Murder in the Bastille Read Online Free PDF Page B

people staring. Most of the time.
    He’d heard Aimée’s message on his voice mail and gathered things from her apartment. Now he turned into the Passage de la Boule Blanche, a narrow half-covered alleyway lined with old storefronts and doorways to courtyards housing craftsmen, upholsterers, and furniture makers. Wide enough for a small car. Once the site of the crimes of the notorious poet-criminal, Lacenaire, guillotined in 1836.
    René retraced his steps to the place where he’d found Aimée sprawled on the cobbles. Not far from the metal waist-high barricade with a Piétons barrés sign. He wondered if there was anything he hadn’t found last night.
    Green garbage bins, emptied and waiting, hugged the narrow stone wall. Too bad, anything left behind would have been cleaned up by the ébouers . Nothing there to indicate the horror of Aimée’s attack last night. What had she said . . . she remembered a light?
    He looked around and in the October sunshine saw the imposing entrance of the Quinze-Vingts hospital at the end of the passage. The Quinze-Vingts—fifteen times twenty—was the number of beds the hospital’s founder, Louis XV, had needed for his knights blinded by Saracens on the Ninth Crusade; the name had endured. Had she meant a light from the hospital?
    The Passage de la Boule Blanche, in the throes of construction, lay deserted. The young designer’s shop was closed. Ahead on the right lay the courtyard of the Cahiers du Cinéma , their former client. He walked over but the gate was chained. On it hung a sign saying CLOSED FOR REMODELING. Too bad, he would have felt comfortable asking questions of people he knew there. He could have ferreted out whether anyone had been in the office late.
    He gazed up. A mossy stone wall lined a good part of the passage. The network of passages in the Bastille once connected the wood shipped down the Seine and the woodworkers and furniture makers in the faubourg’s courtyards. After Louis XI licensed craftsmen in the fifteenth century, this Bastille quartier grew into a working-class area; cradle of revolutions, mother of street-fighters and artisans, home of the Bastille prison.
    Later tinsmiths, blacksmiths, mirror-makers, gilders, and coal merchants joined them, occupying the small glass-roofed factories and warehouses. Now, many of these were gentrified, and the rest had been bulldozed.
    Then he heard hammering from the nichelike entrance on his left.
    René didn’t feel much like a detective even though the sign where he worked read LEDUC DETECTIVE. They shared the computer security jobs, but only Aimée had a criminal investigation background.
    Now he had to take up the slack. Help figure this out. Aimée, his best friend, had suffered a brutal attack outside this atelier; maybe someone inside had seen or heard something.
    He walked into a small, damp courtyard. A sign, styled like a coat of arms, read CAVOUR MASTER WOODWORKERS, EST. 1794. Low strains of a Vivaldi concerto floated through the doorway.
    “Pardon,” René said, raising his voice. He walked through a narrow entrance opening into a large atelier illumined by skylights. The sharp tang of turpentine reached him. “Anyone here?”
    A middle-aged man, wearing a blue workcoat, glasses pushed up on his bald head, stood at a work table. With delicate strokes he rubbed the gilded legs of an antique lacquered chair. Small and exquisite, it looked to René as if anyone sitting on it would snap it in pieces. In the middle of the large room stood a heater, its flue leading to the roof, a water cooler, and more worktables filled with furniture in various stages of repair. From the walls hung every type of antique wooden chair René had ever seen—and many he hadn’t.
    “Forgive me, monsieur,” René said, “for disturbing your work.”
    The man looked up, took in René’s stature, but showed no surprise. He had dark pouches under his eyes and a sallow complexion. His pursed mouth gave him a harried