7

“Your identification, sir.” The officer guarding the door outside the immediate treatment suite crossed her arms and stood wide as she studied us. When Jean-Paul handed her his mangled passport, she grew still more wary. “Is that blood, sir?”

“It is,” he said. “Whether it’s mine or my colleague’s, I can’t say.”

“Have you law enforcement or justice department credentials?”

“I have a national health card and a membership card for an American store called costco,” he said. “Which I would be happy to lend you if you should want to buy a new television or a gross of frozen buffalo wings. Beyond that, what I have is official permission. You were told by your superior that I was to be granted an audience with your esteemed prisoner, were you not?”

Her chin rose two degrees in grudging acknowledgment as she reached behind her to push the electric door opener. Jean-Paul took my arm and we started past, but she put up her hand to stop me. Jean-Paul looked her in the eye as he pulled out his phone and began tapping numbers. She sighed to show her displeasure, but stepped aside and let us both go through. Her parting words were, “This is highly irregular. Highly.”

I leaned close to him as we walked past her into the hallway beyond, and said, “costco?”

“Interesting place. On my first visit, I was able to acquire enough toilet paper to supply the Los Angeles consulate for the remainder of my tenure, buy my son a lifetime supply of athletic socks, and verify that the company had not ripped off a single French product.”

“Did you ever go back?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I was curious to find out what a buffalo wing might be.”

A second officer stood outside the third treatment room along the corridor. When the guard watching from the outer door gave him a nod, he pushed the door opener and, with a little bow, ushered us through.

Our first glimpse of Sabri Qosja made it clear that he had lost the fight. Enthroned in a big chair that looked like it was borrowed from a dentist, his arms bound to the chair arms, chest strapped to the back, his legs shackled, not by chains but by a solid metal bar and locked to the foot rest so he couldn’t kick, and flanked by armed officers, he was the poster boy for abject defeat. Or maybe the captured racoon king. Both eyes were so black and swollen that I could not tell whether he could see until he spoke.

“You,” was all he said.

“Us,” Jean-Paul answered. He turned to the doctor who followed us in, and asked. “How is he?”

“There’s nothing we can do here to cure his foul disposition, but for the rest? He isn’t as badly off as he looks,” the doctor said, gently palpating the purple mass in the middle of Qosja’s face that, until a few hours ago, was a nose. “We’ll need to build him a new sniffer, probably with a bone graft from his hip. But until the swelling subsides and we can get after it, he’ll be breathing through his mouth.”

“Take these fucking restraints off,” Qosja demanded. “My feet have gone to sleep.”

“Good,” the doctor said, patting his shoulder. “Let them sleep. When they wake up, we’ll see if you still want to kick people.”

During that little back-and-forth, I pulled out my camera and snapped a couple of pictures of Qosja for Madame Gonsalves’s scrapbook. Qosja turned his head, trying to avoid the camera, but he was locked down so thoroughly that all he could do was give me a good profile shot. When I had my shot, I flipped to the image I captured at the department store in Venice and offered the camera to the doctor. “Would you like to see him before he tried to mug the wrong woman?”

“Yes, indeed.” The doctor walked around his patient, comparing the photo, a semi-profile, to the ruin in the chair. When he handed the camera back to me, he addressed Qosja. “Monsieur, we will do our best, but…?” And there he left it before walking out of the room again.

Slowly, Jean-Paul took off his coat and handed it to one of the blue-uniformed police guards, a gesture meant to establish his superior rank in the room, I thought. When he finally got around to speaking with the prisoner, he stood just a bit to the side, making Qosja work to see him.

“So, we meet again, Monsieur Qosja,” he said, at last. “And once again I find you in shackles.”

“If my hands were free, I would break your neck.” Qosja’s voice was surprisingly high-pitched for a tough guy. And nasal, but that was Madame Gonsalves’s doing. “And hers, too.”

“I have no doubt of that. And yet, your scattershot efforts over the last week to do some approximation of that have come to nothing, except that here you are, in custody again, and here am I, once again asking you questions.”

“Go to hell.”

“Perhaps I will. But in the meantime, let’s chat, shall we?” Jean-Paul took a step closer, forcing Qosja to look up at him. “We know that you are being paid through an entity called ProtX4, and we know, of course, that ProtX4 is also paying a hacker to track our movements and report them to you. But what, exactly, are you being paid to do?”

“I don’t have to talk to you.”

“You do, you know. You are in France, sir, not Argentina. A little under-the-table mordida or baksheesh will not buy your freedom here; don’t expect your employer to sweep in and save your ass. Trust me, the charges will be serious, and you will be a guest of the miserable French prison system for a very long time. Because your activities amount to international terrorism enhanced by the attempted assassination of two Eurozone officials and the cold-blooded murder of a young nurse, not to mention the attempted bombing of a ship in harbor, you can expect to be brought before the same international court you faced after the Kosovar War. Except this time your father will not be around to take the fall for you.”

“You bastard,” Qosja spat. “You fucking bastard. You killed my father, and I will kill you.”

Jean-Paul turned to the policeman holding his coat. “You heard what he said. Please include his threat on my life in your report.”

“Of course, sir,” the policeman said, but I could see a bit of a tooth-sucking grin behind his starchy façade.

“And, just so we are clear, Monsieur Qosja, your father, may he rest in peace, took his own life. That was, what, sixteen or seventeen years ago? A long time. But, if memory serves, before he hanged himself in his cell, your father confessed to the very crimes you stood accused of committing. Rape and murder of women and children, correct?”

“Not correct, pig. Anything he and I did were legitimate acts of war. Payback for what was done to my mother and sisters.”

“Even in war, sir, there are rules. You broke those rules, and your father paid the ultimate price. So, tell me, Monsieur, is that what all this stalking crap has been about? Payback?”

“No. But why waste an opportunity?” Qosja leaned his head back and gulped air. Maybe he had accepted the reality of his situation, or maybe he was just saving energy for whatever was to come next. Whatever the reason, he seemed calmer. After another deep, gulping breath, he turned his swollen eyes to me. “I don’t know why you’re here. You are that idiot Bord’s job, not mine.”

“Job?” I repeated. “Job to do what, exactly?”

“Same as me,” he said. “We were hired to keep you both out of Paris.”

“Why?”

“No one told me why, and I did not ask. It isn’t my place to ask questions.”

