He chewed his lip. “I don’t know. Désolé.”
She was frustrated, but she sensed that if Nicu had more to say, he would tell her in due time. However, he might be unaware of how much he knew.
Her father always told her that informers required maintenance. They came at a cost—the cost of withholding incriminating evidence from your colleagues on the force, of looking the other way or providing favors to keep them delivering. Sometimes all three.
“I believe you,” she said, trying another tack. “I think she was one of my father’s informants.” She tried to keep the question out of her voice.
Nicu shrugged. He didn’t deny it.
“You would have noticed things, I imagine. Little things. Maybe her behavior was different after my father’s visits.” Nicu averted his gaze. “But he trusted her, Nicu. Offered our help. He knew she kept her promises. That’s what she’s trying to do now.”
Another shrug. Somehow she had to break through his anguish, the shock. She scanned the lobby—a few nurses, murmured conversations.
“The gadjo she talked about,” she said, probing. “Who could she have meant? Maybe you’d seen him before? Can you remember?”
Again no response.
“I want to find her before it’s too late,” she said. “But I need your help. Give me something to work with. Who knows she’s here, who did she last see, where does she live?”
She sensed a stillness in him. Thinking, or shutting down? She couldn’t tell.
“You came to my house, asked for my help. You insisted I come here,” she said. “Why don’t you trust me now?”
He looked up. “She kept saying the gadjo’s back, that he had found her,” said Nicu. “His murderer had found her. And in her next breath, your father’s name.”
Aimée shivered.
“Do you have any idea who she could have meant? Have you noticed any new people around, or why she’d be at risk?”
At first she thought he had shut down again, wasn’t going to answer, but then he suddenly said, “Recently … I’ve felt like we’ve been followed a few times.”
“Followed? By whom?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I just … I could tell. Someone has been watching. A man.”
Two uniformed flics had arrived and were speaking to the security guard in the hospital lobby. The guard pointed to Nicu. All she knew was that she had to figure out what had happened—to Drina, and to her father. How, she didn’t know.
Aimée palmed her card into Nicu’s shaking hand. “We need to talk, but not now. Call me after you talk to the flics.” Nicu chewed his lip. “Can you do that?”
He nodded.
The two flics were working their way past orderlies toward Nicu.
Aimée kept her head down, got in step with a passing nurse and slipped out of the lobby and back down the corridor. Keeping to the wall, she reached Ward C.
The crumpled white sheets showed where a body had lain. Under the hospital bed, she noticed a blue ankle sock on the floor by the machines’ dangling tubes. No other sign of a struggle.
A ball of dread was forming in her stomach. She fought off that old flashback again—but once more her mind flooded with images of her father’s charred remains after the explosion on the blackened pavers of Place Vend?me. And now, just like then, she was arriving too late.
OUT IN THE corridor, she hurried away from the nurses’ station and to the emergency exit. She wrapped her scarf around her palm to avoid leaving fingerprints, and then covered her ear with her other hand and pushed the bar, waiting for the alarm’s shriek to blast.
Silence, except for the nighttime trilling of a starling outside in the shadow-blurred hedge. Looking up she saw snipped wire sticking out from behind the exit sign above the door. Fat lot of good the security did here.
Her shoulders tightened. The abductor had known exactly what he or she was doing. Aimée followed the dark alleyway between buildings until she found herself under a narrow canopy of trees that led to one of the ancient courtyards adjoining the hospital wings. The tall trees rustled in the rising wind. At the far end, the courtyard opened to a narrow paved lane. Aimée quickened her step as an ambulance drove by, bathing her in a flashing blue light. When she reached the lane, she saw that it led to the open gates of the emergency entrance beyond.
She could barely make it out in the dark, but because she was looking for it, she spotted an empty wheelchair shoved into the bushes at the end of the walkway. She felt around its smooth metal frame, its padded arm rests, under the cushion. Nothing. She leaned down into the bushes, running her hands over the rubber wheels and metal spokes, until her fingernail caught on a piece of cloth wedged between the wheel and its guard. Tugged until she heard a rip as it came free. Half of a blue ankle sock, a match for the one under Drina’s hospital bed.
Sunday, 10 P.M.
“FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Mademoiselle Aimée?” said Martin, an old informer of her father’s, as he gazed at the photo Nicu had given her. Martin adjusted his large tortoiseshell glasses on his nose. Dyed charcoal hair, skin too taut and unwrinkled for his age. Martin, she suspected, had had some work done since they’d last met.
Calculating roughly based on what she was wearing in the picture, Aimée had narrowed down the year Nicu’s photo was taken to 1984. “Your father, bless his soul, had so much hair then. Bien s?r, I had more hair, too, Mademoiselle Aimée. We all did.”