Linh pulled Aimée closer. “The vital force, the power of jade to channel the spirits of the other world, still exists.”
She gave the envelope containing the cashier’s check back to Aimée. “You’re my only hope. Keep this and the disk you still have. Find the rest for me.”
“But I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Gassot, a French engineer, saved my father’s life at Dien Bien Phu. I never was able to thank him. He knew about the jade.”
Gassot . . . that name. He’d written the article she’d found online, about jade looted from the Emperor’s Tomb.
“Do you know if he’s still alive?”
“I have no idea.”
“How did you meet Baret?”
“I didn’t,” Linh said, pulling her robe’s hood closer about her head. “He contacted the temple. He knew we’d been searching. We’d heard a rumor that the jade was in Paris.”
“What rumor?”
“Something about an auction catalogue?” Linh asked, shaking her head. “I don’t know about these things. I understand your country less and less every day. Bloodshed. . . that’s not our way. We don’t believe in taking life, not even an animal’s.”
Yet, Linh came from a country that had been at war almost continuously for the past hundred years. Aimée had to keep her on track. “Linh, what about Baret?”
“He telephoned and said it had to be arranged quickly, but as we were the rightful owners, we could have the jade for a small payment. Somehow, I felt that he had a good heart.”
A good heart?
“Bad luck curses those who have evil intentions,” Linh said. “You will find the jade. I count on you.”
Guilt warred with Aimée’s promise to steer clear of this kind of thing.
Linh paused at the temple door. “Follow where this disk leads you.”
And Aimée knew she would. Not only to restore the jade to Linh and subvert the RG’s agenda, but also because, somehow, the trail might lead back to her father.
AIMÉE STOOD in yet another café-tabac in the Clichy quartier, drumming her chipped boa-blue nails on the zinc counter. So far, in the six she’d visited, no one had seen or remembered Baret. If she had to drink yet another espresso she’d sprint down Avenue de Clichy and never fall asleep again.
“Une tisane, s’il vous plaît,” she said, ordering an herbal tea. She caught the owner’s eye during a lull between commuters buying Métro passes and Lotto tickets. She pulled out the PMU betting receipt, handed it to him, and he ran it through the machine.
She was about to engage him in conversation when he slapped one hundred francs on the counter. “You won.”
Aimée had never won anything in her life. But she took the hundred francs. Thadée didn’t need it now.
“Monsieur, it belongs to my friend Thadée Baret. Maybe you remember, I called last evening and you passed him the phone?”
“Not me,” he said, ringing up a sale. “Too busy. Me, I work the early shift.”
“Bon, who would have answered?”
He shrugged and turned to another waiting customer.
“Monsieur, it’s important. Do you know who worked last night?” she asked, determined to discover more about Baret.
“Ask Gérard,” he said. “He’s stocking the beverage shipment.”
Aimée wound past the curved zinc and old streaked bubbled mirrors lining the café. Mechanics in jumpsuits, workers in blue smock coats and an old man with his dog at his feet sipped a morning espresso or un demi de bière blonde. This was a working class pocket of the old Paris like the one she had known growing up.
“Pardonnez-moi, Gérard?” she asked a thirtyish man, buff but bulky, in a T-shirt and stovepipe jeans, lugging a crate of Stella Artois beer.
“Did you work last night?” she asked, her feet crunching sugar cube wrappers littering the floor.
“Why?”
She pulled out the PMU racing receipt and twenty francs. “Maybe you sold my friend Thadée the winning ticket. If so, I owe you a little thank you.”
“Congratulations, but I was at the gym,” he said.
“So, who should I talk to?” she said.
Gérard jerked his thumb at a middle-aged man, tying an apron around his waist, by the orange juice squeezer.
“Alors, Jojo, something to brighten your morning,” he shouted.
Aimée smiled at the man. “Did you answer the phone last night when I called for Thadée Baret?”
“Eh? Speak up,” Jojo said.
She noticed the calluses on his hands.
She held out the form. “Did you sell this to Thadée?”
“I sell a lot of those,” he said, “more than a hundred yesterday.”
Great. “Of course, but when I called around 5:30 you passed the phone to Thadée. Remember, a mec with glasses, no coat?”
He nodded. “Comes in here almost every day. A nice guy.”
Heartened, she grinned. “Here’s twenty, he wanted to share his winnings with you.”
“So I brought him luck!” Jojo squeezed another orange on the spinning machine. Juice trickled through the thick orange pulp.
Aimée didn’t want to inform him just what kind of luck.
“Know where I can find him, now?”
“At work, I’d guess,” he said.
“Where’s that?”
Jojo’s eyes narrowed. “How’d you get his ticket anyway?”
“He gave it to me,” she said. “Said he moved. And I’ve got to give his money to him.”
Despite the reluctance in Jojo’s eyes, he wiped his hands and pocketed the twenty francs. “He lives above the art gallery on rue des Moines. The chichi place.”
Elated, she buttoned her coat.
“Merci,” she said.
Now she had somewhere to start.
AIMÉE KNOCKED on the closed door of Galerie 591, a renovated warehouse. Rain pattered on the cobblestones. She wound her black wool scarf tighter against the chill, trying to figure out what she’d say. Posters advertised an upcoming British collage exhibition. She peered inside the darkened gallery: framed oils, collages, and metal sculptures filled the space. Upscale, and with prices to match, no doubt.
The gallery lay one street over from where Thadée had been shot. She figured he’d cut through a back courtyard or passage to rue Legendre. Didn’t most of these warehouses have rear courtyards?
A wrought iron fence closed off a long courtyard leading to the gallery entrance. Further on stood more warehouses, some converted into lofts. Aimée opened the creaking gate, and used the house phone to call the gallery’s number. As she stood under the eaves by a leaf-clogged gutter, she heard the echo of the gallery phone ringing. Her call went unanswered.
A dilapidated tire factory crumbled under a soot-encrusted glass roof at the rear of the couryard, the faded sign bearing the letters PNEUS in blue type. Huddled next to it was what looked like an old car parts warehouse from the thirties.
She crossed the courtyard from the art gallery to a door- way under the sign GRAPHIX. Strains of jazz came from inside. She pushed the door open and saw a space divided into red cubicles, each containing a drawing board.
“Is anyone here?”
“You lost?” asked a man wearing a black ribbed turtleneck sweater. His shaved head glinted in the light focused on his desk. Rain beat a murmur on the dirty glass roof.
“Does Thadée live next door?”
“You mean the gallery owner?” Irritation shone in his eyes. “I imagine he did.”
Aimée thought it best to feign ignorance. “Did? What do you mean?”