“How were you to keep us away?” I asked.

“No one told me that, either. I’m a professional; I know what to do. Bord thought he was some kind of chick magnet: you know what that is?” When I nodded, he said, “He thought he could get you to go out for drinks with him, slip you some roofies, park you somewhere until the job is over.”

“When will that be?”

“When they tell us it is over.”

“They are ProtX4?”

“Yes, but I don’t know who their client is.”

“The client is a company or consortium called InterCentro.”

“If you say so.”

I said, “You weren’t hired to kill Monsieur Bernard, just to keep him out of Paris?”

“Correct.”

“But you did try to kill him.”

“Sure,” he said, a cocky bastard once again. “No one said not to. If it had been anyone else, I would have just kidnapped him, maybe drugged him for a while, like Bord planned for you. But when I realized who the job was—”

“You wanted revenge,” Jean-Paul said.

“Call it what you want.”

“Un grand faux-pas?” I offered. “You failed.”

Jean-Paul laughed. “Remind me, chérie, to help with your vocabulary of French obscenities.”

“I will. I have been at such a disadvantage.”

Qosja chimed in. “Just because you have me, you think it’s over?”

“Bord is out of commission, too,” I said.

“So what? Men like us, we’re a dime a dozen. Now ProtX4 just goes to the next guy on the list, and the game continues.”

“It isn’t a game,” I said.

Qosja laughed, an ugly, guttural burst. He strained forward and sneered at me. “You’re about to find out how wrong you are.”

One of his guards kicked the bottom of his foot and he winced. The guard grinned at his partner. “Looks like the foot isn’t asleep after all.”

“The irony here, Mr. Qosja,” I said, keeping my distance, “is that if you hadn’t dropped a bomb on Monsieur Bernard, indeed if you had simply left him alone, he would have returned to Paris only long enough to meet me and take me away again. You have wasted a great deal of time, energy, and someone else’s money. And for what?”

“For what?” he shrugged. “I told you. I don’t ask.”

Jean-Paul collected his coat from the policeman and stepped over to take my arm. He turned and studied Qosja long enough to make the prisoner shrink into himself to get away from the scrutiny.

“Monsieur Qosja,” he said, “I recommend that you use your time in prison wisely. Learn a good trade, because, sir, if you ever gain your freedom again, you will need a new line of work. Clearly, you are an abject failure in your current field.”

With that, we turned and left the room.

“Do you believe him?” I asked as we walked out of the hospital.

“About being hired to keep us out of Paris?”

“No, about the client sending someone else after us?”

He toggled his head, a yes-or-no answer. “Except, we are here, in Paris, yes? So what would be the assignment now?”

“I do not want to find that out.”

“We may,” he said, leading me down the ramp into the underground parking garage. “Qosja is a great liar. But, in spite of himself, he did give us some useful information. First, as these things go, from the beginning the effort to stop us has been a low-budget, private operation. Whoever is behind this went for cheap, hired mediocrity. Remember, Qosja also failed his last assignment and had to be rescued out of Argentina. Bottom of the barrel; if either he or Bord was good at what he does, we’d be dead or drugged and tossed into a dark hole by now.”

“They misjudged their target,” I said, pulling up the collar of my coat against the cold.

He laughed softly. “Yes, one should always send in the A Team against a filmmaker and a bureaucrat.”

“Ninja filmmaker and bureaucrat who has the phone number of every official in the Eurozone,” I said. “A tough pair.”

“Tell yourself that, but don’t forget to watch your back.”

“Jean-Paul,” I said as we approached his car. “If this is as you say, a low-budget operation, then whoever is behind it will run out of funds at some point. I’m sure that by now he’s weighed the value of whatever he’s after against the cost of obtaining it. Maybe it’s over.”

“Maybe.” He pulled out his car keys and punched the automatic unlock. “You have an idea what he’s after?”

“So do you. In Paris, what links us?”

“Other than a shared bed?”

“Other than that.”

“Number seven, rue Jacob.”

“And the treasure in the basement.”

As we pulled out of the garage, a white Citroën with a blue stripe down the side emblazed with the word police in red, fell in behind us.

“We have an escort,” I said. “Courtesy of your friend David Berg?”

“Probably. Do you object?”

“Not at all. But what did you tell him?”

“Not much. David’s a good cop. I’m sure he made a few phone calls of his own.”

It was already dark by the time we drove through the big gates at number seven, rue Jacob. The police car that followed us from the hospital was still parked across the driveway when the gates closed behind us. Jean-Paul and I carried in his bags and the groceries we bought at the shops in Vaucresson that afternoon. Though the food had sat in the trunk for several hours, the car was at least as cold as a refrigerator, so I wasn’t concerned about anything spoiling. Except for maybe some produce that might have frozen.

In the kitchen, I put the heat under the remains of the soup Madame Gonsalves had brought the day before, and stowed the new purchases.

“Is there enough soup for tonight?” Jean-Paul asked.

“It’s soup,” I said. “If there isn’t enough, I’ll just add some water.”

“Water?” He sounded dubious. I confess, I am no cook, but why not water? He left the kitchen before I could ask, headed toward the bedroom with his bags. I followed him as far as Isabelle’s office. Dinner could wait until I’d had a look at the library, I decided as I fished the keys out of her desk drawer.

When I went back out into the salon, I could hear men talking somewhere outside the apartment. In the courtyard? In the entry hall downstairs? I wasn’t familiar with the sounds of the building, of neighbors coming and going or regular service people doing their jobs, so I stopped to listen, not to eavesdrop, but to try to figure out where the voices came from. There were muffled good-byes, and a door closed. Barry Griffith’s door downstairs? The keys were in my hand when someone knocked on my door. I froze for a moment to listen again before I went over to the wall panel and flipped on the monitor to see who was there. Philippe, the elder of Freddy’s two sons, stood there holding a turquoise bag from a Patrick Roger chocolate shop—a very expensive chocolate shop—by its little handle.

“Company, Jean-Paul,” I called out as I opened the door. Poor Philippe, clearly nervous, turned bright red the instant he saw me. The chocolates he bore were doubtless a peace offering.

“Aunt Maggie,” he managed to say.

“What a nice surprise,” I said. We exchanged les bises and I drew him inside. “Come in. It’s freezing out there.”

