Murder Below Montparnasse - By Cara Black Page 0,83
brought you into my office.”
Embarrassed, Aimée looked at the woman’s name tag. Doctor Sylvie Taitbout.
“Desolée, doctor,” she said.
“I’m just the PhD kind. Call me Sylvie,” she said, smiling. “I study black holes between the stars.”
Aimée became aware of the posters of planets and galaxies lining the walls. The notebooks piled on the desk beside framed family photos. “You’re an astronomer.”
“Guilty,” she smiled. “I research planetary nebulae in the optical regions of external galaxies—finding tools to understand the late stellar evolution in varying galactic environments. That kind of stuff.” Her mouth turned serious. “Ecoutes, you are exhibiting the symptoms my sister had—anemia compounded by stress. Unpleasant combo. Serious, too. Let me ring your doctor.”
Children’s voices drifted in from the window, along with jasmine scents and humid air.
“Thanks for your concern, but I feel better already,” Aimée said. She had to get going. “My blood sugar gets low. Just need some air.”
“Up to you,” Sylvie said, but she handed Aimée a grapefruit juice from her bag. And a banana. “I insist.”
“Merci.”
“Have your doctor run tests,” Sylvie said. “Does anemia run in your family? Any history with your mother?”
A pang hit her. This woman probably took for granted that all Parisian mothers take Sunday afternoon walks in the Luxembourg Gardens arm in arm with their husbands after the midday roast chicken—a classic déjeuner de famille. Well, not Aimée’s. “No history to speak of.”
Sylvie took off her glasses to clean them, revealing small birdlike eyes. “Mothers don’t tell you everything.”
So true. In her case, nothing. No road map. During the lycée, she’d observed Martine’s mother and secretly recorded her observations in a notebook. Like they did in biology class, cultivating nuclei in a petri dish and recording reactions and behaviors. She made an effort to decipher this species down to each detail—from Martine’s mother’s tweed beige jackets to her effortless soufflés, from her warm living room cluttered with bright pillows and books to the way she wiped her toddler’s runny nose while reminding the girls with a smile to say “merci” at the boulangerie.
“Is everything all right?” Sylvie asked. “Anything on your mind?”
Sylvie seemed like the type of counselor the flics should have assigned to her the other night after the accident. Aimée knew she should take better care of herself. Why had she quit yoga? But without René to insist.…
“Been under more stress lately?”
Apart from her best friend’s defection to America, Saj’s injury, the murder of an old man who’d known her long-gone mother, a stolen Modigliani, death threats from Serbs, being attacked in her office and almost drowned in a bucket.…
“A little more than usual,” Aimée admitted.
And just when she’d stumbled on the van, she’d lost it again. Her chance to find the painting. Her mother, ever elusive, a vague shadow who loomed in the background.
“Try to relax.”
With people out to torture her and only a few hours left? Aimée sat up with mounting dread and scrambled for her boots.
“You’ve been so kind,” she said, standing with a wobble and pulling down her Sonia Rykiel tunic. “But I must go.…”
“Not before you share my tartine and I see you can function. We’ll go to the garden.”
Too weak to argue, Aimée nodded. She and Sylvie sat on a bench in the garden bordered by a gravel drive. An islet of peace bounded by green hedges and old stonework fronting the Observatoire, a blackened limestone-like château punctuated with a rounded verdigris metal globe roof, which dwarfed the trees. “When the king ordered the Observatoire built, this was countryside,” Sylvie told her. “Far from the lights of Paris and perfect for the telescopes. By 1900 the street gaslights rendered them useless. Today we measure and calculate the heavens with computers.”
“Vraiment?” Yet, didn’t numerical equations and statistics neglect the allure of the night sky, of wishing upon a star?
Aimée munched the crisp tartine slathered with Brie, pear slices, and cornichons. She felt color returning to her cheeks. It had been stupid to forget to eat.
“Loaded up?” Sylvie shouted to someone behind the hedge on the gravel drive. It was woman in a hoodie and jeans, loading file boxes into the side door of a van. Aimée noticed how the woman kept her head down. Noticed the white Renault van with a temporary plate. The grapefruit juice in her hand trembled.
But how many new white vans drove in Paris?
“She’ll hit traffic. Running late as usual,” Sylvie said.
“Who’s that?” Aimée asked.
“Morgane delivers our instruments. Receives our air-shipped data drives.”