Private Paris

Chapter 11

9th Arrondissement

April 7, 1:45 a.m.

ÉMILE SAUVAGE LEFT the Chaussée d’Antin Métro station. The major had changed from his army uniform and now wore a dark brown fedora, a thigh-length black leather jacket, and dark pants, gloves, and rubber-soled shoes. He noted to his satisfaction that the lens of the CCTV cameras inside and outside had been sprayed with fresh black paint.

Well done, Epée.

Walking briskly west on Boulevard Haussmann, Sauvage felt jittery, like a junkie in need of a fix. The major had spent most of his career in reconnaissance. For years he had led an elite NATO scout squad that probed the enemy’s front lines. The job was not only to find and document Taliban or Al-Qaeda positions but also to draw fire from their defenses.

It took nerves of titanium and a love of la pagaille, a French military slang word that means “chaos in battle.” Sauvage had both traits, and in spades.

The major had been in thirteen full-on gun battles in Afghanistan. Other officers, lesser officers, had withered when bullets flew or they saw men dying around them. But Sauvage thrived under such pressure, excelled because he had almost instantly become addicted to the sensations of war.

Man against man. Kill or be killed. It was all primal and pure, and he loved it. Especially when the fight was over something that he believed in or opposed.

Like tonight.

Sauvage kept to the shadows thrown by the triangular-shaped Société Générale building to his immediate left and by the massive Galeries Lafayette shopping center on the other side of the boulevard. The sidewalks on both sides of the boulevard were largely empty, save for the lone pedestrian or two. And the few cars that passed all seemed in a rush to be somewhere else.

At the west end of the block, where the boulevard gave way to a traffic roundabout, Captain Mfune was coming in his direction, dressed in civilian clothes. As they walked past each other, the captain said, “They went in twenty minutes ago. I’ll give you three.”

“All I need,” Sauvage said, and kept on.

At the west end of the Société building, Sauvage affected a drunken manner and wove to his left, toward the back of the Palais Garnier, the older and more famous of the two opera houses in Paris. The front of the opera house, which faced the Avenue de l’Opéra, was famously ornate and opulent in the beaux arts style. But the architecture at the rear of the building was drabber, almost plain.

Still, Sauvage took it all in as he crossed the Rue Gluck toward the back gate to the palace. The palace was set well back from the street, and the roof of the main hall dropped away almost six stories to the roof of the backstage area, which had two wings jutting off it, one to each side. On the walls of the wings, long banners promoted upcoming performances of Handel’s Giulio Cesare. Between the wings there was a courtyard protected by a tall curving wall interrupted by three iron gates.

The first gate was closed, as was the middle one, which was the largest of the three. The far gate, however-the one closest to the Rue Scribe-was open. Only a narrow traffic control arm blocked the way.

Sauvage had the hood of his raincoat up and sang a drunken song as he walked past the gate, aware of the security guard sitting in a booth there, but not paying him a bit of attention.

The major had taken five strides past the gate when there was a soft thud somewhere behind him. He slowed, glanced over his shoulder, and saw the first flames rising off the roof of the Galeries Lafayette.

Chapter 12

SAUVAGE PIVOTED AND stood there, watching the flames grow taller and wider. Seconds later, the opera security guard was running across the island in the rotary toward the shopping center, his cell phone pressed to his ear.

The major dodged into the gate and vaulted the traffic control arm. He used a tiny can of hair spray to coat the lens of the security camera mounted on the security booth and kept moving. Sauvage ran toward the rear wall of the opera house’s backstage area.

The major dashed up stairs, hearing the first sirens in the distance, and sprayed the camera above a door. It opened. He slipped inside and softly shut the door behind him. Immediately, the sirens were gone, silenced by the opera house’s thick acoustical walls.

Sauvage heard only the clicking of a woman’s high heels now. He turned and saw Haja Hamid in the security lights. Her hair was dyed red and pinned up. She wore stiletto heels and a tight, black sleeveless dress that showed off the iron worker’s powerful muscles. Haja glanced back over her shoulder at the major, revealing ruby lips and eyes that were no longer ice gray, but as brilliantly blue as tanzanite.

Sauvage got out a folding pocketknife with a razor-sharp blade and nodded to her. Gesturing onward with her chin, she led Sauvage through several turns in dark hallways before halting when a man’s voice echoed from just ahead.

“Mariama?” he called. “Are you there?”

“Coming, Henri,” Haja called.

She held her hand behind her, signaling to Sauvage to creep along, even as she sped up, her heels cracking off the wood floor until he could no longer see her. The major slipped off his shoes, leaving him in a pair of thin neoprene socks. He locked the knife’s blade open, and then went on as a dog might, pausing to listen for sound, sniffing the air, feeling his way forward until he reached the wings off the stage, where only apron lights glowed.

“My God,” Henri said. “Look at you. You’re a goddess.”

Haja laughed and said, “You’re sure we won’t be bothered here?”

“By who?” He chuckled. “The guards? They wouldn’t dare.”

The major eased up to one of the curtains. His left gloved hand found the ropes that controlled it before he peeked around the curtain. Haja stood about ten feet away at the head of an Egyptian-looking couch. She faced a tall, patrician man coming toward her in an expensive suit, no tie. He carried a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

“Pour me some, chéri,” Haja said.

“With pleasure, my dear,” he replied.

Sauvage took that as his cue. Slipping fully behind the curtain, he reached up and, with the blade, cut the curtain rope just above his hand. Holding that end, he crouched and cut the rope again where it passed through a floor pulley, giving him about three feet in total.

He heard the cork pop and champagne pouring.

“Come,” Haja said. “Sit by me.”

Henri made a murmur of approval. The divan creaked under his added weight. “What shall we drink to?” he asked.

“The future,” she said.

“The future,” he said, and glasses clinked. “You are my muse, you know.”

“So you said.”

Hearing them sip, the major dared not move, and fought to slow his breath and heart as he unlocked the blade and slid it back in his pocket. Then he wrapped the rope around both of his gloved hands with fourteen inches of slack between, and waited.

“I’ve thought about nothing but you all week,” Henri said. “It’s been maddening we couldn’t meet, and…you know.”

“We needed a break,” Haja replied. “Kiss me?”

“With the greatest pleasure.”

Haja made a purr of contentment. There was a rustle of fabric, and Sauvage made his move, sliding out from behind the curtain. He spotted Henri on the couch, back turned in Haja’s embrace.

Stealthy and supple, the major took four silent steps up behind him.

Haja broke the kiss, laughed throatily, and pushed Henri back several inches. It was all Sauvage needed. He flipped the rope over the man’s head and wrenched it tight beneath his chin.

Henri began to struggle, his hands flying to the rope as he let out a squeal of disbelief and fear. The choked man kicked over the champagne bottle and one of the glasses. The major ruthlessly wrenched him off the divan and onto the stage floor.

“No,” Henri wheezed. “Please.”

Sauvage realized he was saying this to Haja.

But Haja only had eyes for the major as she rose from the couch and the older man’s struggles subsided into quivers and then death.

“You are a revolutionary, Émile,” she said as he lowered the dead man until he lay on his side. “A man on the right side of history.”

Twenty minutes later, they shut down the apron lights and made their way to the rear door of the backstage area. Sauvage opened it a crack and saw the security post still empty and cops, the guard, and other bystanders across the traffic circle watching firemen up on ladders, spraying down the smoking roof of the Galeries Lafayette.

No one gave them a second glance when he and Haja slipped out the gate and strolled up the Rue Scribe, arm in arm and heads tilted inward, like lovers heading home after a nice late night on the town.

Chapter 13

SEVERAL SHARP KNOCKS woke me.

Sweat poured off my head and I looked around wildly, realizing I was on the couch in the living room of my suite at the Plaza.

The knock came again. I glanced at my watch. Two minutes to seven.

“Coming,” I grunted, and got up to pad across the carpet to the door. I heard the shower start up again in Kim Kopchinski’s end of the suite.

I looked through the peek hole. Louis Langlois was out in the hallway behind a room service cart laden with baskets of croissants and delicate pastries, and two carafes of coffee that immediately piqued my interest.

“I didn’t know room service was part of your job description,” I said after opening the door to let him in.

“It’s not,” Louis said. “But I adore the croissants here, so perfectly buttery and flaky, you know? I just could not wait for you to make the order.”

When we returned to the living area, Louis began pouring us coffee. “She talk?”

“Never left her bedroom,” I said.

“What’s she been doing?”

“Showering, crying, sleeping, and now showering again.”

“Perhaps she is a compulsive obsessive?” Louis asked before taking a big bite of the croissant that melted his face into pure contentment.

“You ask her that,” I said before tearing off a piece of croissant and popping it in my mouth. The taste was simply incredible, not like the stuff you get back in the States, even in the best of bakeries.

“You like these, yes?”

“Extraordinary,” I said, chewing and then taking a long sip of perfect café au lait. “God, how is it possible that the French eat like this every day and don’t weigh three hundred pounds?”

“That is a cultural secret I am bound to keep,” Langlois said. He laughed and then sobered after glancing at the door to Kim’s room. “I suspect she has been abused.”

“Why would you think that?”

Louis drank more coffee and then said, “Many times when I have interviewed poor victims of such abuse, I have found that we could not collect evidence from their bodies because they had scrubbed them so clean.”

I looked at the closed door, wondered if that was the case. It would certainly explain why she’d been so reluctant to talk to us.

“Maybe we should bring in one of the women in your office,” I said. “Make her more comfortable.”

Louis shook half a croissant at me and said, “A good idea. I’ll see to it at once.”

He finished the pastry, drank down more coffee, got out his cell, and punched in the number for Private Paris. Interested to see what was going on back in the States on CNN, I turned on the television, getting instead a commercial for cheese on TF1, a French station. I was about to change the channel when the commercial ended and the screen switched to a Paris street scene at night. A crowd watched firemen spraying the roof of a smoking building.

“Garde will be here in half an hour,” Louis said. “She’s excellent.”

“What’s going on here?” I said, gesturing at the television.

He stepped up beside me, listened, and then said, “A fire last night at the Galeries Lafayette. No one was injured. Must be a slow news day.”

I looked from the television back to the closed doors to Kim’s bedroom. The shower was still going.

Walking to the doors, I knocked lightly and called, “Kim?”

I waited and then knocked louder, and called, “Kim, we have breakfast out here for you. Could you come out?”

Hearing nothing in return, I glanced at Langlois, who squinted and then made a twisting motion with his right hand. I found the door locked, so I knocked loud enough to be heard easily over the falling water. Nothing again.

“God help me if she’s cut her wrists in there,” I said, pulling out my electronic key card and jimmying the lock.

It took me less than fifteen seconds to pry back the hasp and push open the door to find a rumpled bed, an open window, and a closed bathroom door. I almost went to the door to knock again, but I noticed a note on a piece of hotel stationery sitting on the dresser.

Scrawled in big letters, it said, “Tell my grandfather I’m sorry to have bothered him in troubles of my own making. I’m sorry to everyone.”

Chapter 14

“SON-OF-A-BITCH,” I groaned, sure that she’d gone and done it-committed suicide on me.

I wrenched open the bathroom door and was enveloped in steam. The bathtub was empty. So was the shower.

“She’s running,” Louis said behind me.

“Impossible,” I said, rushing out. “How could she have gotten out of here?”

“The window?” He was already heading that way.

But we were eighty feet up. She’d have to be a human fly.

What about that locked door to that other bedroom? I ran to it, tried the knob, but found it still locked and no sign that the lock had been picked.

