Murder at the Lanterne Rouge (27 page)

“Of course, that’s it,” she said. “His work studio, René. Where is it?”

“73 rue Charlot. Bring his keys.”

He clicked off before she could ask him if he’d reached Meizi.

All of a sudden there was a high-pitched whine from a distant fuse box. Then the building plunged into darkness. A power outage.

She froze, rigid with fear. She was wrapped in darkness, alone, just as she’d been last night. She recalled the sensation
of those huge hands around her neck, the plastic bag over her face, straining to breathe. Had he come back to finish the job? Move, she had to move. Quickly she closed the programs on her laptop, not wanting to linger under the groaning scaffolding lacing the nave. It seemed as if it could topple any minute in this blackness.

Or did she imagine it?

She shuddered. The only light came from the stained-glass window in the chapel. Beautiful and unnerving.

“Monsieur Vardet?” she called out to the security guard. Her voice echoed in the nave. She didn’t like this.

The soft flutter of snow settled like a sigh on the protective plastic sheeting, and again she saw Pascal’s eyes under the snow-dusted plastic. “
Sécurité?
” Where was Vardet?

“
Par ici
, Mademoiselle, no cause for alarm,” Vardet’s reassuring voice answered. “You’ll need to exit through the refectory. Let me show you out.”

Thank God.

T
EN MINUTES LATER
, Aimée stood in the
porte cochère
of 73 rue Charlot under a clicking timed light. The snow lay upon upturned cobblestones like confectioner’s sugar in the deep courtyard.

“This leads to the tower in the remaining bit of Templar wall, Aimée.” René pointed to the mildewed wooden door. “Try Samour’s keys.”

She felt in her bag for the keys she’d taken from under the geraniums, inserted the largest, old-fashioned one, like the key her grandmother used to the cellar on her farm. She heard a tumble as the well-oiled lock turned.

Winding stone steps, deep and narrow. No handrails but uneven walls to feel their way upward. Like entering the Dark Ages.

On the first landing stood a hinged wooden door with a
beaten metal clasp. Original, no doubt. She inserted the key again, turned it, and pushed the door open to a mustiness laced with chocolate.

René hit a wall light switch, flooding the circular tower room with light. Aimée saw a blackboard covered with formulas in blue chalk, and an open laptop with a blinking green light on a long trestle table. Next to it, a distilling apparatus. Test tubes, glass flacons, and copper wires. An alchemist’s lab down to the medieval walls. Then she saw what looked like a small, industrial, high-temperature stainless-steel oven.

She gasped.

“That’s it, René.” She ran forward, excited. “The drawing in the encryption.”

She sniffed the contents of the cellophane bag by the laptop. Chocolate. Popped one in her mouth. “Dark-chocolate espresso beans. Pascal had good taste.”

“Thinking what I’m thinking, Aimée?” René asked.

“That Samour distilled his own absinthe? Not quite.”

But René had opened up the screen on Samour’s laptop.

“Look, it’s the same alchemical formula Saj deciphered. Why did he hide this, yet …”

“More than why, René,
from whom
,” she said. “Trawl around and see if you find more.”

She stared at the formulas in intricate blue chalk. Meaningless to her. A funnel of white sand, technical magazines, a fiber optics newsletter on an Aeron chair. An incongruous collection until de Voule’s words came back to her.

“He told his classmate no one has invented anything new since the fourteenth century. What if he tried to prove that here?”

René rolled his eyes. “By making stained glass in an ancient alembic? Melting the contents in that machine?”

She remembered the preliminary autopsy report. “He had burn marks on his hands,” she said. “It could have come from
this heater. The guilds worked with little more than sand, potash, and fire.”

René put his camera in her hands. “Check out the real masterpiece, from the church. The camera captures little of the star’s clarity. But you get the idea.”

The stained-glass window images conveyed bright, streaming light. “Such radiance. Amazing.”

Perplexed, she picked up the magazines. “It’s all here, but we don’t understand.”

“Think where we are.” René’s finger traced the diagram. “Inside the fortified walls of an old Templar enclosure.”

“
Et alors
, I took that history class, too, René.” She ran her fingers over the smooth glass alembic. “But it proves what?”

“We’re in the last remaining Knights Templar tower.” René grinned. “It’s part of the prison where Marie Antoinette and her children were kept.”

