After tucking Chloé in with the hand-crocheted blanket, Dussolier’s gift, Aimée rejoined René, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“I’ve informed Le Parisien and three other tabloids with twenty-four–seven on-call paparazzi.” He glanced at the time. “Any moment now the news hounds will arrive to catch Uncle Radu’s Gypsies wailing at the clinic, the final goodbye,” said René. “It’ll be a circus, all right.”
Aimée could just see it.
“Martine’s on board,” she said. “She’s pitching all her contacts. Her angle is going to be calling out the Ministry of Health, the medical issues, the implications with the hospital boards.” She leaned back and stretched. Bad idea. Her rib hurt and she climbed onto the couch. “She’s even going to tap her contact at Le Monde.”
They’d filled each other in while Aimée took notes in her Moleskine—René’s visit to La Bouteille, Radu’s reactions, the fortune-teller; Aimée’s hunt for Madame Uzes and trip to the clinique; Drina’s last words. They had hashed out the implications over green tea—someone very high-profile seemed ready to do anything to prevent a scandal. But what scandal?
René had come up with a strategy to bring Radu Constantin into the mix and alert the media, which could create a safety net of sorts around them. Everything was in place. But there were still so many things Aimée didn’t understand.
“One thing bothers me, René,” she said, pulling out Chloé’s teething biscuits from between the cushions she’d sat on. “Nicu was dead to the family. But I saw Radu and Nicu arguing at H?pital Laennec. They didn’t look estranged.” She paused. “How did Radu react to the news Nicu had been murdered?”
“He was hurt, shocked. I saw it in his eyes,” said René. “Guilty, you’re thinking? The Constantin clan shunned Djanka for having a half-gadjo baby while her husband was in prison. Maybe after she died that shame was transferred to the child and the sister, who raised him?” René sipped his green tea. “Or maybe Radu only pretended. Maybe he sent them into hiding, fostered the idea of a feud, to protect them. Weren’t they afraid Djanka’s killer was still after them?”
“True,” she said, “and apparently he was. I wonder if there’s anything in this?”
She showed René the Romany words and phrases the nurse had written down in Drina’s last moments. It wasn’t much to go on.
“Even if it’s translated, Aimée, this won’t tell us the men’s identity,” said René. “Tesla, Fifi … Drina only used their code names.”
True again. She hated to admit it, but she had nothing.
She needed to read all her notes over again. Pore over each detail, check and recheck. See if there were any coincidences. The necessary tedious side of investigation.
But that thought shook something loose in her memory. “Wait a minute,” she said. She opened her laptop and pulled up one of the 1978 issues of Libération that she’d had Maxence scan from her father’s file. “Look, René.” She enlarged the article on the suicide of a député at Assemblée Nationale. “Notice the suicide’s name?”
“Pascal? That’s a leap.” René paused, shaking his head. “How many tens of thousands of men named Pascal were there in Paris in 1978?”
“But the fortune-teller told you Djanka’s lover’s death forced Drina and Nicu into hiding.”
“Et alors? How can you connect that to this député named Pascal? It’s not even a coincidence—you’re pulling names out of an old newspaper.”
She disagreed. Especially since the newspaper had come from her father’s file. “Let’s just check, non?”
“Going to communicate with ghosts now?”
“Grand-père kept every Paris Match for the last fifty years before he died,” she said. Scandals, love affairs, real news—it was all there in Paris Match. “It’s bound to be in here.”
“What’s bound to be in there?”
But she’d gone to the library, moved the wooden library ladder, climbed up to scan the dusty shelves. On the top shelf, she found four weekly issues from April 1978.
She dusted them off with her scarf, stepped down, and brought them back to René, plopping down on the recamier next to him to thumb through them.
She checked the index of an issue with a still-young Johnny Hallyday on the cover. Page 34.
“Where are those photos, René?”
René rolled his neck. “Back in the envelope by your laptop.”
But she didn’t want to handle that envelope, couldn’t bear to touch it again. So much dried blood. Nicu’s blood.
“What’s the matter?” he said, noticing her look.
“It’s my fault, René. If I hadn’t …” She paused. “But I did. For what? In the end, Nicu died for nothing. I found Drina, but her message was too cryptic. It did nothing to help solve my father’s murder.”
Or to lessen this feeling that she’d jumped from hot coals into the flame.
Feeling hopeless, Aimée rubbed her aching shoulder. Chloé had gained weight.
René reached for the envelope. “You’re tired. Me too. We’ll go over this tomorrow,” René said, setting the photos on the table.
But if she didn’t check now, it would bother her all night. She turned to the article on Pascal Leseur, an up-and-coming député. Pascal’s funeral was splashed through Paris Match’s society section in agonizing photographic detail. Photos of his apartment, the grief-stricken family on the steps of Saint-Roch Church, the small cortege to the cemetery in the Berry, the family estate and cemetery. There was one photo of Pascal Leseur, taken when he was a baby. Bizarrely, there was not a single photo of him as an adult.
“It was a long shot, Aimée. You tried.”
So tired, she felt so tired. It had all suddenly hit her: Nicu, Drina. A great sadness filled her. She sank back against the sofa.