1

I rang the bell at number 7, rue Jacob a third time. From somewhere behind the imposing iron gates fronting the narrow Left Bank street, I could hear a buzz, but no one responded. A passing car splashed icy mud on my jeans. I swore, I shivered and rang the bell again. For once, I didn’t care that I was in Paris. I hadn’t been to bed for two days and I hadn’t had a bath for far too long. My phone was dead. When a second car sprayed me with road muck I pushed the buzzer and held it. Finally, a voice crackled over the speaker set into the wall beside me: “Oui?”

A noisy service van passed behind me so I leaned in closer to the speaker to be heard. “Madame Gonsalves? I’m Isabelle Martin’s daughter, Maggie MacGowen. My brother told you I was coming.”

“Freddy? No. He told me nothing.” But, slowly, the tall gates began to part. As they opened, I peered through the growing gap, curious as I got my first glimpse at the intimate world hidden behind those barriers. A massive house rose like a great stone bastion around three sides of a well-swept cobblestoned courtyard. What kept the structure from being foreboding on that dark, drizzly morning was that the façade of each of the three wings was architecturally distinct from the others, so that the overall impression was a bit fanciful. A Baroque wing with a mansard roofline and a sandstone country château bookended a tall Gothic éminence grise. Clearly, the house had been erected in phases, likely over a long span of time, and probably by a succession of owners. The number of marked parking spaces along the sides of the courtyard meant that the whole had been subdivided into flats. But the location in the sixth arrondissement of Paris meant that the price of even a studio apartment here would be breathtaking. Beyond my means, anyway. I could not quite accept the fact that, through inheritance from someone who was a stranger to me, my mother, Isabelle, I owned a piece of it.

After a deep breath, I grabbed the handles of my two suitcases, the heavier of them full of camera gear, and started through the gates. A round, flame-haired woman wearing a calico apron over her woolen skirt came out through a side door and stood in my path; the racket of a television game show leaked out the door behind her. As she walked toward me, she folded her cardigan across her full bosom and eyed me warily, as if I might be selling vacuum cleaners or kitchen gadgets out of my big black cases.

“Madame Gonsalves?” I asked again, making sure she was the concierge my grandmother told me watched over the complex.

The woman’s response was a shrug that conveyed, Who else? I waited for her to challenge my presence, but she took the handle of the camera case from me and said, “You’re finally here, Maggie MacGowen.”

I said, “So, you were expecting me?”

“Expecting you sometime, yes, of course. But today? Right now? Non.”

Mme Gonsalves wasn’t very young or very fit and needed both hands to push and tug the big wheeled bag across the courtyard. I offered to take it from her, thinking about my cameras bouncing along the cobblestoned pavement, but she waved me off, keeping up a steady stream of chatter in Spanish- or Portuguese-accented French that I struggled to understand. “That brother of yours, what can we do? Freddy should have called me so I could turn on the heat and get the cleaners in. Head in the clouds, that one. A good boy, yes? But—” A shrug to let me know that my half brother was a hopeless cause. “And those boys of his and their friends. Oh-là! So much noise. Can they walk without kicking a football?”

Freddy, as I knew him, was hardly a man with his head in the clouds, and I thought his two sons were well behaved. For teenagers. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn about the woman’s issues with them now that I was through the gates and making progress across the courtyard toward my goal, namely a hot bath and a bed and some quiet after nearly three days stuck in airports or jammed into packed airplanes.

Mme Gonsalves took out a heavy ring of keys and opened a freshly painted blue door in the central of the three wings, the Gothic confection. I followed her up one flight of stone stairs and through the only door leading off the landing. For a moment, I stood in the dimly lit vestibule of my late mother’s apartment, almost afraid to venture into the darker rooms beyond. I was told that when I was very young I lived in a Paris apartment with her. But certainly not in this one. When I was little more than a baby, I understand, I was jettisoned out a window. I bounced on an awning and fell to the street below, where strangers rescued me. That story didn’t jibe with this place where the tall windows opened onto a terrace over the courtyard and not onto a street. Wherever the event happened, it determined the course of the rest of my life. Shortly thereafter my father took me away from Isabelle, who had once been his paramour, and carried me off to California where he lived with his wife, the only mother I ever knew or knew about until recently. Other than random images that flash during nightmares, I have no recollection of Isabelle or the brief time we had together. Now she’s dead, and I will never know her.