Then I noticed the chair in the closet. It faced shelves and drawers and, high on the closet wall, an air duct, which was missing its grate. The hole would have been impossible for me or Louis to squeeze through. But Kim Kopchinski was certainly small enough.

But could she get out? Or was she still in the ductwork somewhere?

Jumping up on the chair, I peered into the duct and saw, ten or twelve feet away, a thick beam of light shining in where another grate had been.

“Damn it,” I snapped, and jumped off the chair, finding Louis searching the bedroom. “She used the air system to get next door. But I heard her turn on the shower right before you knocked. She can’t be ten minutes ahead of us.”

Louis yanked out his phone again, punched in a number, and began barking questions in French. I went out into the living area, grabbed my shoes, and laced them quickly.

Louis stuck his phone in his pocket and started moving fast toward the suite door, saying, “My man outside, Farad, saw a woman matching Kim’s description leave the hotel ten minutes ago and head north. If she has not taken a taxi, we can catch her.”

We bolted from the suite, ran to the stairs, and took them two at a time, emerging in the wide hallway between the hotel lobby and the dining room. A maître d’ holding breakfast menus smiled and then frowned when we sprinted by him toward the lobby.

But an absolutely huge man in a $5,000 blue suit got in our way. He was at least six foot five and 230 pounds of solid muscle, with a thin beard and mustache, and there was a twisting coil of tubing running up his neck to the back of his ear.

“I’m sorry. You can’t enter the lobby just yet,” he said in a Texas twang.

“We have to get outside!” Louis cried. “What is this?”

“We have members of the Saudi royal family checking in. I’m sorry, sir. As I understand it, you may exit through the Dior spa downstairs.”

Rather than argue, we turned and bolted, with Louis telling our ride where to meet us. We emerged from the spa a few moments later, and a BMW sedan skidded up in front of the hotel. We jumped in.

Louis yelled, “Go. Head for George V Métro.”

The driver, whom I’d met only the day before, was Ali Farad, a former investigator with the French National Police based in Marseille. In addition to speaking six languages, Farad had been trained in anti-terror and drove like it. He wove us through the streets toward the George V Métro station, which Louis said lay in the direction Kim Kopchinski had gone in.

We almost caught her.

Her hair and clothes were still dusty from the ductwork when I spotted her crossing the Avenue George V toward the Champs-Élysées and the Métro entrance. Jumping from the moving car, I raced after her.

Cars skidded and horns blared at me as I dodged out into heavy morning traffic. Kim heard the commotion, looked over her shoulder, saw me, and started running as well, but in the other direction.

Crossing the southbound lane on the Avenue George V, a work truck appeared out of nowhere and damn near clipped me. I was forced to halt, gasping and angry. “Kim!” I shouted.

She never broke stride and disappeared into the Métro station. I got there less than thirty seconds later, vaulted the turnstiles, and sprinted toward the sounds of screeching metal and pneumatic doors whooshing open.

I hit an intersection in the tunnel where I had to decide on northbound or southbound platforms.

I chose south.

It was the correct platform.

But by the time I pounded down the stairs and reached it, the train doors were shutting on Kim who waved at me sadly and mouthed the words, “Good-bye, Jack.”

“C’mon!” I shouted. “Really?”

When I ran back out the exit, breathing hard, I found Louis standing there, his cell phone pressed to his ear. He looked pale when he spotted me, held up a finger, and said, “Yes, of course, Evangeline. I’ll go there right now.”

He hung up. “You catch her?”

Pissed off, I said, “She went southbound. Maybe we can still find her.”

Louis shook his head. “We don’t know where she is going. And Private Paris has just been called in on a delicate case.”

“Louis,” I began, “Sherman Wilkerson is one of our biggest clients, and-”

“Jack, you are the boss. I know this. But it is clear to me that Kim Kopchinski is a grown woman who does not want our protection,” Langlois said firmly. “So for the time, while you may go on a silly goose chase after her, I am going to the Palais Garnier. Henri Richard, the director of the Paris Opera and an esteemed member of L’Académie Française, has been found there, murdered. We have been hired to help the police find out why.”

Trying to slow my breath and still pissed off about losing Kim, I said, “By who? His wife?”

“Come, Jack,” Louis said wearily. “This is Paris. That was Richard’s mistress, Evangeline, who just phoned me.”

Chapter 15

6th Arrondissement

9 a.m.

GASPING FOR AIR and sweating, Sauvage rolled off Haja for the second time since they’d returned from the opera house to the small flat where he lived.

Haja propped herself up on one elbow. “Satisfied?”

“More than satisfied,” Sauvage said, lying on his back. “You’re a genius.”

“I pleased you,” she said. “I’m glad. It pleases me.”

The major glanced over at her. Her hair was still red from the evening before, but she’d taken out the contact lenses that had turned her eyes so electrically blue. Now they were back to that ice-gray color, which made her look even more striking. She was smiling, but he caught the envy in her expression.

“Is it ever satisfying for you?” he asked.

“In a way,” she said, tightening and looking away.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Haja replied. “You had nothing to do with it.”

Sauvage hugged her and said, “You’ll get your revenge.”

“It’s so close I can taste it like salt.”

The major looked down at her again, and he felt that thing about her that had attracted him almost immediately, that thing that excited him every time he was with her. Haja gave off the sense that she was a true nomad, unfettered by rules, laws, and convention, as if she were limitless, as if there were no boundaries to what she’d say, and no telling what she might do at any given moment. In many ways, she was the most alluring woman he’d ever known.

Haja moved away from him, rose naked from the bed. He watched her cross the room toward the bathroom, her back and arms as powerful as a swimmer’s, her legs and bum as firm as a sprinter’s.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To meet Epée. And you have class in forty minutes.”

The major groaned, looked at his watch, realized she was right. Getting up from the bed a few minutes later, he padded past the bathroom, where she was already rinsing. He joined her, seeing that her hair was no longer red at all and significantly darker, almost back to that deep mahogany color he loved.

“No one would ever recognize you,” Sauvage said.

“Funny that something so superficial as color blinds people.”

“It will be on the news soon.”

“I know.”

“You’re ready?”

“I was ready when I turned twelve.”

“Where will I find you later?”

“At the factory. Working on the beast.”

“Have you figured out how to make it burn?”

She smiled. “Yes, I think so.”

“See?” the major said, taking her in his arms. “I said you were a genius.”

Chapter 16

9th Arrondissement

9:30 a.m.

THE STREET IN front of the Galeries Lafayette remained cordoned off. The air still stank of smoke, and there were firemen still working up on the roof. Then I saw the yellow sawhorse and tape across the rear gate of the opera house, which made me wonder how we were going to get inside the crime scene.

“Make nothing of it, Jack,” Louis said when I asked. “There is only one investigator with La Crim who might try to keep me out. The others I’ve known and worked with for years. They trust Private and they trust me.”

At the barrier, a police officer stopped us, but then Louis and I showed him identification. He got on his radio. A few minutes later, the officer shook his head.

“What?” Louis said, acting offended. “Who is the investigateur in charge?”

“Hoskins,” the officer replied.

“Merde,” Louis said.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “The one detective?”

“The one,” Louis said, his face twisting in annoyance.

“What’s he got against you?”

“She,” Louis corrected. “And hell has no fury like the woman scorned.”

“You scorned her?”

“No, of course not,” he replied testily. “But we had an affair shortly after she came to Paris, an affair that didn’t turn out as she wished, and she does not let me forget it.”

“So what do we do?”

“What any man in my position would do,” Louis said. “I will-how do you say?-gravel.”

“Grovel,” I said.

“That one,” Louis said, digging out his phone again.

He turned and walked away from me, going to stand against the Société Générale building, hunched over as if preparing for blows to his upper back. He listened and then put his palm to his forehead just before my cell rang.

“This is Jack,” I said.

The line crackled before Justine said, “I’m at Sherman Wilkerson’s place in Malibu. Someone broke in and trashed the place. Sherman must have walked in on them. It’s bad, Jack. They beat him. He’s unconscious, bleeding from his ears and nose. Del Rio called in Life Flight. They’ll be here in five minutes. He’ll be with the neurologists at UCLA Medical in twelve.”

“Jesus Christ,” I groaned.

“What do you want us to do?”

I paused, trying to collect my thoughts.

“Jack?” Justine said.

“I’m here,” I said. “Once he’s in the air, and before you call the sheriff, go through the place, very low impact. Try to figure out what’s missing without screwing up the scene. I figure you’ve got an hour before you absolutely have to put in the call. Use it well, and look for anything to do with France.”

“We can do that.”

“Keep me posted,” I said, and hung up, hating the fact that I was eight thousand miles from Los Angeles and unable to help, and wondering if the break-in and assault were connected to Kim. Had to be.

Louis tapped me on the back and, with a weary smile, said, “We’re in.”

“You grovel well,” I said.

“One of my many talents,” Louis agreed. “But it was your name that did the trick. She wants your take on the murder scene.”

Before I could ask why that could possibly be, the officer at the barrier pulled a sawhorse aside for us. We walked to a rear door, where crime scene techs were working and a woman in her early forties was waiting.

Fit and attractive, Hoskins had spiked, frosted hair and wore jeans, a pink blouse, and a brown leather jacket. Her Paris Prefecture badge hung on a chain around her neck. She shot Louis a look that could melt ice, and then smiled at me.

She shook my hand firmly, saying, “Sharen Hoskins. Nice to meet you, Mr. Morgan. I’ve read and heard a lot about you and your company.”

To my surprise, Hoskins’s accent was not French. In fact, I swore it sounded like the Bronx. But before I could ask about that unlikelihood, she turned to Louis.

“You don’t touch a thing inside. Are we clear on that, Louis?”

“It will be as if I have leprosy. No fingers to speak of.”

“Nice image,” Hoskins said sourly. She handed us booties and latex gloves, saying, “Nothing of what you are about to see gets out. Understood?”

“I guarantee it,” I replied. “But I’m a little confused as to why we’re being allowed in here in the first place.”

“You are said to be a smart, observant guy, Mr. Morgan,” she replied before leading us inside. “And I don’t believe in turf wars. Long as I put the handcuffs on whoever did this, I’ll be a happy girl.”

We followed her down a long series of hallways before exiting a door into a stunning foyer, with a dramatic vaulted ceiling, huge mirrors, and gold paint that shimmered in the light of what looked like gas lamps. A grand marble staircase rose to a landing before splitting and climbing again.

Hoskins started up the first flight, and I followed, saying, “Why does this seem so familiar to me?”

“Phantom of the Opera?” Hoskins said.

“That’s it,” I said, looking around in some awe. My late mother had taken my brother and me to see the play when we were boys.

“Where was the body found?” Louis asked. “Richard’s office?”

“Not so lucky,” the investigateur said, and crossed the landing between statues that supported a marble slab inscribed “Amphitheater.”

We went through double doors and emerged in a horseshoe-shaped and lofty space decorated in gold and deep reds. A giant chandelier glowed overhead, revealing the incredible design and sheer opulence of the theater.

“Where’s the body?” I asked.

“I wanted you to see him just as he was discovered,” she said, and barked a command into a radio.

The curtains began to open. The area behind it was shadowed until a spotlight went on above and behind us, throwing a beam aimed into the air ten feet above the center of the stage.

“You don’t see that every day,” I said softly.

“Exactly,” Hoskins replied.

Chapter 17

HENRI RICHARD’S CORPSE hung upside down from a rope tied about his ankles. His white dress shirt had come free of his suit pants and hung bunched up around his lower rib cage. A length of rope dangled from his neck.

Other ropes were lashed to his wrists and held his arms directly out to the sides. All the blood in his body had responded to gravity and had rushed to the opera director’s head. His face was bug-eyed and dark purple.