“This is for you.” Standing in the vestibule, he held out the bright little bag on both hands like the offering of a penitent. “I came to tell you I am sorry for all the trouble my friends and I caused you. I hope I can forgive me.”

“How kind of you, Philippe,” I said, accepting the offering. “Thank you. Certainly, I forgive you, though I would love to hear exactly why you think you need forgiveness. Monsieur Griffith downstairs might be tougher to convince than I am, however.”

“I just left him. We’re okay. Except I had to promise him I would go shopping with him during the school holiday to buy a new computer and set it up for him.”

“Is that terrible?”

“No. He’s very nice really. He was a good friend of Mamie Izzy.”

“Mamie Izzy. Is that what you called her: Granny?”

He smiled, finally. “She would not let us call her Grand-mère. Besides, it would be too confusing to have two Grand-mères, yes?”

“I suppose it would.” We had progressed as far as the salon when Jean-Paul walked into the room. Poor Philippe blushed all over again.

“Philippe, good to see you again, man,” Jean-Paul said, offering his hand and leaning in for les bises. I forget sometimes that Jean-Paul’s family and mine had been friends long before they conspired for us to meet. “How is school?”

“Oh, you know, sir. School is school. Very difficult this term. How is Dom?”

“I think he would give the same answer,” Jean-Paul said, showing Philippe to a comfortable chair. We sat opposite him, on Isabelle’s down-stuffed sofa. “What brings you all the way across the Channel to Paris?”

The poor boy colored yet again.

“Would you like some water?” I asked. “Or a cider?”

“Have any cyanide?”

“Oh, Philippe.” I went over to him, sat on the arm of his chair and wrapped an arm around his shoulders, which he tolerated. “It can’t be that bad. Tell us what happened.”

He took a breath, sighed, stalling while he steeled himself. “Did Papa tell you my friends and I stayed here over the New Year?”

“He did.”

“We had permission to stay one night, New Year’s Eve, to see the celebration. But—”

We waited.

“But— Je suis un imbécile.” He dropped his face into his hands. We waited some more. Finally, he straightened up, looked from Jean-Paul’s face to mine, and began again. “It started when my friends said they were disappointed we couldn’t stay to see the fireworks. In Paris, it’s really big, you know? Papa agreed we could, if we promised not to get drunk and be stupid, and to get on the Chunnel train back to school in the morning. So, after Papa and Robert left, we hung out with a guy I know in the Marais for a while before going over to the Champs Elysées for the show. There were concerts, and— We stayed out pretty late. After, when we got home, I thought, it’s New Year’s, we should have some Champagne. So, we went down to Mamie Izzy’s wine cellar to get some.”

“Isabelle had a wine cellar?” Apparently, from his reaction, this was news to Jean-Paul. “Where?”

“Uh, in the cellar, sir.” Philippe pointed toward the floor.

“Why not? There’s plenty of space down there,” Jean-Paul said with a little shrug. “Wish I’d thought to put one in. Sorry to interrupt. Go on.”

“So, we went down to get the wine. And that’s when things got crazy.”

“Crazy how?” I asked.

“It’s my fault. My friends, Val and Cho, had never seen basements like that. Cho called it Hogwarts. He thought it would be so great to play this sort of laser tag we play at school with our phones sometimes. It was really late; I should have said no.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“So, we were running around, shooting at each other. Cho got the keys from me and he started opening doors down there to find hiding places and make barricades. Monsieur Griffith came down and told us to shut up. I grabbed Cho and told him we had to quit. But we couldn’t find Val. We looked all over. By then it was about noon, and we were supposed to go to the train, but I couldn’t leave without Val, could I?”

He looked at us, expecting maybe affirmation. I said, “Did you try calling his mobile phone?”

He grimaced. “Yes, finally, when I got a little sober.”

“Champagne?” Jean-Paul asked.

He shook his head. “Uncle Antoine’s eau de vie.”

Eau de vie is a wicked, aged apple brandy my cousin, Antoine—actually, he’s Philippe’s cousin, as well, but the appropriate age to be an uncle—distilled from cider produced on the family’s estate in Normandy. A short snifter as an after-dinner digestif was all that I could manage of the potent, but delicious, stuff. If those kids had been swilling it all night long, I’m surprised that only one of them got misplaced.

“But there’s no phone signal in the basement,” Philippe said.

“You did find him, though?”

“Yes.” He blushed yet again. “Finally, I looked in the library. I showed it to them earlier, when we got the brandy, but I warned them that it was forbidden to go in there without me, totally off limits. But Val went in anyway, alone. I think he slept in there.”

“Tell me Val’s whole name,” I said.

“Vasily Barkoff. But he hates it. He gets mad if you call him Vasily.”

I looked at Jean-Paul. “Son of Boris?”

“Val has a temper?”

Philippe raised his palms in a “maybe” gesture. “He’s full of himself. Brags a lot. His father has a lot of money, so he thinks that makes him an übermensch.”

“Übermensch?” So, the kids were reading Nietzsche.

Phillipe said, “You know, some kind of special guy. Super man.”

“What was this übermensch doing when you found him in the library?” Jean-Paul asked.

“Looking at books. His father is some kind of expert on old Russian books; he brags about that, too. Val found the Russian stuff and started piling it up on a table. He said he was just looking at it, but I know he was planning to steal some of it.”

“Why do you think that?” I asked.

“Because he hid one under his sweater. I found it later.”

“Excuse me for just a sec.” I got up and went into Isabelle’s office to fetch the little volume of Psalms. I held it up for Philippe to see. “This one?”

“Yes. I think maybe he forgot it was there. When he stripped to go to bed, it fell out.”

“What was he going to do with it?”

“He said he just wanted to send a picture of it to his father, but he couldn’t get a signal downstairs, so he brought it up. I told him I didn’t believe him.”

“And?”

“And then Cho threw up and we all went to sleep. When we got up, it was too late to get the train. It was a holiday, so there wasn’t much to do. We just hung around, ate takeout, watched movies, went back to bed.”

Jean-Paul leaned forward and spoke softly. “Everyone had an eau de vie hangover, yes?”

The kid’s guilty grin was answer enough.

“How long did you stay?” I asked.

