“My mother’s third cousin’s wife asked me to help you,” she said. “I do it as one of God’s creatures to another. Not all gens du voyage want to take your money, Monsieur.”
“Please forgive me, Sister Dorothée,” he said, ashamed that his prejudice had showed. “I’m told these words contain a curse, and that voicing it would give the words power.”
“Some say that, Monsieur Friant,” she said. “Others say a curse only has power if you grant it power.”
While she read, he gazed at this ancient convent garden, its expanse of lawn lined by fruit trees and blue and purple hydrangeas. A jardin potager, a kitchen garden, extended to a wall almost a soccer field away. Vast for the center of Paris. This had all been farms and countryside until Marie de Médicis awarded her land to the convents. The Sisters of Charity convent was just one of many institutions and parcels of land the church owned in the arrondissement.
The tree branches dripped and hung low, heavy with rain.
“C’est privé.” A gardener in a blue workcoat emerged from a side path, pushing a wheelbarrow. “The garden’s not open to the public,” he said sharply to René. “Ah, pardonnez-moi, I didn’t see you, Sister.”
Sister Dorothée nodded.
“Can you make sense of some of it?” René asked.
“It’s very sad.”
The last thing René expected.
“You’re sure you want to know?” she asked.
What could it contain? A dying woman’s last words? He nodded.
“D’accord, well, some makes no sense,” said Sister Dorothée. “But from here it’s more coherent. He covered up my sister’s murder by those men. I understood. He couldn’t do anything else, he had a daughter. What could I do … my people shunned the boy Nicholás, painted me black. He kept the cloak over the guilty. Unfair. That’s why we live our own way, with our own kind, only trust our own. But that didn’t exist for me. Radu said Djanka was a whore—all family honor gone. I had nothing, so I took his help. When they’d gone too far and he refused to cover up more dirtiness, they blew him up. I saw them. Then we ran and hid, no protector anymore. But he wanted his daughter to know he did it for her, that she should make it right. I owed him that. Tesla, Fifi, I spit in their eyes, on their souls.”
René bowed his head, sadness flooding him. He and the nun sat in silence. Some pink and white petals of the blooming plum and almond trees had drifted to the ground, joining the pastel carpet of blossoms already covering the vegetable beds. A church bell chimed in the distance. How could he tell Aimée that her father had been part of the cover-up—had died trying to get out of it?
Wednesday Morning
ON RUE DU Pré-aux-Clercs, named for the ancient monk’s abbey and once a popular dueling site, a shudder of wind misted Aimée’s cheeks with the spring rain. She had salvaged her phone from the gutter, wiped it off, shaken it. Still working. She waited out the second sudden shower under a stone portico. Across the street, a concierge leaned out of her open ground-floor window, talking to the postman huddling in his yellow rain slicker. And just as quickly as the shower burst, it stopped and sunlight broke over the glistening wet pavers.
At the smudged reception window in the commissariat, she asked for Commissaire Dejouy, crossing her fingers he hadn’t retired.
“In a meeting,” said a young recruit, his ironed collar standing at attention.
Great. Her only contact here.
“Can you tell him it’s Aimée Leduc?”
“Concerning?”
“An investigation.”
“Your identification.”
She passed over her new PI license. He shook his head. “Then that’s an official visit. You’d need permission from the commissaire, and he’s in a meeting.”
Helpful, this new recruit. And the stale air in here was as bad as his attitude.
“Five minutes, please,” she said, glancing at her Tintin watch. “Can you check with the commissaire?”
Jojo Dejouy stuck his head round the door. “I’ll take care of this, Lelong.”
Repressing the urge to smile at the bewildered Lelong, she went through the door Dejouy had opened for her.
Jojo, greyer than she’d remembered and with an expanding waist, led her past institution-green cubicles, through the haze of cigarette smoke and into his office. Brittle fluorescent light highlighted the dust layer on his file cabinet.
He closed the door. “It’s good to see you, Aimée.” said Jojo. “I appreciate you inviting me to your baby’s christening, I’m just sorry I couldn’t make it. Your father meant a lot to me. Maybe I didn’t show it when they put him against the wall.” Jojo shrugged. “I know you’re a bigger person than me. You look at the good in people, like he did.”
Jojo, like many in the force, had distanced himself from her papa when he’d been fingered for an offense he didn’t commit. Years later, her father had said it was the best thing that had ever happened to him; it had driven him to private work. If he could forgive his old team, she’d decided she could, too. And she knew her father would be smiling.
“Here’s the card I’ve been meaning to send.” He handed her a baptism card.
“That’s sweet, Jojo.”
“Got a picture of her?”
“Bien s?r, but …” She rummaged for her wallet. “Bad mother, moi. I took out Chloé’s newborns and forgot to put in the ones where she’s sitting up.”
Jojo smiled. “Your papa would be over the moon.”
She nodded. But she hadn’t come to socialize “You’re investigating Nicu Constantin’s knifing under the Métro at La Motte-Piquet–Grenelle?”
“Same twenty-two-year-old manouche questioned about the mercy killing of a patient who disappeared from H?pital Laennec?” Jojo asked.
She nodded, disappointed he would even bring that up now that the real story of Drina’s death was public knowledge, splashed all over the papers. “Admit it, Jojo, moot point. A frame-up. Then, right after your men take him in for questioning, he’s knifed. A hate crime? I don’t think so.”
“An angel tell you from on high?”