“Who found him and when?” I asked.

“A security guard shortly after the shift change at six a.m.,” Investigateur Hoskins replied. “The guards on duty last night said Richard arrived on foot at the rear gate at around twelve thirty with an exotic redhead half his age.”

“Why do so many Parisian tales begin with a younger woman?” Louis asked.

Hoskins ignored him and said, “Because she was with Richard, the guards didn’t ask for her identification, and she managed to keep her face turned from the security tapes we’ve reviewed.”

“So she’s your killer?” I asked skeptically. “That’s a big man. It would take a woman of Amazonian proportions to hoist him up like that.”

Hoskins tilted her head as if reappraising me before saying, “Yes, and it would take an Amazon to strangle monsieur le directeur with a length of rope cut from one of the curtains. It appears she had one or more accomplices.”

“Is that fact or conjecture?” Louis asked.

The investigator directed her answer to me. “After the fire broke out across the street, the security guard forgot all about Monsieur Richard and his mystery date. But the tapes from the security cameras at the gate and above that stage door we came through indicate that someone sprayed the lenses with a gel of some kind shortly after the fire started.”

“So the fire was a diversion?” I said.

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Motive?”

“None that we understand at the moment.”

“Meaning what?” Louis asked.

“Meaning there’s more to this scene than you can see from back here,” Hoskins said curtly before marching down the aisle.

We followed her past plush red orchestra seats to stairs that climbed the left side of the stage. I could see high above us that the other end of the rope tied to Richard’s ankles had been lashed to a catwalk that gave access to scrims and overhead lights. The ropes that held the opera director’s arms at ninety degrees to the body were tied to light poles at the left and right of the stage.

Hoskins halted just shy of the corpse.

“There’s your motivation,” she said, gesturing to the stage floor.

I came around her with Louis trailing and stopped, seeing for the first time the looping, bloodred graffiti that would torment Paris in the coming days.

AB-16

Chapter 18

I STUDIED THE tag, then looked almost straight up at the opera director’s corpse. Henri Richard’s eyes seemed to stare directly down at the graffiti.

“What does it mean?” I asked. “AB-16? Some French thing?”

“We have no idea,” Hoskins said. “Or at least I have no idea. Yet. But tell me, Mr. Morgan, what does it all suggest to you? This mystery woman Henri was with. The fire diversion across the street so her accomplice could enter. The weapon. The setting. The position of the body postmortem. And this graffiti.”

Louis cleared his throat and said, “I’ll tell you what I think.”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion, Louis,” Hoskins said brusquely. “I’m interested in an L.A. perspective for the moment.”

Langlois puffed up in irritation but bit his tongue when I gave him an almost imperceptible shake of my chin and said, “From an L.A. perspective, the position of the corpse and the tag is meant to cause shock, attract attention, provoke interest, and perhaps invite speculation. Through a West Hollywood lens, it could be interpreted as fetishistic, the killers acting out some kind of perversity, real or imagined.”

“The weapon?”

After considering that, I went with my instincts and said, “The curtain rope is part of Richard’s world, so it could be symbolic or it could be ironic. The setting could be interpreted in either way as well, depending on the killers’ intent.”

The investigator wrapped her arms together and pursed her lips.

“And this graffiti?”

“In L.A., graffiti can mean a lot of things,” I replied. “But here it strikes me like gang graffiti, meant to define turf in some way.”

Hoskins walked around the tag, considering it, glancing up at the body, and then halting. She looked at Louis. “And you, Monsieur Langlois?”

Louis’s eyelids went heavy. “Jack has said it all.”

She stared at him with her jaw moving slightly, but then smiled at me and extended her hand. “Well, then, I appreciate you coming in, Mr. Morgan. At the moment, we need to clear the theater so the criminalists can do their job.”

I shook her hand, took her card, and gave her mine.

As we turned to leave, she said, “And Louis, I know you said Private Paris has been hired by Richard’s mistress, but that gives you no legal standing to get in the way of my murder investigation. We’re clear on that?”

His eyelids still heavy, Louis said, “Très clair, madame l’investigateur.”

The streets outside the Palais Garnier had been turned into a media circus by the time we exited the opera house. Word of Richard’s death was out. There were white television vans parked beyond the cordoned area. Several reporters recognized Louis and started peppering him with questions in French.

He begged off, telling them that Investigateur Hoskins was the person to find. When we’d finally broken free of them, Louis lit a cigarette and puffed on it violently while using his iPhone to summon a ride through Uber, an app and company that provide on-demand private cars and drivers.

“Two minutes,” he said. “This Uber thing really works, you know.”

I nodded. “I’ve used it in L.A. when I’ve wanted to go out, have a few drinks. On another note, Hoskins really does not like you.”

“Oh, really?” Louis said, drawing it out and dripping with sarcasm. Then he flicked his ash and added, with a tinge of regret, “It is a pity, actually, because I do admire her, and in the art of love she was truly magnificent.”

The Uber car turned up before I could reply. We climbed in and Louis gave the driver the address of our new client, the opera director’s mistress.

When we were rolling, I said, “You did see something in the opera house that I missed, right?”

“Perhaps,” Louis said.

“Want to enlighten me?”

“There is a friend of mine I wish to consult before I draw any conclusions or make any claims.”

“Former cop?”

“A professor of art,” he said. “And an expert on graffiti.”

Chapter 19

16th Arrondissement

11:35 a.m.

LOUIS AND I pulled up in front of a beautiful old building in a chic neighborhood north of Place du Trocadéro. The mistress’s maid, a tiny Vietnamese woman, opened the apartment door before Louis could knock.

She led us into a well-appointed living area where two women sat on a couch, holding hands and struggling not to weep. The younger and larger of the two women was in her late forties, with dark, Mediterranean features. The older woman, a petite platinum blonde with a dancer’s posture, might have been sixty, but if so she’d aged incredibly well.

The younger woman said, “Louis, we are so glad you’ve come.”

“How could I not for an old and dear friend?” Louis said, taking her in his arms for a brief bear hug. Then he turned and said, “This is Jack Morgan, the head of all Private. Jack, this is Evangeline Soleil.”

She greeted me with a sad smile and said, “I wish it were under different circumstances, Monsieur Morgan. And may I introduce Valerie Richard?”

Before the name could register with me, Louis went straight to the woman and clasped her hand in his great paws, and said, “Madame Richard, I am so very sorry for your loss. If Private Paris can do anything, please ask.”

For a second there I admit I was kind of floored to find the widow and the mistress comforting each other in their hour of grief, but then I chalked it up to one more thing that confused me about the French. I shook Madame Richard’s hand and she, too, thanked me for taking an interest.

After the maid brought us coffee, the women sat side by side again, holding hands, looking expectantly at Louis.

“What have you found out?” Evangeline Soleil said.

“La Crim will tell us nothing,” Valerie Richard said.

“How did you know your husband was dead?” I asked.

The opera director’s wife said, “One of the guards called me, and I immediately called Evangeline.”

“And I called La Crim,” the mistress said. “And all they said was that someone would be along to talk with us in due time.”

“Have either of you heard Henri mention the phrase ‘AB-16’?” I asked.

Both women shook their heads.

“What does it mean?” Valerie Richard said.

“We don’t know,” Louis said, and then masterfully recounted what we’d learned without telling them what we’d seen, as I’d guaranteed Hoskins.

Rather than express shock or outrage that Richard had been with a young redhead, the two women looked at each other as if in vindication.

“We were right,” the mistress said. “He was up to his old tricks.”

“The foolish old goat,” the wife said. “It got him killed after all.”

Both women said that Richard was ordinarily given to melancholy, but he had been acting strangely happy in the past few weeks, disappearing at night for mysterious meetings and telling neither of them where he’d been.

Richard’s wife said she had confronted her husband finally, and he had said there was no new love interest, that he’d been holing up in a studio flat in Popincourt that he’d inherited from his mother to work on the libretto of a new opera. He had told his mistress the same thing.

“Devious, wasn’t he?” Evangeline Soleil said to Valerie Richard.

The wife sighed in anguish and said, “There are things we cannot change about some men no matter how hard we try.”

“Some men?” the mistress said. “All men.”

This vein of discussion made me shift in my seat and try to change course. “Did he have any enemies?”

Valerie Richard shot me a look as if I were mentally challenged. “What man in a position like his does not have enemies?”

I hadn’t thought of opera house director as being a particularly dangerous or controversial job before. “Anyone specific?”

Evangeline Soleil let out a long, slow breath and said, “Anyone in the opera community you might think of, Mr. Morgan. I mean, they all acted nice to Henri, but you know how it is when someone is successful in Paris.”

“Uh, actually, I don’t,” I said.

Louis said, “The people in the same field, they hate you for your success. They think something must be wrong, that you’re corrupt in some way.”

“Of course,” Richard’s wife said. “They plot against you.”

I said, “Was there anyone actively plotting against him lately?”

“The redhead, obviously,” his mistress sniffed.

“Focus on her,” the wife agreed. “A woman will be at the center of it all.”

Chapter 20

18th Arrondissement

Noon

HAJA HAMID EXITED the women’s toilet and went to the fountain in the lobby of the mosque. She performed the ritual of ablution-washing her hands and feet-with practiced ease. When she stepped into the women’s prayer hall, there were already fifty or sixty women inside. Like Haja, they all wore brown or black robes and matching scarves. Some, like Haja, also wore veils.

She knelt at the back, listening to the clicking of worry beads and the voices murmuring surrender to Allah. The sounds brought back so many memories that she was filled once again with strength and resolve.

Facing east, Haja started the physical motions of Islamic prayer, bowing to put her forehead flat on the carpet and then rising with a stiff posture. She wasn’t silently reciting lines from the Koran, however. Her lips curled around vows she’d made long ago.

She waited until Imam Ibrahim Al-Moustapha went to the front of the prayer hall to lead the service. The second his back was turned, Haja got up and returned to the anteroom, searching for her sandals amid all the other shoes.

The imam began his talk just as she snatched up her sandals and went out the door, into the street. Head down, Haja kicked into the sandals and moved past three men trying to paint over the AB-16 tag on the mosque’s outer wall.

Satisfied that the bloodred tag was still bleeding through, she walked by a man sweeping the sidewalk in front of FEZ Couriers, a messenger service next door to the mosque, and then a tailor shop that sold robes.

“Ay, pétasse!”

The call-“Hey, bitch!”-came from the other side of the street.

Haja glanced left and saw him: late teens, pale skin, and brown curly hair. Carrying a camera slung across his chest, he was pointing at her in a rage.

“Can’t wear the veil in public, Muslim bitch!” he yelled.

Haja tore down the veil, turned her head from him, and broke into a trot. When she glanced again, he was angling across the street at her.

That kicked her into an all-out sprint down the sidewalk toward an old green Peugeot sedan. She got there half a block ahead of her pursuer, jumped in the backseat, and said, “Get us out of here. Now.”

Epée already had the Peugeot running. He threw it in gear and squealed out, heading back toward the mosque. The teen stepped from between two cars, trying to aim his camera.

Haja pulled up the veil. In the front passenger seat, Mfune, who was dressed in the green jumpsuit of a Paris sanitation worker, turned his head. Epée jerked the wheel toward the kid as if to run him down.

The photographer jumped back between the parked cars and they were past him.

“What was that all about?” Epée asked.

“My fault,” she said. “When I came out of the mosque, I still had the veil up and he started shouting at me that I was a Muslim bitch.”

“Why the camera?” Epée demanded, turning off the boulevard heading toward the train tracks.