“Till the day after that. We didn’t have to be back at school until the fourth, so we decided we’d hang out in Paris until the third. But the next morning Cho and Val wanted to play tag again. They got really mad that I wouldn’t let them have the keys for the basement, but they got down there somehow. Maybe they followed someone who was going down. Anyway, they chased each other around until Monsieur Griffith threatened to call Papa. I told Cho and Val to grab their stuff and leave, like now.”

“What happened with the cleaners?” I asked.

“That was bad,” he said, sniffing the air, distracted for a moment, I thought, by the aroma of soup, and I wondered when he had eaten last. “The cleaners are nice ladies, but they’re really strict Muslims. We weren’t supposed to still be in the apartment when they came. The younger one, Saida, she’s really nice and really pretty. Val tried to mess with her, pulled off her head scarf, touched her. She got blindly upset, and they left.”

“And wouldn’t come back.” I said.

“I tried to apologize, but, yeah. So, when Papa called last week to schedule them to come in, they said they wouldn’t, and if he had questions, he should ask me.” He took a deep breath. “Anyway, I am sorry Mamie Izzy’s place was a mess when you got here. I was going to come and clean during the Easter holiday, but—”

“But I showed up.”

He nodded.

“Val came by looking for his coat,” I said. “Will you take it to him when you go back to school?”

He shook his head. “He left. I came back from a tutorial one day and he was gone. Just gone. Cho didn’t know where he went either.”

I looked at Jean-Paul, and said, “Suddenly Val’s gone. Just gone.”

“Aunt Maggie?”

“Yes, Philippe.”

“Do I smell Madame Gigi’s soup?”

“If Madame Gigi is the concierge, you do.”

He sniffed the air again.

“You’ll stay for dinner, of course.” Jean-Paul rose to his feet. “But first, let’s go have a look at the library.”

I pulled the keys out of my pocket and started for the front door with Jean-Paul close behind.

“Not that way.” Philippe gestured for us to follow him to the kitchen. “This way is shorter.”

There was a narrow door at the back of the kitchen between the washer and dryer and a small table. If I had paid attention to it, and I had not, I would assume it led to a broom closet or pantry. Phillipe asked me for the keys, unlocked a deadbolt, opened the door, and flipped a wall switch that turned on a row of recessed ceiling lights above a steep, narrow stone stairway that seemed to end in a dense, black abyss. At the bottom, he flipped another switch, illuminating a chamber that was no more than five feet square. There were bolted doors on the right and the left, and a solid wall straight ahead. Not a happy place for anyone with claustrophobia issues.

“Wine,” Phillipe said, opening the door on the right and turning on the light. Indeed, there was a well-stocked cellar, rows of racked bottles extending into the gloom beyond the reach of the fanciful chandelier—rescued from a château?—hanging above my head.

“Merde,” was all I could think to say, calling upon that lovely universal French obscenity once again. I stood just inside the doorway, washed over, or rather bowled over, by the heady perfume of wine-soaked wood and old cork, trying to figure out what the hell I had tumbled into by the accident of the union between my beloved late father and this enigma, Isabelle, the ultimate inconnue, the unknown, and now unknowable woman who had given birth to me. Jean-Paul walked straight inside with a happy grin on his face and started pulling out random bottles. He’d study a label and put the bottle back, except for four, which he handed Phillipe to set on the stairs to take up with us later.

“Isabelle was a connoisseur,” he said, smiling at me. “If it’s all right with you, I’ve selected something very nice to have with soup tonight, and something to take to my sister’s lunch tomorrow.”

I held up my palms. “Bien sûr, pourquoi pas?” Sure, why not? My wine is your wine. My wine? I needed to step out to catch my breath.

Jean-Paul turned off the lights and Philippe locked up after him. The door on the opposite side of the stairway had a recessed pull instead of a knob of some sort. Phillipe inserted a key in a bolt and slid the door into a wall pocket, releasing a burst of chilly air into the warmer passage. He hit a switch and, after a pause, rows of filtered museum lights flickered on. Again, I hesitated before venturing inside. When I first heard about the convent’s library and scriptorium, I imagined something lifted out of a medieval castle, or a movie about a medieval castle: stone walls and carved paneling and heavy tapestries. What I saw could have been a newly appointed reading room in the rare books section of any university library. I confess that I was a bit disappointed by the industrial-looking glass-front shelving, the spare utilitarian tables and chairs. Everything in the room was perfectly tidy, except for twin towers of volumes stacked at the far end of one of the tables.

When the door was closed behind us, it disappeared, becoming just another part of the solid wall between two bookcases, a puzzling contrast to the heavy, electronically secured door on the far side of the room. Next to that door, there were two computers on small desks, above which were posted instructions for library visitors to log in and for accessing the online card catalogue.

“Once again,” Jean-Paul said, venturing further inside, “Isabelle has surprised me. I knew nothing about this second entrance. She and I, and the curator from the Louvre, have electronic fob keys for the other door. Just so you know, for security, each key has a different signature that is recorded every time it is used. But I think that Isabelle wanted to come and go without anyone knowing. Philippe, do you have any idea when she installed the door?”

The question merited a slight lift of one shoulder, which I read to mean that the answer was obvious. “It was always here. I mean, for as long as I can remember.”

“You’re eighteen, Philippe?” Jean-Paul asked, and was answered with an affirmative lift of the chin. “The same as my Dom. We started the restoration when you two were just babies. So, you’re right, the door probably has been here for most of your life. I simply don’t know.”

I looked around at the shelved volumes—old, leather-bound works—and at the long drawers for texts that needed to be stored flat. It was a cold, uncomfortable room, the temperature and humidity regulated by a machine affixed to the far wall. Not a pleasant place, at all, to hang out. Curious, I asked Phillippe, “Did your grandmother come down here often?”

“Oh, yes. Mamie Izzy would bring her work down sometimes. It’s very quiet. The books were good company, she said. Sometimes, when I visited her, I would bring my school work, and we’d sit here and she would do her work and I would do mine.”

“Her work?” I repeated; Isabelle, like my father, was a nuclear physicist. “She was working on a church-related project?”

He laughed at that. “Mamie Izzy was an atheist. She thought that these books were pretty, but she said that between the fancy covers, everything on the pages was superstitious bullshit. Excuse me, but that is her word.”

“And I thought she was so genteel,” I said.

Jean-Paul’s snort had a sardonic edge. “But then, you never knew her.”

