“Madame organizer, they called Maman. I crawled around her legs in soup kitchens for the workers. It’s in my blood, I guess.”
No wonder.
“And you? What compels you to write about causes?”
Startled, she ran her finger around the rim of the glass. Not many men asked her what she thought.
“I don’t like injustice, real or abstract. My mother didn’t either.” She paused. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked about her mother with anyone. And never about her mother’s ideals, the causes she’d embraced. “A seventies radical. But I don’t know much. She left when I was eight. To save the world.”
He gave her a sad smile.
“That’s young. Mine left when I was sixteen. Soon after, I stowed away on a freighter bound for Liberia. I came back years later but my father had passed away by then.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Maybe we’re the same in some way, don’t you think?”
Both scarred and searching.
“That and a franc, twenty centimes gets you the paper,” she said, a half smile on her lips. She didn’t want to deal with this.
“You have to face it sometime,” he said, almost reading her thoughts.
As if she could and it would disappear.
She turned away.
He put his hand on her shoulder. Warm. “Voilà, done it again.”
“What’s that?”
“Brought down the burden of the world onto your shoulders . . . no wonder I’m not invited to parties.” He shrugged. “My friends tell me to lighten up.”
“Right now I’ve got a story to write,” she said.
She pulled out her worn Vuitton wallet, removed two hundred francs.
“Of course, I’ll pay you for the tape and your time. You’re busy. You can leave it outside your door, and I’ll pick it up or send for it,” she said. “Will this cover your expense?”
“Forget the money,” he said. “Journalists don’t pay their sources.”
Didn’t they? If she didn’t hurry, she’d miss her next appointment.
“I do. You’re a professional.”
“On one condition,” he said, an amused look in his eye. “This goes toward more of that superb Chinon and you come by later.”
AIMÉE SKIRTED PLACE VALHUBERT. His words, the wine, the warmth. She’d wanted to stay. But mixing business and men never worked.
She heard a baby’s cry and turned around to see a woman emerging from the Metro with a stroller, the plastic cover coated with rain, blue-bootied feet just visible. A shudder of guilt went through her. Stella. And those big blue eyes. She had to hurry to her appointment, then relieve René. An oil company seeking an injunction against an environmental protest group; Krzysztof Linski discredited as a right-wing plant and drummed out of MondeFocus; bottle bombs that the CRS knew about in advance while the demonstrators were ignorant: It didn’t make sense.
Ahead, car headlights illuminated the wet pavement. She passed the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, a belle époque building Jules Verne would feel at home in—musty glass display cases of taxidermied tortoises from the Galápagos, two-headed fetuses curled in glass tubes from the year 1830. A place where she’d spent many a Saturday afternoon with her grandfather, hiding behind him to peek at the more graphic displays.
She checked her watch again and ran. A raincoated flic directed traffic and by the time she’d made it down the bank, littered with sand and salt to prevent slipping, to the Brigade Fluviale’s headquarters, she had a less than a minute to spare.
Quai Saint-Bernard, home in the summer to evening tango dancing, glimmered wet and forlorn in the lights from Pont d’Austerlitz. The slick gangplank to the Brigade Fluviale’s long, low-lying péniche swayed over the Seine’s current. She clutched the gangway rope tightly, almost losing her balance twice.
On the left loomed L’Institut du Monde Arabe. And not more than a few barge lengths across the Seine from it lay Place Bayre, at the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, like the prow of a ship. White wavelets lapped against the stone steps and brushed the deserted bank. She thought of the tire iron, of fleeing through the park, and shivered with fear as well as cold.
She tapped on the white fiberglass door. A blue-uniformed member of the river police greeted her, a snarling white German shepherd at his side.
“Bonjour. Aimée Leduc to see the capitaine de police.”
He pulled the leashed dog back. “Arrêt, Nemo!” he said as he motioned her inside. The brigade headquarters reminded her of a holiday houseboat except for the computers, the white erasable boards filled with assignments, the scurrying officers, the thrum of fax machines, and the smell of the river.
“This way.”
She followed him and a now friendly Nemo, who smelled her legs and keened to be petted. The officer slid another door open and they crossed a deck to an adjoining péniche.
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Leduc,” said Capitaine de Police Michel Sezeur. Shorter than Aimée, he had brown hair combed back en brosse. He wore a Manhurin standard-issue revolver in a holster on the belt of his form-fitting blue twill trousers. “I regret that I can only give you five minutes.” He gestured toward a row of blinking red lights on his telephone.
“I appreciate your making the time for me, Capitaine,” she said and sat down on a swivel chair facing his crowded desk.
The péniche rocked in the backwash of a boat speeding past and her stomach lurched. Waves lapped over the steamed-up portholes and gray mist hovered in the distance.
“Commissaire Morbier confirmed your request,” he said, handing her a stapled report several pages in length
Smart and quick. He’d checked with Morbier after her call.
“You’ll find all the details in this report: our recovery of the victim at 02:47 hours, attempts at resuscitation by one of our paramedic qualified divers, the assessment of the inspector who arrived on the scene and decided upon the next course of action, and the victim’s subsequent removal to the Institut médicolégal. Standard procedure as you will see.”
“About the CRS involvement—” she started to say.
He kept a tight smile. “You know the CRS carry no bullets, their guns are sealed, and they can’t attack the public unless provoked or for due cause.”
“A demonstrator’s in the hospital—”
He cut her off. “Due to illegal assembly, failure to disperse, and discovery of weapons. The CRS only react if demonstrators cross the line. Which, I believe, one of them did.” He sat. “But that’s not my area nor the reason you’re here, correct?”
“How do this victim’s circumstances correspond to or differ from those relating to other bodies you’ve recovered?”
“We find fifty to sixty bodies a year in the Seine. More often than not, they’ve been submerged a long time.”
“But this one wasn’t. Mind telling me the river’s depth and temperature?”
“Usually four to five meters*.” He gestured to a wall chart of the river confluences. The péniche rocked and her stomach lurched again. A door swung open, revealing a line of hanging wet suits. “However, the Seine can rise two to three meters more, as it has now. The current’s strongest now. Temperature-wise, it’s three to four degrees in winter, up to twenty** degrees in the summer.”
“You mentioned that the corpses are usually submerged. How does that affect the body?”
“It’s not rocket science, Mademoiselle. In winter, bodies sink, in spring, they bloat. Sometimes they blow up with body gases like a hot-air balloon. When they’re black and swollen it’s difficult to distinguish between a man or a woman. We’ve recovered bodies as far away as the barrage, the sluice gates south of the Tour Eiffel.” He paused. “That one took three weeks to travel eight kilometers.”