“You understand, I have a few minutes only,” Brault said, his thin mouth working in his long face. Expensive mechanical pencil tops showed in the pocket of his shirt. He wore tailored black denim jeans, a charcoal gray shirt and jacket, blue socks, and black hiking boots. All Gaultier by their look.
“Please sit down,” Brault said. “I’m concerned, but I don’t know how it involves me.”
After one glance at the tall, olive Philippe Starck-designed chair, René preferred to stand. “Non, merci,” René said. “I’ll get to the point.”
Instead, René headed to the window, shaking his head. He stood silently, figuring his next move, hoping to throw Brault off guard. The office window opened onto the coppered roof connected to the glass skylight. Vestiges of a bas-relief on the wall and verdigris-patinaed rain spouts stood out against the gable walls. Beyond, he saw a niche with a worn stone figure where the building roof overhung the street. Probably St. Anne, the patron saint of carpenters, René figured.
“What’s this about?” Brault said, breaking the silence.
“Josiane was protecting you, wasn’t she?” René asked, taking a stab in the dark.
A pencil lead cracked.
“Go ahead, talk to me. I’m not a flic,” René said. “What you tell me . . .”
“Goes to your boss, right?” Brault interrupted. “That salope of an editor who wants corroboration from two sources before he prints a fanny-licking article that makes it to France-Soir by nightfall.”
René struggled to keep the surprise from his face. “We don’t have to play it like that,” René said.
“Josiane was a good journalist. I don’t know why she associated with the likes of you.”
“Me?” René wielded his short arms in mock defense. What the hell was going on here? Brault had jumped from coolness to white-heat without a warm-up. He wished Aimée were here. He needed clues on how to proceed. And his hip ached.
“She had to pay rent like the rest of us,” he said.
“Josiane?”
Merde . . . had she been wealthy . . . had he blown it?
“There’s a lot you didn’t know about her,” René said, hoping he could bluff this out. He regretted it immediately. How lame it sounded! Why couldn’t he have a script or a computer program to guide him?
“Look, I won’t involve the flics,” said René, “if you tell me what you and Josiane were working on.”
Brault’s stainless steel intercom buzzed. “Planning commission’s assembled and waiting in the conference room, Monsieur Brault.”
“Tell me or I turn over my info,” René said. “I’m waiting.”
“What guarantee do I have you’ll conceal the fact that my number was on Josiane’s speed dial?”
Behind the small designer glasses, Brault’s eyes glared.
“We’re not the Brigade Criminelle,” René said, and winked. “One source works for me.” If that didn’t confuse Brault even more, he didn’t know what would. “There’s no benefit for me in involving the flics. I’ll erase your number.”
“Your boss knows, doesn’t he?” Brault glared.
Knows what? But René returned the glare in silence. And waited.
Brault snapped the mechanical pencil lead in and out, but it didn’t break. Just shot a little rain of pencil lead onto the Berber carpet.
“They hire flunkies to clear the tenants out,” Brault said. His tone was harsh and he spat the words out.
“Who does?”
“Mirador.”
“The big construction developer Mirador?”
Brault nodded.
“The Bastille Historic Preservation Society can’t compete with the palms greased by developers like Mirador. The Romanian spilled the beans one night after some 80 proof vodka. He plastered ceilings, did occasional jobs for us. There’s no reason to doubt him. The rue des Taillandiers project seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. That’s what I told Josiane. And that’s all.”
“What happened on rue des Taillandiers?”
“Forget the November to March ban on tenant evictions. Mirador evicts anytime.”
Brault’s words sounded like code to René. But not the kind of code he could decrypt.
“The Romanian?”
“Dragos.”
“Then Dragos can verify . . .”
“Don’t bother to check,” Brault interrupted. “He’s disappeared with the wind. That’s how they work. They hire transient Romanians, Serbs, or Russians.”
René nodded, hoping he didn’t look as clueless as he felt.
“Josiane wrote the article to put a spoke in Mirador’s wheel,” said Brault.
René’s ears perked up.
“Would it be big enough to stop Mirador from evicting illegally?”
Brault’s office door swung open. Two men in suits beckoned him. “The representative of the Bureau de la Construction’s here. We can’t hold up the meeting any longer.”
Brault strode out of his office, leaving René to see himself out, laboriously, with short steps. René’s mind spun. Whirled. He’d promised Aimée he’d call after interviewing Brault. But he couldn’t stop now; he had to find out about Mirador.
RENÉ LABORED several blocks to rue Basfroi, in the northern part of the Bastille. He headed to his friend Gaetan Larzan’s prop rental, where he knew he’d get information. Maybe even a decent glass of wine.
“Business good?” René asked.
“Terrible!” said Gaetan, brushing off his stained overalls, then slicking back his hair.
Always the same reply. Like his old uncle.
Gaetan, who stood near a tarnished knight in armor, returned to consulting a checklist, marking things off.
“These television crews, they’re more careless than monkeys,” he said. Beside him stood a garish green plastic palm tree, bent as though weeping on his shoulder. Ahead lay a hall full of coat racks: wood ones, bamboo, mahogany, metal, lucite, every size and shape imaginable. In a cavernous room strewn with clawfooted bathtubs, old screens, and mirrors propped against the wall, René saw a massive stuffed polar bear towering between low-slung chandeliers.
“Time for a glass?” Gaetan asked.
“Twist my arm and I might,” René said. Gaetan’s uncle and René’s mother had become friends when she’d foraged through the shop for props for her act.
“How’s your uncle?”
“Spry, as usual. He escaped from the home last week,” Gaetan nodded. “But his leg gave out. He didn’t get far.”
His uncle’s wooden leg, a souvenir from the Austerlitz battlefield hospital, intrigued René. After the war he’d refused a prosthetic, saying so many had died, he’d been lucky to get the stump, and he wouldn’t let anyone forget that. René felt empathy for him. “Makes a nice pair of salt and pepper shakers,” he’d heard some workers laugh behind their backs, “a tall cripple and a short one.”
At the secretary’s desk, littered with piles of yellow invoices under a stuffed hedgehog, Gaetan cleared a place for René. He reached back and pulled out a dusty, unlabeled bottle. In the pencil holder he found a corkscrew, then rinsed two long-stemmed wine glasses with bottled Evian, flicked the water into the waste bin, and poured.
“Château Margaux nineteen seventy-six?” René swirled the rich rust-red liquid, sniffing the cork.
“Close. You’re quite the connoisseur. Nineteen seventy-five was a vintage year.”
René wondered how Gaetan managed to get hold of such excellent wine. He wouldn’t mind a bottle.
Gaetan shrugged. “Fell off a truck in Marseilles,” he said.
Comme d’habitude—as usual—René thought. Business must be booming, or else he was paid in wine.