Something felt off. Way off.
She didn’t know what was bothering her but … and then she looked up. The dates were wrong. They had to be.
She reread the file. On her office wall was her favorite photo of herself with her father, taken the day after Bastille Day in 1976. They’d spent the whole day together before her flight to New York. She looked closer at the surveillance log dated July 15, 1976, containing her father’s name. The day the paintings were recovered.
But Bastille Day was always July 14th.
So her father had been with her on July 15th. Not on stakeout.
He’d been set up. And she was the proof.
She took the photo from the wall and stuck it in her bag with the Modigliani data she’d copied from the Agence France Presse.
A further search showed Teynard had retired. He ran a detective firm with his nephew on rue de Turbigo.
Close. On the edge of the Sentier and a few blocks away.
Forget the scooter. She needed to walk. Work out some angry energy, so she wouldn’t arrive at Teynard’s swinging. At least not at first.
“
“Please, can’t you fit me in?” Aimee asked, letting the whine rise in her voice. “Something’s come up, it’s important.”
“He handles cases jointly with his nephew,” Madame Goroux said. “Let me see if he’s available.”
An express delivery man wheeled in a package on a dolly. “
“I can sign, Cedric,” she said.
“Sorry, but the sender specifically required Monsieur Teynard’s signature.”
“Come back in a while,” said Madame Goroux, consulting her schedule. “He marked himself out until his three o’clock appointment.”
Aimee glanced at her Tintin watch.
Twenty minutes. If he was on time.
She left and descended the worn stairs. In the quiet mosaic-tiled lobby of Teynard’s building, her mind raced. She chewed Nicorette furiously, dying for a cigarette. Within ten minutes, a dapper white-haired man in his sixties in a wheat-colored linen suit entered the lobby.
“Monsieur Teynard?” she asked, standing partially behind a pillar.
He removed his sunglasses and blinked, adjusting his eyes from the glare outside to the darkened lobby.
“Mademoiselle, are we acquainted?” he asked, a smile spreading over his face. A whiff of scented aftershave accompanied him. Perhaps he fancied himself a ladies’ man.
“Indirectly,” she said, walking toward him. “That’s what I’d like to talk about.”
He squinted.
Aimee hit the light switch, flooding the lobby with light.
Teynard’s brow furrowed as he stared at her.
“If I didn’t know better,” he said in a low voice, “I’d say the past has come back …”
“To haunt you?” she finished for him. “Let’s go talk.”
Aimee pointed to the cafe in Passage du Bourg-l’Abbe directly opposite Teynard’s office.
WITH A wary look, Teynard watched her set two espressos on the cafe table. She pushed the round aluminum sugar cube bowl toward him. The young owner, wearing a Lakers tank top and prayer beads around his wrist, sat behind the counter reading a Turkish newspaper.
Apart from Aimee and Teynard, the narrow cafe, with its yellowed smoke-stained walls, hammered-tin counter, and brown leatherette chairs, was empty. From the corners came the musk-like smell of lingering genteel decay. Wood-framed windows fronted the passage under a glass-and-iron roof probably unchanged from Napoleon’s time.
“Monsieur Teynard,” she said, “you were part of the Galerie Arte surveillance on July 15, 1976, weren’t you?”
“That’s a long time ago,” Teynard said, smoothing back his hair. His ice blue eyes darted over the cafe.
“I’m interested in your version.”
“My version?”
“You were there along with my father, Dray, and Szlovak.”
“I don’t remember.”
She nodded, unwrapping the sugar cube’s paper. “Good point. Maybe you weren’t there either. I know Papa wasn’t.”
“What’s this all about?”
“Shouldn’t you tell me, Monsieur Teynard?” She stirred her sugar.
“I have appointments….” He smoothed his linen trousers and started to stand up.
“I told Madame Goroux your plans had changed.”
For the first time he looked surprised.
“This might refresh your memory,” she said, wiping the sticky table off with a napkin and spreading the file in front of him. “I’m a visual person. Seeing things in black and white brings it home to me. Maybe you are, too. See, there’s your name.”
Teynard’s chin sagged.
She pointed. “Here’s another visual.” She pulled out the photo of her and her father. “There’s a date. See
“You’re talking about ancient history,” Teynard said.
“My father was framed,” she said, “for something he didn’t do.”
“The facts speak for themselves.”
“
“That’s old news,” he said. “If you had more going on in your life you wouldn’t be hung up on the past.”
Rude man. Maybe that was true. But it was none of his business.
“Move on, young lady,” he smiled. “Get a life. Isn’t that how they say it?”
Teynard didn’t like women. Or maybe just her. But something about his dapper persona didn’t match his hard eyes.
“Good advice, Monsieur Teynard,” she said. “I’ll move on to the prosecutor, Edith Mesard.”
She saw a flicker of interest in his eyes.
“And Monsieur Szlovak,” she lied. “He has a better memory than you.”
“Talk with Dray,” he said. “Before you make more of a fool of yourself.”
And then she knew. Dray and Teynard were thick. Pudding thick, like thieves.
“It was you two, wasn’t it?”
Something caught in his throat. “What are you …?”
“Don’t lie again,” she said. “For more than twenty years, you’ve been afraid someone would accuse you of that, haven’t you? But my father took the fall. Maybe he was just convenient, having a terrorist wife and all.”
Teynard shook his head. “You aren’t making sense,” he said in a quiet voice. “I need to get back to the office.”
“But it makes perfect sense,” she said. “Especially if he got my mother to inform, and cut a deal for a light prison sentence for her. He left the force with honors, too. Things don’t often happen like that if a police officer has been under disciplinary review, do they?”
Teynard looked away. “Typical
“Matter of fact”—she leaned forward and downed her espresso—“in the Commissariat, you probably bounced
