Murder at the Lanterne Rouge by Cara Black Read Free Book Online Page B

longhandled brass pot of boiling water, then adjusted the blue flame. “Drumming up business? But you don’t look like an ambulance chaser. Why visit me?”
    A sharp-eyed old bird who got to the point, this octogenarian. Aimée draped her leather coat on the thatched cane chair and sat, unbuttoning her vintage checked-wool Chanel jacket, a church bazaar find.
    “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she offered again, the words sounding trite. She took a breath and continued. “But I presumed Pascal Samour lived here.”
    “Then you saw my address on Pascal’s old student library card, like the
flics
did.” She nodded. “Bon, I figured you were smarter than you look.”
    Aimée dropped her bag, but caught it in time before her mascara, encryption manual, and nail polish scattered across the warm floor.
    “Pascal lives … lived near Square du Temple,” said Mademoiselle Samoukashian. “He taught at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.” The engineering school a few blocks away.
    “I saw … found his body last night.”
    “But how is it a detective just happens to find his body?”
    Aimée couldn’t let the old bird intimidate her. She had to find out why Pascal had Meizi’s photo in his wallet.
    “That’s why I’m here, Mademoiselle,” she said.
    Mademoiselle Samoukashian handed Aimée a Limoges demitasse and saucer. Into it she poured frothing brown liquid, then crowned the coffee with a lip of foam. “Armenian style, with cardamom.”
    “
Merci
.”
    The old woman uncovered a plate of crescent rolls smelling of apricot. “
Dziranamahig
. We’re Armenian, Mademoiselle,” she said. “My grandparents sought refuge here from the Turkish genocide. And then we were only rounded up again here during the war, that time by French police. Since the last war, I don’t trust the
flics
. And I don’t trust them now. Neither did Pascal.”
    The war? “But that was fifty years ago.”
    “More. I’m hoping you’re better at math than that.” She shook her head. “Drink. Then I read your grinds. Then we see.”
    See what, Aimée wondered.
    “Please, first hear me out,” Aimée said, determined to leave out the horrific details. “Last night, my partner and I were eating dinner nearby in Chinatown when an old woman came into the
resto
shouting about a murder. We followed the crowd behind the luggage shop, and your … and we found Pascal. Everyone ran away, but I picked up his wallet to learn his identity. There was nothing in it but his library card.”
    “That’s all you know?” Sadness pooled in Mademoiselle Samoukashian’s eyes.
    “Meizi Wu’s picture was on the back of his card.” Aimée took a sip. “Can you tell me about their relationship? Anything you know about Meizi?”
    “Ask her.”
    “Meizi’s disappeared.”
    She nodded, matter of fact. “
Bien sur
, she’s illegal, terrified.”
    Like a steamroller, this little woman. “So you know Meizi?”
    “Never heard of her. But that’s most everyone in this slice of the quartier.
Alors
, it never changes—immigrants, illegals. Roundups just like in ’42.”
    “Roundups?” Was she really comparing Chinese sweatshop workers today to French Jews deported to extermination camps?
    “I know the feeling. Hunted, hiding, moving all the time.”
    Surprised, Aimée leaned forward. “You do?”
    “I was part of the Resistance, you know,” the old woman said. “History forgot us: immigrants, political exiles, Communists. A ragtag bunch of Poles, Jews, Hungarians, Italians. Guerilla fighters. Our last names and politics didn’t fit in with de Gaulle’s myth of
la grande Résistance Française
. My cousin Manouchian, the Armenian poet, led thirty successful attacks against occupying Germans. But do schoolchildren learn this?” She shook her head. “His group was betrayed, branded as criminals by the Vichy collaborators—you’ve heard of the infamous Affiche Rouge poster? Those were the Communist Resistants. And they