“Except,” Philippe said, “for the things she called the refugees. She did like looking through those sometimes.”

“What are the refugees?” I asked.

“Papers that were brought here for safekeeping during the Revolution,” he said.

I turned to Jean-Paul. “You told me about that.”

He nodded. “The convent gave sanctuary to precious children and precious documents, both. For a price, I suspect.”

“You think the nuns rented out space?”

“In a sense,” Jean-Paul answered. “I’m sure that if the nuns weren’t given cash they were given special favors of some sort for the risk they took. Words can be dangerous, yes?”

“Mightier than the sword.”

He chuckled. “When the men whose words they safeguarded—kings and nobles and priests—were losing their heads, I’m certain the nuns knew the danger they faced. From the look of the place when we found it, no one spent a minute longer down here with the contraband than it took to open the door, shove it inside. And lock the door behind. It’s difficult to imagine now, but when the workmen found the old library, this room was a filthy mess. There were stacks of crates and chests pushed against the walls. Some had collapsed from the burdens of time and weight, and spilled. I confess I felt overwhelmed. We knew that what was here was important, but what to do with it?”

“That’s when you called the university?” I asked.

“Your mother did. As soon as Isabelle saw the royal crest on some crates, she called the Sorbonne, and they in turn brought in the Louvre. It was a great relief to have the experts take over sorting and organizing. Too bad they went public about the discovery.”

“Because that brought in the Vatican and the local diocese.”

“What a headache.” He looked around, and sighed. “Or maybe nightmare. Sometimes I wish the workmen had never opened that door to begin with.”

I put my hand along his cheek, beside the fresh scars. “Roger that. I’m new to all this, but already I wish it would go away.”

“You’ve no idea.” He took my hand and kissed it. “From the beginning, my role at rue Jacob has been managing financial and legal issues. Bankers, lawyers and lawsuits. So, as you have figured out by now, I did not pay very close attention to what was happening in here. Other than to check on the security system when it was periodically upgraded, I did not visit the library. For her own reasons, Isabelle neglected to mention she had put in a second door. One that is not connected to the alarm system.”

“She could be sneaky,” Phillipe said with a grin. “But when I said she liked the refugees, I wasn’t talking about refugees from the French Revolution. It was the other ones.”

“Sorry,” Jean-Paul said. “Which other ones?”

“From the Russian Revolution.” He pointed to the stacks of books on the far table. “Those are the books Val was interested in, too.”

For just a moment, the only sound in the room was the soft beeping of the humidity monitor. Jean-Paul was the first to speak. He turned to me. “The Russians. Another headache that won’t go away.”

“When did they arrive?” I asked. “And who brought them?”

Both Jean-Paul and Phillipe shrugged. Phillipe said, “Sometime after 1917 when the revolution began.”

“A lot of Russian nobility, and probably clergy, fled to Paris around then,” Jean-Paul added. “We assumed that someone rescued, or looted, church artifacts and texts when the Bolsheviks shut down the churches and outlawed the priesthood, and somehow parked what they could save here. By then, the library was probably already in a shambles.”

I looked around the room. “Philippe, from Isabelle’s back stairs, is there a way to get into the rest of the basement other than going through the main library door over there?”

“No. You have to go back up, out the apartment’s front door, and down the main stairs. Do you want me to show you?”

“Later maybe. Did you bring Cho and Val in here through the pocket door, or the main door?”

“The slider,” he said, indicating the door we had come through. “I know I shouldn’t have brought them in at all, but Val is always bragging about his father and his precious Russian book collection and how it’s worth millions. It gets very boring. When we came down for the brandy, I pointed to the library door and told Val that there were very old Russian books in here, worth a ton. He didn’t believe me, so I said he could pull up the museum site and see for himself. He tried, but he couldn’t get a phone signal down here, so I took him in, but just to show him the catalogue on the computer.”

“And he saw the list of Russian holdings,” I said.

“Not exactly. He only saw that there were things from Russia. I’ll show you.” He booted one of the computers near the main door and pulled up the library catalogue. Besides the location on the shelves, the catalogue included a brief description, and sometimes a photograph, of the original holdings of the St. Jérôme Émilian convent library. Anyone interested in the refugees, as Philippe called the material brought into the convent for safekeeping during dangerous times, was to contact the curator of rare books at the Louvre for a catalogue of the holdings or to apply for permission to see them. Those materials were listed only as Collections: Saint-Germain-de-Prés, Paris; Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, Paris; Saint-Sulpice, Paris. And Vladimirsky Cathedral, St. Petersburg.

“Why aren’t the contents of the refugee collections in the accessible catalogue?” I asked.

When Philippe, having no answer, raised his palms, Jean-Paul stepped in. “It has to do with lawsuits, as well as issues of provenance, and degree of pain-in-the-ass.”

“I don’t see any of the royal papers in the catalogue,” I said, scrolling through the menu.

“That’s because they aren’t here,” Jean-Paul said. “The Vatican has no claim on them, so they were shipped out to the Louvre right away. Interesting though, some of the documents were actually produced right here, in the scriptorium of the Little Sisters of Saint Jérôme Émilian.”

“I understand how the Vatican can claim the books, texts, whatever, that were in the convent library. But can’t we pack up everything that belonged to the three local churches on the list, drop it on their doorsteps, ring the bell, and run like hell?”

Philippe laughed. “Mamie Izzy said almost the same thing.”

“I’m game,” Jean-Paul said. “I’m damn tired of dealing with it all. The museum lawyers and the diocese lawyers agree with you, but the Vatican doesn’t and they are happy to pay their lawyers until Judgment Day. That still leaves us with the Russians, and right now I would really like for the Russian material to be somewhere else.”

“I don’t see how either the Vatican or the local diocese can claim any of that,” I said. “So why don’t we just truck it over to the Louvre?”

“Because they won’t touch it with a fork,” Jean-Paul said.

“Why not?”

“First, the Louvre won’t accept anything that may have been improperly acquired. We have no idea who left the stuff here, or how the nuns came to possess it. Next, the museum already has enough problems getting Russia to return pieces of their collection that the Nazis stole during the war, and that the Soviets in turn stole from the Nazis. Fine French works that belong to the Louvre still hang in Russian museums.”

“Maybe we could arrange a swap,” I said. “A lovely stolen Book of Psalms for a stolen Monet.”

