Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [76]
He had just finished reading it when she gave him another one:
Cotonou Airport, December 25. I had a very bad premonitionand I really felt ill at ease. Every time something badis going to happen to me, I can feel it. And this time mysixth sense was telling me we weren’t going to take off. Iwas really expecting something to happen. I even told oneof my coworkers what I felt. A few seconds later, the planewas in the water. The people who were still alive werescreaming. I wasn’t afraid because I’d sensed somethingterrible was going to happen. Everything happened veryfast. I’d say there were two minutes between takeoff andthe accident. When I got out of the plane, I wasn’t far fromthe shore. So I swam back to the land and survived.
The lieutenant put them away in his wallet with the others, then walked to the stairs. He didn’t need to use the keys the real estate agent had given him. The door had been forced open and every nook and cranny of the studio had been searched. He looked at the disaster—the drawers thrown over, the bed upside down, the slashed mattress. He picked up the furniture, looking for the computer or the flash drive Tristanne had mentioned. Apparently the visitor had taken everything away. Mattéo found one more enigmatic message in a trash can in the bathroom:
December 26. Rababa and his son Hamed were sleepingwhen the earthquake hit the little town of Bam, in Iran.
Before they had time to run outside, their house had collapsedaround them. They remained trapped for four daysuntil a neighbor came to the rescue, digging into the wreckagewith his bare hands.
He walked back to rue de la Lune, near the old postern of la Poissonnerie, the fish-market gate: They used to bring the day’s catch into Paris through it at dawn. A tiny, almost provincial enclave, with its small public garden, its church, and its little bands of children. Just a step away from the noisy Grands Boulevards, the excitement of rue Saint-Denis, and the sector reserved for bohemian yuppies. From the kitchen he could make out the ceramic advertisement for Castrique, promising Total dust removal when you vacuum. He had kept the apartment after his divorce, when Annabelle left with the kids, s almost half his income on rent for a place where he used only two rooms out of four. Everything was ready for their return. Moving out would have meant admitting defeat.
He heated up a tajine, lemon chicken with carrots, cooked by the Moroccan woman who took care of the building as well as his laundry and cleaning. Later he watched a gangster film on TV the way you look at the passing landscape from the window of a train, unable to follow the plot, his mind fixated on the murder of Flavien Carvel.
The next morning, after stopping by the offices of the Criminal Investigation Department, Mattéo went to the bank that managed Carvel’s accounts, the Financière des Victoires.
No one seemed to be aware they had lost an important client the day before on rue des Degrés. The dead man’s financial adviser very grudgingly agreed to enter the password to access information in his computer about Carvel’s financial transactions.
“Monsieur Carvel’s net holdings amount to nearly 400,000 euros. We have also approved transactions for double that amount. Real estate projects. I can give you a statement to the last centime.”
“Thank you very much, but what would really help would be to know where Flavien Carvel got his money from … If I understand correctly, he made his fortune rather suddenly. One might wonder … Everything was legal, in your opinion?” The banker tensed up at the mere suggestion of money-laundering. “I don’t see why you would have any doubt …”
“No reason … Experience, maybe … I’m just asking you to reassure me. Where did those 400,000 euros come from?” “From all over … Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia, South Africa. Close to a hundred countries in all … Last month, he received nearly 10,000 transfers via the Internet at an average of three