Murder at the Lanterne Rouge (11 page)

Two men in overalls hauled an antique harp through the doorway of No. 32. She followed the grunting men and paused in the courtyard. Pots of geraniums lined the damp butterscotch stone walls. Upscale and bourgeois. Not what she figured for a sweatshop.

“Up here, Messieurs, top floor.” A gray-haired woman smiled and beckoned from an upstairs window.

“Up yours, Madame,” muttered one of the men under his breath. Had Aram steered her wrong?

Aimée closed her eyes and listened, distinguishing the sounds of the movers mounting the creaking staircase, the rush of water in courtyard pipes. And then she heard it. A faint, continuous clicking.

The clicking grew louder as she followed them to the back of the courtyard. Behind it a coved walkway nestled into the remnants of an old wall. The clicking drifted up from a grilled vent set in cracked stone. She lowered her head to duck into the dark stairway, treading over the uneven dirt to find herself in a humid warren of caverns. Vaulted stone arches supported the low ceilings. It was positively dungeon-like. She remembered a school field trip to an old château where, during the Terror, revolutionaries chained aristocrats to metal rings on the walls. Not too different, she thought.

Bare white bulbs dangled from the ceiling, illuminating squatting young Chinese women surrounded by red silk flowers—hundreds of them, exploding with color in the dank cavern. She scrutinized the young women’s faces as their fingers worked nonstop, twisting bright red flowers onto green wire stems. By an arch she saw a ponytail bent down over a pile of flowers.

“Meizi?”

A few women looked up with questioning eyes.

“Lunchtime?” an older woman said. She made a gesture of eating, and several others laughed.

Aimée stepped around the flowers and bent down. “Meizi, are you okay?”

The young woman looked up. Glasses, brown birthmark on her cheek. “Boss eat lunch. Back soon.”

Shaken, Aimée sat back on her haunches like everyone else. The women watched her with curiosity, not fear.

“Beautiful flowers,” Aimée said. “Do any of you know Meizi Wu?” She pointed to the woman’s ponytail. “Hair like hers?”

A few smiles. The women kept twisting the stems.

Didn’t they understand? Did they think she was crazy? Or both?

But she had an idea.

She rooted in her bag. Found the red velvet jewelry box she’d forgotten to give back to René. Held it up.

“Meizi forgot her birthday present.” She cleared her throat and sang, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Meizi …”

More smiles. One woman nudged the pixie-haired woman next to her, who smiled.

“Meizi Wu,” she said, pointing to herself.

A joke? But no one laughed.

“I mean Meizi Wu, who worked for Ching Wao.”

She nodded. “Me.”

Another idea flat on the dirt. Aimée shook her head. “
Desolée
, but …”

“You look.” In her silk-stained hand, the woman held a
carte de séjour
. It showed her photo with the name Meizi Wu, and the same address on rue au Maire. The luggage store.

Startled, Aimée leaned forward. As Aram had said, no one was who they said they were. Yet she could work this for information.

Aimée took out the luminous pearl ring. “
Belle
, eh? It’s for the other Meizi. Give me Ching Wao’s number, okay? I want to tell him.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know, or don’t want to tell me?”

“Boss call him.” Her face was blank now, no longer smiling.

But she had to get information. Something. “Where do you sleep?”

She pointed to the address.

“No, you don’t. Tell me the truth.” Aimée set the ring back in the box.

“You say you give me.” Her eyes teared, and Aimée’s heart clenched.

“We live at Chinese evangelical church,” said the woman next to her in accented but proficient French.

“Who are you?”

“Nina’s my French name,” she said. “We’re Christian. We study and pray with a pastor, who gives us a dormitory. No one works for Ching Wao, if they can avoid it.”

“But these flowers—”

“Bad times now,” Nina interrupted. “We do piecework. Have to.” She paused. “Ching Wao’s contact gave her this card yesterday. Our families pay lots of money in China for this. We don’t ask questions. You’ll give her the ring?”

“Cash is more useful.” Aimée pressed a hundred francs into the girl’s hands. “But she got a raw deal with that card. The
flics
suspect Meizi Wu in last night’s murder on rue au Maire. Or didn’t Ching Wao tell you?”

Nina spoke rapidly in Chinese to the increasingly frightened-looking girls.