“Please don’t do that,” Phillipe said, with surprising heat. “Please. Mamie Izzy studied who should have the Russian books. But they can’t go to Russia. She said someone went to a lot of trouble to rescue them from destruction, and she couldn’t bear to see them sent back into what she called a cesspool of corruption. There was nowhere to send them: not the church, not the museums. She said the reactionary Patriarch of Moscow—he’s the head of the church—is in the pocket of the reprehensible Russian government and she would do nothing that would seem to support his sexist, racist, xenophobic agenda. And that anything sent to a museum or university would probably end up in the hands of some oligarch who would only sell it for cash to pay his whores.”

“Your grandmother said that?” I asked. I didn’t necessarily disagree with her, but is that the way Isabelle spoke with her grandchild? Lordy, she was an ever-deepening puzzle to me.

I looked up to see Jean-Paul watching me. The bob of his head told me that, yes, that was something Isabelle might say.

Philippe was looking at the stack of books that his friend Val took off the shelves, when he said, “Mamie Izzy thought the best thing was to keep it all here, where it was clean, quiet, and safe, until she could figure things out. But, she died, and, well, that was it.”

“Philippe, son,” Jean-Paul said, putting a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Thank you for sharing your grandmother’s thinking. Isabelle was right. Until a solution can be figured out, it would be best to keep the Russian collection here, safe. And quiet. But I’m not sure, in light of recent events, how possible that will be.”

“I’m an idiot for saying anything to Val, aren’t I?”

“No, you’re not. We should be free to talk to our friends without worrying that they might steal from us. Or worse.”

“Gentlemen,” I said. “It’s cold down here. Let’s go upstairs and see if I’ve managed to burn the soup.”

“What should we do with those books?” Philippe asked, eyes again on Val’s pile.

“Leave them for now,” Jean-Paul said. “We’ll want to take a closer look at what he found so interesting. But right now, let’s have something to eat, yes? I would not want to have to report to Madame Gonsalves that we ruined her soup through neglect.”

We turned out the lights and locked the door behind us. About halfway up the stairs, Jean-Paul’s phone got a signal again and began to ding with messages that had come in while we were in the basement. As he passed through the kitchen, he excused himself, set the wine on the counter and continued on into the salon. I could hear him talking to someone, but not what he was talking about.

Though the soup hadn’t burned, it had become thick enough to stand a spoon in. I filled a cup from the tap to thin it, but before I could dump water into the pot, Philippe stopped me.

“Madame Gigi adds chicken broth when she needs to thin the soup.” He opened a cupboard, pulled out a liter box of chicken broth, and set to work.

“You like to cook?” I asked as I pulled out the mortadella we lugged all the way from Bologna, and the cheese and bread we acquired in Vaucresson that afternoon. Leftover soup, a little salad, cold meat and cheese sounded like a perfect Saturday night meal to me.

“I’d rather cook than study physics,” he said. “But I’d rather jump out a window than study physics.”

“I think the physics gene skipped both of us,” I said. “What do you want to study?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, really.”

“When is your spring break? Sounds like you’re ready for it.”

“Not for two more weeks.”

“Think you can last?”

He shrugged as he stirred the soup, but he smiled. We were talking about school and plans for the summer when Jean-Paul came into the kitchen. As he searched drawers looking for a corkscrew, he announced, “I hope it’s all right; David Berg is going to drop by.”

“When?” I asked.

“I just opened the gate for him.”

“How lovely. Shall I open the wine?”

“Do you mind?”

What was there to say when the man was already driving through the gate? I reached for the corkscrew. “Of course not.”

“Is there enough soup for one more?”

I glanced at Philippe, he nodded, and I answered, “Certainly.”

When Jean-Paul left to go downstairs to let in his friend, I appealed to my co-chef. “Guess we’re having a dinner guest. How thin can we make the soup?”

“No worry.” He pulled a box of stewed roma tomatoes out of the cupboard, dumped them into the pot, added some tarragon and thyme, and the rest of the box of broth. Next, he cut a wedge off the mortadella, slivered it, dropped that into the pot, and chased it with a healthy shot of apple brandy he found somewhere.

“I’m glad you’re here, Philippe,” I said. For my part, I took the roasted chicken we’d bought from the butcher’s smoochy wife out of the refrigerator. I thought I would slice it and we could eat it cold after the soup, but with what on the side? The edges of the salad greens had turned brown while they sat in the frigid car all afternoon, though the hothouse green beans looked just fine. I washed them, and holding the dripping colander over the sink, asked, “Any ideas about what to do with these?”

“Sure, sure.” Philippe pulled out a sauté pan, olive oil and a head of garlic. I left him to it, picked up the wine and went out to greet our guest. Except, there were two men in dark suits taking off snow-flecked coats in the vestibule, not one.

“Maggie,” Jean-Paul said, reaching for me. “This is my old friend, David Berg.”

“Enchanté,” the older of the two said, an elegant man of about fifty, the same age as Jean-Paul. He offered his hand and leaned in for les bises. “I am so very happy to meet you at last.”

“Monsieur le Préfet.” I sneaked a peek at myself in the mirror on the wall behind him. He looked as if he’d just stepped out of a showroom. I looked like I’d had a long day. “How nice to meet a friend of Jean-Paul.”

Still holding my hand, he leaned in a bit again to say, in a low voice, “I beg you, call me David, or Davey, or anything else except Monsieur le Préfet.”

“Shall I tell her what we called you at school?” Jean-Paul asked.

“Please don’t.” Berg found a hook on the hall tree for his coat. “Maggie, I want you to meet Thierry Dusaud, my assistant.”

I offered my hand to Dusaud. He took it and bowed over it, a more formal greeting than kissing the air around my cheeks. I said, “Welcome.”

“I hope we aren’t a burden,” Dusaud said as he released my hand. “My wife would kill me if I dragged in dinner guests without advance warning.”

I liked him right away. “Dinner, I’m afraid, will be potluck.”

Berg unwrapped a cashmere muffler from around his neck and draped it on a hook beside his coat. “Something smells wonderful.”

“I take no credit.”

