Aimée’s heart dropped. Already? “But I’m just making the appointment. How could he know?”
“You’ll need to confer with Ma?tre Benosh.”
What was Melac plottng?
“Tell her he hasn’t recognized his daughter. His name’s not on the birth certificate.”
“That’s another thing,” the secretary said. “Ma?tre Benosh requests you bring your daughter’s birth certificate and livret de famille.”
And hand them over to Melac’s lawyer? No way. “I don’t understand. I’m her client. Isn’t she supposed to work for me?”
“The paperwork’s standard. Again, you’ll need to discuss the details with Ma?tre Benosh,” said the secretary. “Or do you want to cancel?”
Torn, she paced. Her fingers gripped the cell phone so tight in anger she almost cancelled the appointment then and there. But she needed a lawyer, fast—and Morbier said this lawyer was the best. She knew better than to ignore a tip from the commissaire.
“Keep the appointment,” she said, her insides churning.
“Ma?tre Benosh insists that you have no contact with the biological father before your appointment.” The phone clicked off.
Her cold hands clamped together in fear. Melac meant business.
Then her phone rang again—Nicu this time. Within a minute she had arranged a meeting and headed to her scooter. Her hands were shaking. For now she had to put Melac aside, stuff down her fear of custody over Chloé. She could deal with this. Couldn’t she?
And a dying woman who’d begged to see her about her father’s murder—missing. She noticed the time on the wall clock as she left the building: 9:40 A.M. Drina had been missing for more than twelve hours.
AIMéE PARKED HER scooter on the curb outside side La Pagode, where she’d arranged to meet Nicu. La Pagode, a rose-colored nineteenth-century Japanese pagoda, had been built by the director of Le Bon Marché as a “folly” for his wife. A few months later, the wife left him for a chauffeur.
Now La Pagode was an art-house cinema with ivy trailing the walls. Drooping willows canopied the tea tables nestled in the Japanese garden. It lay quiet and deserted, apart from Michel, the projectionist, who waved to her while sweeping the lobby. Ma?s, the house cat, slinked past the pair of ceramic dragons guarding the stained-glass door to the cinema.
Nicu wasn’t there. She tried to take deep breaths under the paulownia tree’s curved branches. Did her best not to worry that Melac was running more than one step ahead of her. This jardin de rêves, an exquisite jewel of the Japonisme craze that had swept that epoch’s haute bourgeoisie, had been her haunt during maternity leave. She’d brought Chloé in a sling on her chest to two o’clock matinees and a silent-film festival with accompanying piano. Music put her baby to sleep, even in a theater.
Wistfulness filled her. Her mind went back to drinking green tea in the garden as Chloé gummed a teething biscuit, entranced by a butterfly hovering over a stone lantern. A faded memory of coming here years ago with her mother floated through her mind.
She’d fight Melac if it took everything she had.
And then she remembered, this was her first day back in the office. Time to quit daydreaming. No way she’d make it to Leduc Detective in fifteen minutes to open up. Merde! But she could handle it, couldn’t she? Still plenty of time to prepare for the late lunch meeting. She called the office and left Maxence a message that she would be working from home until the lunch meeting with René. But where was Nicu?
Nicu’s voice jolted her out of her thoughts. He was wearing the jeans and hoodie from last night; dark circles pooled under his eyes.
“Over here,” she said, pulling out a chair for him.
Nicu sat down. “The flics tried to frame me for murdering my mother, accused me of performing a mercy killing. Set me up as the suspect, showed me a body in the morgue. It looked like an eighty-year-old woman, and they claimed she’d been found with Drina’s chart.”
Planting evidence on a corpse. Incompetence or desperation? In either case, worse than she’d thought. The flics would never find Drina in time.
She checked her Tintin watch. More than thirteen hours since Drina’s abduction.
“Listen, Nicu.” She recounted what she’d discovered last night: the alarm wires that had been cut on the hospital’s exit door, Drina’s sock lodged in the spoke of a wheelchair by the ambulance alley, the ambulance driver who had observed a dark car blocking the allée, Naftali hearing a woman screaming in Romany, the theft of a staff uniform from the locker room.
“Et alors?” said Nicu, his voice thick. “The flics do nothing.”
“That’s the work of a pro, Nicu.” She took Nicu’s shaking hand over the tea table. “Who was Drina frightened of? Who can you think of?”
“I don’t know.”
Nicu, no more than a kid, was in shock.
She had to reel him in, get him to focus. “You need to think. We don’t have much time, Nicu,” she said. If Drina was even alive. “That man you said had been following you. Can you remember anything? Clothing, an accent, tattoos?”
He rubbed his eyes, distracted. “Maman kept jabbering.”
“Jabbering what?”
“I don’t know,” said Nicu, his lip quivering. “ ‘Sister,’ she kept saying. Her sister, maybe?”
“Her sister, your aunt?” Aimée asked. “Where is she?”
“Passed on a long time ago. Death’s a taboo, we don’t speak of the dead. But she said she couldn’t meet God without telling me …”
Exasperated, she tried to get him back on track. “Think back to the person who was following you, Nicu.”
“The gadjo came back, she said. He came back. That’s all.”
The metal garden chair bit into her spine. She took a deep breath to calm herself, then coughed at the mingling smells of fetid drain and drifting pollen. Think, she had to think how to investigate from here. “Nicu, we’ll start with Drina’s apartment on Boulevard des Invalides. Go from there.” And look for what? But she had to start somewhere.