Footsteps tramped in the door, then came rustling noises, then the slinging metallic sound of clothes hangers sliding along a rack.
“Madame . . . I’ll take this in medium. Here’s my card.”
Aimée heard clicks, a muttered curse. Lulu must have slid a credit card through the portable machine, then slammed it hard on the pink concrete counter. She’d done the same thing with Aimée’s card last week. Another loud thwack and Aimée jumped. Right against something that jiggled. The beaded jewelry display?
“Piece of garbage, this thing.” Lulu’s voice, in a low growl, came from Aimée’s right. “My clients wait, the charge doesn’t go through. I end up doing this twenty times a day! Look, we’ll have to talk later.”
Aimée felt an arm and Lulu’s frangipani-scented lip tint brushing by her cheek and realized she was being escorted out the door. “I’ll do what I can.”
* * *
ALL THE way back along the slippery pavement, clinging to Chantal’s arm, Aimée wanted to kick herself. She knew she must look awful. And the crowded, narrow streets and cars whizzing by terrified her. Noises jumped out from everywhere.
Something chirped and startled her. Birds . . . near the Bastille column?
“That traffic signal’s for us,” Chantal said. “You can let my arm loose, you know. I’ll need it later and you’ve nearly squeezed off my blood circulation.”
“Sorry,” Aimée said, feeling sheepish. She was adrift in the sea of sounds.
“You need protection, now,” said Chantal. “You’ll feel safer once you master simple cane skills.”
Chantal left her in the lobby and Aimée rode the elevator by herself. The numbers were announced automatically, and she felt proud when she got off at her floor until, once again, she sensed another presence. Someone stood in the hallway. Somewhere near her room. Her voice caught in her throat.
She took two steps. Grabbed for the railing and missed. Found it the next time and reached for her keys.
“Looking for someone?” she asked.
Silence.
Paralyzed, she waited.
Then the elevator whished open behind her. She turned, her keys pointed.
“Shopping, in your condition?” René asked behind her. “Find anything?”
“I found out more about Josiane Dolet. Now I’m certain she was the intended victim,” Aimée said. “Anyone else here?”
“Just us.”
“Could you look inside my room for me?”
She felt him take the door key that she held between her fingers, poised in the attack mode, and brush by her.
The door clicked as it was unlocked. “Coast seems clear,” René said a moment later.
Was she paranoid? Hadn’t someone been standing there when she got out of the elevator?
She told him about Sergeant Bellan’s questioning and Morbier’s comments about Vaduz.
The attacker had taken nothing from her. She figured he’d been in a hurry when he found out she wasn’t the right woman.
“Time to get to work, partner,” she said, feeling her way along the wall. After a big breath and three steps, she reached her bed and kicked her bag under it.
She located a bottle of water, twisted the top, and took a slug. Half of it went down her shirt. Cold and soaking wet.
“Here’s the screen access program I promised you,” said René. “Blind programmers say DOS screen readers go quicker than what we’re used to. They’re dealing with strings of text with no graphic interface to slow it down. I think 128 megs of RAM should be enough for you. Schematics, variable capacity and interfaces work off those. Remember, the way we designed the Populax firewall?”
She heard the machine power up, the echoing pings as the net connection was made.
“A double password protected firewall, as usual!” she said.
“Click on Internet, then open browser,” René said.
A silky robotic-tinged voice responded “Log-in completed, internet connection established.”
“You’re wonderful, René.” Simultaneously, a surge of power ran through her. “Now I can investigate what’s bothering me.”
“What’s that?”
“Why did Vincent tear up our contract?” she said. She nodded, her fingers finding the keys, nestling in the ridges. Enjoying the familiar little clicks, feeling at home. Her fingers racing over the keys and responding to voice commands. “What is he hiding?”
She positioned the laptop on her bed, crossed her legs, and opened an internet browser. A pleasant male voice, deep and with a slightly robotic accent, responded to her key commands.
“Sexy enough for you?” René asked.
“He’s no Aznavour, but he’ll do,” she said. “René, I need a favor. Please copy these numbers.” She thrust the paper with Josiane’s speed dial numbers at him and the phone itself.
“And then . . .” she paused. She didn’t want to ask him to do this. But one of them had to comb the hard drive as soon as possible. René had provided her with the software so she could, and right now he would be better at interviewing someone.
“Up to calling on these folks and getting information from them, René?” she asked.
“It says Leduc Detective on our door,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”
Thursday Morning
RENÉ BACKED HIS CUSTOMIZED Citroën into a vacant sliver of space on boulevard Richard Lenoir. Never mind that it consisted of several zebra crossing stripes. A Parisian parking spot—you got in where you could.
Red-brown leaves fluttered from the trees, crackling under his feet. A weak, late-morning sun was framed by the bare plane tree branches overhead.
Opposite stood the Bataclan theatre. Once a pagoda-style folly built by Napoléon III for Empress Eugénie, then un caf’ conc’, café concert hall, where Maurice Chevalier sang for the Germans, later a cinema. Now the marquee read “Limited run only . . . Viva Zapata, the musical!”
The chance to do something, work in the field like Aimée, excited René. Their roles were reversed, finally. But his stomach churned. The burden was on him to investigate a murder and the attack on Aimée. He’d made an appointment with Miou-Miou, the woman who answered the first number on Josiane Dolet’s speed dial.
“Monsieur Friant, ça va?” said a woman with blonde ringlets who skated up to him in front of the Bataclan. She flashed a card: “Astrology readings by Miou-Miou—day or night, I rollerblade to YOU.”
“Thanks for meeting me. Let’s have a drink,” he said, indicating the dim café.
“Bon, my next client’s the numbers man upstairs.”
René wondered if that boded well for the Bataclan’s finances. He struggled to keep up with her. The curse of short legs, he thought, as he had a thousand times. Boulevard de Temple, known in the eighteenth century as the notorious “Boulevard du Crime,” bordering the Marais and the Bastille, lay ahead of them.
The café, once the Bataclan lobby, looked overdue for a renovation. At least a cleaning, René thought. Remnants of Chinese temple-style pillars and red lacquer beams, paint peeling off in places, arched above them. The circular zinc bar, a 50s island in the sea of café tables and rattan chairs, beckoned with a rainbow display of liquor bottles.
“Taurus . . . Scorpio rising,” Miou-Miou said, with a big grin. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
René nodded.
She sat down, crossed her rollerblades, and pulled her shoulder bag onto her lap. She opened it, and drew out a pile of astrological charts. “First consultation costs two hundred francs. Then I prepare your chart, which I keep with me. You can call anytime and I’ll give you a reading on the spot or come to you with a detailed horoscope. For fifty francs more, I do important events or weekly forecasts.”