The Aimee Leduc Companion

des Quinze-Vingts. Second stop.
    5. Opéra de Paris-Bastille. The front entrance.

    6. Passage de Bel Air. What a difference one passage makes. Cavour père et fils: period furniture. gun-running (or worse), and much more. Can there be worse? Oh, yes.
    7. and 7a. The covered Marché d’Aligre, and, up at 34, rue Cotte, Josiane Dolet’s apartment.
    8. Monsieur Malraux’s little theatre, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine.

    9. Madame Danoux’s apartment (an old opera singer offers a port in the storm).
    10. (CD2–3) Clothilde’s bar. A little Peau le chien is good for the soul.
    11. (A4) The moorings of the Bassin de l’Arsenal. The seacoast of Romania?

    12. Institut Medico-légale (that’s Morgue to you). Réné waits to find out from Serge just when a DOA did arrive.
    13. The Chapel (Saint Antoine’s) of the Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts: what a temptation.
    14. Vincent’s Populax office.
    15. The petit arabe at 22, blvd. de la Bastille. Help from an unexpected source.

Cara’s Bastille Picks

    Le Square Trousseau: (see #1)1, rue Antoine Vollon, 75012 Paris. A lovely room (it’s appeared in more than one movie) and good food. bb.
    La Table d’Aligre: 11, place d’Aligre, 75012 Paris. Modern and imaginative cooking, and very sympa staff.
    Le Baron Rouge: 1, rue Théophile Roussel, 75012 Paris. Very popular wine bar near the Marché d’Aligre. The action spills out onto the street. Oysters in season.
    Le Bar à Soupes: 33, rue de Charonne, 75011 Paris. Four or five freshly made soups every day, served by the chef/owner and her gentle staff. Little menus built around the soup. Perfect for lunch. Carry-outs also available.
    À La Biche au Bois: 45, av. Ledru Rollin, 75012 Paris. Great-value menus, patient and friendly staff. Always crowded. ff.
    Open-air and covered market: Place d’Aligre and streets radiating from it. Every day. One of Paris’s great markets, especially strong on African and Middle Eastern produce.
    Open-air market: Blvd. Richard-Lenoir, between Place de la Bastille and rue du Chemin-vert. One of the two or three largest markets in Paris. Thursdays and Sundays.

Murder in Clichy (November 1994)

    Aimée needs to learn to relax. She has been introduced to the Cao Dai temple in Paris by her partner, René Friant. He urges her to learn to meditate: she could use a more healthful approach to life. But calm meditation is not her forte, and besides, when she goes to a Cao Dai temple to learn to meditate with a Vietnamese nun, she just gets herself into more trouble. The nun asks Aimée a favor: to take an envelope to a rendezvous in Clichy, and collect a bag from the man she meets there. But the intended recipient, Thadée Baret, is shot and dies in Aimée’s arms before the transaction can be completed, leaving Aimée with a wounded arm, a check for 50,000 francs, and a trove of ancient jade artifacts. Someone is in hot pursuit of this cache, and Aimée isn’t sure of anything except that she doesn’t want it to fall into that someone’s hands.
    As she digs for more information about her strange quandary, Aimée uncovers the secret history of these specific pieces. They are sacred imperial carvings looted forty years earlier when the French armies were fighting for what was then Indochina. French colonial history in Vietnam is complex and bloody, and the men who were responsible for the jade’s original theft have not been able to escape their consciences. Aimée searches for answers among auction houses and jade specialists, old vets of the Indochine wars, drug rings and Vietnamese immigrant neighborhoods to figure out who the jade really belongs to, and who was willing to murder for it.
    Characters

    Series characters whose info has changed since the previous book:
    Aimée , after being blinded by an optic nerve injury last month in Murder in the Bastille, has recovered most of her sight.
    Martine is now an investigative freelancer for AFP—Agence France Presse—and Reuters.
    Non-series characters appearing in this book:
    Baret, Thadée (donor to Cao Dai temple), ex-wife Sophie
    Blondel (scum)
    de Lussigny, Julien (on Olf’s board), ex-wife Lena de Lussigny, Pascale ( Julien’s sister, another Thadée Baret ex-wife)
    de Rosnay, Saj (computer whiz)
    Dinard, Jacques (Asian art expert)
    Franck (apprentice at shoe repair shop)
    Gérard (café employee)
    Hortense (street person, former model)
    Jin (Vietnamese man wounded at same time as Gassot )
    JoJo (café employee)
    Lambert, Guy (eye