She noticed a hefty price tag on a Sèvres porcelain figurine. Not her type of bargain at all. The shop contained château-sized armoires, stone statues, marble busts on faux fireplace mantels, and delicate Louis XIV desks. But it held no clients.
“Bonjour,” said a middle-aged man with a receding hairline. A smell of espresso clung to him. His eyes flickered as he sized her up, estimating the cost of her dress. Not couture but a good label. No way he’d know it came from the rack at her favorite secondhand stall in the Porte de Vanves flea market.
“Mademoiselle, how can I help you?” he asked with a smile.
“I’m meeting Monsieur Vavin. Perhaps he’s here . . . in back?”
“Non, Mademoiselle,” he said.
“I’ll wait if you don’t mind.”
But he has already left, Mademoiselle,” he told her. “
She was going around in circles. She should have ignored Vavin’s message and kept working.
“Did he leave any word for me?”
“He left in a hurry, that’s all I know.”
“Where did he go?”
The man shrugged. “He’s a client but I don’t keep track of his movements.”
“A client?”
“Such good taste.” The man’s face brightened. He’d thought of another sales tactic. “Mademoiselle, are you interested in antique children’s toys, like Monsieur Vavin is? This is a delightful nineteenth-century rocking horse.” He gestured to a miniature horse with a horsehair mane and leather reins, its white paint peeling.
“It’s just ornamental, isn’t it?” she asked. It was so small that she doubted a child could ride it.
“Monsieur Vavin’s daughter rides one very like it, he tells me. It’s been repainted, of course. Monsieur Vavin’s very particular. He never buys plastic or mass-market toys for her. He wants her to appreciate craft and tradition.”
She let him ramble on, her mind elsewhere. Vavin might have stepped out to buy cigarettes, talk on his cell phone, or for a myriad other reasons. She’d wait.
“ . . . the MondeFocus petition . . . ,” the man was saying.
Her ears perked up. “Pardon, Monsieur, what did you say?”
“Not that I’m against the environment, you understand,” he said. “I signed her petition. Monsieur Vavin explained how important it is.”
“Today?”
He tapped his forehead. “A few weeks ago.”
Her mind raced. “Monsieur Vavin came here together with a woman who had a MondeFocus petition?” She had an idea. “Was it about oil pollution?”
“Saving the whales, I believe,” he said. “So important.”
She pulled out the photo. “Do you recognize her in this group?”
He peered closer. “So polite. Oui, that’s her.”
Nelie Landrou.
“When she visited the shop, was she pregnant?”
He stuck his arms out and linked them in a big circle. “Like this.”
The door opened to a rush of traffic noise from the quai. She looked up. Instead of Vavin, a couple had entered, triggering a buzzer.
“Monsieur, which way did Monsieur Vavin go?” she asked.
“If you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Through your glass windows you can see the quai. Did he go left or right?”
The man stuck his thumb to the right. “Aaah, Madame et Monsieur Renaud, so good to see you. That cloisonné vase has your name on it.” He’d already forgotten Aimée as he scurried toward the couple.
Vavin, the Regnault publicity head, and a pregnant Nelie, a MondeFocus activist . . . together?
She stood outside on the quai. The gunmetal gray sky threatened rain. She tried Vavin’s number. No answer or message. Then why had he summoned her here?
A BATEAU-MOUCHE PASSED under the supports of Pont Marie more slowly than usual because of the rising level of the Seine. The slap of water against the stone mingled with the blaring horn of a taxi. Cars, unable to use the flooded road on other bank, crossed the bridge at a snail’s pace. Fliers advertising neighboring Théâtre de L’Ile Saint-Louis performances were caught up in the wind; they swirled around her ankles. She grabbed a handful, meaning to bring them back to the theatre. Inside the building, she set them down in a corner stacked with theatre notices and more fliers. She saw a pile of MondeFocus report pamphlets, identical to the one she’d found in Krzysztof’s room and noticed in Vavin’s office. She’d better check this out.
Her footsteps echoed in the damp tunnel-like passage that led to a seventeenth-century courtyard like that of her own building. The theatre proper and rehearsal studios were upstairs. She climbed a switchback series of neo-Gothic wood-railed steps and heard a voice coming through a window that opened onto the courtyard. The words themselves were in old formal French. I find that everything goes wrong in our world; that nobody knows his duty, what he’s doing, or what he ought to be doing, and that outside of mealtimes . . . the rest of the day is spent in useless quarrels. . . . It’s one unending warfare.
She recognized lines from Voltaire’s Candide. Valid then and today.
Loath to interrupt the rehearsal, the first drops of rain pattering in the vacant courtyard, and with nowhere else to stand but the dank hallway, she entered the small theatre. Red crushed-velvet curtains were halfway drawn. The brightly lit stage was bare except for a throne-like wooden chair and a woman mopping the scuffed black-painted floor planks, humming, her bucket beside her.
“Madame, are any of the crew about?”
The woman looked up, squinting into the darkness beyond the stage lights. She pointed. “Rehearsal.”
“Merci, I’ll wait.” Aimée pulled up a corner of the dust sheet that covered a seat, glad to take a rest, even in the cramped velvet chaise designed in the nineteenth century for a less statuesque person. She put her feet up, rubbed her calves. Checked her voice mail. No message from Vavin or René.
The woman finished mopping and left. Aimée tried Vavin again. No answer. She let the cell phone ring.
In the middle of a yawn, she heard a digitized ring-tone version of “Frère Jacques” from the stage. Then an ear-piercing scream made her sit up. It was followed by another, higher pitched.
She ran down the aisle and up the side steps leading backstage. The white-faced cleaning woman leaned, heaving, against an electrician’s stage-light panel.
“Are you hurt?”
A salvo of Portuguese erupted from the woman’s mouth. She crossed herself. “Maria Madonna” was all Aimée could make out as the shaking woman pointed to the partly open door of a broom closet.
A stout security guard arrived, red faced and panting. The ring tone was repeated. It was closer now.
“Not another mouse! Xaviera, I told you last time, old buildings have them,” said the guard. Catching Aimée’s glance, he rolled his eyes. “Answer your phone, Xaviera!”
The cleaning woman’s hands were trembling, her eyes wide with terror.
“Non . . . telefono de mi . . . non ai . . . non telefon.”
No phone, that much Aimée understood. She stepped over the fallen mop and opened the broom-closet door wider. The annoying ring tone was repeated.
Vavin’s trouser-clad legs sprawled. His head was turned away and slumped onto his shoulder. The brooms and a tin pail were overturned next to him inside the closet.
“Monsieur Vavin?” she said. She knelt and gripped his shoulders. “Can you hear me?”