“I have no idea,” she said, taking deeper and slower breaths. “None.”

“Did you get the job done?” Mfune asked.

The tension fell from Haja’s shoulders. She wiped at the sweat on her brow, saying, “Just as we planned. You?”

The captain held up a green translucent plastic bag filled with trash and said, “What do you think?”

Chapter 21

WE LEFT EVANGELINE Soleil’s flat, having received permission from Valerie Richard to search her home. She’d offered to take us there straightaway, but Louis said he wanted to go take a look at her husband’s opera-writing hideaway first.

The Uber car was waiting, and Louis gave the driver the address.

“So is that the norm in Paris?” I asked. “To have a mistress and a wife who are friends?”

“No,” Louis said. “And even to have a mistress now, it is not so common among men younger than fifty.”

“Why’s that?”

“Changing times,” he said with a note of wistfulness. “Now, the young are all in relationships, except when they are-how do you say?-exchanging.”

“Exchanging what?”

“Each other,” he said.

“You mean swinging?”

“That’s the word,” Louis said. “There are clubs, even, for these things.”

As we pulled out into traffic, I stared out the window at people and wondered how many had mistresses, or were mistresses, or were swingers. I live in L.A., and I am hardly a prude, but I found Paris behind closed doors oddly fascinating.

“Are they right?” I asked. “About the redhead being at the center of it?”

“She’s part of it. But the center? I don’t think so.”

“Reason?”

He brooded for several moments before saying, “Just my instinct, Jack. Still nothing hard that I can hold on to yet.”

That seemed to remind Louis of something because he got out his iPhone and started punching in numbers. Before he finished and hit send, my own cell rang. It was Justine calling from L.A.

“How’s Sherman?” I asked.

She sounded exhausted and upset. “He’s in surgery, Jack. They’re removing a piece of his skull to relieve the pressure from brain swelling.”

“That’s awful,” I said, frustrated again that we didn’t have his granddaughter in a safe place. “What’s his prognosis?”

“The doctors won’t tell me,” she said. “I’m not next of kin. But a nurse in the ICU said he’ll probably be held in an artificial coma for the next couple of days. Is the granddaughter on the way home?”

“She ran. We don’t have her.”

“This is bad, Jack,” she said. “There’s no one here to make decisions.”

“Find out who he named as the executor of his living will.”

“After I get a few hours’ sleep,” she promised. “It’s four a.m. here and-Del Rio just came in. He wants to tell you something.”

“Jack?” Del Rio growled.

“You’re up early.”

“Late,” he replied. “One of the great perks of the job.”

Del Rio told me that he’d gone through Wilkerson’s home before alerting the L.A. sheriff about the assault and break-in. The deputies and detectives who arrived weren’t very happy about the delay in notification, but they’d live.

“You figure out what they were looking for?” I asked.

“No,” Del Rio replied. “At least nothing that jumped right out at me. But I did find something you might find useful. Wilkerson still keeps paper bank statements around, and some involve her trust.”

“You’ve got an account number?”

“I do. She uses a debit card and makes cash withdrawals from ATM machines. No checking account.”

“You have records of the withdrawals?”

“Not for this month yet, if that’s what you mean.”

“It is what I mean,” I said. “Even though Sherman’s old-school when it comes to keeping his financial records, his bank won’t be. You should be able to get an up-to-the-minute electronic record of all withdrawals she’s made.”

“It’s a private account.”

“Use your imagination.”

“That’s never been one of my long suits, but I’ll let you know.”

“Get some sleep. The both of you.”

“Nah, we’ll stick around until he comes out of surgery, and charge you double time while we’re doing it.”

“Nice of you.”

“I’m a saint. Didn’t you know?” Del Rio said, and hung up.

Louis ended his call as well and said, “My friend the graffiti expert will see us once classes are over for the day. Around four.”

I brought him up to date on Sherman’s condition and on Del Rio’s discovery of Kim’s trust account.

“If you can get some kind of alert every time she uses her ATM card, we should be able to track her down,” Louis said.

“Exactly,” I said. “I’d still like to know what they were after-the guys who beat Sherman, I mean.”

“Maybe the same thing,” he grunted. “Some way to track Kim.”

It made sense, and it made me anxious. Even though she’d run on us, I didn’t want to see her end up like her grandfather, with surgeons sawing off part of her skull to relieve the swelling.

The driver pulled over a few minutes later in front of a pharmacy on the Rue Popincourt, a narrow street of trendy boutiques. Louis led the way to the high arched double doors next to the pharmacy and was ringing the bell when I happened to glance at the lower wall. I tapped Louis on the shoulder and gestured at the small red letters.

AB-16

“Looks like we came to the right place,” Louis said.

Chapter 22

I GOT OUT my phone and took a picture of the tag before the door opened and the concierge, an older woman in a smock and apron, looked out at us suspiciously, and barked at us in a French patois that completely lost me.

Louis showed her his identification and spoke to her. She argued for a bit, but then reluctantly allowed us in. We entered a nice courtyard, and Louis spoke again to the old woman, who scolded him in return.

“Okay,” he said. “Richard’s mother’s place is on the top floor.”

As we climbed a steep set of switchback staircases, I said, “I didn’t understand a thing that came out of that old woman’s mouth.”

“Because she’s from Portugal,” he said. “Most concierges are.”

“What were you arguing about? The apartment?”

“No, no,” he said. “About the woman. She says she never saw a redhead come to see Richard here. Plenty of other women, but no redhead.”

“She here all the time?”

“Pretty much.”

“When was the last time she saw him?”

“Four days ago.”

We reached the upper floor. The ceiling of the garret was quite low and we had to stoop beneath a beam to get to Richard’s studio flat. We put on latex gloves. Louis got out a pick set and fiddled with the lock until it clicked.

When we pushed open the wooden door there was a rush of wind. Shredded paper and several pigeons flew everywhere. The windows were wide open. Once we’d shooed out the birds and closed the windows, I could see that the place was less than five hundred square feet and completely in shambles.

Bookcases turned over. Desk drawers pulled out. Files dumped. A laptop computer lay smashed beside them. The kitchen cabinets were open. So was the small refrigerator, which smelled of rotted meat and curdled milk.

Paper was strewn across the floor and on the bed, which had been stripped of linen and blankets save a blue pillowcase. And on the wall above the headboard there was the tag again: AB-16.

Louis picked up a handful of papers and files and started going through them.

I went to the head of the bed, leaned over, and sniffed the graffiti paint.

“New,” I said, pulling back and crinkling my nose. “Past day or so.”

Louis said, “And it looks like he was working on an opera libretto.”

Then he looked confused and went back to reading.

I got down on my knees to look under the bed, hearing Louis grab up more files and more paper. At first glance, I saw nothing. But as I drew my head back to get up, I noticed that a section of floorboard about eighteen inches long was sticking up a half inch or so over by the wall.

I got up and moved the bed to get at that floorboard. I was able to use my fingernails to pry up the board, revealing a plastic Tupperware-style container.

I lifted it out, unsnapped the lid, and looked inside.

As I did, Louis slapped the files in his hand and said, “I sensed at the murder scene that Monsieur Richard had been playing with fire. This proves it. No wonder he got burned.”

That didn’t register for several seconds while I studied the shocking contents of the box. Finally, I looked up and said, “Come again?”

“The libretto of his opera, Jack,” he said. “It is the tale of a doomed love affair between a Catholic priest and a Muslim woman.”

I glanced back in the box, squinted one eye, and said, “Then I’ll bet this is what they were in here looking for.”

Coming over to look, Louis said, “What have you got?”

“The gas Henri Richard played with when he was playing with fire.”

Chapter 23

INSIDE THE BOX were condoms, lubricant, and sex toys. There were also raunchy porno photos of Richard in a priest’s collar having sex with a woman.

In some of the pictures she wore a flowing black robe hitched up over her hips. In others, she was naked from the neck down. But in every picture we found, she wore a black hijab and veil that hid her face except for deep-brown eyes that seemed to stare defiantly into the camera lens.

I took the pictures out, one by one, and set them on the lid, where Louis could see and make his own judgments. When I did, I realized there was something else zipped inside the kind of clear plastic case my mother used to use to protect her sweaters.

“I’ve got the priest’s collar and the hijab here,” I said. “Those could be different women in the pictures using the outfit to fulfill his fucked-up fantasies.”

Louis shook his head and said, “It is the same woman. Sans doute.”

I looked at him skeptically and then he pointed out the evidence in the pictures, and I was horrified and sickened. Setting the pictures back on the box top, my mind whirled with questions and speculations.

Was the veiled woman in the photographs also the redhead Henri Richard was seen with last night? Were these disturbing photos behind the opera director’s murder? Someone in the woman’s Muslim family seeking vengeance?

Something Louis said came back to me, and I looked over at him. “What was that you said earlier about the murder scene being more than it seemed?”

His jaw stiffened. “With these photos, I cannot see it another way now. The whole thing looked highly symbolic to me, Jack.”

“Okay.”

Louis hesitated and then said, “Remember how Richard was hanging?”

I nodded and said, “Inverted, arms out to his side, looking down at the graffiti.”

“Yes, now put a narrow beam of wood behind him from above his toes to below his head, and a second one holding his arms out at right angles.”

I saw it, and my eyes flew open. “An upside-down cross?”

“The cross of the apostle Saint Peter,” Louis said. “Do you know this story?”

Though lapsed, I’d been raised a Catholic by my staunch mother, and vaguely remembered the story. “When the apostle Peter was condemned to death for spreading Christ’s word, he asked his executioners to crucify him upside down because he thought he was unworthy of dying as Jesus had died.”

“This is correct,” Louis said.

“But what does that have-”

He held up his hands and said, “Over the centuries, Saint Peter’s upside-down cross also became an anti-Christian symbol, one that suggested the religion’s ultimate demise, especially among Islamists and during the Crusades.”

“Crusades?” I groaned. “I hope you’re not telling me this is one of those hokey stories that link a killing to some secret Christian society and a valuable ancient whatever belonging to Saint whomever.”

“No, no,” he snorted. “No evidence of that, thank God. I’m just saying that you can interpret Richard’s body position as anti-Christian, and perhaps pro-Islamist. That’s how it struck me at first view, but I had no other link. Now, with pictures of Richard role-playing a priest having sex with a Muslim woman, and Richard writing an opera about a torrid affair between a Catholic priest and a Muslim woman, I’d say we have the link.”

“So who killed Richard? Father? Brothers? And who was the redhead?”

“I don’t-”

The door blew open behind us and the little flat became crowded with men aiming pistols at us.

Chapter 24

SHAREN HOSKINS CAME in behind her men. Her face contorted and red, she snapped, “You are both under arrest.”

“On what charges?” Louis demanded.

“Obstruction of justice!” the homicide investigator shouted. “Evidence tampering! And I can probably come up with six more!”

“We were given permission by the widow to be here,” I said. “And we followed Interpol search procedures. This place was tossed before we got here.”

Hoskins’s expression soured, and she said, “You have absolutely no say in any of this, Monsieur Morgan.”

Louis said, “Can we help it if La Crim moves at a snail’s pace, while Private Paris makes discoveries missed by whoever searched this place first?”

Hoskins narrowed her left eye and said, “What discoveries?”

Langlois told her about Richard’s opera libretto. I showed her the hijab and veil, and the pictures. She studied them coldly while Louis explained his belief that the women were all one and the same, and that the opera director’s body position was meant as an anti-Christian statement.

“Do you see?” he asked. “Now imagine if we are under arrest and we explain this to every journalist we can get interested in our case.”

Hoskins set the photographs down, thought for several moments, and then said, “For finding this evidence you are no longer under arrest.”

