A choir of sirens heralded the arrival of the fire brigade. Rousseau and Maelstrom stared each other down as if they were about to fight to the death in a Parisian alley, next to overflowing bins and a bike without wheels. For once, Shenanigan wasn’t sure she’d bet on her uncle.
But when one of his officers moved towards Maelstrom, cuffs in hand, Rousseau instinctively stepped into her path—then blinked, as if he wasn’t quite sure how he’d got there. He said something in French, and scowling, the woman handed the cuffs over.
“You realize they want to arrest you,” Rousseau told Maelstrom. “You let an international gang of criminals escape with a sculpture worth a small fortune.”
“I did too!” protested Shenanigan.
“And us!” added Felicity.
“You are children,” Rousseau reminded them. “You’re not old enough to be arrested.”
“Don’t tell them that,” said Maelstrom, smiling. “They’ll see it as a challenge.”
Another officer shouted impatiently. Whatever authority Rousseau had here was slipping. An exchange in rapid, angry French followed, and Rousseau turned back, cuffs clenched in his fist.
“Swift,” said Rousseau. “If you don’t tell us where they went—”
“This is more complicated than it looks, Hugo.”
“I know that, but I am not, shall we say, the belle of the ball around here. If you don’t cooperate, they will arrest you.”
In response, Maelstrom proffered his wrists. Rousseau hesitated. Steeling himself, he snapped the cuffs on Maelstrom, an expression of extreme displeasure on his face.
“Come on.” He ushered them towards the mouth of the alley, where they could see police lights flashing. The sun had just set, and the sky was the yellow-blue of a fading bruise. The Martinets were clustered together in a knot of sodden formalwear, Soufflé twisting his handkerchief in his fingers and berating his hired men, one of whom had a bandage on his forehead. Laurent was sitting on a curb, looking dazed. Firefighters, summoned by the alarms, were folding their hose away with faint disappointment, while some of them held flashlights for a man in a coverall struggling to turn off the museum’s water.
Rousseau stared at the chaos for a moment, hands clasped behind his back as if he could sort everything out with the force of his glare alone.
“Uncle,” whispered Shenanigan.
“Yes?”
“You know you can break the chain on those cuffs if you twist it like this, and then pull—”
“I know, Skipper.”
“And if you dislocate your thumbs, you can pull them over your wrists—”
“Yes, Skipper.”
“And I have my lockpicks with me, so I could just—”
“Shenanigan,” he whispered, “they aren’t fastened.”
Shenanigan looked. He was right.
When he seemed sure no one was watching, Rousseau led them not to one of the police cars, but to a beat-up tan sedan. He opened the passenger door.
“Get in,” he said crisply. Maelstrom got in. “The rest of you too.”
The children piled in the back. Rousseau shut the door, and they drove away.
It was a tense ride.
Rousseau’s hands were clenched tight on the wheel. Every now and then his eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, where Maelstrom, Felicity, and Erf were squashed in the back seat, with Phenomena on Maelstrom’s lap. Shenanigan, of course, had clambered over the gearbox and into the passenger seat the moment they’d got in the car.
Finally, she could take it no longer.
“So…Ouvolpo didn’t kill anyone,” she began. She had no intention of telling Rousseau anything they had learned, but it seemed important he know Ouvolpo weren’t murderers. Leather creaked as Rousseau tightened his hands on the wheel. “I know it looks like they were the ones who killed Bernard—”
“I know Ouvolpo didn’t kill Bernard,” Rousseau said calmly.
“How—”
“Because I have been investigating Ouvolpo for a decade, and in that time they have not given anyone so much as a paper cut,” he said. “That is not a judgment on their moral character. It is simply a pattern of behavior. Thieves and criminals, generally speaking, do not change their patterns of behavior.” His eyes flicked to Maelstrom again. “I also have information you do not.”
“Like?” asked Phenomena.
“Like a close look at the carpet at the Galerie Valerie,” he said. “And the clumsy way it had been stitched closed over the body, as if it had been hidden there as an afterthought. Like a full examination of Bernard’s corpse, which was several days old by the time it was placed in that crime scene. Like access to police files on the Martinets, which contain more holes than Swiss cheese.”