About a year and a half ago, I met Isabelle’s family for the first time. They welcomed me: my half brother, Freddy; my ninety-three-year-old grandmother; an uncle, Gérard; and many, many cousins. But I still felt that I hovered at their periphery, unsure about who might resent an interloper, me, who had equal inheritance rights to an estate that could be substantial. Was Freddy maybe sending a message to me by neglecting to warn the concierge that I was coming? No, that wouldn’t be like Freddy. More likely there was so much happening in his life that notifying the woman had simply slipped past him.

Mme Gonsalves flipped on a light in the main salon and uttered, “Oh-là!” as my camera bag met the floor with a worrisome thunk.

Beyond the lovely, well-tended courtyard, behind the freshly painted front door and the broad stone staircase, the beautifully appointed apartment looked like a fraternity house the morning after a kegger. Mounds of used bath towels—now stiff and dry—wads of soiled athletic socks, food wrappers, dirty dishes, beer cans, empty wine bottles, and random heaps of cast-off clothing and sports equipment had moldered into a rancid, testosterone-rich stench. I knew that after Isabelle died, and after Freddy’s marriage fell dramatically apart, my half brother and his two teenage sons lived a bachelor existence in Isabelle’s apartment. They had decamped last spring to the family farm estate in Normandy, where Freddy had a large building project underway. But surely Freddy would have cleared up this mess long before now. Madame Gonsalves pulled a telephone out of her pocket and launched into a fierce-sounding conversation with whoever answered; was it Freddy? While she gave orders to the poor soul on the receiving end, I went around opening windows to bring in some fresh, though chilly, February air.

“Madame, non, non, non!” Phone in hand, the concierge closed the windows again. “Do you think you are still in California, Madame MacGowen? No, it is too cold today for open windows. I have turned on the heat, but it will do no good if you insist on heating all of Paris.”

“Is there a washing machine?” I asked, thoroughly chastened.

She pointed: “Kitchen.”

I pulled my dirty clothes out of the smaller suitcase, leaving the bag nearly empty, and headed for the kitchen. A modern full-sized washer and dryer were maybe the prettiest things I had seen all day. With the concierge still arguing on the phone in the salon, I dumped out the clothes and started sorting. Shorts and tank tops from the Laos leg of my trip, long johns and thick socks from the Ukraine bit, all were tumbled out onto the floor and sorted into piles by color.

For the previous four months, I had traipsed across Europe and Asia with a film crew, shooting sites that still harbored unexploded ordnance left over from various wars. I make investigative films for a living, most recently under contract with one of the big American television networks. During the summer and into fall, before the bomb project came along, my film crew and I had happily followed my grandmother around the family’s farm in Normandy, capturing beautiful footage of the place, its people, their quirks, commerce, and traditions. I was as in love with the footage we had captured as I was with its subject. Until one morning, when, as we filmed, remains of a company of World War II German soldiers were unearthed from one of Grand-mère’s carrot fields. Naturally, there ensued conversation about local farmers and builders who, in the course of their work, accidentally but regularly detonate explosives left over from World War II. It was an interesting but minor passage in the film, or so I thought. When I took the raw footage back to Los Angeles, where I live and work, the project, and my life, took an abrupt right turn.

I learned early on as a filmmaker that the meanings of words in Hollywood contracts can be frangible, dependent on the whim of the folks in charge. My production unit had a new project head, an extravagantly tattooed youth who was ambitious to make a name for himself. That meant originating his own projects, not fostering through the projects of his predecessor. One morning, as the rough cut of my film spooled before him, he kept saying, “Pretty, pretty, like to visit there” without great enthusiasm. But when he came to the footage of the discovery of the remains of a German Wehrmacht company among Grand-mère’s carrots, he sat up sharply and hit pause. Turns out the young genius had just been to the dentist—root canal, worst day of his life—where he read a magazine article about an old man in eastern Germany who lived in a camp trailer next to a bomb crater where his ancestral home had stood for centuries. Satellite imaging of the area, done during the course of who-knows-what sort of civic improvement project, revealed the path of a previously unknown, or long-forgotten, unexploded bomb that had burrowed deep below the man’s home during World War II. To save the old guy’s village, the government detonated the bomb, destroying the house and leaving him the bereft owner of a hole in the ground. The article went on to discuss the global issue of unexploded ordnance in former war zones.