“Not all that Holy Grail business.”

René snorted. “Think of the Templars as investors in startups,” he said. “They had more money than kings, or the Pope.”

“So you took Medieval Studies 101 at the Sorbonne?”

“Fundamentals of Economics, second semester.” René went on, “So the Templars were venture capitalists, this tower was their Silicon Valley. Instead of developing microprocessors, the Templars built cathedrals, castles, a whole series of industries. They employed the guilds for research and development in architecture, weapons, communication.”

Pascal would have appreciated René’s enthusiasm for his project. René got to work on the laptop. Pulled his goatee. “No wonder there’s been no more activity, his laptop’s frozen.”

“Try mine. See if you can unfreeze and network.”

René stood engrossed at the trestle table, comparing Aimée’s backed-up work from the Musée. She checked the magazines, the newsletter. Nothing jumped out at her. She tried to make sense of this, put things together.

Finally, René broke the silence. “Samour’s search prints show all over the Musée files you digitized today, Aimée.”

So Samour had been looking. “That’s what I’ll tell the DST.”

“Make sure that’s all you tell them. We found this tower on our own.” René plugged a cable from Aimée’s laptop to Samour’s. Hit several keys. “I’m rebooting his laptop and will network it to ours.” He tugged his goatee again. “Why didn’t Mademoiselle Samoukashian tell you about this tower?”

“Pascal protected her,” she said. “Considering his diagrams and secrecy, it’s like he wanted to discover something here.”

“Or prove it before he showed anyone,” René said.

She picked up the newsletter, thumbed through it until an article caught her attention. “Aren’t fiber optics made of glass?”

René looked up, nodding. His eyes met hers and widened.

She lifted a slim, colorless strand, little thicker than a hair, from the drawer. “Like this?”

René blinked. “Fiber optics is a hot market in telecommunications these days,” he said. “Bundle that up with more strands and it will carry up to ten million messages, using light pulses.” He shot her a look. “Not chump change either.”

“
Bon
, I’ll ask my dinner date about it,” she said, applying Chanel Red to her lips. “He runs one of those things.”

“The same
mec
from last night?”

Odd, she could have sworn René sounded … 
non
, not jealous, he had Meizi. But concerned.

“How’s Meizi?”

His brow creased. “I’m worried. She’s at the hotel, but doesn’t answer the phone.”

Aimée buttoned her coat. “You’re staying until I come back?”

“Until I find something,” René said, a grim set to his mouth. “I’ll have Saj bring what he finds over and we’ll work on this together.”

A quiver ran down her spine. “Whoever murdered Samour didn’t find this place, René. The murderer is still looking.”

“Then make sure you’re not followed, Aimée.” René pulled out the diagram. “According to this, if you go left in the courtyard there’s an exit to rue de Picardie.”

Her heeled boots clicked down the tower’s steep, damp staircase. And then she missed a step, lost her balance. She caught a rusted ring in the wall and held on for dear life. No broken bones, no fall, but a scuffed leather heel and a pang in her sore wrist. Damn medieval towers.

Her phone beeped. One new message. Prévost.

“Give me Clodo’s phone and I’ll tell you when the raid’s scheduled.”

Nothing else.

She hit callback. Tried to leave a message, but his voice mail was full.

She had to find Clodo’s phone.

“W
HAT’S THE WEATHER
report tonight, Monsieur?” She smiled at the homeless man on the grate at Carreau du Temple.

“Radio’s broken,
ma chère
.”

“This should help,” she said, laying twenty francs on his sleeping bag. “How’s your daughter?”

“Doing her homework.” His face lit up.

“Don’t you have something for me?”

He handed her the prepaid phone card she’d given him. “
Desolé
, I couldn’t find a phone cabin. Everyone has mobiles.”

Disappointed, she wanted to kick the grate. She needed a bartering tool for Prévost. A way to protect Meizi.

“But you’re interested in this,
non?
” A cell phone. “I can’t vouch it’s the one Clodo took, but rumor goes it is.”

“Brilliant.” She slipped him a hundred francs. “Don’t forget I count on your weather predictions for my wardrobe.”

Now she had something to bargain with Prévost. Finally, the trail smelled like it went somewhere.

