Murder at the Lanterne Rouge (25 page)

“Partially, and engineer shorthand.” Cho gave a little smile. The first time he’d thawed. “Electrical engineering’s not my field.” Interested now, he studied the diagram. “But we metallurgists sometimes worked with similar equations.”

“So what can you tell me?”

“It’s hard to say.” He shook his head.

Take a guess, she wanted to yell. Instead, she managed a smile. “But with what you know, your expertise …”

“Clearly these symbols represent an alloy. But this … maybe glass?”

She stared at the diagram, wishing she could see what he saw.

“If I enlarge these, could you tell me more?”

“The diagram looks like a map. But this? Your best bet, Mademoiselle?” Cho put his glasses back on. “Find an electrical engineer.”

A
IMÉE DOUBLE-KNOTTED THE
cashmere scarf around her sore neck, donned her leather gloves, and wove her scooter through traffic on chilly Boulevard de Sébastopol. Thoughts of sunny Martinique and Melac spun in her mind.

Her cell phone rang. With one hand she answered it.

“Saj cracked the encryption, Aimée,” René said.

Finally.

“See you in five minutes.” She clicked off and veered around a bus and gunned her scooter.

A
ROMAS OF CILANTRO
and curry drifted from the Indian takeout cartons on René’s desk. Saj stepped on a Louis XV chair, spread a damask tablecloth over the gilt-framed mirror hanging above the fireplace. He then angled his laptop on Aimée’s desk. “I cracked a portion. A part’s missing. I figure if he’d encrypted this a week, two weeks ago—”

“Then found the other part yesterday,” she interrupted,
taking off her leather gloves, “it wouldn’t be in there. I’ll get going on that at the museum.”

“What’s wrong with your wrists?” René asked, looking at her bruises.

It all came back to her—the panic, struggling to breathe, her bound hands, biting at the plastic, rubbing her face against the sharp glass shards, crawling in the wet walkway. She knew if the couple hailing the taxi hadn’t frightened the killer off she wouldn’t be here now. She stilled her shaking hands and told him.

“Samour’s murderer attacked you?” René’s eyes widened.

The memory of the thread from his coat stuck in her fingernail came back to her. “I’m close, René.”

“Too close,” he said. “Have you told Prévost?”

“Not yet,” she rubbed her wrist, “but I will, and I’ll discover when the raid’s planned.” She had to move on. “But how’s Meizi?”

A little smile painted René’s face. “Safe.” Then it disappeared. “For now, Aimée.”

Right now Saj’s discovery of Pascal’s encryption was more important.

“Ready, Saj?” she asked.

He hit a key on his laptop, projecting an image of a bordered manuscript. Her mouth dropped open. Tight lines of black-ink script, ancient-looking and illegible to her, marched across the page, reminding her of the tiny, sharp curls of a monk’s illuminated manuscript. Accompanying the script was a drawing that looked like a primitive blueprint, for what she didn’t know.

“But that looks like Latin.” Not her strong point.

Saj bit into a potato pakora. “Latin’s the standard, the lingua franca. Samour encrypted a recipe.”

“Like a medieval Paul Bocuse?” René stared at Pascal’s encrypted attachment under the chandelier, enlarged on the
damask tablecloth. “Cookbooks in the fourteenth century? That looks like an oven.”

Aimée peered closer. “But what is it?”

“I’d say an alchemical formula,” Saj said.

“Alchemy?” Aimée sat up. “You mean wizards, Merlin, eye of newt and mad monks?”

“Why not?” Saj’s eyes gleamed.

René frowned. “It could as easily be a poison. Or a machine.”

“Saj, let’s forget the woo-woo.” Aimée pulled Samour’s book on medieval guilds from her bag and opened to the chapter he had marked. Glassmaking—a coincidence? “To me it’s more concrete.” Her gaze caught on a subchapter heading. “Listen.”

She read out loud, “ ‘Glassmaking guilds guarded secret alchemical formulas and techniques used in the prized leaded-glass-paned windows of cathedrals.’ ”

René’s eyes widened. “He lived in a tower, didn’t he?” René lifted up the diagrams he’d scanned from her digital camera. “Drew these. We just don’t know the connection.”

Aimée grabbed a pakora. “And we need to connect the dots.” Cho’s words came back to her: alloy, glass, formulas. “Look at the elongated swirls, René. They’re symbols, part of an equation or formula. For an alloy, or glass …”

“A machine or a concept,” René interrupted, his voice rising. “Lost in the past, misfiled in the archives. Why didn’t we see it before?”