“But what about—”
“And a conversation I had with a certain Commissioner of Police, who, when I said I suspected the Martinets were involved not only in the death of Bernard Plourdes, but in a disappearance almost a century old, instructed me to leave them alone, since they are such ‘upstanding members of the community’ and have been ‘so very generous over the years.’ ”
There was silence.
“It’s not everyone,” said Erf quietly. “The Martinets aren’t all bad.”
“Probably not, no,” said Rousseau. “But Soufflé is. I suspect there are others. And yet at this moment, I have only suspicions. I do not know if I will be able to clear Ouvolpo of murder, or arrest the Martinets responsible.”
The car slowed. They had pulled onto the rue Regrette.
“If you have information to share, now is the time.”
Shenanigan looked at Rousseau, and saw the shadows under his eyes. If he had been just a person, she thought, perhaps she would have told him. But he wasn’t just a person. He was The Law, with all the responsibilities and complications of The Law’s machinery behind him. That badge was a barrier between them.
“There’s nothing,” Shenanigan said finally.
Rousseau nodded, as if he had been expecting that. “You are brave, resourceful, and clever children,” he said finally. “Please get out of my car. I would like to talk to your uncle for a moment.”
The children got out of the car and waited. Unfortunately, it is a common misconception of people inside cars that people outside can’t hear them; this is why you frequently encounter people singing off-key at traffic lights. Once Rousseau and Maelstrom started shouting, the children could hear them quite well. Felicity shuffled them farther down the street, where they all pretended to have water in their ears.
Finally, the door slammed, the car peeled away, and Maelstrom rejoined them, silent and tight-lipped.
Shenanigan knew she shouldn’t say anything, but she couldn’t help it. “You weren’t surprised to see Pomme.”
“No,” said Maelstrom.
“You knew she was part of Ouvolpo.”
“I suspected.”
“Since when?”
“Since she disappeared after the Galerie Valerie. It seemed the most likely explanation.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Because your arch-aunt, Cook, and Fauna agreed with me that if you all knew you’d go running off after her, and get yourselves into further trouble. A similar reason why you didn’t keep me up to date on your investigation, I wager.”
“We didn’t want you to get arrested,” said Felicity. “Not when you were having so much fun, and you’d just got your boat, and you haven’t had a holiday in so long—”
Maelstrom looked at her sadly. “I couldn’t bring myself to forbid you anything, and you could have got hurt because of it. Maybe Rousseau was right.”
Shenanigan took hold of her uncle’s sleeve. She wasn’t used to being at odds with him. It was awful. “The case isn’t over,” she whispered. “Ouvolpo have the statue, but the Martinets—”
“Shenanigan.” His voice was as heavy as an old anchor. “Not now. Please just go to bed.”
They went. They sat on the floor of Felicity’s room in their drenched clothes until they heard a knock. They opened the door to Souris, and he did not have to say anything for them to know that he’d heard the news. He absorbed everything they told him without interruption, and at the end he asked only, “Now what?”
When they offered only desolate expressions, he scoffed. “So Ouvolpo took the statue,” he said. “Bravo, Ouvolpo! We still need to find out what happened to Bernard—and Pierrot.”
Shenanigan thought that the only thing she needed right now was to go downstairs and eat that entire croquembouche. But Phenomena rubbed her temples, and began to shuffle through her notes, so Shenanigan bottled up her feelings and put them on a shelf for later.
“All right. Leads. Is Gourmet back?”
“No sign of him.”
Phenomena turned to Gourmet’s clandestine messages. “Why Room 415?” she muttered, almost to herself.
“It’s Pomme’s old room,” said Souris. “The one that was ruined by Soufflé’s bath.”
Felicity wrinkled her nose. “Why would he want to meet us there?”
“Because it’s quiet?” suggested Souris. “No one’s going to go in—it’s too disgusting.”
“Wait—Souris, didn’t you say that was the last job Bernard was doing, before he ‘quit’? Fixing the leak in Pomme’s old room?”
“Yes?” said Souris.
“Then maybe that’s why,” said Shenanigan. She felt the beginnings of a theory form. She was thinking about the pipe at the Galerie Valerie, and Pierrot’s signature, and the envelope in the kitchen bin; and beneath all these thoughts, she was thinking about the dreams of the Société des Pierrots.
“What, do you think Gourmet could be there now?” asked Erf doubtfully.
“I don’t know. But there’s only one way to find out.”