“De Brosselet accepted the proposal, and he’s ready to sign contracts. Before he changes his mind I need your approval.” René sounded nervous like he always did before closing a deal. “Now, Aimée.”
“Attends.” She put her hand over the receiver. “Anywhere here René and I can take a few minutes in private?”
“On one condition.”
What now? “Join your cooking class? Use all my free time to start taking Italian classes with you?”
“Promise me you’ll make an effort with Gianni’s cousin.”
“If I can stay awake.”
Martine pointed to a window above. “Good. The room directly above this one’s free—my Italian lesson starts in half an hour. Use it till then.”
THE TALL-CEILINGED CLASSROOM was lined by cases of Italian books and large windows whose frames were carved with wreaths of oak and laurel. An adjoining salon, with mirrors on every wall and a tromp l’oeil mural of a blue sky and clouds painted on the ceiling, contained a life-sized statue of the Marquis de Galliffet.
“Can anyone listen in on us here?” Maxence asked, looking around. His leather boots creaked on the herringbone wood floor.
“Doubt it,” Aimée said. “Just don’t speak Italian. Where’s René?”
“Parking.” Maxence set the printout on the teacher’s oak desk. “Here’s the meteorological report you requested. Scattered showers around ten P.M. on the night of April twenty-first, 1978, then again around one A.M. on the twenty-second. The dew forms roughly an hour before sunrise. So say five A.M.”
Given the dew on Djanka’s hair and her damp but not soaked clothes, she must have been dumped in the moat at les Invalides between 1 A.M. and 5 A.M. Aimée knew her father must have figured that out. She felt like she was late to the party. Twenty years too late.
She sifted the information in her mind, fixed on the fact that the military had been denied the right to investigate—unless they’d hushed it up themselves. But why? And who’d trump the Ministry of Defense? No one in her address book.
She sat down on the teacher’s desk. Thought.
The classroom’s radiator hissed. A feeble sputter of heat blew out and then died.
“Look, Aimée, according to this Paris Match article,” said Maxence, pointing to her copy, “Pascal Leseur’s suicide was discovered by the cleaning lady on the morning of April twenty-second. The same day Djanka was found strangled in the moat at the école Militaire.”
“I know. And it must connect.” Aimée mulled. Buttoned her tuxedo jacket up and wished she was back in the inviting warmth of the cooking-class kitchen.
“Alors?” said René, putting down his briefcase and joining them.
Aimée filled him in on what they had learned.
“But this Pascal Leseur committed suicide,” René said, stabbing the Paris Match page with his forefinger.
“If Djanka’s the mother of his child, I’d say the fact that they were both discovered dead on the same day is more than a coincidence.”
“And if Leseur’s suicide wasn’t a suicide, and they were both murdered … Good luck proving that twenty years after the fact.” René wiped a fallen almond leaf off his lapel. It drifted, twisting in the sunlight, to the hardwood floor. “We’ve got work to do, Aimée.”
“But this matters, René. It mattered enough that they pulled my father off the case. Even the military were denied an investigation on their own turf.”
“Says who?” René snorted in disgust. “They hush stuff all the time.”
“No denying that. But my former riding instructor has no reason to lie. I believe him. And Drina was trying to tell me that it’s the reason my father was murdered ten years later. And now one other innocent person has been killed, poor Nicu Constantin. That means it matters to someone, René; that someone still thinks it can be proved twenty years later, and is afraid of what will happen if it is. And I’ll find out who.”
René opened his case, shaking his head. “You call that a connection?”
“Big players,” said Maxence, nodding. “You think someone took out two hits twenty years ago and has been trying to cover them up ever since?”
“You’re on the right path, Maxence,” Aimée said. “Say Leseur, an up-and-coming politician, was the target, Djanka a secondary target, or maybe killed because she was a witness … Years later, something surfaces, my father makes the connection to an old case …”
Maxence interrupted, excited. “So whoever they are, they need to cover up the murders again, so they take him out.” He smiled, brushed his long bangs to the side. Noticed Aimée’s wince. “I’m so sorry, I meant …” The alarm on his watch suddenly played a techno version of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” “Oops, got class. Meet you later, Aimée. I’ll set up the surveillance equipment for tonight’s reception—it’s an early one.”
What a jewel Maxence was.
“Before I forget,” he added, “de Brosselet left this for you.”
From his backpack Maxence pulled out a mottled-gris pigskin Villeroi Frères bag. Soft as butter. Her heart fluttered. “I guess he liked the diaper service tip.”
“At least there’s some good news,” said René, spreading out the contract pages. He handed her his Montblanc pen. “Sign here.”
As Maxence left, the open door let in a flurry of cold air. The repeated notes of a piano being tuned in the adjoining salon were momentarily louder and clearer until the door closed again.
As she placed the cap back on the pen, there was something niggling at her, just out of reach. What had she been trying to remember? Something she’d meant to make a note of before. Something to do with manouches? Why hadn’t she written it down instead of relying on her bébé-addled brain? “René, what do they call people from that region where you went for a healer?”
He’d once tried a guérisseur, a healer, in the countryside for his hip dysplasia.
“Peasants? A step below provincials? Superstitious dullards who go in for witchcraft?”
“Quit le snobisme, René.” She handed his pen back to him. “I mean what are the natives called?”