She nodded. Saj clicked the brown beads around his wrist. A sign his chakras were aligned, or were out of alignment, she could never remember. “But the formula’s incomplete,” Saj said, moving the cursor down. The page ended in what was obviously the middle of the text. “I found corresponding alchemical symbols and phrases,” Saj said, “in Nicolas de Locques’s
Les rudimens de la philosophie naturelle
.” He patted a thick leather-bound volume under the curry takeout container. “Published in 1655.”

“That tail of newt, eye of toad nonsense again?”

Saj expelled air. “This explanation of the symbols cut my work in half, let me tell you. Samour used de Locques’s book as a guide. The same Latin words appear here in Samour’s incomplete segment.”

Her excitement mounted. “Pascal searched for the missing part of the formula. He knew there was more, and where better to find it than in the museum’s archives.”

“Formula to what? Alchemical stained glass?”

“Why not? This connects somehow,” she said. “I’ll comb the museum holdings, Saj. I’ll find it.”

“
Et alors
, so we know everything Pascal knew?”

She paused in thought. “But not the formula’s significance,” she said. “Something so important that Pascal was murdered for it.”

This added up. But how?

“A nerd who grew up in the museum’s shadows,” Saj said, “an engineer who’s obsessed about a lost alchemical formula?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t add up.”

“As René pointed out, he lived in a tower,” Aimée said. “His former classmate spoke of his obsession with the fourteenth century.” At her desk, she downloaded Saj’s enhanced encryption, then powered off her laptop. But Saj’s words raised more questions.

“Picture Samour, tech-savvy, skilled at encrypting, spending time and energy on a lost formula.” She shook her head. “What would it get him, Saj?”

Saj stretched. “
Bon
, in academia he’d publish a paper, write a treatise. Or a book,” he said. “What about Becquerel?”

His last professor. “Dead in a nursing home at ninety last week.”

“So another blind alley,” Saj said, looking at the remembrance pages Aimée had copied.

“Or the usual academic battle,” René said. “Say Pascal tried
to garner department funding after discovering a lost medieval stained-glass formula.”

People killed for less. But that held less water than their poorly functioning radiator.

“It’s more than just that if the DST wants me to monitor Samour’s activity at the museum.”

Saj whistled. “So any ideas?”

“Besides checking my horoscope?” She rubbed her bandaged wrist. “Keep monitoring Coulade’s computer.”

So far all that they’d discovered put her back in the dark.

“The conservator mentioned that the Archives Nationales used the museum’s storage during the war,” she said, racking her brain. “They don’t know half of what’s in it, either.”

“Pascal programmed a dead man’s switch to e-mail this encryption,” Saj said. “He insisted Becquerel be contacted. Becquerel’s role was pivotal to Pascal, yet …”

“Well, everyone talks about Becquerel’s innovation.” René pointed to the copies from the remembrance book. “ ‘A pioneer who knew no boundaries in the field of optics and technology.’ ” He looked up. “Thinking what I’m thinking?”

Aimée nodded. “Fiber optics?”

“It’s an avenue to explore,” he said.

Saj grabbed his laptop. “Let me see what I find.”

B
EFORE GOING TO
the museum, Aimée hoped to find answers in the stained-glass atelier in her cousin Sebastien’s damp courtyard. Disappointed, she stared into the darkened windows. Knocked. No answer, nor at Sebastien’s atelier either.

Great.

She pulled her coat tighter and in the
porte cochère
scanned the mailboxes. Listed under Atelier J, Stained Glass was an alternate delivery address at a Galerie Juno on rue des Archives. A place to start.

Three blocks away she found Galerie Juno, with a sign in the door that said Open by Appointment Only.

Merde
. Before she met Prévost she needed answers. And a game plan.

She punched in Galerie Juno’s number on her cell phone, and heard a recording of Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
and a voice saying, “Leave a message,
s’il vous plaît
.”

“Bonjour, I’m interested in the stained-glass artist who has an atelier on rue de Saintonge,” she said, hoping that the gallery would answer. That she wasn’t speaking to the wind. “I’m at your gallery and want to make an appointment.”

The message clicked off. Full.

Lace curtains moved in the window next door.

Smiling, she put her face to the window.

