Got off at the Gare du Nord, headed for the Metro. Got out at the 6th Arrondissement, the Saint Germain-des-Prés area. Louise’s ex kept a flat he had inherited from his family here, the only way anyone could possibly have a place in this part of town. His name was Loïc Bazennec, probably the most French name ever. D-list fashion photographer who made a decent living on magazine shoots; he wanted to be Annie Leibovitz.
“Only more misogynist,” Julia added.
His flat was in a backstreet on the way to Saint-Michel. The entrance to the building opened to a cobblestoned courtyard.
“Loïc isn’t home this week. He’s off for Fashion Week in Berlin,” Julia said.
Social engineering is the art of subtly manipulating people into thinking that giving you what you want was the most sensible thing in the world. It’s really a fancy way of saying “con job.” The trick to social engineering is to always act with total confidence, like you’re supposed to be there. That was what Julia and I did. We walked up to the front entrance of Loïc Bazannec’s building like a couple coming home. Julia pressed the bell, and the door buzzed open for us.
Julia had a set of spare keys that Louise had held on to after she and Loïc had broken up. We climbed the stairs to his front door. I put on a pair of surgical gloves and gave Julia a pair so we didn’t leave our fingerprints anywhere.
Swish flat. Old photos on the bookshelves of Louise with a lanky, jowly bloke that I presumed was Loïc.
“He was domineering. Abusive.”
The walls of his flat were lined with oversize photos of nude models he had obviously taken great pride in shooting. He had a particular fixation on crotches and bums.
I hated this guy already.
Julia headed for the office area in the living room. She’d been here before, back when Louise was living with Loïc. How long had she been planning to do this? The safe was sitting under the desk. I recognized it as one of those common commercial models, barely larger than a shoe box, with a keypad and seven-pin tubular lock.
“Louise always meant to sneak back here to get those photos.”
She entered a code on the keypad.
“Shit! He’s changed the code.”
“Let me have a go,” I said.
When I was training for the job, Benjamin walked me through the gamut of safecracking: listening for the tumblers on combination locks, cutting another model open from the soft metal back, brute-force cracking the bigger models with a crowbar if you had the time. Then there were the cheap, crap ones with keypads.
Of course I carried a small lock-pick kit with me as part of the job. That didn’t include a crowbar for brute-forcing a safe, though. The question, then, was which tactic to use.
I pulled out the safe from the desk, entered a random code to hear the beep of the error message, and then smacked the top of the safe with my palm.
Sure enough, the door flipped open. Design flaw in the spring.
Luckily for us, Loïc’s mediocrity extended to his choice of safety appliances.
Julia pulled out a large manila envelope. Negatives and prints of Louise and some other women in handcuffs and leather straps and smeared in filth. They didn’t all look consensual.
“His fetish was bondage and poo. He insisted his girls ‘play’ with him. Lou always regretted these.”
She left the small wad of cash alone in the safe. I reached behind the safe door and pressed a little red button on the side near the hinge and heard a beep, resetting the passcode. Louise entered a new random code. Loïc would come back from Berlin to find he couldn’t open his safe the next time he wanted to take out the photos for a wank. He probably didn’t know how easy it was to open the safe, since if he knew how rubbish these safes were, he probably wouldn’t have bought one. Julia was happy to let him stew.
I found nothing that would tie Loïc to Holcomb. Julia said Louise never told Holcomb about him, and they never met. We left the flat with the photos and walked over to the Pont des Arts. Louise took out a lighter and set the negatives and photos on fire, letting them flutter into the Seine. We watched the wind take them as they dwindled into embers before they hit the water. The lovers and tourists who passed us didn’t bat an eyelash.
“I have to turn in a paper about The Canterbury Tales next week. It’s stressing me out a bit.”
“And you’re not stressed about committing burglary?”
“I’ll do anything to protect my sister,” she said. “I’m going to write about ‘The Miller’s Tale.’ Laughed my arse off at that one.”
“The Miller’s Tale.” Story about a carpenter whose wife was cheating on him with a local scholar, and a second scholar also fancied her. When the second scholar pestered her for a kiss, she told him to close his eyes, then stuck her bum out the window. She and her lover had a good laugh when the second bloke kissed her arse instead of her mouth. The second scholar got pissed off and grabbed a hot poker to punish her, but it was her lover who stuck his arse out the window this time for a laugh, and he got the poker up his bum instead, screaming bloody murder and waking up the town.
“It’s always the ‘poker up the bum’ story that everyone remembers,” I said.
We laughed, trying to shake off the adrenaline rush from the breaking and entering we just pulled off.
Suddenly she kissed me, taking me by surprise.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Just doing my job. I wanted to see if Loîc might have been the one out to get Roger. Now I can rule him out.”
She kissed me again.
“When this is over, we should go out properly,” she said.
As first dates went, this was pretty good. Nothing like a bit of breaking and entering for a bonding experience. I was probably crossing an ethical line here somewhere, but Julia wasn’t a client, so I didn’t feel any dings on my conscience.
In the corner of my eye, at the other side of the bridge, stood Kali. Goddess of death and rebirth, what was she doing here? Was I doing something that was about to change my life? I ignored her, a blur in the distance.
We took the Eurostar back to London. It was dark when we came out at St. Pancras. I put Julia in a cab, since she had to go home to write her paper. I headed home, still abuzz from our kiss, and passed out from exhaustion—exhaustion mixed with excitement.