“It was just a mix-up,” Louis said in a magnanimous tone.

“Yes,” I said. “And in a gesture of goodwill, I can offer you Private Paris’s forensics team to work this room. They are fully certified.”

“I’m sure,” she said, cool. “But we can take care of it.”

The investigateur stepped toward Louis, hardened, and shook a finger in his face, saying, “But so help me God, Louis, if you or your boss breathe one word of what you’ve seen in here, or if you pursue anything having to do with what you’ve seen in here, Monsieur Morgan will be deported immediately, and you, Louis, will be held incommunicado for as long as I see fit.”

“You don’t have that authority,” he said in a soft growl.

“But I know people who do,” Hoskins said. “Now, gentlemen, I need you to get far, far out of my way.”

Langlois looked ready to argue further, but I said, “Louis, don’t we have that other appointment anyway? The art lady?”

“What art lady?” the investigateur asked.

“Another case,” Louis said, brightening and moving toward the door. “On my honor, we will not breathe a word of what we have seen here.”

“Louis, you have no honor,” she said.

“You wound me,” he said, opening the door, and we left.

Outside on the street, I said, “So what do we tell the wife and mistress?”

“Officially, we say that we cannot continue under orders from La Crim,” he said. “Unofficially is another story. As you have just heard, I have no honor.”

“I, for one, disagree.”

“You have not known me long enough,” Langlois grunted, and laughed.

He lit a cigarette, and we walked along the Rue Popincourt.

Recalling that Del Rio was trying to track Kim Kopchinski through her finances, I suggested we do the same for the opera director. Louis said that it was certain Hoskins had frozen access to the accounts.

“Even his wife couldn’t get at them now,” he said, and then smiled and blew smoke rings. “Ah, but I bet a dog I know could get to them.”

Chapter 25

20th Arrondissement

3 p.m.

LOUIS SAID WE still had almost an hour and a half before we were due to meet with his friend the graffiti expert, so we took a short Métro ride and came aboveground at the Philippe Auguste station.

We headed north along the Boulevard de Ménilmontant until we reached the Rue de la Roquette, where we headed west to number 173. Louis rang the bell of an apartment on the second floor of the small building, but no answer.

“No problem,” he said to me. “I know where Le Chien will be.”

“Why are we looking for a dog?” I asked as he lit another cigarette.

“Not a dog, Jack. The Dog. And if he is not home, he is usually sniffing around gravestones.”

We crossed the boulevard and entered Père-Lachaise cemetery.

“This place is huge,” I said. “How are we going to find him?”

“He usually orbits between the tomb of Héloïse and Abelard and the grave of Jim Morrison.”

I’d never been in the famous cemetery before, and as we walked the paths I had to hand it to the Parisians. They knew how to commemorate their dead. Each headstone or tomb face was carved in some bas-relief or fitted with the statues of angels, or children, sleeping men, or women whose bronze faces were streaked with green patinas so they seemed to be weeping.

We passed tourists gathered by the tomb of the ill-fated twelfth-century lovers Héloïse and Abelard, but spotted no one who fit Louis’s description of Le Chien. For several minutes I thought we were on a wild dog chase, but then we looped toward a crowd around Morrison’s grave.

Many of the pilgrims wore pictures of the dead singer on their shirts. Others were lighting candles. A speaker cabled to an MP3 player was blasting “Peace Frog,” which caught my attention because the song had played a part in a bizarre series of crimes in Los Angeles the year before. In any case, Jim Morrison was chanting about ghosts crowding the child’s fragile eggshell mind when Louis said, “And there he is.”

Mouthing along with the lyrics and carrying a filthy green book bag, the Dog moved outside the perimeter of the crowd, seeming to know which monuments he could step up on to get a better look at the people in front of the rock singer’s grave. There he’d pause a second, make a slight sideways twitch of his head, pop the tips of the fingers on both hands together, and then move on a few feet and repeat the ritual.

Louis cut him off. “Chien?” he said.

The Dog stopped and looked afraid, but then relaxed a bit and said, “Louis?”

“Right here, my friend, as always,” Louis said, and held out his fist.

The Dog hesitated, scratched at his scraggly reddish beard, and contemplated Louis’s hand for a long beat before reluctantly bumping it.

“I have a job for you,” Louis said. “If you feel like working.”

“Who’s he?” he asked.

“Jack,” Louis said. “He’s my boss.”

“Boss is from fantastic L.A.,” the Dog said, as if remembering the fact.

“That’s right,” I said. “I live in Los Angeles.”

He seemed to tune us out then, and started to sing with Morrison, “Blood in my love in the terrible-”

Louis snapped his fingers in front of the Dog’s eyes and said, “Work?”

The Dog tilted his head sideways, and I noticed a thick white scar high on the left side of his head, not quite hidden by his hair.

“How much?” he asked.

“Sensitive job,” Louis said. “Two thousand euros.”

“Make it twenty-five hundred, and the Dog starts right now.”

“Deal,” Louis said.

“Need somewhere quiet,” he said, and then started walking away from us.

We followed as the Dog strolled on, tilting his head, popping his fingertips together, and never looking back. He finally took a seat on the marble stairs to the right of Frédéric Chopin’s grave, which featured a muse with a lyre sitting in grief.

The Dog took off his knapsack and pulled out a MacBook Pro. He set it in his lap and opened it. When he did, he seemed to change-become calmer, certainly. The facial tics did not stop, but they subsided as he stared at the screen, and his language became more fluid and connected.

“What do you need, Louis?” he asked.

Louis handed him a piece of paper he’d scribbled on during the Métro ride and said, “I need this man’s financials. Past three months.”

The Dog looked at it and said, “He’s the opera director.”

“Yes.”

“He’s dead.”

“That’s right.”

“So the accounts will be frozen.”

“You’re right again.”

“This will take a while,” he said. “Later today?”

“That will be fine.”

“Cash on delivery.”

“Same as always.”

And then it was as if we’d been dismissed. The Dog gazed at the screen as if it were a doorway into another world, and he started to type.

Louis tugged on my sleeve. We left him, heading back toward the cemetery’s front gate. When we’d gotten out of earshot, I said, “Okay, so what’s his story? What’s that scar on his head?”

“The scar and his story are one and the same,” Louis replied sadly.

The Dog’s real name was Pierre Moulton. Louis had been best man at the Dog’s parents’ wedding. The boy was born soon after and proved to be a prodigy. He could speak with fluency at fourteen months and learned algebra at five years old. His true genius surfaced at age eight, when his parents gave him a computer and he taught himself how to write code.

“They lived there on the Rue de la Roquette, where we rang the bell,” Louis said. “Pierre was, as I said, a genius. But he was not very coordinated and possessed very little common sense. When he was fourteen he went out riding his bike without a helmet.”

A motorcyclist clipped him, sending him flying. His head collided with a curb and caused a massive injury to his skull and brain.

“A tragedy,” Louis said. “It is only because of his incredible natural intelligence that he can do what he can now. He’s still a brilliant hacker.”

“What’s with the name?”

He shrugged as we left the cemetery. “It was something he just came up with one day. He liked that it made him sound tough.”

“Parents?”

Louis dipped his head and said, “Both dead. His mom to cancer, and his dad to a heart attack. In the will, I was named his guardian and the trustee of the insurance money he got from the accident, which was not much when you consider he’ll probably live a long time.”

“But you give him work when you can?”

“Of course,” Louis said. “He’s a genius and I’m all the Dog has left.”

Chapter 26

6th Arrondissement

4:35 p.m.

WE CLIMBED FROM a cab on the Rue Bonaparte and went to the security gate at L’Académie des Beaux-Arts.

Langlois asked for Professor Herbert and was given directions to a studio in a large building across the cut-stone courtyard. Classes were letting out. Scores of young hipsters poured out into the courtyard carrying sketchbooks as they bustled toward the street.

“This is the school for artists in France, correct?” I asked.

“The students are less French these days. You get kids from the States, or Japan, or wherever, and they want to study art. Their rich parents have heard of this place, which was, at one time, the very center of the art world. Now not so much. The art world has passed by this place, except for my friend Professor Herbert, who is a groundbreaker, as you will see.”

Louis led the way to a high-ceilinged room, where an older man with gray frizzed-out hair was talking to a lean woman in jeans and a starched white shirt with the collar turned up against her bobbed hairdo. He stood in three-quarter profile. She had her back to us.

They were studying a huge collage that featured iconic Parisian street scenes as a backdrop. Over the top of the backdrop were images from France’s past, both good times and bad. There were bright blue graffiti tags as well. They featured arrows and question marks linking the images in a way that suggested the city’s vast history and commented on it.

“Professor?” Langlois called.

I don’t know why, but I expected the older guy to reply.

Instead, the woman smiled and cried, “Louis Langlois, it has been much too long!”

To say that Professor Herbert was good-looking would be like saying Usain Bolt jogged or Adele sang a few songs in her spare time. She had a flawless complexion; high, pronounced cheekbones; and a delicate jaw that ran out from lush dark hair to a dimpled chin that featured a tiny mole on the left side.

Her eyes were soft, aquamarine, and turned up ever so slightly at the outer corners, as if fashioned after teardrops. Her nose looked wind-carved, with a narrow bridge and flaring nostrils. Her lips were thinner and more alluring than the Botox pout you see on so many models and actresses back in L.A., and her smile, though brilliantly white, wasn’t perfect. Like the actress Lauren Hutton, she had a small gap between her upper two front teeth.

“This is my boss, Jack Morgan,” Langlois said after embracing her and blowing Euro kisses. “Jack, may I present Professor Michele Herbert.”

Her smile broadened, and she pressed her tongue into the back of that gap between her teeth. She held out her hand and said in lightly accented English, “Enchanted to meet you, monsieur. I have read of Private’s exploitations. That is the word, yes?”

I was frankly mesmerized, but managed to say, “Close enough. And I am the one who is enchanted.”

Her eyes and hand lingered on me before she pressed her tongue again to that gap in her teeth and turned, gesturing to the old guy with the frizzy hair.

“Louis?” she said. “Do you know François? My representative?”

François took Louis’s hand and then mine in that weird little three-quarter thing the French call a handshake.

“Michele has made a miracle, yes?” he said, pointing at the collage.

Louis nodded and said, “Something that the French can ponder and argue about for years to come.”

“And Monsieur Morgan? It pleases you?”

“It intrigues me,” I said.

“‘Intrigue’ is good, yes?” said Michele Herbert, who smiled impishly.

“I’ve made a good living out of intrigue.”

“And Michele will do this as well,” her rep said. “I have galleries all over the world clamoring to represent her.”

Herbert blushed and said, “François, you make too much of me.”

“I must be going, to make much of you everywhere I can,” he replied. He blew kisses past her cheeks and then sort of shook our hands again before leaving.

“So, how may I help you?” the art professor asked.

“I told Jack that you are an expert on graffiti,” Louis said.

Herbert turned the smile on me again and said, “He also makes too much of me. Graffiti is my interest as a historian, and it has become a part of my own work over the years.”

Digging out my iPhone, I showed her the photograph we’d taken of the AB-16 tag outside Henri Richard’s pied-à-terre.

She said, “I have never seen this before. What does it mean?”

“We don’t know,” Louis said.

Herbert looked at it again, a frown appearing as she said, “C’est bizarre.”

Chapter 27

“WHAT’S BIZARRE?” LOUIS asked.

“Can you e-mail this photo to me?” she asked. “So I can see it better?”

I did, and she blew it up on a computer screen in a corner of the studio. She made a little puffing noise and then gestured at the loops and shadow work on the A and the B of the tag. “You see how these come together to create that-how do you say?-pop?”

