“It’s all yours.” She squeezed past him and ran into the street. She didn’t stop until she stood on the quai de la Mégisserie, several blocks away. No Regnier in sight. She leaned on the stone bridge, her shoulders shaking and her breath fanning into the air in frosted puffs. How were Regnier and Pleyet involved?
She caught her breath. Lars would know, or he could find out. She walked to the Préfecture de Police, glad she’d kept her fake police ID updated, and entered the Statistics Bureau. The wide door stood ajar, pieces of plaster sprinkled everywhere. Her footsteps crunched across the floor. A man with a mask gestured toward a penciled sign.
Due to pipe refitting, Statistics temporarily in Bâtiment B, second floor cellar.
Several stairways later she found it. And her friend Lars Sorensen, who headed the Préfecture’s statistics department. Statistics, a broad term, provided Lars interdepartmental and interministerial access.
The makeshift office, once a vaulted medieval cellar, consisted of rows of metal file cabinets and several vacant desks. The burnt odor of metal soldering pervaded the office. A green beanbag pillow sat forgotten in the corner.
Lars, wearing army fatigues, leaned back on his chair and drank Orangina. She figured he’d come from the special training he did midweek outside Paris. His prominent jaw and punched in nose made him look like a prize fighter. “Do me a favor, Lars, check what these mecs des RG, Regnier and Pleyet, are working on,” Aimée said. “Like you, they could be in reserve special ops.”
“Moi?” Lars grinned. “Let me see. Every month each commissariat turns in a report, some big patron’s idea so we classify and subclassify them. Like we’ve got nothing else to do, eh? Besides get manicures, trim the commissaire’s ear hairs, and play skat!”
Her father had put up with Lars, pointing out not many could ferret the devil out of a hole like him. But she actively liked him. Lars was half Danish. But to hear him talk you’d think he’d been born and bred in Copenhagen, not lived in the working class district of Batignolles since infancy, now with a French wife and three children.
Lars searched in his files. The whine of a sander came from the hallway.
“You didn’t see this, okay? ”
She nodded.
Lars opened a creaking file cabinet, pulled a state-of-the-art Titanium laptop from inside, and powered it up.
“How old is Pleyet?” he asked, typing in his password.
She noted the last four digits Lars entered.
“Fifties, in good shape, with deep-set gray eyes that take everything in, like a hawk.”
“But that describes a lot of them.”
She remembered something. “Keloid scars on his right wrist.”
He scanned the report. “Did he tell you he was RG?” He rolled his eyes. ”More like Surveillance Circle Line.”
“Circle Line?” she asked. “What’s that? Regnier, too?”
“Regnier’s RG,” Lars said. “But, according to this, he’s under suspension.”
Her mouth dropped.
“Suspension? For what and since when?”
“Let’s see. . . .” Lars hit some keys. “Pretty generic, misappropriation of operating funds last June. The chief discovered it in September.” He clicked more keys, “On the ball, eh, your government fonctionnaires!”
So Regnier had gone rogue, but felt bold enough to threaten her. He had sniffed the jade. But how? And that didn’t explain Pleyet.
Aimée leaned over Lars’ desk. “What does Circle Line mean, Lars? How’s Pleyet involved, eh?”
For the first time she saw hesitation in his eyes. He shifted in his chair and the springs squeaked.
“Don’t ask me, Aimée, I can’t tell you.”
“Please, Lars.” She ran her hand through her damp hair.
“I can’t tell you because I don’t know,” he said. “Just rumors.”
“Hinting at what?”
Lars didn’t meet her gaze. A plume of sawdust shot up in the hallway.
“Lars, your papa and mine were friends. Why hold back? Pleyet was on the Place Vendôme surveillance. He looked familiar but I never knew his name. Any of their names. They made sure of that. I want to know his background, at least.”
Lars looked away.
“It’s important to me, Lars.”
“Nothing in here concerns the past,” Lars said. “This comes from Special Branch. They don’t data entry old, failed missions. You know that.”
But she’d figured one thing out. “So this Special Branch Circle Line’s new?”
He nodded.
Wiretapping? But the RG had been doing that for years.
“It’s not all governmental, that’s what I heard,” Lars said.
“Meaning industrial espionage?” she asked.
Two men in suits walked in and gave Lars the eye.
“Of course, mademoiselle,” Lars said, his tone businesslike now, as he closed the folder and shut down the laptop, “when I tally the figures we’ll report the amounts to your father’s insurance agent. The Commissariat will have that information on file.”
“Merci, monsieur,” she said, playing along.
The men kept walking and passed them. She heard their footsteps echoing on the metal stairs leading to winding corridors and, eventually, to the holding pens under the Tribunal. She could imagine the sweating stone walls, and the prisoners awaiting sentencing in cells little changed since the Reign of Terror.
“Can’t you do a quick search to see if there’s a report filed on missing Asian jade?”
“You’re looking for missing oriental art?” asked Lars. “You want me to check the list, you mean?”
She nodded.
He sat up, pulled at a drawer that stuck, then slammed it hard and it opened.
“A stolen Rodin sculpture in the 14th from narrow Impasse Nansouty near Parc Montsouris.”
“Try the 17th arrondissement.”
He thumbed through the file. The crinkling paper competed with the low whine of the saw in the background.
“What about missing jade?”
“Hmmm . . . a dope racket and bordello, but that’s as close as it gets in the 17th.”
Frustrated, she pulled out her map, studied it.
“My brother-in-law delivers meat to a boucherie in the 17th,” Lars said. “He always bitches that he can’t unload. One time he had to walk with a whole side of a cow through the narrow passage and an old lady fainted right on her poodle.”
She read the map, half listening to Lars, thinking of the threadlike streets of this village within a village, still beating with a provincial life of its own.
“Sorry, that’s it,” Lars concluded.
She exhaled with disgust, leaning against Lars’s grease-stained metal filing cabinet. If the jade was “hot,” no one would report it stolen.
“Merci, Lars,” she said, and left his office.
SHE TRIED to make sense of what she’d learned. Regnier, under suspension, had gone rogue, which made him more dangerous. Pleyet, still a cipher, worked for the “Circle Line.” All along the quai, as brown leaves rustled past her on the gravel, she thought about Lars’s change of attitude after he had spoken those two words. She pulled off her leather glove and wrote down the last four digits of Lars’s password on her palm. She’d play with the numbers later.
Time was running out for René. She tried Commissaire Ronsard on her cell phone.
“The Commissaire’s in a meeting,” said a bored voice.
She tried Léo.
“Club Radio,” Léo answered.
“It’s Aimée, any luck with René’s phone, Léo?”
“Désolée, so far the antenna’s picked up nothing.”
Aimée’s heart sank to her feet.