a name?”

“No name.”

She fought back the image flashing into her head, his charred limbs on paving stones, one lone shoe with a foot still inside. The horror flooded back. A sob erupted from deep inside her.

“Proof,” Nicu said, “you need more proof that I’m telling you the truth, right?” He thrust his hands into his pockets and pulled out a crinkled black-and-white photo, tucked it in her hand. “Keep it.”

A scene of her in knee-highs, looking up at a younger version of her father, smiling; behind them a market stall with a woman in a long skirt with a young boy holding a model airplane. Nicu looked about eight, Drina a little older than Aimée now. What year could this have been?

“Tell me more, Nicu.”

“That’s all I know. She needed to tell you herself. She insisted.”

A trio of nurses assembled hurriedly around Aimée and Nicu as a thirty-something male doctor strode toward them. “Who unplugged the Ward C patient from the machines?” said the doctor, his brow furrowed. “Why did you take her off the medication drip? I want her chart.”

“We have no record of her being moved,” said the nurse with the green hair clip. She didn’t look stern anymore.

“I don’t understand how this patient could have been disconnected without my approval and knowledge. Check the wards, the whole floor.”

“
Tout de suite
, Doctor Estienne,” said the nurse, mobilizing the others with a wave of her arm.

“My mother was here an hour and a half ago,” said Nicu. “Why didn’t someone stay with her? How was it you didn’t notice she was gone?”

Dr. Estienne stuck his stethoscope in his coat pocket. He put his hand on Nicu’s shaking shoulder. “As soon as I find her chart—”

“What good will that do?” Nicu interrupted.

“
Ne t’inquiète pas
, young man,” said Dr. Estienne, his voice measured and reassuring. “We’ll sort this out.”

Sort this out? But Aimée knew that tone—they taught it in med school, for use with hopeless cases.

“Doctor, when’s Drina due her next medication?”

“I don’t have her chart at the moment, Mademoiselle,” he said, looking her in the eye before turning to Nicu. “I checked on your mother an hour ago, after her last meds. I wanted to monitor her pain level. She will most likely be due another dose in a few hours or so, and we will have found her and everything will be back to normal by then.”

“Her situation’s critical,” Aimée said. “As you should know. Didn’t you run tests today? Her son deserves to know her prognosis.”

“Mademoiselle, we don’t receive crystal balls on graduating from med school.”

“I learned that in my first year of med school, Doctor,” she said, neglecting to add that it had also been her last year of med school. The formaldehyde smell of the dissection-lab fridge, with its human organs sitting side by side with student lunches, had cured her of any aspirations to a medical career. “What’s her prognosis?” she repeated.

“We’re concerned about possible renal failure,” he said finally. “The hemodialysis was keeping her electrolytes out of the critical range. And I’m worried that with a heightened potassium level, she’s facing a fatal heart-rhythm disturbance.”

Good God. A hemodialysis patient yanked from the machine.

“You gave her meds an hour ago.” Nicu seized the doctor’s
arm. “How long does she have if she doesn’t get her next medication dose?”

“Young man, we’ll have this under control soon,” he said, in that smooth voice again.

“And if you don’t?”

But the doctor was nodding at the arriving orderlies. “Search the X-ray center and lab wing,” he said to them, pointing down the corridor.

He turned away from them to consult with an arriving doctor. Aimée strained to catch snatches of their murmured conversation. “If she’s kept stable … dosed at six-hour intervals … fifteen, eighteen hours before it’s … irregular heart rhythm.”

Aimée inserted herself between the two doctors. “Give me the best- and worst-case scenarios,” she said, lowering her voice. “Please. I might have to prepare her son.”

“Best-case scenario?” Dr. Estienne glanced back at Nicu. “His mother’s terminal, an advanced stage of invasive cancer. We can help her to pass peacefully, control her pain over the next few days.”

“What if she’s not found? What would happen to her?”

The doctor looked at Nicu, then back at Aimée. “Not that this will happen. But the other scenario …?
D’accord
. Without intervention, in ten to twelve hours there will be limb paralysis, then another few hours and her heart will start to fail. Twenty to twenty-two hours, development of delirium. Twenty-four to twenty-eight, spontaneous hemorrhaging, the respiratory system, vital organs shut down. I’m sorry, but there will be nothing painless or peaceful about it.”

Aimée’s throat caught. Her heart ached for Nicu, and for this missing woman she didn’t remember knowing. Her father’s informer, she felt sure now. What could she do?

“H
IM
.” T
HE NURSE
pointed to Nicu’s uncle, who’d arrived, chest heaving, at the nursing station, with the older woman and little girl in tow. “That’s him, the man who kept threatening to discharge the patient.”

The woman let out a cry and began to beat her chest. She rocked back and forth on her heels, weeping.

“Never trust hospitals.” Nicu’s uncle’s eyes narrowed. “I told you, Nicu. And Drina alone here—in our tradition we never let someone pass alone. Why didn’t you tell me earlier that she was here so we could come keep vigil?”

“I didn’t know how sick she was until last night,” he said. “Today she got worse, like I’ve told you already.” Hurt and resentment simmered in his eyes.

“So you talked her into leaving?” asked Dr. Estienne.

“Me? I haven’t seen her.” The uncle’s voice was furious. “I’ve been trying to get
in
, not take her out.”

“That’s impossible, as I’ve been telling you, monsieur,” said the nurse. “Hospital regulations forbid anyone after visiting hours.”

“And now look what’s happened.” His uncle stepped toward the doctor. “May the spit in your eye dry up if you’ve killed her.”

Aimée’s gaze caught on an orderly who had appeared behind Nicu’s uncle. He gave a quick shake of his head. “All patients accounted for except for one in Ward C, Doctor.”

She could tell from the staff’s faces that they were at a loss. Not good. She couldn’t just stand here, listen to this wailing woman. She had to do something.

Amid the ensuing shouting match between Nicu’s uncle and the staff, no one paid her any attention. She followed the corridor until it branched in two, one hallway heading toward the lobby, the other toward the staircase. Which way had Drina gone? Had someone bundled her out, somehow sneaking her past the reception desk? Beneath the staircase on the left was
a door with an emergency-exit sign over it, but a large sign proclaimed that an alarm would go off if the door was opened.

She ran toward the lobby.

“Have you discharged anyone within the past hour?” she asked at the main reception.

The long-faced male receptionist looked up. “Visiting hours are over, Mademoiselle. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Just what she needed. Another by-the-book hospital administrator.

“We’re looking for Drina Constantin,” said Nicu, who had appeared, panting, at her elbow. “I’m her son.”