“The three-dimensionality?” I asked.

“This too,” Herbert said. “But you see the letters, how they seem to hover? It is one of the signature methods of a Parisian graffiti artist who called himself Zee Pac-Man.”

“Where can we find him?” I asked.

“He was murdered late last year, just after Christmas. Found dead in the 9th beneath his last tag. Stabbed several times in the back.”

Louis said, “So what? This could be a follower of Zee Pac-Man?”

“Or simply a thief,” Herbert replied, and then looked to me to explain. “Artists steal what we like and admire, you know this?”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Do you still have all those followers?” Louis asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Think you could ask them if they’ve seen this tag elsewhere?”

“Bien sûr,” she replied. “What do I say it is about?”

“Just say you’re interested,” Louis replied, and then explained to me that Herbert had a Facebook page where people from all over the world posted shots of interesting graffiti. The page had been “liked” by more than half a million people.

“She has thousands of Parisians who follow her. Isn’t that right?”

Herbert blushed again. “They follow the graffiti. I just help others see it.”

I liked her. A lot. In the past I’ve met a few successful artists, and had several as clients. The majority are quirky egocentrics quick to turn the lights on themselves, a trait that inevitably leads to self-destructive behaviors. But Herbert seemed normal as well as self-deprecating, smart, and, well, just gorgeous.

“Any help would be much appreciated,” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “You are in Paris long, Monsieur Morgan?”

I glanced at Louis, thought about all that had happened since my arrival, and said, “That’s unclear. But a few more days, anyway.”

“Well, then, I will put the request on the Facebook page rapidement.”

“Excellent,” I said. “And it was an honor to meet you.”

Herbert touched her neck, laughed, looked at Louis, and said, “An honor?”

“The man has a way with words.”

Herbert smiled and said, “And it is…sorry, it was wonderful to meet you.”

Louis’s eyes bounced between us a few times before he said, “Michele, would you care to have a glass of wine with us?”

Her head cocked left, and then right, before she laughed again and said, “Why not? I have been working much too hard lately.”

“Come, then,” Louis said. “Where should we go?”

Before she could answer, my cell phone rang. It was Rick Del Rio.

“How’s Paris?” he asked.

I glanced at Michele Herbert, held up a finger, walked away, and said, “Looking up all of a sudden.”

“Well, then let me make your day even sunnier.”

Del Rio had managed to get hold of Kim Kopchinski’s most recent cash withdrawals and credit card charges.

“Anything today?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’ll e-mail you the particulars. I also arranged it so we’ll both get alerts of any future transactions sent automatically to our phones.”

“You’re a machine.”

“Bionic man,” he said, and hung up.

I hurried to catch up with Louis and Michele Herbert. My phone dinged to alert me to an e-mail. I opened it and showed it to Louis as we left the building.

He slowed and scanned the addresses of the ATM withdrawals and debit charges. “These are all in the Marais.”

“One of my favorite areas in Paris,” Herbert said. “We could go there for drinks, and maybe something to eat?”

“Perfect,” I said.

Chapter 28

4th Arrondissement

5:20 p.m.

LOUIS TOOK US to a café on the Rue des Archives.

The art professor looked around and said, “Louis, there are much more sympathetic places to entertain Jack in the Marais.”

“This is true, Michele,” the big bear of a man said, taking a seat outdoors. “But we are mixing business with pleasure.”

“Does it have to do with the tag?” she asked.

“It’s a missing persons case,” I said.

“Well, sort of,” Louis said. “This person wants to be missing.”

“Who is this person?” Herbert asked.

“The granddaughter of a client of mine back in Los Angeles,” I said.

“So, she is a runaway?”

“Not like a teen runaway. But she’s trying to escape something or someone and we don’t know why, other than knowing that drugs are involved.”

“And you think she’s here somewhere?” the artist asked, looking around.

Louis pointed across the street and said, “At eleven o’clock this morning, she withdrew five hundred euros from an ATM machine in that pharmacy. Twenty minutes later, she used a debit card to pay for a haircut in that salon. She also bought wine at that shop over there. And forty minutes ago, she returned to get more money from the pharmacy ATM.”

The artist grew excited and said, “We are on the stakeout, yes?”

“Something like that,” Louis said.

“I feel like I am in a film noir,” she said, beaming at the idea.

“Nothing that thrilling,” I said, flashing on the car chase and shoot-out from the night before and wondering just how much we should tell her.

A waitress came. Louis ordered a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. It soon arrived and was chilled perfectly. There was a warm breeze as Michele described the neighborhood. First settled in the 1200s, Le Marais-the marsh-was one of the oldest districts in the city. During the Renaissance, it was the preferred neighborhood of noblemen. Jews had lived there for centuries. The Chinese came after World War I, and the gays more recently.

“Many galleries in Paris are here,” she said. “Nice restaurants too.”

“Do you have pieces in them? The galleries?”

“I do,” she said. “I can show you some later.”

The conversation drifted to discussions of Paris and Los Angeles. Time seemed to disappear as we chatted and laughed. The artist had a semi-humorous take on nearly everything, and after a while I became less flabbergasted by her looks than I was by her mind, which could be cutting or playful. Again and again, I heard this voice in my head saying that I’d never met a woman like Michele Herbert.

“So,” she said at one point. “Are you in love, Jack?”

I startled and glanced over at Louis, but was surprised to find him not there. I’d been so engrossed in my conversation that I hadn’t heard or seen him get up.

“Jack?”

“I’m in love with life,” I said.

“But there is not someone special?”

“Not at the moment,” I said, feeling my cheeks burn slightly. “You?”

“Just my art,” Michele said, doing that tongue-in-the-teeth thing before draining her glass. “More?”

I finished my glass and poured us both another. Louis returned and said, “Henri Richard’s murder is the talk of the café.”

“A terrible thing,” the artist said. “Have they got a suspect?”

“Not yet,” Louis said, and eyed the bottle. “Shall we order another?”

“Why not?” Michele said.

I was about to agree when I felt my phone buzz with an incoming text. I read it, looked up at Louis, and said, “She just bought something at Open Café.”

He jumped up and said, “It’s two blocks. One of the big gay clubs.”

We both looked at Michele, who started laughing and making shooing gestures. “Go, go!” she said. “I’ll pay and then come to find you.”

Louis was already moving. I had to run hard to catch up with him.

“Why would she be in a gay bar?” Louis grunted.

“Good place for a woman to hide?” I said.

We ran to the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie. Open Café was on the southwest corner. A crowd of men had spilled from the club onto the sidewalk, blocking our view of the tables inside and out.

Rather than go straight into the bar, however, Louis kept us on the opposite side of the intersection, walking north across the Rue Sainte-Croix and then west across the Rue des Archives. In front of the Agora bookstore, I panned the crowd and looked right past Kim Kopchinski at first and second glance.

Then she turned and I caught her in profile, sitting at a table by the club entrance. Her shoulder-length brown hair was gone in favor of short spikes dyed the color of straw. She wore no makeup, a black T-shirt, and pants. If I hadn’t just spent time with her, I might have thought she was an effeminate-looking guy.

“You see her?” Louis said, still searching.

“Yes,” I said. “Let me do the talking.”

Crossing the street, I felt many eyes in the crowd turn toward me, sizing me up. I’m over six feet with a football player’s build. The men ogling me looked as though they’d never seen a gym, but one came at me straightaway and started propositioning me.

I told him I was flattered, but straight, and on my way to meet a friend. He said something unflattering that I didn’t catch and turned his shoulder.

Kim lit a cigarette with that lighter she kept on a chain around her neck. She was chatting with a man in a white tennis sweater who had his back to me. I was trying to close the last few feet to her table when an older Brit got in my way.

“Don’t you even think of not talking to me, cowboy,” he said loudly.

“I’m straight,” I said again, trying to get around him, only to bump into a waiter, who dropped a tray.

The sound of breaking glass was enough to split the crowd and draw Kim’s attention. She took one look at me and got to her feet fast.

Her wineglass exploded.

Hit by flying glass, she panicked and pivoted right to get inside the club, but another waiter holding a tray at shoulder height blocked her path.

She ducked as if to go under his arm. The waiter jerked, dropped his tray. A plume of bright blood appeared on his white shirt, and he collapsed.

“Shooter, Jack!” Louis shouted.

I dove to the ground, twisted, and saw that pale, gaunt guy from the night before crouched in a combat shooting stance and aiming a suppressed pistol from twenty-five feet away.

Kaboom!

That shot was Louis’s. He roared, “Everyone down!”

The crowd threw themselves to the street and sidewalk, leaving Louis to my right leveling his Glock at the pale guy who still faced me.

The gunman must have caught sight of Louis in his peripheral vision, and his reflexes had to have been astounding, because in a move that was as quick as a cobra strike he dropped to his knees, pivoted the gun, and fired, hitting Louis square in the chest and blowing the big man off his feet.

Chapter 29

THE GUNMAN SWUNG his weapon back my way, and then looked past me into the club. A split second later, he took off west on the Rue Sainte-Croix.

My marine training kicked in.

Lurching to my feet, I charged toward Louis, who sprawled in the gutter. Sirens wailed in the distance when I crouched beside him, expecting the worst.

“Get him,” Louis croaked.

“You’re hit,” I said. “I’m staying right here.”

“Armor,” he croaked. “I’m fine.”

I stared a second at the hole in his loose shirt and the blue ballistic vest showing beneath it before I jumped back up to start after the gunman. But he was gone. And after I searched the nightclub, I knew that so was Wilkerson’s granddaughter.

Michele Herbert came running to me when I exited.

“Mon Dieu,” she cried, looking at Louis still lying there, trying to get his breath back. “I heard the shot. Is he…?”

“He’s good,” I said. “Just had the wind knocked out of him.”

The same could not be said of the waiter who’d taken the second bullet. He died before the ambulances got there. The police were on the scene quicker and soon cordoned off the area until La Crim could arrive.

To our chagrin, Investigateur Hoskins was the first to arrive. She took one look at us and groaned.

“All of it!” she shouted. “I want all of it. Right now!”

It took us twenty minutes to tell her everything-the phone call from Sherman Wilkerson, the trip to Les Bosquets, the car chase and gun battle the evening before, Kim’s escape and the way we tracked her.

I said, “Because of the break-in at Sherman’s house back in Malibu, I think the pale guy must have had access to the same bank and credit card accounts that we had. When she paid for those drinks, she brought him in as well as us.”

The investigator chewed on that for a few moments, and then said, “A shoot-out last night on the A5 and you don’t report it?”

“Discretion is often the better part of valor,” Louis replied.

That seemed to annoy her, because she said, “Your license to carry is still up to date?”

“Of course,” he said wearily.

“Why are you hassling him?” I said. “If it wasn’t for Louis standing up and taking the hit, who knows how many people that guy might have killed?”

Hoskins appeared to struggle with that, but then let it out in a sharp exhalation. “You’re right, Monsieur Morgan. I apologize, Louis.”

“Accepted,” Louis grunted, and rubbed at his chest.

The investigator turned her attention to Michele Herbert. “You are the art expert they went to see?”

“Yes,” she said.

“So where’s the art in all this?” Hoskins asked.

“No, no,” Louis said a little too quickly. “A different case entirely. Michele had merely joined us for a drink.”

I hated to think what would happen if Michele mentioned that her expertise was in graffiti art. Me deported. Louis tossed in some dungeon.

“True?” Hoskins asked the artist.

Michele nodded. “Just as they said.”

Clearly exasperated, the investigator said, “And you have no idea why the pale guy wants to kill her?”