The lace curtains parted to reveal a young woman with blue braids wound shell-like above her ears, and matching lipstick. A punkette wearing a dirndl, no less.

The window frame cracked open. “Juno’s working in back.” She jerked her thumb. The window slammed shut, and there was the sound of a lock tumbling.

Aimée pushed open the door, stepped over the frame into a courtyard lined with potted plants. Miniature bonsai trees in animal shapes—a rabbit, a bird. Whimsical.

Keeping her heeled boots out of the cracks between the worn pavers, she reached the atelier in the rear. On the wall were framed certificates from the Artisan Glassmaker Association, a notice of completed apprenticeship to a master glass-maker. Both with the names Juno Braud.

She’d come to the right man.

Hot molten-metal smells filled the atelier. Bundled lead rods stood upright like a forest against the glass walls. A man in overalls worked copper foil along the edges of a piece of blue glass using a soldering iron.

“Monsieur Juno?”

A wayward brown hair hung over a work mask that covered half his face. He looked young. “Attends,” came the muffled reply.

He set the soldering iron down on a brick, switched off the generator box. “
Oui?
” He’d pulled his mask off. A slash for a mouth, a cleft palate. Sad, it could have easily been treated by surgery in childhood.

“Sorry to bother you,” she said, focusing on his eyes. “My cousin Sebastien’s in the atelier next to yours.”

He tapped his thick fingers. “So?”

Impatient. She’d make this quick. “He suggested you could help me. Those for sale?” She gestured to a shelf of shimmering indigo-blue glass boxes.

“Rejects.”

“But they’re beautiful.”

“Imperfections, the glass bubbled …” He paused, a nervous swipe of his hand over his mouth. “But that’s not why you’re bothering me.”

She gave what she hoped he took for an enthralled gaze. “I need your expertise for five minutes. And I’ll buy those.” She pulled out the copy she’d made of the Latin alchemical formula. The black-and-white encrypted copy. “Could you tell me about this, besides the fact that it’s incomplete?”

“Where did you get this?”

She could go two ways here: offer some version of the truth, or coax him and see how far she got.

“Does it matter?” she leaned forward. “Is it valuable?”

“Would you ask me if it weren’t?” He stared at it. “It’s medieval symbols, an archaic formula, I’d have to guess.”

“Meaning it’s a formula for a stained-glass window in a cathedral?”

“Did I say that?” For a moment she thought she’d lost him.

But he sat down on a battered stool, ran his fingers over the paper. Nodded. “The Revolution disbanded guilds in 1791. The guild emblem’s unique.”

“Meaning?”

“This guild, deTheodric, was one of the oldest, going back to the thirteenth, fourteenth century. They were known for working with the Templars. Not much survives of their work now, though,” he said sadly.

What did the Templars have to do with anything, she wondered. But Samour lived in what had been the Knights’ old enclave.

“But why the Templars?”

“Stained glass was for cathedrals and monasteries.” He ran his fingers over a warm metal frame. “Apart from the aristocracy, tell me who else financed cathedral building? Promoted and used the artisans, the trades and the guilds?”

She figured it was a rhetorical question.

“The Templars ran it all. That’s until the Pope outlawed the Templars and took over their coffers.” He paused. “Like I said, little’s left of deTheodric’s work. They went the way of the Templars in 1311. Disbanded or executed, some accounts say.”

But a connection had to exist. “It’s your métier, what do you think?”

“There were stories,” he said, his words slow. A shrug. “But all glass artisans hear them.”

“Like what?”

He let out a puff of air. “Well, all trades and guilds were regulated at the time. Statutes and regulations in force until the Revolution. The powerful guilds paid the most tax and kept their craft secrets. Think of the windows at Chartres, no one’s replicated their technique.” He shook his head in rueful respect. “Or Abbé Suger, who developed that resonant blue ‘sapphire glass’ used at Saint-Denis.”

“But wouldn’t the techniques be passed down by word of mouth?”

“Or they died with the alchemists,” he said. “Like so many things, secrets lost, shrouded in time. Who knows?”

Something tugged in her mind.

“Art can happen by mistake,” he continued, a distant look in his eye.” In the thirteenth century, for example, a monk dropped his silver button into the glass and created indigo for the first time. We only found this out two hundred years ago. This discovery gave us a chance to make the indigo the hue guilds used before the Revolution in 1791.”

She heard other things in his voice now. A quiet excitement, almost awe. Any self-consciousness about his cleft palate had disappeared.