“The memoir and the Libé article, you mean?”
“Damn reporters dredging for scandal. They hired you, didn’t they?” Fear crinkled the crow’s-feet edging his eyes. He shook his head. Was that pain or sorrow on his face?
“I’m a detective, Monsieur.”
“And you had my ear. Now you don’t.”
This wasn’t going well. Scrapes of metal and shouts of en garde came from behind the door.
“My journalist friend says the Libé article’s been pulled. Nobody will ever read it,” she said. “Please just help me understand how your family in the Berry knew the Constantins. Two minutes.”
She read the surprise in his face. “But what does it matter anymore?”
Time for the truth. “There’s a piece of the puzzle no one will give me,” she said. “A piece of information I need to solve my father’s murder.”
“I don’t see a connection, Mademoiselle.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m wasting your two minutes,” she said. “But if I don’t look for the piece, I won’t know.” Determined to reach him, she took out a photo of her father. Her favorite, of him leaning over a puzzle. “My father, Jean-Claude Leduc. Think of a crime like a puzzle, he’d say. Gone almost ten years. His death unsolved, murderers never caught. Don’t you wish you could reel time back in and see your brother?”
He studied her card. “It was all in my father’s time. During the war.”
His guard down now, he fiddled with his fencing mask. His father’s time? Something stuck in his memory, she could tell. She had to keep the momentum.
“See, there’s a connection,” she said. “Wasn’t your father a decorated Resistance hero? Did he save the Constantin family, hide them from the Germans in the Berry?”
Leseur shrugged. “For years the manouches traveled by our land, on the old routes. My father let them camp at the lake when I was small. They played such music at night; I’ll always remember their horses and painted caravans, the fish we caught.” He stopped himself. “But the old Constantin—we called him the Gypsy King—he relayed Resistance messages to the maquis hiding in the forests.”
“Underground, you mean?”
“They called it the Gypsy mail via forest trails,” he said. “Markers like a broken branch or twisted twig, signs in nature. Who even talks about them now?”
Who even talks about them? Naftali’s words.
“My father worked with the Gypsy King throughout the war. For years after, they’d come in the summer. My father even attended his Gypsy funeral in the sixties. Non, maybe it was in the seventies.”
“So you knew Drina and Djanka as children.”
He paused to think. Something opened up inside him. Memories of a happier time?
“But that’s years ago. My parents sent me away to boarding school.” Leseur leaned against the metal locker.
“Help me understand, then, why the Constantin family shunned Djanka for having your brother’s baby.” Ready with the photo—Djanka, Nicholás and Pascal—she brought it out from the old pages of Paris Match for him to see.
The phone inside his locker vibrated with a long buzz. Leseur ignored it, his face etched with hurt and longing. His lips moved. No sound came out.
“Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur, but what did you …?”
“I said, who understands Gypsies?” He didn’t deny that Pascal was Nicu’s father.
“Nicu was murdered yesterday. In broad daylight, by professionals. A hit.”
Leseur stiffened. “I never knew the boy.” After a moment, he said, “They sent me away.”
“What secret stretching back to Djanka and your brother could still be important enough to need covering up and to have caused my father’s murder?”
His phone beeped: a message alert. He averted his eyes.
“Why are you so afraid, Monsieur Leseur? Is someone threatening you?”
His bony, gloved fingers grabbed her arm. “Get out.” He shoved her aside.
She grabbed at the open locker door to stop herself from tripping.
“Is there a problem?” A red-faced man appeared at the locker-room door, pulled off his face mask.
Leseur moved forward, letting go of her arm. She stuck her hand in her bag, rooting through mascara tubes, her phone and mini-packs of baby wipes until she found what she was looking for.
“Zut,” the man said, looking at her, “don’t tell me the press got in here?”
“Press? Non, she told me she’s a …” He caught himself before saying detective. “Ce n’est pas important.”
Aimée took advantage of Leseur’s distraction. Stuck the centime-sized tracker into his wallet fold.
“This woman’s made a mistake,” said Leseur, turning back to Aimée. “She’s leaving.”
She rubbed her arm. Leaned into Leseur’s ear and whispered, “Tell me. Or I’ll make a scene in front of your friend.”
Sweat broke out on his brow. His hand shook. What was he holding back?
But by now her fame had spread throughout the fencing piste, and politicians in tight-fitting gear were crowding through the doorway, eager to expel the stranger in their midst. When she looked back at Leseur on her way out, a jacket over his fencing outfit, he was clutching his briefcase and speaking into his cell phone. The next moment, he’d disappeared through the far exit. She clicked the button to activate the tracker.
With only fifteen minutes until her appointment with the lawyer, Aimée looked down the tree-lined quai for a taxi.
“Mademoiselle Leduc, this way, s’il vous pla?t.”
A suit wearing dark sunglasses stood at the curb by a black Peugeot with tinted windows, the door open and the engine purring.
“There must be a mistake—I haven’t reserved a car,” she said, raising her hand to hail a passing taxi.
“The ministry’s internal security chief has a few questions,” he said. “I’ve been instructed to escort you.”