“None,” Louis said.

“What about the man she was sitting with? The one with the curly brown hair and the white tennis sweater?”

“I didn’t get a good look at him,” I replied. “And I haven’t seen him since. Believe me, I looked.”

“I saw him,” Michele said. “He ran right by me after the shooting stopped.”

“Which way was he going?” Hoskins asked.

“South on Rue des Archives.”

We were kept on the scene for another two hours and then brought to La Crim, where we made formal statements. Because he had discharged his weapon in the city, Louis was still giving his statement when Michele and I were released.

We were both hungry, so she took me to a bistro near her flat in the 8th Arrondissement.

“The best frites you have ever had,” she said on the way in, and she was right. They were shoestring, hot, salted, and crispy.

“These could be addicting,” I said.

Michele smiled. “I try to stay away, but I can’t. I must have them at least once a week.”

“If I lived in Paris, I think I’d be here every other day.”

“Your job,” she said after we’d finished and were drinking coffee. “It is always dangerous like today?”

“No,” I said. “Well, sometimes.”

She made a throwaway gesture with her hand. “It makes me think that what I do is-how do you say?-trivial.”

“Oh, I don’t think that at all. Artists help us explain the world to ourselves.”

“I like that,” she said later, when I was walking her back to her apartment.

“What?”

“What you said about artists,” she replied.

“I think I read it somewhere, but it makes sense.”

We got to her building. “Thank you for the most exciting day I think I have ever had,” Michele said.

I smiled and said, “My pleasure.”

She walked up the stoop, used her keys to open the front door, stepped inside, and turned to me with that impish expression on her face.

“You have nice eyes, Jack Morgan,” Michele said, and shut the door.

Walking away, I’d rarely been happier.

Chapter 30

9th Arrondissement

April 8, 1 a.m.

WEARING SOILED CLOTHES, his face smeared with grime, Émile Sauvage acted the drunken bum and lay sprawled in an alleyway upwind of a Dumpster and downwind of some of the most amazing odors he’d ever smelled. The scents boiled out of a steel door that was ajar about fifty feet away, and made the major realize he should have eaten more. Then the breeze stilled and he could smell the beer he’d poured on his pant legs.

Sauvage glanced around, saw no one, and pressed his hand to the tiny transceiver in his ear. “How many left?” he murmured, knowing that the throat microphone would pick it up loud and clear.

“Two,” Epée said. “Maître d’ and the sommelier.”

“Stay patient,” Sauvage cautioned. “You know his rep. Every day the same way. Like clock-”

The steel door pushed open. The maître d’, a plump, intense-looking man in his late thirties, exited and immediately lit a cigarette. The sommelier, a younger woman, came after him, turned, and called back inside, “À demain, René.”

Then she closed the door, locked it, and followed the maître d’ toward Sauvage’s position.

“He works too hard,” the wine steward was saying.

“It’s his passion,” the maître d’ said.

“His heart will just break one of these days.”

Glancing in disgust at Sauvage lying in the filth, the maître d’ replied, “The price of greatness.”

“I just wish he’d pause to look around, relax, enjoy what he’s built.”

The man said something Sauvage did not catch, and then they were gone.

“Fifteen minutes,” the major said, and rolled to his feet, putting on gloves.

Down the alley, Captain Mfune was already up and moving toward the door. The captain picked the lock and they were quickly inside a small entry area with work clogs on the floor and white jackets in a large hamper.

The major took two careful steps and peeked around the corner of a doorway, seeing a large, softly lit commercial kitchen with a high ceiling. A cluster of red enamel ovens and stovetops dominated the room, with gleaming copper pots of all sizes hanging from an overhead beam.

Sauvage knew at a glance that the kitchen was immaculate. This was a restaurant run with discipline. The major admired it, and almost changed his mind about the target. But when it came to impact, this was the man they wanted.

They padded through the kitchen. Sauvage glanced through the porthole into the dining area. Pitch-dark. Near the refrigerators and a freezer, they reached a door that Mfune opened, revealing a steep wooden staircase and an exposed stone wall. Light glowed in the cellar below them.

Keeping their feet to the outside of each step, right above the riser support, they made it to the basement with nary a creak. The light came through an open oak door down a narrow hallway.

The major led the way, quiet as possible, until they’d reached the doorway. Sauvage drew a pistol and stepped around and through the passage.

Wine bottles filled floor-to-ceiling racks on all sides of a room about forty feet long and fifteen feet wide. A silver-haired, barrel-shaped man in a white blouse and apron sat at a table with an open bottle of red wine, an almost empty glass, and a plate holding a baguette, cheese, chocolate, and fruit.

“Chef Pincus,” Sauvage said as Mfune came in behind him.

The chef startled, saw the gun, and jumped up, knocking the table. The bottle fell over. Wine spilled across the tabletop, dripped on the floor.

“Who the hell are you?” Pincus demanded.

“The future,” the major said. “We need you to help us set things right.”

“Right about what?” the chef asked, stepping back, looking around, seeing that he was cornered. “Is this about the Bocuse d’Or?”

“We’re about so much more than the quality of French food,” Mfune said.

“What do you want, then? If it’s money, I’ll take you upstairs, give you tonight’s till.”

“That’s a start,” Sauvage said, and waved the gun. “You first.”

Chef Pincus hesitated, rubbed his hands on his apron, and walked by them. Sauvage and Mfune stayed close to the chef as they navigated the hall and climbed the narrow stairs back to the kitchen.

When Pincus tried to exit out into the dining area, the major stopped him and said, “I read in Bon Appétit that you make chicken stock once a week.”

Pincus stiffened, nodded. “It’s the last thing I do on Saturdays before having my wine and going home.”

“Can we see it?” the captain asked, joining them.

“That is what this is about, isn’t it? The Bocuse? Stealing my secrets?”

“Believe what you want to believe. Just show us the soup.”

Sullenly, Pincus jerked his chin at one of the refrigerators. Mfune opened it. On the middle shelf stood a forty-quart stockpot with a lid. The captain grabbed the handles, lifted the pot with a grunt, and carried it to one of the prep tables.

“Go over there,” Sauvage said to the chef. “Stand right in front of it.”

Reluctantly, Pincus followed his orders and stood before the stockpot, with Mfune at his left. The captain lifted the lid, set it aside. The major came around to the chef’s right and looked in at fat starting to congeal on top of the liquid.

“Smells good,” Mfune said.

“Of course it does,” Pincus snapped.

“Take a smell. Lean right in there and sniff your masterpiece.”

The chef frowned and glanced at Sauvage, who said, “Do it.”

Pincus looked uncertain but stepped closer, and brought his nose over the top of ten gallons of cooling gourmet chicken stock. He sniffed, started to raise his chin, and then squealed with fear and alarm when the officers grabbed the back of his skull and plunged his face into the cooling liquid.

Terrified screams bubbled up out of the broth.

Then the chef started to fight, squirming side to side against their grip and throwing his fists wildly. Sauvage took a blow to the ribs and another to his hip before he flipped the pistol in his hand and chopped below the collar of Pincus’s white blouse.

The flailing stopped. The squirming subsided and then halted altogether when the major hit the chef a second time.

“There,” Sauvage said, his breathing shallow, rapid. “Not a bad recipe, really.”

Chapter 31

8th Arrondissement

6 a.m.

MY DREAMS WHIRLED with visions of the blood blooming on the waiter’s shirt, Louis blown off his feet, and the pale gunman tracking the pistol muzzle over me.

In every vision, in every dream, I kept catching glimpses of Michele Herbert standing at the periphery of the action, and watching it all unfold as if through a glass, darkly. But when I awoke in my bed at the Plaza, my first thoughts were of the art professor laughing at the café the night before, and then climbing her stoop, smiling as if we were already sharing secrets, and telling me I had nice eyes.

Had any woman ever told me that?

If they had, I didn’t remember.

Who cared? Michele thought my eyes were nice and that was all that counted. My God, she was beyond-belief good-looking and off-the-charts smart and creative. And yet she didn’t seem to take herself too seriously.

She seemed relaxed, good in her own skin, free of issues, someone you wanted to spend time with. In the darkness of my room at the Plaza Athénée, I grinned like a fool, sat up in bed, and turned on the lights.

There was no chance I’d sleep any more, and given my embarrassing teenage giddiness, I knew I’d just sit there thinking about her unless I gave myself a task that could be taken care of at this early hour. Nothing came to mind until I realized it was only 9 p.m. back home.

Grabbing my phone, I punched in Justine’s contact. I listened to her cell ring twice before she answered, “I was just thinking about you, Jack.”

“That right?”

“I don’t know exactly why, but you’ve been on my mind,” she said. “So, anyway, how are you? Any luck with Kim Kopchinski? Del Rio told me there was a charge to a café in Paris.”

I told her about my entire crazy day, from losing Kim, to seeing the opera director’s corpse, to finding the secrets of his pied-à-terre, to Michele Herbert’s collage. I took care not to make much of the artist beyond her smarts. I certainly wasn’t going to babble on about Herbert’s beauty and wit.

Instead, I emphasized her thoughts, her legions of followers, and her belief that someone who’d studied under or emulated a famous dead graffiti artist had painted the AB-16 tag.

Then I described the scene at Open Café, how we’d closed in on Kim Kopchinski, the gunplay that had ensued, and her escape. I didn’t say a thing about dinner or the world’s greatest fries or the fact that the artist liked my eyes.

“Sounds like you’ve got your hands full,” she said. “And this Michele Herbert sounds like quite a woman.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, she’s nice.”

“Uh-huh,” Justine said.

“You can’t resist analyzing every word, can you?” I said hotly. “It’s like you can take the therapist out of the therapy room but you can’t keep the therapy room out of the therapist.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“How’s Sherman?” I asked.

“They’ve got him in a deep medical coma,” Justine said. “They said it could take a few days for the swelling to subside enough to bring him out of it. I plan on stopping by there in the morning.”

“Sounds like you’re all carrying on well without me.”

“You’ve assembled a strong team,” she said. “You should be happy.”

“Oh, I’m a happy guy,” I said. “April. Paris. Mysteries up the wazoo.”

“Hobnobbing with famous French artists,” she added.

“That too,” I replied. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call tomorrow.”

“Uh-huh.”

I clicked off, wondering what I’d said or tone I’d used to cause Justine to home in so quickly on Michele Herbert. It was as if she had an emotional radar or something, an innate sensitivity that had made her so effective as a psychologist for the L.A. district attorney and as an investigator with Private.

I took a shower, flashing on Michele and finding it nice that she hadn’t spent the night scrutinizing me, trying to figure out what made me tick, or what old wounds I was trying to work out. Instead, she was interested, fun, and easy to be with, and I vowed I would not leave Paris without seeing her again.

Chapter 32

I WENT DOWNSTAIRS for breakfast.

The second the elevator opened, the big, shaved-headed Saudi royal bodyguard with the Texas accent was looking at me.

He nodded. “Mr. Morgan.”

“You know my name?”

“We know everyone who’s staying here.”

“What’s your name?”

“Randall Peaks.”

“Need a job, Randall Peaks?”

“I don’t think you could afford me.”

“Probably not. Can I go have breakfast?”

“Just don’t get near the princesses, and you’ll be fine.”

“So the royals don’t use Saudi bodyguards?”

“A few,” he said. “The rest of us are contracted.”

“How long have you been working there?”

“Seven years,” Peaks said as the elevator pinged behind me. “Have a good day, Mr. Morgan.”

I left him and went into the dining area, spotting a large table of Middle Eastern women who looked ready for fashion week. Every one of them was wearing a couture dress. Every one of them had flawless makeup, a dramatic hairdo, and stunning jewelry.

