She nodded. Let him draw his own conclusions when he saw the blood behind the old man’s armoire. “Too bad you can’t ask the Serb about the robbery. Right place, right time for him to know something.” She shivered, pulling her jacket tighter. “Don’t you find it strange the victim didn’t bleed? There’s no blood here on the street. Do you understand it?”
“No, I don’t.” He shrugged. “Maybe there was internal bleeding. We’ll know after the autopsy.”
The tow-truck driver’s horn shrieked a blasting echo off the stone walls. “Finished?” he yelled out the window to a crime scene tech. “Last run tonight. I need to hook up the cars and process them at the yard before it closes.”
“Take your things, Mademoiselle.” The flic waved to the crime scene tech and hurried ahead. “Open them up, show the officer.” He paused and turned back, his shoe squeaking on the stone. “And the trunk.”
AFTER FINALLY GIVING her statement, Aimée hurried down the cobbled lane. In the brisk chill, she searched her old address book for the fifth-floor criminal ward phone number in H?tel-Dieu. She hoped her contact, Nora, a nurse, was working the night shift.
“Nora’s off,” said an older female voice laced with irritation. “Who’s this?”
She needed to know Saj’s condition and hated dealing with the notoriously close-mouthed police medical unit. She thought quick. “Traffic division in the fourteenth arrondissement. Any status update on the man injured in the collision fatality on Villa d’Alésia?”
“But I don’t even have your report yet. Why so eager?”
“Make my life easy tonight, eh? The medics checked his vitals and took him for observation. Didn’t even list suspected concussion, head injury, whiplash, or superficial injuries. I need a possible diagnosis for my report.”
Yells and shouts came over the line.
“We’re busy tonight,” she said, “must be a full moon. I’ll get back to you later.”
“New regulations,” Aimée said. “We need to fill in all the boxes and I’ve got a few empty. Please.”
Sigh. “Just a moment. The patient’s here. I’ll ask his doctor.”
“Parfait.” She had an idea. “I know you’ve got other patients. Put me on speakerphone with the doctor, it’s faster.”
Another sigh. The click of a button. A rush of background noise. “Doctor Robler speaking,” said a crackling speakerphone voice. “The patient shows possible shoulder muscle and neck injury.”
Poor Saj. “The patient’s with you? You’re taking him for X-rays?”
“Bien s?r,” said Doctor Robler, “but after his questioning.”
Alarm spread over her. “Saj, only give your statement,” she said, hoping he was in earshot.
“Aimée?” It was Saj’s voice, tired and confused.
“There’s a robbery involved. Say nothing else until.…”
A loud buzz. The speakerphone disconnected.
Monday, 9:30 P.M.
MORGANE WATCHED HER accomplice, Flèche, peer out the half-open blue shutter. In the moonlight, tendrils of ivy curved over the potted geraniums on the window ledge. Morgane hated working with amateurs. Amateurs with hairy palms, her uncle would say, so lazy they grew hair on their palms.
Where the hell was Servier? Twenty minutes late already and they didn’t have much time to hand over the goods. Her ears perked up as the gate clicked open below.
Flèche shook his head. “Just the hipster with a new conquest, like clockwork.” He yawned, running a matchstick under his fingernail. A pigeon cooed from the low rooftop of a two-story house across the courtyard. “Bores me stiff.”
“That’s a good thing,” Morgane said. Her shirt collar, damp with perspiration, weighed on her neck. She gathered her lank brown hair in a twist and clipped it up on her head.
“Too quiet. I don’t like it.”
Wary, she checked the walkie-talkie signal. All bars lit. “Nothing from control. Nerves got you?” Was he worried about the talkative owner of the café-tabac around the corner, where he’d bought cigarettes an hour ago? Like she’d told him not to. Never leave a presence, she’d warned him. “You think there’s a spotter?”
“I mean it’s dead here,” Flèche said. “Old people, kids practicing piano after dinner, the retiree on the ground floor who never goes out. Spooks me.”
“She’s agoraphobic.” That was the one Morgane worried about. An insomniac who telephoned her brother in Marseilles every night. A watcher with eyes like a crow’s. “You’re correct. It is dead quiet. The perfect place to hide.” She’d told him time and again. The 14th arrondissement was ideal, residential, a mix of working-class and arty types. “You know, at the turn of the century, the tsar’s Okhrana had more secret agents hidden in this quartier than in Saint Petersburg.”
“Merde. Don’t start with the history lessons again.”
“Hasn’t changed much. These people mind their business. Working-class solidarity.”
He flicked his cigarette ash in the Ricard ashtray, stuck the cigarette back in his mouth and inhaled. In the dark, the redorange glow from the burning tip made his face look ethereal. “A bunch of Commies.”
She rolled her eyes. The Wall came down in 1989. “Who calls anyone Communists any more?”
Nearby lay Parc Montsouris, sloping grass hills and the reservoir, just beyond la petite ceinture—the abandoned and overgrown rail tracks edging the old Montrouge quartier. She’d grown up in the clustered lanes of small houses. Generations of her family had been dairy farmers here. Now almost all the farms were gone.
But she knew the quartier in the marrow of her bones, from the Montparnasse artist ateliers on rue Campagne Première—including famous ones, like Gaugin’s and Picasso’s—where publishing bohos now lived, to the Catacombs at Place Denfert-Rochereau, the only tourist attraction. The screams piercing the night from the psychiatric hospital of Sainte Anne. The nineteenth-century prison of La Santé hunkered scab-like on the fragrant lime-tree-lined Boulevard Arago.
A good place to lie low. Wait for the drop. And strategic. Access to the Périphérique ring road less than two kilometers away. A quick twenty minutes to the baggage handler connection at Orly Airport. Morgane could almost taste success.