But she was late. At the small square, she spied a taxi, ran to catch it and jumped in, and overtipped the driver for the short six-block ride.

But the maître d’ at the bistro shook his head. “
Desolé
, the monsieur changed your dinner reservations to seven thirty. An urgent meeting. He apologizes.”

More than an hour away. Why hadn’t Jean-Luc called her? Then she remembered she hadn’t given him her number. Stupid.

But she had his. She got only his voice mail, left a message to call her.

“Why don’t you wait at the bar? I’m sorry, Mademoiselle, blame it on the symposium. The attendees booked the whole bistro.”

She glanced around. Suits in earnest conversations, consulting handheld calendars under the dark oak beams. Great. “Any idea where the symposium’s held?”

He shrugged.

So now she’d have to wait in the crowded bistro where she couldn’t hear herself think, or roam the dark, wet street?

She didn’t think so. She wedged a place at the bar by an engineering type, a young man with thick-framed glasses, an ill-fitting suit, and licorice-black hair.

“My friend Jean-Luc’s late to meet me from the symposium.” She smiled.

“Which symposium?” he asked, his eyes catching on her cleavage. The pianist in the corner struck up “L’Heure Bleue,” the Françoise Hardy version.

“You know … he’s with Bouygues … I forgot …”

“Do you mean fiber optics in today’s world? Or fiber optics infrastructure in the Third World?”

Fiber optics. “I’m not sure.”

“No matter, they’re both held at the old cloister, on rue des Archives. Cloître des Billettes.”

Close by.

He smiled, revealing a set of braces that caught the light. He looked twelve. “Like a drink?”

“Next time.”

She’d crash the symposium and find Jean-Luc. Too bad she didn’t have her business suit.

Three blocks away, she only had to wait a few minutes before a group of men exited the arched doors of the cloister. She slipped inside. Quiet reigned, broken only by the drip of melting snow on worn pavers. She passed under the fifteenth-century vaulted arcade surrounding the small courtyard.

She half expected robed religious figures treading in prayer. But at the far end, a door opened to a crack of light and voices. A place to start, she thought. Inside, she found a cavernous chapel with men huddled by pillars, signs posting seminars in various rooms, and a label reading Wine Reception on the sacristy door. But the sacristy was empty. Jean-Luc could be in a meeting anywhere here, or somewhere else entirely.

But she could learn about fiber optics. She consulted a symposium schedule in the main chapel and headed to the first room on the right. The meeting had broken up. A few people lingered by a grouping of red velvet gilt-backed chairs, thick binders under their arms. Above them on the sandblasted stone wall, a canvas banner read: Information Highways—Fiber Optics in the 21st Century. René would eat this up. And ask for another helping.

A man in a suit was speaking. “As outlined in our presentation, clients should connect with solar companies like ours via infrastructures with up-to-date fiber optics …”

Weren’t solar and fiber optics two different things? Her eyes began to glaze until she saw his name tag:
Rimmel, Solas Energie
. De Voule, the Gadz’Arts she spoken with on the phone, headed the company.

“
Excusez-moi
, Monsieur.” She smiled, stepping into the group. “That’s like connecting apples and oranges,
non?
”

He took in her leather pants, faux fur coat. “If you interns bothered to attend our presentation, the correlation would be obvious.” A sneer appeared on his long, pale face.

Intern? Thank God the concealer had masked the shadows under her eyes. She’d buy it by the kilo.

“Who do you work with, Mademoiselle?”

She thought quickly. “Jean-Luc at Bouygues,” she said. “Have you seen him?”

“The symposium’s finished for today,” he said dismissively.

His condescending air rankled, yet who better to ask about fiber optics than one in the business? “I’m assembling a marketing proposal for a fiber-optics campaign, Monsieur. I’d like to get a handle on it. Maybe you could elaborate?”

His sneer relaxed. He seemed the type who enjoyed imparting his expertise.

“Third World countries, without existing infrastructure, can put fiber optics in place immediately without expensive adaptations to outdated and often malfunctioning systems,” he said, flicking lint off his tweed jacket.

Patronizing, too.

“The goal would be to provide renewable energy coordinating with a basic delivery infrastructure,” he said. “The horse with the buggy.”

A young engineer type nodded. “Brilliant. Basket the services.”