Laughing, chatting, and generally having a good time, they paid no attention to me. But the guards positioned discreetly around the room watched me all the way to my seat.

I read the International Herald Tribune and had an exceptional breakfast of poached eggs, asparagus, and a dill sauce that I wanted to eat with a spoon.

The princesses left before I had finished. Only one of them looked even remotely my way as they exited the room. She was the youngest, probably in her mid- to late teens, and by my estimation the most beautiful of them all. It took me a moment to realize that she wasn’t looking at me, but studying a painting over my right shoulder.

Brought back to earth, stuffed and caffeinated, I was at the offices of Private Paris by seven fifteen and not surprised to find Louis already at his desk drinking an espresso.

“Do you ever sleep?” I asked.

“Five hours, every night,” he said, and snapped his fingers. “Five hours and I am ready to go. I have only just heard from Le Chien.”

“Yeah?” I said, taking a seat. “He find anything on Richard?”

“Many things,” Louis said. “Including the fact that several times in the last week he ate at a very famous restaurant in Paris, Chez Pincus. By the amount of money he spent, it suggests that he was entertaining a woman. Perhaps the woman in the-”

Ali Farad, Private Paris’s newest hire, came in. “You wanted to see me?”

“Yes,” Louis said, leaning over a desktop computer and typing in a command. When he finished, he peered over the screen at Farad and said, “Ali, what you’re about to see you aren’t going to like, and you are to keep what you are about to see completely to yourself.”

“Okay…” Farad said.

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, okay.”

Louis pivoted the screen to show the hijab and veil that I’d photographed with my phone when we were inside the opera director’s love shack. Farad looked at them with little expression, and then shrugged. “Why are these important?”

“Because of these,” Louis said, and gave the computer another command.

The screen blinked, divided into quadrants, and up popped four photographs of the opera director in the Catholic priest’s collar having sex with the fierce-eyed woman in the hijab and veil.

Farad’s lips thinned. “That’s Henri Richard.”

“Correct,” Louis said. “He seemed to have a fetish about priests and Muslim girls. He was writing an opera about it.”

“We think he might have been killed because he was also living out his fantasies,” I said. “Are we off base on that? Could you see a Muslim father, or brother, or uncle finding out about the affair and deciding to kill Richard?”

Farad nodded without hesitation. “Sure, I could see it. I mean, this is just the rankest porn imaginable. Among radical sects, it would be just cause for revenge on Richard, and perhaps her death as well.”

“Richard was with a woman last night, before his death. A redhead,” I said. “Maybe this woman.”

“Any idea how we’d find her?” Louis asked.

Farad stayed quiet and scratched at his chin while my thoughts tracked to the hijab and veil, and I thumbed through the pictures I’d taken of them on my phone.

When I found what I was looking for, I sent it to Louis’s e-mail address and said, “Pull this picture up when you get it on e-mail, and blow it up on the screen.”

The file went through almost immediately, and quickly Louis had the picture up on his screen, where we could all see it well. The hijab and veil were turned inside out, exposing labels in Arabic.

“What’s that say?” I asked Farad.

The investigator scooted forward, studied the image, and said, “Al-Jumaa Custom Tailor and Embroidery. I know this place. It’s around the corner from my mosque.”

Chapter 33

18th Arrondissement

12:35 p.m.

HAJA HAMID SLIPPED in among the other women retrieving their shoes and sandals. She fell in behind three women leaving the mosque, and followed their lead, removing her veil before she passed through the door. She wanted none of the attention she’d received the day before.

But when she stepped down onto the sidewalk, she noticed that same young man-he couldn’t have been more than seventeen-standing across the street, holding his camera. He spotted her, came her way. She tried to duck behind some other women, but he was relentless and came right up beside her.

“You are so beautiful,” he said.

Haja said nothing, increased her pace.

“Please. My name is Alain Du Champs, and I am doing a project where I am taking pictures of Muslim women without their veil on, showing the world what it and they have been missing. Can I take your picture, please?”

“No. Never,” she said, and hurried on.

Hurrying up beside her, the photographer began to sing to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young.”

“Wake up, Fatima, don’t let me wait. You Muslim girls start much too late. Aw, but sooner or later it comes down to fate. I might as well be the one!”

Haja picked up her pace, trying to get away, but he kept after her, still singing. Three men were coming at her down the sidewalk: an older one with longish iron-gray hair, smoking a cigarette; a younger, athletic, blond, hazel-eyed guy; and an even younger Arab man wearing a black leather jacket and jeans.

Something about the trio triggered fear in Haja. For a moment she thought they were police. But then they stood aside. The Arab guy said, “Accept my apologies, mademoiselle. Not all Frenchmen are assholes like the kid with the camera and the voice of an ass.”

Haja smiled, nodded at the men uncertainly, and then hurried on toward Epée and the car.

Chapter 34

WE WATCHED HER hurry away with her head down. The kid who’d been singing to her held tight to his camera as he tried to get around us.

Ali Farad stopped him and said, “That’s enough. Leave her alone.”

The photographer scowled and said, “Makmood, in case you hadn’t noticed, France is still a free country. We don’t do Sharia law here.”

“It is a free country, and she has the right not to be harassed.”

“You a cop?”

“No.”

“Then fuck yourself, and eat pork while you’re doing it,” the kid said. But he did not pursue the woman, instead crossing the street and walking away from us.

“He was right about something,” Louis said when we moved on.

“What’s that?” Farad said, clearly still pissed at the kid.

“She was beautiful. Did you see her face? And those eyes? In my opinion, it is a waste of the feminine mystique to have her covered up like that.”

Farad seemed unimpressed and said, “People have a right to their culture.”

“Sans doute,” Louis replied. “As long as it does not infringe on my right to my culture, and men of my culture enjoy the female form.”

We walked on past several young men putting a coat of paint on top of a coat of paint on top of an AB-16 tag, which had bled through. An older man in a long white tunic was watching with his arms crossed.

“Imam,” Farad said, his face falling. “They’ve defaced the mosque.”

The imam nodded grimly. “Do you know what this means? AB-16?”

“No,” Farad said, and then introduced us.

Imam Ibrahim Al-Moustapha was one of those men who beam with kindness. He shook our hands, looked deeply into our eyes, repeated our names, and said how happy he was to meet us.

“When was this done?” I asked, gesturing to the tag.

“Two nights ago,” Al-Moustapha replied. “The police chased him but he caused two police cars to collide up the street as he made his escape.”

“Imam?” one of the painters said.

Al-Moustapha excused himself and went over to him.

We continued on, and Farad said, “The imam is a great man. He stands for a moderate, progressive, and inclusive Islam. And he speaks up for it, and against the radicals.”

“A rare man, then,” Louis said.

With heat in his voice, Farad replied, “With all due respect, Louis, no, he’s not. There are many of us who think this way, who want to build communities, not destroy them.”

He gestured to a storefront just beyond the mosque.

The FEZ Couriers sign in the window featured a large Moroccan hat with a gold tassel hanging off the top. There were several men smoking out front and wearing jackets featuring the FEZ logo as well.

“Firmus Massi built this business from nothing,” Farad said. “His parents came from Algiers, as mine did. He saw a need for a messenger service and started it on a credit card. Now he employs twenty messengers in Paris. A builder. Not a destroyer.”

“An entrepreneur in France,” Louis said, impressed. “A rarer thing than a moderate Muslim.”

Farad ignored him and gestured to the store next to the messenger service. “This is where the hijab and veil were made.”

“Al-Jumaa Custom Tailor and Embroidery” was written above the door in French and Arabic. Farad went in first and we followed. The interior was crowded with bolts of fabric stacked in cubbies, several women working on sewing machines, and racks of robes, tunics, and veils on the far wall.

Farad was soon talking to Monsieur Al-Jumaa, a gaunt man in a white tunic and black pants. His wife, who stood beside him, was dressed the same as the woman we’d seen running from the kid with the camera: long dark robes and a hijab that surrounded her face like a frame. For some reason she had been staring hostilely at me from the get-go. Maybe she didn’t like blonds.

Farad did the talking in Arabic, and then in French, with Louis translating for me. We showed the tailor our Private badges. He seemed unimpressed. His wife, a pudgy-faced woman with the constant threat of a snarl on her upper lip, looked at the badges, flung her hands in the air, and chattered something in Arabic. Her husband chattered back.

“She thinks we’re here to persecute them,” Farad said. “He agrees.”

“Tell them Private doesn’t do persecution,” I said. “We just ask questions. They’re under no obligation to answer, but we could use their help.”

Farad rattled that off, and we got grudging harrumphs in return.

“Show them the picture, Jack,” Louis said.

I did, and the Al-Jumaas studied it. Immediately the tailor turned suspicious and said, “Why do you have this picture to show me?”

“It’s part of a murder investigation,” Louis said. “I’m sure the police will be by at some point to talk to you about it. We’re looking into it for the victim’s wife.”

“We know nothing about a murder,” the tailor’s wife said, on the defensive now. “We are good people. We work hard.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said. “And you keep records, yes?”

“What kind of records?” Al-Jumaa asked, the suspicion returning.

“Orders,” Louis said. “Measurements. Addresses. Phone numbers. Who bought that hijab and that veil and when.”

Madame Al-Jumaa clucked sharply at her husband in Arabic and threw her hands up in surrender. Al-Jumaa shrugged and asked to see the picture again.

The tailor enlarged the photo and stared at the label for a moment, and then shook his head and said, “Ready-to-wear. No records of this.”

“Explain that,” Farad said.

Al-Jumaa pointed to two short, thin, black lines in the corner of the label and then gestured at the racks along the far wall.

“All the premades carry these two lines,” he said. “The custom hijabs and robes carry a crescent.”

“So you don’t keep a record of who bought ready-to-wear?” Louis asked.

“Just that a robe was sold. No names. No addresses. We are not required to keep them.”

“How’s business?” I asked.

The tailor studied me, nodded, and said, “Business is good. Every year it gets better. The future is bright for us.”

That surprised me. “Even with the laws on wearing the hijab and veil?”

His wife heard that and started clucking in amusement this time.

“She says those laws will be repealed eventually,” Farad interpreted.

“What makes her think that?” Louis asked.

Her husband said, “The population of old France is aging and dying, while the immigrant population is young and growing. The birthrate in old France is less than two children per marriage. The birthrate among immigrants is in the fours. We have five children. Sooner than later, we will simply outnumber the old French, and then the law will fall, just as I will grow rich.”

His wife added, “It is simple mathematics. Like Allah’s will: indisputable and inevitable.”

I couldn’t argue with the tailor’s logic. The numbers were the numbers.

“How long until you see it happening?” I asked Farad and Louis once we were back out on the sidewalk.

“It already is happening,” Louis said. “You can see it in places like Les Bosquets. There they are, bulging at the seams.”

“Twenty years?” Farad said. “Twenty-five until the law changes?”

“Something like that,” Louis agreed. “But by then I shall be too old to care.”

“But by then, won’t the immigrants have assimilated more into French culture?” I asked.

“Not if we isolate them,” Louis said. His cell phone rang and he answered.

“What do you think?” I asked Farad.

He shrugged. “I am not much interested in politics.”

“Pincus?” Louis gasped. “Yes, of course. We’ll be right there.”

Shaken, Louis shut his phone, looked at me, and said, “That was Sharen Hoskins. She has been ordered to accept your offer of a forensics team. La Crim’s criminalists are backlogged and AB-16 has struck again.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Who’s the victim?”

“René Pincus. Arguably the greatest chef in all of France.”