But what he really meant was that she wasn’t up to it. The damage to her optic nerve made her useless. A liability.
“I worked all through my hospital stay,” she said. “I don’t intend to stop now. The medication and meditation control it.”
At least she hoped so.
“Hostage negotiation’s a fine art,” he said. “How did they find you, and trace René?”
“They must have followed me,” she said.
Weariness had settled in her cold, damp legs. She noticed Morbier’s thinning salt-and-pepper hair, more salt than pepper now. When he was tired, his jowls sagged, reminding her of a basset hound.
Morbier poured them each another glass.
“What if you were the target, Leduc? Victim of a setup?”
Her chest tightened. “I wondered about that, too,” she said. “But why, Morbier? Then there’s the flic I saw with the RG. He was involved in the Place Vendôme surveillance.”
Morbier raised his hands to ward off her words. “Not this again. Get a life, Leduc.”
“When the secret service or their lackeys are involved, everything stinks.”
Morbier pulled out a box of cigarillos and another of wooden kitchen matches from near his black phone. A relic, with a rotary dial. He scratched one of the matches and lit up a Montecristo.
“I thought you quit,” she said.
“These little cigarillos from Havana?” he said, tossing the empty yellow box into the trash. “They don’t count.”
Like hell they didn’t. And what she wouldn’t give for one right now! She leaned over the table wishing she didn’t want a puff so much. Wasn’t that stop smoking patch working anymore? She rolled down her jeans waist. Merde! The patch was gone. She pulled out one from her bag, unpeeled it, and stuck it on her hip.
“Like one, Morbier?”
“After I finish this coffin nail,” he said, taking a deep drag.
“Plant a word, I need to see the file on Thadée Baret. The kidnapper said forty-eight hours, Morbier,” she said. “Look into it, please.”
Morbier shook his head.
”After all, what’s a godfather with an ear at Brigade Criminelle for?”
“That’s rich, Leduc. I’m only there one day a week,” he said, rubbing his jaw.
“It’s for René. Morbier, please,” she said. “I swear I won’t ask for any more help.”
“You’ll deal with the RG?”
She looked down. Noticed the peeling brown linoleum, his thin ankles and worn brown wool slippers, like those her grandfather used to wear.
“Consider it,” Morbier said. “Otherwise I won’t stick my neck out. And I’m not even promising that. Lots of the old boys have retired.”
She nodded.
“How do I know you mean it, Leduc?”
“You want a pinky promise?” she said, remembering when she was ten years old and making a pinky promise put the world in order. Too bad it didn’t do that anymore.
“What about her?” Morbier gestured to the sleeping Sophie.
“Just one night.”
She held up the jade disk. It glowed with a pear-hued translucence in the dim light of Morbier’s galley kitchen.
“And what’s that supposed to mean, Leduc?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m going to find out. Meanwhile, I’ll sleep on your floor and monitor Sophie to make sure she doesn’t have a concussion.”
Morbier went to bed. She tucked the blanket around Sophie’s shoulders and tried René’s number again. Three rings and then a click.
“Allô . . . allô?”
She heard breathing. Her pulse raced.
“René!”
“The dwarf’s tied up at the moment. . . .” She heard snickering.
“Please meet me. I have what. . . .”
In the background, she heard scuffling. The sounds of splintering wood.
“Not now,” a voice said.
Then a cry. René’s cry. And the line went dead.
Nervous, she tried Léo.
“Allô, Léo?” she said. “Could you locate it?”
“In five seconds?” Léo said, her voice sleepy. “The Northeastern sector antenna responded; he’s in Paris. Keep him on longer next time.”
“Merci,” Aimée said, pacing the worn wood floor.
Thursday Morning
AIMÉE WOKE AT 6 A.M. to darkness, her shoulders and legs stiff.
Twelve hours had passed since the first kidnappers’ call. She had to get to work. Morbier snored in his back bedroom. Sophie lay asleep, after a night of twisting and turning on the couch. But she had no fever, hadn’t thrown up.
Aimée wrote “Call me when you wake up” on a graph-lined piece of paper and put it on Morbier’s kitchen table.
She swallowed her pills with an espresso at the corner café on Morbier’s street and made it to her apartment, changed into a black leather skirt and long pullover. She walked an eager Miles Davis on the fog-lined quai, then dropped him at the groomers’ for a much-needed trim.
Aimée tried Gassot’s number again but it rang and rang. Frustrated, she wanted to beat her head against the stone wall. So far, she was spinning her wheels in the sand.
On her calendar the day was circled in red . . . payday. Time for René’s paycheck. All over France, veterans and retirees collected their pensions. Most banked at their post office accounts.
That’s where Gassot would be! Too bad her bike had been stolen. She jumped on the Number 74 bus to Clichy, passing old ladies walking their chichiteux dogs in front of bourgeois gray Haussmann buildings.
Aimée knew the Clichy area, boasting bigger apartments, was about to become the next “in” place. It was becoming sprinkled with avant-garde boutiques whose back windows overlooked the trainyard, with newcomers who could ignore that water wasn’t connected to the main around the clock, and the fact the quartier had been “in” once before, then out. Far, far out.
Here Degas and Zola had argued at Café Guerbois, over Zola’s infamous article on the Salon that had refused Manet’s painting of Nana, a courtesan. Now the café was a Bata shoe store.
The rail lines, a symbol of modernity and access to the lush countryside for the Impressionists, were now grimy and soot-encrusted and the countryside better known for cinderblock HLM low-rent council housing. Place de Clichy’s former 1930s showcase Gaumont cinema had become the 1970s do-it-yourself Castorama hardware store.
Aimée left the bus. Her shoulders slumped when she saw the line at the post office trailing out the door. How could she find one particular veteran in a sea of old faces?
She took a black marker and on an envelope wrote “Hervé GASSOT, anciens combattants,” as she’d seen done at the airport.
On her third trip walking the line, an old woman tugged at her sleeve. “What’s he done?” she asked.
Aimée noted the sixtyish woman’s white hair held in place by a hairband, the tailored winter-white wool coat with dirty, too short sleeves, scuffed 70s Courrèges patent leather ankle boots.
“Nothing yet,” Aimée said. “Can you help me?”
The woman shrugged and looked away.
“Feel like a coffee?” Aimée asked.
“Un demi’s more my style,” she said.
“Bon,” said Aimée. “Let’s go. My treat.”
They ended up across the street in a working class café facing Avenue de Saint Ouen. Aimée tapped her chipped nails on the zinc counter as the old woman knocked back a beer and then another.
“Alors, Madame, have you seen Hervé Gassot?”