Her stomach churned. She debated telling him to put on his Beatles jacket and hike out the frosted glass door. “No room for interns here, desolée.”
He swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Please give me a chance,” he said, his cockiness gone. “I’ll do anything. René thinks I’m good. Let me help your part-timer, Saj.”
She knew the flics might hold Saj in garde à vue longer. Or his injuries could slow him down; he might need to take medical leave.
Maxence’s hopeful eyes bored into her skull. After all, René recommended him. Did she even have another option? Might as well try him to see what he could do.
“On a trial basis,” she said. “But you might take an early and permanent lunch.”
Fifteen minutes later, she’d checked the mail stacked on the marble fireplace ledge and started running the virus scans, checking the monitors for daily security contracts. All put in place by René. The whole operation could almost run itself.
“Keep your eyes on the systems and print out the reports and spreadsheets,” she said.
Maxence nodded, eager now. “Then shall I download the info onto René’s desktop files, make a backup?”
She nodded. Not so green after all. Her heart wasn’t in this day-to-day stuff; she’d let the kid handle grunt routine and monitor his work.
Ongoing reports filled her desktop screen, and she took her laptop from the drawer. On it, she pulled up the old files she’d digitized from her father’s dossiers. She’d transcribed his notes during the long November evenings after his death in the bomb explosion in Place Vend?me. A painful exercise in hopes of finding some clue to the explosion. But the leads had all gone up with him in a ball of fire and smoke.
All those years in the police force had instilled in him the habit of recording names, places, descriptions of people he interviewed or investigated—any memorable characteristic or quirk—in pocket-sized leather-bound notepads. Each entry, each date and name or initial, constituted a piece of a case her father had worked on. A detail he’d rechecked to fit pieces together. His scent clung to the notebooks. The pain lessened over the years, but never completely went away. For that reason, she kept his original notebooks rubber-banded together in the safe. Touching them hurt too much.
Now, she searched her father’s case files under V for Volodya, and Y for Yuri. Nothing. She kicked off her ankle boots, rubbed her stockinged feet on the smooth wood floor, and wished she had an espresso. René had forgotten—correction, she had forgotten to buy coffee beans.
Quiet reigned, apart from Maxence’s clicking fingers and the distant thrumming of traffic outside on rue du Louvre. With the report summaries done, she concentrated on refining her search. She limited the parameters to her father’s cases involving indicateurs, or snitches. Problematic, since her father often referred to his informers by initials or nicknames. Again, nothing under V or Y.
Her grandfather’s cases went back to the thirties, a few from the Surêté he’d carried with him as private clients when he’d founded Leduc Detective. She hadn’t gotten to digitizing those yet.
“Quite a history here,” Maxence said, gesturing to the wall with her grandfather’s sepia photo, complete with waxed mustache; Leduc Detective’s original license, circa 1925; her father’s first case in the newspaper; the old sewer maps of Paris.
“Nice that you’ve kept it in the family,” he said.
Looking down on her from the wall was her grandfather’s commendation from the Louvre for service to la République in recovering a Degas. Another stolen painting. She had her grandfather’s notes on the case. Somewhere. Fascinating, but not what she was searching for—she needed to find some connection to Yuri Volodya and her mother.
Think. Think like her father.
Trusting her gut feeling that Volodya had dealt with Leduc Detective in the past, she continued cross-referencing dates, names, and initials. Thirty minutes later, after eliminating the non-matches, she sat back, rubbing her big right toe along her left ankle to help her think.
“Remember your first impression,” her father had always said. “Nail it down or it comes back to nail you later.” Often all you had were first impressions to go on. She thought back to her first impression of Yuri Volodya, the old Russian—“a little Cossack,” one of the medic crew called him. Belligerent, scared. But a criminal?
Under RUSSIAN in her father’s case file, she found a photocopied Le Parisien newspaper article of a Trotskyist rally and conference in the 14th arrondissement. Dated 1972. A grainy photo showed what appeared to be an abandoned Regency-style townhouse splattered with graffiti, slogans, and banners with the hammer and sickle. A squat, according to the article, housing assorted anarchists and radical leftists in Action-Réaction. More photos showed smiling members with armbands holding posters. Her eye caught on a younger man, with more hair but stocky then like now. Yuri Volodya.
The connection—murky but there. So did her father know him? Or.…
She read further. The article detailed doings of the leftist squatters who’d played host to the German Haader-Rofmein gang—radical seventies terrorists—before a security forces raid.
Her throat caught. Several years ago she’d learned her American mother—Sydney Leduc—had been captured with the Haader-Rofmein group after she’d abandoned Aimée. Sydney had been imprisoned and deported in a deal wangled by her father. Her father never talked about it, refused to speak her mother’s name.
The hurt that never went away surfaced. Her hands shook.
Here was the connection. Why had her father kept this in his files?