After watching film of the skull emerge from Grand-mère’s carrots three more times, my new boss said, “You have good stuff here, Maggie. Real pretty. But hell, let’s go find those bombs for Spring Sweeps. You can do this family hearts-and-flowers shit later.”

Two weeks after that one-sided conversation, on October first, my film crew and I were on our way to Flanders to film the Iron Harvest, as the annual retrieval of World War I and World War II combat leftovers from the farmland of Western Europe is called; roughly a hundred tons of live and spent shells are unearthed from Flanders fields every year. Lugging our gear, we traipsed from those muddy fields to unexploded bomb sites under densely populated Berlin, into Ukraine, and finally off to look for unexploded ordnance left by the covert American raids over Laos during the Vietnam War. It had been an adventure, a dirty and exhausting one. Now, four months later, the last of the raw footage was winging toward Los Angeles in the custody of my film partner, Guido Patrini, and I was taking a little time off in Paris. On Monday morning, five days from now, I had an appointment with a producer at a French television network to discuss their offer to pick up the Normandy film project the American network had, essentially, dumped. But the first item on my agenda was to spend precious time with my fiancé, Jean-Paul Bernard. Though Jean-Paul expected me to arrive sometime during that week, he did not know, yet, that I was on the ground and at Isabelle’s apartment. As soon as I charged my phone, I would tell him.

With the first wash load started, I put my dead phone on its charger and plugged it in. When there was enough restored power to turn the thing on, I punched in Jean-Paul’s number. My hand shook a little as I waited for him to pick up. I hadn’t seen him since Christmas, but until five days ago, we spoke daily, no matter where in the world either of us was. Now, for five days my calls to him had gone directly to message. And for the first time he had not returned them. Had he lost his phone? Fallen under a bus? Decided to climb Everest? Whatever, wherever, I left yet another message, telling him I was, at last, in Paris.

There was a twenty-four-hour accumulation of messages in my own voice mailbox. First, I called Mom, my real mom, the woman who raised me. She had left several messages during the time I was without a phone, each more insistent than the last. It was eight a.m. Thursday in Paris, so it was ten p.m. Wednesday in Los Angeles, where she lives. Though it was late, I doubted she was asleep, probably waiting for me to call or worrying about why I wasn’t. Everything was fine, Mom told me when she picked up, but she reminded me that she worried whenever I was gallivanting off somewhere and she couldn’t reach me. Not that she called me every day, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t always thinking of me, or worried about me, especially when I was off digging up explosives. After a few minutes of ordinary “How’s your day?” conversation, she was reassured that I was still mostly intact. I wished her a good night and promised to call again in the morning. Her morning. My daughter, a college junior, was in her dorm room studying. Or so she said. We filled in some blanks since our last conversation, I promised to deposit money into her account, and she went back to her books. As soon as she clicked off, I made an electronic transfer of funds into her account. Guido, my filmmaking partner, should be in the air somewhere over the Pacific, headed home to begin editing the footage we had captured during our odyssey across former war zones, so I wouldn’t be able to speak with him until he landed. I left a message telling Guido that I had a meeting Monday with the French television people. Last, I left a message for Freddy, telling him that after two days of cancelled or delayed flights out of Asia, I was finally at Isabelle’s. I said nothing about the state of the apartment.

Breakfast on the plane, served before dawn local time, had been a rubbery disk concocted from some egglike substance, canned peaches, and a stale sweet roll. I was hungry. The refrigerator under Isabelle’s kitchen counter was smaller than the one in my daughter’s dorm room, not untypical in Europe. Inside I found two bottles of Perrier, a beer, and a desiccated chunk of some stinky cheese: about what I expected. I took out a Perrier, found an opener, and wandered with it back into the main salon. I found Madame Gonsalves gathering my nephews’ dirty socks and bath towels. She leaned a hockey stick against the wall and looked up at me.

“Cleaners are coming,” she said.

“When will they be here?”

One shoulder rose slightly. “Thirty minutes? Forty?”

“Good. Thanks. If you’ll excuse me, I need a bath.”

I saw her to the door and shot the deadbolt.