Philippe came out to the salon long enough to be introduced and to collect a short pour of wine, as is French custom, when Jean-Paul was serving the adults. He raised his glass with us, and then excused himself and, wineglass in hand, went back to the kitchen. He insisted, quite assertively, that he would set the table and serve dinner. He owed me, he said. And though I protested, I thought he was happy for the opportunity to be useful. It was probably better that he was busy elsewhere, out of earshot, while Jean-Paul answered his friend’s question, “What the hell is going on?” in some detail, beginning with the drone attack in Greece a week ago.

A week ago? Could it be only a week ago? The last three days alone felt like months.

“Maggie?” Berg sat forward in his chair, opposite my seat next to Jean-Paul on the sofa. He seemed earnest. “You arrived in Paris Thursday?”

“Yes. In the morning.”

“The last leg of your trip was from Abu Dhabi, yes?”

“You checked up on me?”

“I didn’t,” Berg said. “But a one-hundred-and-ten-pound, fifteen-year-old hacker in Taiwan did. You were tracked from Vientiane, Laos, to the airport in Bangkok, on to Abu Dhabi, and finally to Paris.”

“How did he track me?” I asked. “Through flight manifests or customs records?”

“You tell me how.” He pulled a little notebook out of his pants pocket, and with a smile, reported: “Tuesday, at the airport in Vientiane, you bought something to read and something to drink. In Bangkok, it looks like you had both lunch and a late dinner in the airport, and then you went to a hotel. Your flight was delayed?”

“Damn credit cards,” I said, knowing now the source of his information. “It’s such a bother when you’re in transit through a country to exchange currency just to buy a cup of coffee, a newspaper, and a sandwich. And yes, a delayed flight out of Bangkok. The first of several.”

“A long trip, yes?”

“Longer than it needed to be. If I’d known every purchase was being tracked, I would have stuck with airline peanuts and water.”

“I have only one question,” Berg said, referring to his notes. “And that concerns what you were doing last Saturday afternoon.”

“Saturday afternoon in what time zone?”

He laughed. “Around the time our dear boy was being blasted by a toy drone.”

“What time was that?”

“After lunch,” Jean-Paul said. “Around two o’clock, maybe.”

I had to think for a moment, but in the end, I gave up. “I don’t know. I think the time difference between here and Laos is five hours. Is Greece an hour ahead of us?”

“I think so,” Jean-Paul said. “My watch changes automatically, so I don’t have to think about time zones anymore when I travel.”

“Watch, past tense,” I said.

“Ah, yes. Gone the way of my telephone.”

Berg raised an eyebrow. “Blown up?”

“No. It was still running when I traded it to some Greek fishermen for passage to Italy.”

I looked across at Berg. “So, around six o’clock on Saturday, I was with my film crew in a tiny Lao village near the Thai border. Probably having dinner, or using a bucket to take a shower. Why?”

“Thierry?” Berg turned to his assistant. “You’re primary on this, what do you know?”

His assistant scooted a few inches forward on his seat and leaned toward me. “You disappeared from the hacker’s surveillance from Saturday morning until Monday evening. Something interesting must have happened during that time, because your bar tab in Vientiane when you reappeared on Monday was impressive.”

“Believe me, I wasn’t in Greece launching a drone,” I said, though I knew that he was only looking for information and not accusing me of anything nefarious, except maybe having a drinking problem. “There are places in the world, my friend, where credit cards are useless. We could only use cash, Lao kip, in the village where we filmed that weekend, though the innkeeper was okay with U.S. dollars. We finished filming Monday afternoon, packed our gear, and headed for Vientiane. That night, I hosted a wrap party for the crew, as is our tradition when we finish final filming. They can drink impressive quantities of hooch. Tuesday morning, we all flew out. Or tried to fly out.”

“I only asked because when we got hold of the hacker’s log this afternoon, we saw that you disappeared offline at about the same time as Monsieur Bernard—”

“Jean-Paul,” Jean-Paul said.

“Thank you,” Dusaud said, with a little nod. “We had some concern that something, let’s just say dire, was happening to you during the same time that Jean-Paul was under attack in Greece.”

“Happily, no,” I said. “The more I think about how vulnerable we are to anyone who wants to, as you say, do something dire to us, the more I like that Laotian village. Even though we had to be vaccinated against several deadly diseases, walk gingerly around areas with live ordnance, and truck in our own water, I felt safer there than I do right now, here in very civilized Paris. So, what happens next?”

“Davey?” Dusaud deferred to his superior.

“Wish we knew. If we’d had this information sooner, I might have a better answer for you.” Berg set aside his wineglass and nailed Jean-Paul with the sort of look angry mothers aim at naughty children. “My dear old friend didn’t see fit to tell me a damn thing about what was going on for one long week. So, we’ve hardly had time to figure it all out. This afternoon, I did as you suggested, Jeep, and I called Luca Ponti for information. You might like to know that, based on the information you gave him yesterday, police in Taiwan took la petite merde who hacked your accounts into custody.”

It seemed to me that Berg was truly hurt that Jean-Paul hadn’t come to him immediately. Why, I wondered, hadn’t he? I turned to Jean-Paul. When I saw his discomfort, I asked, “In this case, does the feminine article, la, refer to the gender of the person who is a little shit, or is shit a feminine noun?”

“The noun is feminine,” Jean-Paul said. “But the hacker: Davey? Thierry?”

Berg answered, unable to hide a little smile. “Your little shit is a boy.”

I asked, “So why is merde a feminine noun?”

Jean-Paul said, “If it makes you feel better, fart— pet—is masculine in French.”

“It does, a little bit. And I’m happy that our petite merde will be separated from his computer for a while. But how does that help us? Won’t ProtX4 just go to the next hacker on their list in the same way that, if Qosja’s threat is correct, they’ll hire the next thug in line to come after us?”

Berg sat up taller. “He said that to you?”

“He did.”

Dusaud moved the conversation back on topic. “We haven’t had time to learn much about either ProtX4 or InterCentro. After his arrest, the kid in Taiwan handed over every bit of information he had collected. But all he knows about whoever hired him are a bank routing number for the money that was deposited on his credit card and the access code for an anonymous message drop box. About ProtX4, we know only what anyone can find out by pulling up their web page. They seem to function entirely online. We left a couple of messages on their contact link, but they haven’t responded.”

“Anything on InterCentro?” Jean-Paul asked.

“Not yet,” Dusaud said. “Other than that they claim to be a center for the study of traditional Russian culture.”

