In the courtyard she replayed Nicu’s voice mail. Chilling. Could he have been calling from the hospital? She tried the number for the hospital’s reception, and they put her on hold, then requested she call back after rounds. Great.
Her scooter was still in the shop, and wouldn’t be ready for another fifteen minutes, so she stopped at the corner café.
“Un express double,” she said to Fantine, the Normandaise wife of the owner’s son, who helped out from time to time.
Fantine knocked the coffee grounds into the bin with several loud thumps and switched on the espresso machine. “Need an extra jolt? Powder not enough for you this morning?”
The street term for cocaine. Where did that come from?
Fantine pointed to her nose. Aimée rubbed the tip and her finger came back white. Babette had forgotten to tell her.
“Baby powder, Fantine.” She smelled her fingers: Chloé’s sweet baby smell. A pang hit her.
“Alors, you’ve lost weight. Look tired these days.”
“It’s called having a six-month-old,” she said.
Aimée pulled out her LeClerc compact to touch up her face. Her dark-circle disaster needed more than quick first aid. At this rate she’d need to buy concealer wholesale and spackle it on.
“So Chloé’s with a babysitter today? That Babette?”
Why did she always forget what a village it was here? And Fantine was nosey for a Normandaise—unlike the majority of those phlegmatic apple growers, notorious for their closed lips.
Fantine slid the steaming demitasse over the counter. “C’est dur, by yourself and all,” she said as Aimée stirred sugar lumps into the espresso. “Your ex—the ex-flic, that one—he was going on about it last night. Said you kicked him out of the christening.”
Aimée dropped the spoon. Hot brown spatters flecked her wrist. She licked them off.
“He stopped for a drink with his new woman,” said Fantine, wiping the counter. Her small eyes gleamed. The gossip queen. Playing a part in what she saw as the soap opera that was Aimée’s life. “That red-haired nurse.”
Aimée winced thinking of Donatine’s greedy arms holding Chloé.
“Sounds merveilleux, their farm in Brittany, sharing custody.”
So Melac had hatched a plan, goaded on by Donatine. Hadn’t Morbier said he’d heard things about her?
Fantine was watching Aimée for a reaction. She’d be damned if she gave her the satisfaction.
“So they like Brittany, eh?” Aimée smiled, her knuckles clenched below the counter.
“The only crime there is poaching, the air’s clean and great for children, Donatine kept saying.”
They were on a first-name basis, it seemed.
“Did they ask you about me, Fantine?”
She shrugged. “Eh bien, you know me.” Fantine ran her forefinger across her mouth as if zipping it. “Melac helped my brother with that fiasco a while ago. Kept it quiet. But I keep clients’ confidences.”
Like hell she did. Aimée was about to tell her off when the Stella Artois deliveryman interrupted and Fantine disappeared down into the cellar.
Talk about a gossip—suggesting she coked up before work, looked too tired to handle her baby. All fodder for Melac. But Aimée couldn’t let it get under her skin. She downed her espresso, slid some francs across the counter and pulled out the lawyer’s information. As she left the café to head toward the garage, she punched in the number Morbier had written down. Only an answering service.
Merde. She left a message for the lawyer, then another for René at Leduc Detective confirming their scheduled lunch meeting with a potential client—a lucrative one he had been salivating over. She had to keep the accounts and René happy. Couldn’t let the search for this Gypsy derail her priorities.
Let Morbier think she’d listened to him.
Last night after she’d tucked Chloé into her crib, she’d made notes in her red Moleskine notebook, trying to come up with a plan. Right now she only had Nicu to go on, but he hadn’t said much and his message worried her.
“Installed a new spark plug,” said her mechanic at the garage on the tip of ?le Saint-Louis when she returned the loaner. “You’re good to go.” He always said that.
“Merci.”
Opening the scooter’s seat, she took out her leather gloves and pulled them on against the morning chill. She walked her scooter over one-way Pont de Sully to the Left Bank, then keyed the scooter’s ignition and drove along the river. She watched the long quai change names, growing posher as she passed through the arrondissements: from de la Tournelle to de Montebello in the 5th, to des Grands Augustins and de Conti in the 6th and Voltaire in the 7th, then Anatole France, until it became the quai d’Orsay alongside l’Assemblée Nationale; and further on, the not-so-secret Centre d’écoute, the wiretapping center.
Always start from the target’s last known location—a dictum drilled into her by her father. She’d see if she could find Nicu, and while she was there, she would check for possible witnesses to Drina’s abduction.
Taking the long way round to the rear of H?pital Laennec, she reached the ambulance entrance off rue Vaneau connected via Impasse Oudinot. Off the narrow allée in the hospital grounds were tucked small blossoming courtyard gardens where patients in wheelchairs soaked up the chance sunshine. An ambulance was parked with its doors open, a gurney being lifted out. The wheeled legs clicked into place, and Aimée heard rubber tires bump over the damp cobbles. She parked her scooter.
The ambulance attendant, a woman, closed the van’s back doors. Her arms were muscular in her white uniform, her short reddish hair pinned back.
“Bonjour.” Aimée flipped open her father’s police ID, which she had doctored with her photo and name. “I’m following up on last night’s patient abduction. You might have answered questions already …”
“Moi? No one talked to me.”
Aimée seethed. The flics on top of it, as usual.
“But I heard. Terrible,” said Lana, which Aimée had read on her badge. “Matter of fact, it must have happened on our shift.”