“Something bad might have happened to the other Meizi,” Aimée said. “I need to find Ching Wao.”

“No one knows where he goes.”

Great.

“Can’t you think back, remember something, anything? What if she’s hurt, or being held prisoner?”

Nina shook her head. “Bad people. Better stay away. You’re a French woman. You don’t know.”

Like that made a difference to Meizi? Aimée wanted to shake this woman.

“But Ching Wao pays all of you centimes while he makes thousands of francs,” she said, her voice rising. “A man extorts money from this girl’s family for the
carte de séjour
of a murder suspect? But you think I don’t know, or can’t understand, or not want to help?”

Her speech was met by silence, broken only by the clicking of wire and shushing noises of silk. A chill went up her spine. She turned around.

A Chinese woman stood with Styrofoam containers of takeout food, glaring at her.

“Private business,” she said. “You better leave. We have a permit to work here.”

Aimée doubted that. But she was tired of seeing fake papers and arguing with people who would disappear.

She left another hundred francs by the girl’s leg, then stood and made her way out.

In the dank passageway, she felt a tug on her coat sleeve.

Nina pulled her close. “Ching Wao gets girls from Tso, a snakehead. Bad teeth. Everyone knows him on rue au Maire.”

And then she’d gone.

“T
OUGH GOING
, R
ENÉ
. The two sweatshops I checked out were dead ends,” she said into her phone. She pulled her collar up against the damp chill. “But I discovered Meizi’s
carte de séjour
has gone to another Meizi.”

“Sweatshops?” René said. “Start at the beginning, Aimée.”

She gave him a brief account, told him about Aram and Tso, the snakehead.

“Breaking bread with a dealer who sold drugs to your cousin?”

“He’s a source, René.” One of the reasons she hated criminal investigation. Yet, down and dirty resulted in leads and information, her father always told her. You just take a long, hot shower later. “Not that I’d do it again, though he does serve a mean couscous.”

“You believe this Aram?”

“I believe he dislikes paying Chinese protection money,” she said. “Let’s call it a mutual non-admiration society.”

“So he’d know this Tso,” he said. “We have to prove my Meizi’s innocent.”

Silver rivulets of rain snaked down the apartment windows overlooking Passage du Pont-aux-Biches. Aimée’s shoulders slumped. Why couldn’t René get it?

“But Chinatown’s a closed world,” she said, frustrated. “I’m getting nowhere.”

“Has that ever stopped you before, Aimée?”

C
LODO BURPED
. H
E
was safe from the
flic
, celebrating down in the Métro on the bench of the line 9 platform at République station. He steadied his shaking hand around the bottle of red, trying to rid his mind of what happened last night, the
mec
’s cry for help.

Unsuccessful, he watched the surge of passengers. That poor
mec
didn’t deserve suffocating like that. Who did?

The burnt-rubber smell from the train brakes lingered in the fetid air. The
parfum
of his childhood, of the underground. A warning buzzer sounded and the doors shuddered closed. Then the train rumbled off, gathering speed.

Clodo swigged from his bottle on the deserted platform, watching the train’s red lights disappear in the dark tunnel. In the distance he heard the grating of a shutter being rolled down, closing off this section.

Now he could get some sleep.

Snatches of conversation heralded the crew who maintained the subterranean world—three hundred stations, more than two hundred kilometers of routes unseen by
flics
. The Métro workers were simple to avoid if one knew the station maintenance closure schedule via the homeless grapevine. And Clodo did, courtesy of a fellow clochard. On the weekends, no line work, apart from stock and service repair runs, would run on this route, which branched toward Strasbourg Saint-Denis.

Ever since the war, he’d dreamed of working in the Métro. It was a second home to him, in a way, after the nights taking shelter in the station. Always good with his hands, he’d applied at the Vincennes train repair center, but without a school certificate he had no chance.

He downed the dregs from his bottle, tossed it in the bin. Time for his stash in the Métro tunnel.

And to barter the cell phone he’d found on the steps near the body. Wouldn’t do the
mec
any good now. But Clodo would raise a bottle to his memory.