Philippe had been in and out of the salon, carrying dishes and eating implements as he set the table. Occasionally something that was being said would catch his attention and he would pause, but he generally went about the tasks he had taken on himself without paying much attention to the conversation on the far side of the room. The table was ready, a second bottle of wine was open and breathing on the sideboard, when he came in carrying a soup tureen. He set the soup near bowls stacked at one end of the table and announced, “À table.”

“Gentlemen. Dinner is served.” I rose, and they followed. Jean-Paul still had the use of only one arm, so I asked Philippe if he would serve the soup, but his eyes grew wide with horror at taking over for the host, and instead he pulled out the chair in front of the tureen for me, putting me at the head of the table, instead of him. The soup was good. The stewed tomatoes and herbs Philippe added brightened Madame Gonsalves’s rather heavy, but delicious, potato-leek porrusalda. Conversation during dinner, like conversation during our lunch with Luca, went everywhere except anywhere near the real topic for the evening. We discussed children and parents and school, making films for television, hating or loving physics, fighting international terrorism. Philippe did his best to participate, and the men were gracious about finding subjects that included him. The soup was cleared and he brought out a platter with a heap of sautéed green beans in the center of a necklace of cold sliced chicken drizzled with a sort of sriracha aioli that he improvised, he told us, by adding a few drops of vinegar, olive oil, and hot sauce to the crème fraîche he found in the refrigerator. It was delicious.

“Young man,” Berg said after savoring a bite. “Did your mother teach you to cook?”

Philippe blushed furiously: if there were a tabu topic, especially in my presence, it would be anything having to do with his mother. After taking a sip of water, he said, quietly, “No, my grand-mère is a famous cook.”

I knew he did not mean Isabelle, but her mother.

Jean-Paul raised his wineglass. “Here’s to the cook. Who the hell needs physics when he can throw together a meal like this from nothing?”

The last course was cheese, fig jam, coffee, and brandy. As we lingered with the brandy, the conversation finally moved to the library in the basement, and to Val Barkoff’s interest in the ­Russian texts.

“I remember when you found the old library,” Berg said, breaking off a chunk of aged Roquefort and daubing it with fig jam. “That time, you came to me because you needed my advice about what should be done with it.”

“You were a great help,” Jean-Paul said. “I’m asking for your help again.”

“Other than trying to keep you two alive just a little longer, what is it, exactly, that you want me to do, my dear Jeep?”

“I have a question for Philippe first.” Making eye contact with Philippe, Jean-Paul asked, “Have you met your friend Val’s father?”

“Yes, a few times. He came for sports days and parent meetings.”

“Do you know his Christian name?”

Philippe covered his mouth to hide a giggle. When he caught his breath, he said, “It’s Boris.”

“Is that funny?” I asked him.

“Well, yes, because he is short and fat, and his wife is tall and thin, and her name is Natasha. He’s Russian, and he always has these security men around him. So, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale. Get it?”

“You watch American cartoons?” I asked.

“Sure. Rocky and Bullwinkle, moose and squirrel.”

Jean-Paul said, “Maggie, I’ll teach you how to swear in French if you’ll help me with the American idiom. I have no idea what you two are talking about.”

“I’ll explain later. But, yes, Boris Barkov, expert on antique Russian texts, board member of InterCentro, apparently is Val’s father. It’s pronounced the same, isn’t it, even though he spells his name differently. A difference in conversion from the Cyrillic to the Latinate alphabet, I suppose.”

Jean-Paul nodded acknowledgment and turned back to Berg. “I would like to know what Monsieur Barkov’s interest is in the library. But more importantly, what is his interest in Maggie and me? Someone has gone to great lengths to keep the two of us away from this apartment. At first, there were little forays made to get access, but they failed, and then escalated the closer we came to the time when Maggie was to arrive.”

“Maggie.” Dusaud set down his brandy snifter when he turned to me. “Who knew about your plans to stay in Paris?”

I had to think for a moment. “My friends, our families, my co-workers.”

“And everyone who sees the entertainment news,” Philippe said. That got everyone’s attention. The poor kid blushed yet again, but he continued. “There were stories that said you worked on a film in Normandy all summer, Aunt Maggie, and that you were talking about moving to Paris to work with French television once you finished the project about bombs.”

“Jean-Paul,” I said, covering his hand. “Right now I need something juicer than just merde. And remind me to call Uncle Max.”

“When was this?” Berg asked.

Philippe shrugged. “After the holidays. It was when Aunt Maggie was filming battlefields in Flanders. When Grand-mère saw the report, she was so happy to think you are staying in France forever.”

“Did your friend Val see the report?” Jean-Paul asked.

“Oh, yes. I got into a panic about cleaning the apartment before Aunt Maggie came. But we had exams, and I couldn’t get away.”

“Until now,” I said.

He sighed. “I’m not supposed to be here. Papa will kill me if he finds out. But I had to come and explain.”

“How did you know I had arrived?” I asked.

“Madame Gigi. She scolded me so hard.”

“When did you talk to her?”

“Yesterday. She said I could stay over at her apartment tonight if I came today to apologize. She isn’t answering her phone, but her hearing isn’t very good.”

“If you stay anywhere tonight,” I said, “you’ll stay right here with us. Philippe, Madame Gonsalves had a little accident this afternoon. She’s in hospital.”

“Oh, no.” He started to rise from his chair, but Jean-Paul put a hand on his arm and he settled back down.

“She’ll be fine,” Jean-Paul said, giving him a pat. “Just a little bump on the head. You’ll come with us to check on her in the morning, then you’ll come to lunch with us at Karine and Émile’s. Their girls will be very happy to see you. After lunch, we’ll put you on the train back to school. D’accord?”

“Yes.” Philippe glanced at me to make sure it was all right. When I nodded, he repeated, “Yes. Thank you. Yes.”

Berg folded his napkin beside his plate, signaling that the meal was over for him. “Philippe, unless you’re too tired after your kitchen labors, I would like you to take us down to the library so that we can have a look at the books that your friend found so interesting.”

My nephew turned to me, expecting permission, I suppose. I said, “Go ahead. You made dinner, I’ll clear away. I expect that Jean-Paul wants to go down with you.”

For the second time that day, lights went on over the back stairs, and Philippe led a party of inquiry down into the basement. I did dishes.