Already the room was warm enough that I could take off my coat. In my stocking feet, I walked around, exploring Isabelle’s private little world. High ceilings and large rooms with tall windows gave the impression that the apartment was larger than it actually was. Besides the small but functional kitchen, there was a spacious main salon with a dining table at one end, a small side room that Isabelle apparently used as an office, two large bedrooms, and a single but huge marble-lined bathroom. The décor was an interesting mélange of stark modern pieces and good-quality but comfortably worn and ordinary furniture that somehow lived together in interesting harmony. The only jarring note I found was my face among the array of framed family photographs displayed on a long table behind the sofa. I had not known Isabelle, did not recognize her the one time I saw her before she died. However, though I wasn’t aware of it, from time to time as I grew up on the far western edge of a different continent, she would fly over to lurk around me, sneaking the photos that she put on display here in her home; illicit souvenirs of the daughter she had relinquished. Knowing the issues her visits had created, in deference to Mom, I opened a drawer and swept the photos of me out of sight.

Isabelle was a stranger to me. I admit to having a guilty, maybe morbid, curiosity about her because, like it or not, she was my mother. Over the year and a half since I learned that she existed I had pieced together bits and scraps of information about her, but she was still a mystery to me. I lingered in her office, looking for hints, any little clue about what she thought, what she loved, who she was. The room seemed to have been spared the clutter that took over the rest of the apartment during its bachelor era. Books in three languages—French, English, German—lined the walls. Most of the titles had something to do with harnessing energy, nuclear power, physics, computers, climate change, or agriculture. I didn’t see a single novel on the shelves. My late father, a physicist, who had once been Isabelle’s mentor—and lover—never had much interest in fiction, either, though poetry was a passion.

A fine layer of dust coated the orderly desktop. I tried to imagine Isabelle sitting there. When she worked at the computer, she would have faced the door with the monitor at the center of the desk in front of her. To the left of the computer, there were a telephone, a clean pad of paper, and a cup full of pens and pencils. There was nothing else on the desk except a small, elegant leather-bound book. I could see that it was old, and looked much handled. Perhaps a beloved volume of poetry? The leather cover had worn away at the corners, revealing wood underneath. When I lifted the cover, I half expected to find an inscription written by my father on the fly leaf. Instead, I found another puzzle.

Clearly, this little volume was a treasure; no wonder Isabelle kept it close. The script was very elaborately hand-scribed on vellum or parchment, with richly, brightly illuminated capitals twined with flowers and scrolls and birds. Over the years oil from people’s hands had turned the edges of the leaves brown. I couldn’t read the text, but I recognized the first capital, a richly illuminated pi, the Greek equivalent of the Latinate letter P, and saw that the text was indeed structured like poetry. A Book of Psalms, in Greek, was my best guess.

Isabelle, I was told, was a committed atheist. If this were a little volume of the Psalms, was it anything more to her than poetry? An object of beauty? Maybe she had taken up the study of Greek. Until I saw that gem of a book, I had little interest in anything I might inherit from Isabelle’s estate. I closed the wonderful book and gently placed it inside the top right-hand desk drawer to keep it safe.

I grabbed my toiletries kit and padded off to the bathroom. Half an hour later, I was clean again, wearing a mostly clean collection of clothes, some of them mine, some I’d borrowed from my teenage nephews’ bureau drawers. Someone’s trainers, tossed into a bathroom corner, were dry and fit me well enough that I appropriated them. I was in the kitchen switching my wash when the cleaners arrived. Two young women, their heads shrouded by hijabs, came in, arms loaded with the tools of their trade. The older one accepted the hand I offered and gave it a quick shake.

“Thank you for coming, Madame,” I said.

“Fitting you in is most inconvenient,” she offered as a curt greeting, narrowing her eyes to let me know that she was not at all happy to be there. “We will do what we can, but we haven’t time to complete a thorough cleaning. Oui?”

“D’accord.” Sure, whatever. That issue settled, they went straight to work on the mess as if they were familiar with the house and its sloppy inhabitants. I did my best to stay out of their way.

The telephone on Isabelle’s desk rang as I was walking past with a stack of freshly laundered clothes. I glanced in at the phone, but kept walking. This wasn’t my house or my phone, and anyone who knew I was there would call me on my mobile phone, so I thought I should let it go to message. But the younger of the two cleaning women looked from the jangling phone to me and back with an expression of great puzzlement and reproach as if to say, “Answer it already.” So, I picked it up.

“Maggie?” Jean-Paul. How did he know where I was and how did he get Isabelle’s number when even I didn’t know what it was?

All I could think to say was, “Where are you?”

“Have you pencil and paper?”

I pulled the pad on the desk closer and took a pencil out of the cup. “Yes.”