At the mouth of the tunnel, he ignored the yellow sign saying
Passage Interdit au Public—Danger
and the blinking signal-switch panel. He followed the narrow walkway hugging the curved wall of the Métro tunnel. The service walkway supported a small, green, illuminated track that stretched ahead in the darkness. Clodo inched his cold fingers along the grimy wall for several yards until his thumb caught on the flaking mortar. He wedged out the loose brick and reached into the niche for the bag.

His stash.

As he replaced it with the
mec
’s cell phone, the tunnel filled with blaring white light and a terrifying whoosh as a repair train thundered through like a luminous snake. He saw the momentary silhouette of a figure before the bright light passed. He closed his eyes, grabbed the wall. Wind blew grit in his nose and ears. The walkway vibrated beneath his feet.

Merde
. He moved faster. The walkway led down three steps to the rails. Candles flickered ahead on the ghost station platform, silhouetting blanketed mounds. The enclave of the homeless. Not far.

With the forecasted drop in temperature today and the shelters full, it was too much trouble for the Métro
flics
to rouse the drunken and unwashed. Clodo clutched his stash inside his
fur coat, knotted his pink scarf, and steadied himself, careful to avoid the live third rail. 750 volts of electricity. He’d seen a man fried last year. Lying on the rail, his hair standing up like a porcupine’s.

Raised drunken voices and red wine smells told him he’d arrived. Graffitied posters and water-stained advertisements from the forties still clung to the walls. Forgotten relics, like those who clustered here for warmth, but intimately familiar to Clodo. He remembered his mother swearing by Persil soap, like the old pockmarked green bottle half visible on the tattered poster. It was one of the few things he remembered her saying.

He gathered crumpled newspapers and torn cardboard, nodded to Fichu, who huddled in several khaki sleeping bags.

“Want to rent me a bag, Fichu?”

“If the price feels right,” Fichu mumbled. “What you got, Clodo?”

Clodo sat down. A wave of dizziness, then a fit of coughing overtook him. Damn lungs burned.

He fumbled in his coat, keeping the bag from Fichu’s view. Pulled it out.

“What the …?”

In his hand was a sealed Plasticine bag of white powder.

“I don’t do sugar, Clodo.”

“Some bastard took my bottle,” Clodo said. “My wine’s gone.”

“Left you with something you don’t want to keep.” Fichu shook his head. Bleary-eyed, he rubbed his nose. “Dope dealers here these days. Strangers.”

Clodo struggled to his feet. “We’ll see about that. He owes me, the
salaud
,” he said. Then he remembered. “Interested in a cell phone, Fichu? It’s fresh.”

“Like I’d get reception down here?”

Clodo shuffled to the end of the platform. Another fit of coughing overtook him. The tunnel reverberated with the roar of an approaching train.

“Looking for this?” a voice said behind him.

Before Clodo could turn, he felt a hand on his back. Then a push. Felt himself flying in front of the blinding light.

“B
UT
I
TELL
flic
this morning,” said Madame Liu, “I no see
le petit
, or you. I go to funeral service last night.”

Aimée stared at Madame Liu, the manager of Chez Chun, a tiny woman with an upswept hairdo of lacquered curls. Her hair didn’t move when she shook her head, but her jade bracelet jingled as she speared a receipt on a nail.

“Can I speak to the waitress who worked last night?”

“She live far away, work Monday.”

Convenient.

“But
flics
tell her my food make
le petit
sick. True?”

No one forgot René. Aimée shook her head. Looked outside on the narrow, slush-filled street.

Aimée pointed to the shuttered luggage store. “But you must know the Wus and Meizi. Any idea where I can find them?”

“Quartier change. New shops. People come and go.”

“What about this man with bad teeth. Tso?”

Madame Liu averted her eyes. “I semiretired.”

Aimée wouldn’t know it from the way Madame Liu whipped around cleaning tables. She noticed the woman’s knuckles had whitened around the dishtowel she clutched. Was she hiding something?

But it made her think. This narrow street was the shortest route from the Conservatoire to Pascal’s great-aunt’s.

“Have you ever seen this man?” She showed Madame Liu Pascal’s photo.

Madame Liu lifted her reading glasses from the chain around her neck. Stared. “Him? No eat.”

As she suspected, Madame knew him. A local in the quartier. Aimée suppressed her excitement. “Last night? What time?”