“Rue Pigalle.” She clicked off.
The closed resto dining room, converted from one half of the old theatre stage, sported retro decor with a splash of old polished silver and fifties turquoise glass. More branché, catering to the bourgeoises-bohèmes rather than the rockers downstairs.
The back stairs from the kitchen led down to a door. She tried six keys from the red key ring before she got the right one.
She stepped out onto a dim, sloping stage, passed the DJ apparatus—turntables, microphones. At the backstage door, she let Zacharié in.
“Find them?”
“Just this.” She showed him the red tassel. “It’s Zazie’s.”
“Marie-Jo has one, too.”
“How would you know?” she said. “You’ve been in prison.”
“Think we didn’t communicate? That I don’t know what’s going on with my daughter?” His gaze swept the seats, the balcony. “We wrote each other every week. She sent photos. She had a backpack with a tassel like that.”
“So they were here,” Aimée said. “We’ve got three options: backstage, stage entrance, lighting loft.”
“Lighting,” said Zacharié without skipping a beat.
“Why?”
“You said you’d trust me.”
She nodded.
“Raoul’s in charge of lighting.” He took the flashlight and headed toward the spiral staircase on the right. “Stay down here.”
She hiked up the waistband on her leather pants. She hated heights. “Like hell I will.”
THE HIGH CATWALK, rimmed with colored gel-filter spotlights, swayed like a tightrope, making her feel like she was on a high-wire act with no safety harness or net. Only a top rail, thin metal planks and a toeboard between her and the orchestra pit below—and the whole outfit in serious need of welding.
She snuck a glance down at the stage. Big mistake. Dizzy, she grabbed the narrow rail, made her feet move, shuffling one forward after the other. Every breath of the hot, dense air was a struggle.
Under the rafters nested a cockpit-like glassed-in booth. When she followed Zacharié inside, it turned out to be larger than it appeared. More hot, stale air, a flat console with toggle switches and buttons, an overflowing ashtray. An empty bottle of Ricard sat on the unswept wood floor.
Raoul’s lighting nest in the eaves stifled her. She gasped, finding it hard to breathe. Zacharié cursed and kicked the stool over. “I know Raoul’s got them. Give me the keys. I’ll search backstage, under the orchestra pit.”
She’d climbed up this high—she was going to spend longer than one minute examining it. And catch her breath before the long way down. “Impatient type, eh?” She took the flashlight from him. Shone it on wall shelving filled with plugs, odd bulbs and tools. “The color’s different here.”
“Et alors?” He’d turned and headed to the walkway. “There’s no time to waste. They’re in danger.”
Her frustration mounted. “Quit the runaround. What kind of danger?”
Zacharié’s lips pursed. She could see the conflict behind his eyes. “You don’t want to know. If not for yourself, think of that baby inside you.”
His words sent a shiver down her neck.
She played the flashlight over the shelves once more, more carefully. This time, the beam revealed a chalk mark, faint and smudged, but distinctive: an X.
Her throat caught. She’d seen that chalk X in the park. Zazie’s sign. “That’s from Zazie.”
“You’re sure?”
“Help me move these shelves aside.”
That done, they saw a light-colored plywood sheet, hung at the side with hinges, like a door. A door no bigger than a suitcase.
He pulled back the hinged door, then propped it back with a power strip. Going onto her knees, she studied the crawl space. The air was even denser than in the stifling lighting booth. But if Zazie was here …
She hunched down and crawled. Her hands pressed against swags of dank velvet, and cobwebs clung to her damp arms.
She emerged on her knees into a stale, musty room. Bright mid-morning sunlight seeped through the closed shutters and softened the dust-swaddled edges of a Second Empire-style salon.
“Zazie? Where are you?” Her voice echoed off the high boiserie-molded ceilings.
The place looked deserted. Had they walked into some kind of museum?
Disappointed, she strode past a stuffed ostrich, framed paintings and a writing desk piled with old letters bound with ribbon. She walked over to a mirrored dressing table covered in perfume bottles and ivory-backed hairbrushes and picked up a gold lipstick case. Ruby-colored lipstick inside with a cloying sweet scent.
How long ago had it been abandoned? Like something from a Proust novel, from another era. A past long gone, frozen in time.
She and Zacharié searched every nook and cranny from the enamel, claw-footed bathtub to the large brick-and-iron coal furnace in the kitchen. She checked the walk-in pantry and found a yellow matchbox and a portrait of Maréchal Pétain.
Dust everywhere. Patches disturbed on the kitchen floor, the carpet in the salon. Random or a sign?
“No one has lived here for a while,” Zacharié said, wiping his finger over piles of yellowed newspapers dated 1940.
“We’ve missed something,” she said. She paced through the rooms. In the library she noticed more mashed footsteps in the dust on the faded carpet. Behind a gilded chair she discovered a six-pack of water bottles and some toilet roll—the only evidence of the modern day.
Frustrated, she leaned against the wall. “They’ve been here. Look.” She pulled out the Monoprix receipts. “Bought yesterday.”
Alarm filled his eyes. “Then we’re too late. He’s moved them.”
“Who’s he?”
“Better you don’t know.”
“Quit playing games. You’ve got what this man wants, right? Your daughter’s the pawn for it. And Zazie.” She leaned against the bookcase. “Why don’t you call the shots? Threaten to expose whatever he doesn’t want exposed?”
It seemed simple to her.