“Exactly,” David replied. “Until the Revolution.”
“When it was turned over to the citizens of the French Republic.”
With Olivia, David never had to finish a thought. As the cab beat a path through the swarming, horn-blaring traffic, Olivia stared silently out her window and David, his mind going a mile a minute, was trying to organize the next leg of his journey and wondering how fast he could get it done. Taking out his phone, he quickly began scanning for flights to Paris. Cost was no object, but timing might be. Olivia would have to collect a few things, he would have to go back to the Grand for his own belongings, and then they’d need to get to the airport.
“How long do you expect me to stay on this job?” Olivia said.
“As long as it takes,” David said, concentrating chiefly on his cell-phone screen. Alitalia had a flight at three that they might be able to make if they hurried.
“But why,” she said, with an uncharacteristic hesitancy, “do you want me?”
“My French is really rusty,” David replied, before thinking.
And he could all but feel her fold in on herself.
And what made it worse was, it wasn’t even true. He just didn’t know how to tell her what he was really feeling and thinking. Here he was, on a desperate mission to save his sister, and he hadn’t confessed even that to her yet. He had so much to tell her that he didn’t know where, or when, to start. And in the back of a hurtling cab, it seemed like the worst possible time.
“Olivia,” he tried to begin, “I do need your help with this work. If anybody can help me cut through the thicket of the French archives and bureaucracy, it will be you.”
“So that’s the reason?” she said. “You just need me to help you with your … quest?”
God, he had gotten off on the wrong foot again. His French wasn’t nearly as rusty as some of his other skills.
The taxi had stopped at a busy crosswalk, but the driver, fed up with the unimpeded flow of pedestrians, leaned on his horn again and to a chorus of jeers, plowed through a narrow opening and sped on. Normally, David would have been appalled at such recklessness, but today he was thrilled.
“And this person you work for—” Olivia ventured.
“Mrs. Van Owen. A widow, in Chicago.” He knew he was painting a more staid portrait than was warranted. “Very rich. She’ll continue to pay for everything.”
“You say she is willing to do anything to get this Medusa.”
“Yes.”
“But you?” She looked at him intently now. “Why do you want to find it so much?”
“I’ll get a big promotion,” he said, not wanting to get into the whole story yet. Not here, not now. “And I’ll be well paid.”
She frowned, and, shaking her head, said, “No, no, no.”
Not for the first time, he felt like she could see right through him.
“You are not someone who works for money.”
“I’m not?” Pretending otherwise.
“No, you are like me. We don’t care about money,” she said. “We only care about knowledge, and truth. If we cared about money, we would do some other kind of work than this. We would be bankers.” She said that last word as if she were saying swine.
Overall, he took her point.
“No, what we do,” she concluded, “we do for love. There is some love at the root of this—always—and it is personal, too. That is what is pushing you.”
It was as if she’d shot an arrow right into his heart. He longed to tell her about the real stakes he was playing for—he ached to unburden himself of the truth about his sister and the strange promise of his mysterious benefactor—but he was afraid he would sound crazy. Even to someone as open-minded as Olivia.
“If we are going to do this thing together,” Olivia said, “from now on you are going to have to tell me only the truth.” As the cab slowed down to check the street addresses, she pressed him. “Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“On the right,” Olivia said to the driver. “Next door to the café.”
They got out of the cab, went inside, and climbed three stories of rickety steps with worn carpeting; it made his own place, David thought, look pretty good by comparison. On the third floor, Olivia stopped at a door decorated with a postcard of the Laoco?n and put the key in the lock. Something seemed to surprise her, as if the lock had already been turned; but she opened it and stepped inside.
Even with the curtains drawn, David could see the chaos. And when Olivia flicked on the lights and saw her books strewn across the floor and a wooden perch of some kind toppled over, she said, “Oh my God.”
It was plain she’d been burglarized, but it wasn’t so plain that the thieves were gone.
“Hold on,” David said, stepping in front of her and moving cautiously toward the next room. As he approached the half-open door, he thought he heard some commotion inside, and was about to back off when something gray suddenly flew smack into his face, wings fluttering wildly, before careening off into the living room.