“Oui?”
“I want to find someone,” Aimée said.
“Then you have to pay,” Léo Frot said at the other end of the line. His nasal voice competed with an occasional metallic ting in the background.
“How much?”
“Price mounts when someone doesn’t want to be found.”
“How do you know that, Léo?”
“Why would you call me if you could find them?”
Léo hadn’t changed. He’d squeeze the venom from a viper and charge the snake for it.
Too bad he was right.
She couldn’t data mine the files at the police judiciare on Quaides Orfèvres. None of them were computerized. Everything before the nineties was handwritten, stored in folders and police blotters. Dossiers. Face it, everything sensitive was done with pen and ink … probably quill pens.
“Someone do a walkabout, eh?” Léo asked.
“Walkabout?” she asked.
“We just came back from Australia,” he said. “That’s what they call an aborigine’s disappearance there.”
Typical Léo. Must be desperate to brag about his trip to someone, she thought. She’d known him for years. They’d gone to the lycée together. His father was her dentist.
“What if I do a systems security scan for you in return.”
Silence.
“Why do I feel that’s unfair?” Léo scraped something in the background.
“Suit yourself,” she said. “But that’s worth more than cash, believe me. You can’t imagine the stuff I find.”
“Like what?”
She knew he’d bite. His credit history lay before her on her screen. “Like the amount overdue on your Visa card. A gold one. And they’re about to pull it.”
“But they said …”
“Forget it,” she said. “The process started six hours ago…. I see bad credit in your future. Very bad.”
“Change it and I’ll help you,” he said.
She thought he caved in too fast.
“Files on Action-Réaction and the Haader-Rofmein gang,” she said. “From the seventies on.” She paused, hesitating. “And my father’s police review.”
A pause.
“Can’t you find them?” Léo asked.
“If they were in the system, I would,” she said. He knew that, too. “But I don’t feel inclined to break into the prefecture at Quaides Orfèvres. Makes me squeamish.”
“So I have to?”
“Tiens, Léo,” she said, “it’s your department.”
There was a long pause.
“Only if you adjust my credit report.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
She hit several keys and his bank balance flashed in front of her. “You’re overdrawn, Léo!”
“Fix that”—he took a deep breath—“and you’ve got my fingers at your disposal.”
“My partner hasn’t broken Banque de France’s encryption algorithms yet,” she said.
But she lied. René had done it two years ago. Even amped up their security system to a faster, better-tested algorithm called Blowfish. As he often said, better to be paranoid than sorry.
“Everything’s automated,” she said. “Programmed for glitches … too late….”
She let that sink in.
“But if I shut down the billing department with a postage-meter problem, that gives you an extra day.”
Pause.
“One day?”
Greedy mec!
“Figure the weekend,” she said, struggling to sound patient. “On Monday you pay the Visa and prevent a lifetime of nasty credit ratings that could screw up your application to refinance your Neuilly house.”
“It’s Chantal,” he said, expelling air in disgust.
Aimée had met his wife, Chantal. Bubbleheaded but she seemed kind.
“Her heart’s set on a Corsican holiday bungalow,” Léo said. “With a hot tub!”
“I’m sure it’s difficult.” Aimée found it hard to feign sympathy for this couple. A vast majority of Parisian families struggled with two jobs even with subsidized day care, to buy necessities and pay the skyrocketing rents for their small apartments.
“But you have to come here to see the records; I’m so busy,” he said, his tone petulant. “When I find them, they go no farther than the lavatory.”
She’d met him in the Art Nouveau men’s lavatory in the Quaides Orfèvres once before.
“Some files might have traveled to the DST,” she said. “Can you check?”
“DST!” Léo groaned. “The ninth-floor division on rue Nélaton?”
“Good place to start.”
“Talk about paranoia,” Léo said. “Everything one says or does there gets classified. Papers must be locked in office safes and even when you take a piss you have to lock your office.”
“I bet you know the combinations of some safes.”
She heard his slow chuckle.
“Or you know someone who does,” she said.
“What did you say you’d do about the Visa?” he asked.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Thursday Afternoon
MARIUS TEYNARD WALKED past his receptionist, Madame Goroux, who was busy at the keyboard.
“Mark me out for this afternoon,” he said.
“Monsieur Teynard, there’s a late afternoon appointment….”
“Tell the boy to take it,” he said. The boy, as he referred to his nephew, was fifty-five. Teynard slipped on his oatmeal-colored linen jacket, ruffled his white hair back from his temples, and gave her a half-smile. “You know how to handle him.”
He knew Madame Goroux would think he was visiting his mistress, who lived on the next block in the rue de Turbigo. She often covered for him. Let her think what she wanted.
Out on the haze-filled street where the heat hovered, hemmed in by the tall Haussmann buildings, he turned in the opposite direction. Teynard headed toward the préfecture de police on Quaides Orfèvres.
Along the broad part of rue de Turbigo that sliced the edge of the Sentier, he passed the Kookai boutique. Salesgirls smoked outside on the steps and the tatouage sign on rue Tiquetonne blinked orange-pink neon in the dusk. A dope haven if he ever saw it, but he knew the flics let it slide as long as their informants checked in with them. And, he reminded himself, that wasn’t his business.
Not anymore.
In the distance he saw the Tour Jean-Sans-Peur nestled behind the sandstone-colored school. The scum had been right here … a stone’s throw from his office. Merde!
He was getting slow, admit it. Not on top of it anymore. Yet no one said that but himself. Be your own harshest critic, he’d learned, then no one else could be.
But that would change. He’d entered the fray. Time to wipe out the degenerate lice once and for all, if it was the last thing he did.
The hunt, the chase—these were the only things keeping him alive. The shivery tingle on the back of his arms … it was what he lived for. Face it, had always lived for.
He’d deluded himself when he retired from the préfecture, started the agency, and kept half-time hours. Even the DST contract work hadn’t filled the need. Keeping a young mistress had become difficult, and so time-consuming. His true mistress was his work.
He needed to get this information face-to-face, without risk of compromised phone lines, big-eared subordinates, or his former cronies from the Quai des Orfèvres. Time to mine his old-boy network.