“I need you to go out and find an Internet café, any Internet café. Pay with cash and access this email.” He gave me an electronic address and a PIN to access it. “There is a message for you in the draft message box. Follow the instructions. Will you do this?”

“Of course. But why? What’s going on?”

“I’ll explain when I see you. Now, please write this down.” He recited a string of numbers. “Turn your mobile phone to airplane mode, then turn it off, and leave it in the apartment when you go. Same with your laptop.”

“You’re being very mysterious, Jean-Paul.”

“I’m sorry, mon coeur, but yes. Can you trust me? Will you do this?”

“Up to certain obvious limits, of course. I mean, if you’re giving me nuclear launch codes, my love, then sorry, no deal.”

He laughed. And then he coughed.

I said, “I need you to tell me you’re okay.”

“I’m fine.” He answered, too quickly, with no little joke about how I might make him feel better when we were together. “Maggie, I miss you. I love you. If there were anyone else I could ask, I would. I hope you can trust me.”

If anyone other than Jean-Paul had given me those instructions, I would have laughed and hung up. “When will I see you?”

“Tonight, chérie. Will you go find an Internet café now?”

“Sure.” I heard a vacuum cleaner start up in one of the bedrooms. “I’m on my way. I’ll call you when I get back.”

“I’m sorry, but no, you can’t call me. Do you know what a burner phone is?”

“A throwaway,” I said.

“Exactly. This phone is a burner. When we say good-bye I’ll toss it. I’ll see you tonight and explain everything.” There was a click and the line went dead.

I have never known exactly what Jean-Paul does. He always says he’s a boring businessman, but I have never bought that. When I met him, he was the French consul general appointed to Los Angeles, a position that seemed to have more to do with promoting French trade and helping French citizens who wandered into problems in the U.S. than with the sort of spycraft he seemed to have access to. If I ever needed information on just about anything, from counterfeit masterpieces to stolen military weapons, the more arcane the better, Jean-Paul could make a phone call to the appropriate friend and find it. Always without explaining just who he had called or how they were connected except to say that they were at school together. More recently, since his recall home to France from Los Angeles, he worked with a trade group, something about representing European Union exports to the global marketplace. But he was always a little vague about the details.

As Jean-Paul gave me his instructions, I suspected that he was staying off the electronic information grid because he had been hacked, or was being cautious to prevent being hacked. But why? Whatever was going on with him certainly smelled intriguingly cloak-and-dagger. While I hoped I just might be on the verge of finding out something more about Monsieur Jean-Paul Bernard, I was also worried about his safety. Global wars have been fought over trade routes and the protection of monopolies on products and commodities. But there are also quieter, undeclared wars among commercial competitors. The scary thing is, those private commercial wars are not bound by the rules of the Geneva Convention.

My own coat was damp and mud-spattered. I rummaged among the coats and jackets hanging from the hall tree in the vestibule, found one that would do nicely, a handsome flannel-lined waxed canvas with a Barbour label that, from its size, was probably Freddy’s; he was a tall, broad-shouldered man. I slid my wallet and the keys Mme Gonsalves left for me into a pocket, and told the cleaners that I would be back soon.

The jacket was far too big for me, but it was dry and it was warm, and it covered me to the knees. I pulled up the collar and walked briskly up to boulevard Saint-Germain and then headed in the general direction of the Sorbonne, thinking that I was likely to find an Internet café in an area where students congregate. The first place I spotted was a few doors down from the Odéon Métro station, a bright new door on the ground floor of an ancient building. Inside, the room was redolent of coffee, tobacco, pot, and unwashed youth. But it was warm. I gave the attendant a few euros from my meager stash, assuming he wouldn’t be interested in the Laotian kip I hadn’t yet exchanged, chose a terminal in a far corner, as far from a cluster of young men playing a noisy video game as I could get, sat down and opened the email account Jean-Paul had given me.

The draft message he left me was very strange. First he asked me not to use credit or ATM cards, and again told me to keep my telephone and laptop in airplane mode and turned off, and to leave them in the apartment. The next part was cryptic: “Always aim for the moon, and remember how far it is to China.” Hoping for explanation, I clicked on the URL imbedded in the message and up popped the home page for an airline. Mystified, I studied the page. In the top corner, there was a box for an itinerary number. I punched in the string of numbers Jean-Paul had given me over the phone and found a boarding pass for a flight that left that afternoon at two o’clock from Orly Airport, Paris, headed for Marco Polo Airport, Venice. The boarding pass was issued in my name.