Murder in the Palais Royal by Cara Black Read Free Book Online Page B

Voici.
    Her manicured hands trembled. The black marble clock on her desk showed 3:45. She reached for her cell phone. Time to make a call, squeeze her contact. Get this handled.
    But the recorded voicemail message said: “Out of the country. No messages taken.”
    Whatever this “proof ” consisted of, she couldn’t risk having it made public. Not now. Gabrielle stared from window overlooking the flowering Palais Royal garden, the fountain, the alley of trees and shops under the colonnade. Peaceful, almost bucolic. But her insides churned. It smelled like the threat of an amateur. Then again, this could mask more sophisticated forces at work.
    She took our her wallet, found five thousand francs. In her desk drawer was another five thousand. She took a sheet of paper and started to write. Her hands shook so much that the ink blotted. She tore it up, tried again, and wrote “The rest when I have the proof.”
    Her cell phone rang. The minister’s number appeared. Of all times, she thought.
“Oui, Minister Ney .
”
The minister cleared his throat. An ominous sign.
    “Gabrielle,” he began, “I’m concerned that your staff cocked it up over the junior deputy’s little indiscretion.”
    Cocked it up? “I think your junior deputy already did that, Monsieur le Ministre,” she said. “The flics caught him with a fifteen-year-old hooker.”
    She couldn’t deal with this now. She had to hurry to the antiquarian bookseller, to question him herself.
    A small expulsion of air came over the line. “But how can one tell these days?” said the minister. “I mean, they don’t provide birth certificates, do they?”
    Gabrielle wondered if Minister Ney spoke from personal experience. But that wasn’t anything she wanted to know.
    Gabrielle stuffed the money into the envelope and shut her drawer.
    “Fix this the usual way, Gabrielle.”
    Did the whole bureau depend on her for damage control? For once, couldn’t the minister invoke national security and cover up the old-fashioned way?
    “But Monsieur le Ministre, he not only ran a red light but resisted arrest with an underage illegal Romanian hooker in the car.”
    “Gabrielle,” Minister Ney said, “it’s important that he interviews well on Opinions tomorrow. We must bolster public support against the delegation’s proposal. It’s in no one’s interest to unseal those documents in the National Archives.”
    No need to remind her. More than a few government officials feared that their past would appear in the media if certain documents were made available. Especially now, given the upcoming wartime collaboration trial in Bordeaux of the former Vichy official Papon.
    She reached for her bag. “I can’t make this go away, Monsieur le Ministre.”
    Opinions was the highest-rated political-commentary show on the télé . And she’d scheduled the junior deputy’s interview more than a month ago. Unfortunate, since—despite the junior deputy’s underage proclivities—he influenced a significant delegation in the Ministry.
    She glanced at the time. 3:55 P.M.
    “I don’t care what you do, Gabrielle,” he said. “Or how you do it. Make the moderator sympathetic.”
“But Cédric’s a well-respected political analyst.”
“And he’s got a little file he’d like kept quiet, as I recall.”
    Cédric led a discreet life, apart from his fondness for cocaine. An old charge of possession had been swept under the carpet, standard procedure for influential celebrities, but ready for activation as needed. Cédric was her old classmate from ENA, witty and intelligent. The thought of smearing him sickened her.
    “Minister, he’s been in rehab. That chapter’s closed. I can’t do that to my friend,” she said. “Couldn’t we find some other way?”
    But for all her damage-control expertise, what it might be escaped her.
“Can’t, or won’t, Gabrielle?”
His words dangled over the line.
    “Your husband Roland’s up for a ministry position, isn’t he? I