Great, another bigot. “Monsieur, this woman canes chairs. She is an artisan, not a thief.”
“Et alors? Enough of them are. One pickpocketed me on the Métro last week. I filed a report and the flics just laughed at me.”
“I’m sorry, but this woman’s dying,” she said. “She was abducted from the hospital, her atelier’s been trashed. People here don’t want to know or to help. Do you know anything that could help me find her?”
“You don’t look like a flic.”
“I’m not.” She took out her PI license. “Did you notice anything unusual this morning or last night?”
“What’s it worth, Mademoiselle Columbo?”
A smart ass. But she didn’t have time to shake him down, there was no love-thy-neighbor feeling in this quartier. “This look right?” She put a fifty-franc note on the fabric.
“Why don’t you sweeten it?” he said.
She forced a smile. “Give me some juice to sweeten. Do you remember seeing someone at her atelier?”
His foot paused on the sewing-machine pedal as he put the note in his shirt pocket. “My back window upstairs looks onto the passage. Two or three nights ago, looked like the flics were there. Unmarked car.”
The flics?
“And you know this how?”
“My son-in-law’s a flic in Nantes. Did a stint plainclothes.”
“Go on,” she said.
“Odd, I thought, seeing flics by her place. Then I see her coming from the Métro with a shopping bag. She stumbled, her bag fell. Looked ill, I thought,” he said. “Left a few minutes later, her hands empty.”
Drina had been well enough to walk. “Like she’d dropped something off, that’s what you mean?”
He nodded, not looking up, guiding the fabric under the punching needle. The hum of the machine filled the small shop.
“Can you remember what day this was? The time?”
He paused. Lifted up his foot and thought.
“I’d just eaten dinner. Spaghetti vongole. So Saturday.”
“Why did the unmarked car strike you, Monsieur?”
“Nothing’s open. Barely anyone walks there at night.” He pressed his foot on the pedal. The machine hummed to life. “But there was someone watching the street.”
“How could you tell?”
“Who stands smoking on the corner in the rain for an hour?”
So the night before she went missing from the hospital, Drina returned from the Métro and someone watched her. She’d left something in the atelier, according to the tailor. Hidden it?
Her phone rang. “Merci, Monsieur.” She slipped another fifty-franc note down.
She stepped outside the tailor shop to take the call and headed toward the passage.
“Oui?”
“Where are you, Aimée?”
“Coming from the tailor’s. He noticed someone watching the street two nights ago. What have you found?” She turned into the short passage and saw Drina’s locked atelier.
“You need to see this. There’s half of Drina’s notebook.” He sounded excited.
“I’m coming,” she said, breaking into a run. “Let me get my scooter.”
“I’m at the phone booth on the corner, under the Métro.”
She got on her scooter, popped the kickstand and inserted the key with the phone still to her ear. “What’s in the notebook?” she said as she started up the alley.
“You’ll see. Names, numbers, places. It’s torn. It’s sort of like the notebook she keeps accounts in.”
“Anything you recognize, Nicu?”
“I don’t know. Lots of numbers …”
“Phone numbers, Nicu?” she interrupted, trying to crane her neck above the traffic. An old Fiat pulled in front of her, taking its sweet time.
“Ah non, like she enters her sales. Five hundred francs every month”—a horn blared, cutting through his words—“entries end in June 1989.”
The year Aimée’s father died. Going on her assumption that Drina informed for her father—maybe a record of payoffs?
“What names?”
Over the line she heard scuffling, shouts. Alarmed, she sped up. “What names, Nicu?”
“Where are you?” he said, terse and distracted.
Traffic had ground to a halt at the red light.
“Right down across the street. Stuck in a wall of cars and taxis.” She fumed inside as a passing bus shot diesel exhaust in her face. “Tell me, Nicu. What are the names?”
“Fifi, Tesla. The last entry says Tonton JC à six heures du soir Place Vend?me.”
Her gut churned. JC? Like Jean-Claude? Papa had died in the bomb explosion in Place Vend?me.
“I found something else, there’s pictures. My …” His voice cracked. “Come to the corner …” The rumble of the train overhead drowned him out.
“Pictures of what, Nicu? Please, can’t you tell me?”
Only the rumbling of the Métro. Her stomach knotted, her knuckles whitened as she squeezed the handlebars.
“Can you see me?” she yelled into the phone over the noise of the busy two-lane boulevard. So much traffic.
The call had clicked off.
Two cars zipped past her, honking at each other. She saw him now standing at the Métro’s stone pillar support. He waved. She motioned for him to wait, she’d come to him. A van pulled up between them, and she watched more traffic block her way. Buses, cars, trucks, scooters—everyone going somewhere. The Métro added to the urban cacophony.
Her heart was pounding. She felt so close to knowing the truth about her father.
The traffic thinned.
In the crowd of people that had suddenly assembled at the corner, she couldn’t see Nicu anymore. She pulled up. Then she saw why the people were huddling. Nicu lay half sprawled against the pillar, bleeding. His face frightened, he reached out to her.
Non, non … It couldn’t …
Someone in the crowd shouted, “Anyone a doctor?”
Aimée dropped her Vespa to the ground and ran toward him. His ripped hoodie was red with blood. His lips moved.
She heard a man on a cell phone demanding an ambulance. She pushed her way past a young woman bending toward him holding out tissues. Aimée knelt down besides Nicu. He was saying, “My bag. They took it.”