"Didn't you refer Elise Peltier to Papa? C'est-ca, non? We're just trying to do what you told her we would. She says the flics do nothing."

"Pah, there's a forensics slowdown. The brigade criminelle deal as best they can. She's a nuisance."

Should she try a personal plea? "Can't you do a small favor for your own goddaughter?"

"So I used to take you to ballet lessons," he said, exhaling. "So what?"

So much for that strategy. One for the minus column.

"Look, I'm in the middle of a robbery investigation. Full-on."

"What's new?" Aimee said, annoyed with him now. So stubborn. "Elise broke down in tears in our office, begging us. Her fiance says a police suspect turned out to have an alibi."

"Et alors, the brigade criminelle's got to prioritize, but they're investigating and she's not helping by meddling."

"Can you help me or not?"

A sigh. He stabbed out his cigarette and the Ricard ashtray clinked into a water glass. She'd seen him do that a thousand times. Another sigh as he stood up. "No promises."

While she waited, she munched the crudites and jambon cru she'd pocketed from the party. Shared some of the ham with Miles Davis, who'd woken up.

"Who's this?" Morbier had returned with a stack of folders. Miles Davis licked Morbier's pointing finger. "Another of your grand-pere's strays?"

She told him.

"Meels Daveez?"

"He likes you, Morbier. Can't you just tell me the victim's name?"

"How do I know? I grabbed the latest homicide reports. Takes time to go through them. So read me your list of names quick or we don't do this at all. I've got a meeting."

Better than nothing.

She read out the names she'd culled from the reservation log in the photo. "Mondini, Guerbois, Pribault."

Morbier thumbed the reports, keeping them out of her view. Shook his head.

"Dubois, Pepy . . ."

"Any with a B?" asked Morbier.

"Could be . . . " She pulled out the blurry photo again, but the angle of her hurried shot distorted the letters. "Would it be Ba . . . looks like B-A-R . . ."

"Baret?"

Had to be. Party of three. Two other names listed in the left margin-those names she could make out.

"That's him. He dined with an Alain Dufard, and Philbert Royant." She tried to contain her excitement at the discovery-after all, it could be a coincidence. The blurry name might be something else entirely; the second murder victim, Baret, might not actually be a friend of Bruno Peltier's, or have anything to do with him at all. But she remembered what her grand-pere had said about coincidences-they usually weren't. "Those other two men need to be warned," she said.

"Warned?"

"What if they're in danger?"

"That's supposition, Aimee."

"A supposition you can't afford to ignore. Were Bruno Peltier's friends, whom he dined with the night he died, even questioned? Now it looks like a second man from that group has been executed in exactly the same way. I don't need a crystal ball to tell you the others might be next."

Morbier snorted. "Well, our crystal ball's called evidence." He gestured to the board. "This is how it's done. Piecing together solid evidence to build a case." Another shake of his head. "Now look. I have my hands full with my own cases. This isn't even my department. Belongs to the brigade criminelle, who have it under control."

Under control? Hadn't he hinted the case ranked low in priority?

"Now you tell your father he owes me."

Lichtenberg, Former East Germany.

Saturday Morning.

"You owe me this, Gerhard," said Jean-Claude Leduc, pulling his wool scarf tighter in the slicing wind.

Gerhard, his contact, put his hands deep in his coat pocket. Jean-Claude heard coins jingle.

"And my contact owes me," said Gerhard. He was an unusual-looking man, with high Slavic cheekbones, slanted eyes, and thick black hair. "You know how it works."

Favors begat favors here on the grey street in Lichtenberg, where the Stasi had their headquarters on the outskirts of Berlin. The prewar buildings were pockmarked with bullet holes. The HQ, a stark, oyster-grey concrete building, stood next to a weed-choked bomb site. It had once housed the main office of the Soviet Military Administration in Berlin; before that it was a Wehrmacht officers' mess.

"Et alors? I expected the documents ready and waiting for pickup. Like we've always done, Gerhard."

"My contact went out celebrating," said Gerhard. "He got drunk after the Wall fell, set fire to his Trabi. Expecting a Mercedes like everyone drives in the West." Gerhard grinned. And when he did, the Asian in him surfaced. The child of a Mongolian soldier and Prussian mother, he'd been conceived in the Battle of Berlin as the Soviet troops invaded. Gerhard never knew his father. After a long night of drinking, he once told Jean-Claude he doubted his mother knew him either. She'd been hiding in the basement when a Soviet Mongolian troop found her. His mother hanged herself when he was two. There were many like Gerhard, Russenkind, though Gerhard said no one talked about them. He grew up in an orphanage in what became the East.

Jean-Claude rubbed his hands. So damn cold. "Why is it you're just telling me now?"

"I'm not," Gerhard replied. "When your daughter woke me up in the middle of the night, I told her, too."

His heart caught. "She called you? Why? Something wrong?"

His little princess, worse than a squirrel after a nut.

"Nein. Not from what I heard. She was going to leave you a message at the hotel."

Jean-Claude hadn't had time to check in.

"What did you tell her exactly, Gerhard?"

Gerhard scanned the windblown street. "Your daughter? I said my contact went incommunicado, I think. She woke me up."

A man in a leather jacket walked by, stopped to greet Gerhard in Russian. Gerhard spoke Russian, German, French, and British English, the Allies' language of his childhood on the rubbled Berlin streets.

"Give me a little trinkgeld for my contact. You know, so he can get himself some schnapps for his hangover. Hair of the dog, you call it?"

Gerhard still surprised Jean-Claude with his inimitable Berliner gallows humor, cynical and irreverent. Not even the most hardened homicide flics he knew came close.

Reaching back in his overcoat pocket, Jean-Claude pulled out a handful of West German marks. "What else did my daughter say? You didn't tell her anything, give any names, did you?"

Gerhard's eyes narrowed as he looked over Jean-Claude's shoulder. "There's my contact, he's going in the gate. If I don't hurry I'll miss him."

Jean-Claude reached in another pocket and thrust a wad of American dollars in his hands. "Get it, Gerhard. Beg, borrow, steal, promise anything. I mean it."

Gerhard nodded. "Wait for me in that Kaffeehaus. The same one."

The wind whipped gusts of shredded paper and a yellowed Berliner Tageblatt down the street as Jean-Claude watched Gerhard go. The time was now, before Stasi officers shredded and burned their way through several decades' worth of intelligence files. They wanted to protect informants, hide government crimes, and cleanse the archives of any evidence that would be used against them. Or, in some cases, they wanted to sell the files to the highest bidder.

Walking through the Berlin streets, Jean-Claude felt the euphoria and confusion-all the rules and regulations were out the window. He had to make the most of the chaos as the Wall came down.

He lingered a moment on the street. Felt a curious tingling up his neck, like a sixth sense. He turned around. Only vacant windows like hollow eyes, a man and a woman pushing a baby buggy across the windswept street. Their laughter floated on the wind.

His remembered pushing Aimee in a buggy like that. She'd been muffled up for a cold November. Sidonie's arm was in his, her other clutching a sketchbook, as they walked on the quai after her drawing class. He remembered stopping in the steamy, warm cafe. Sidonie's laughter at Aimee's look of delight as she tasted her first sip of chocolat chaud.

A bus pulled up, the couple mounted, and then it was gone. He was alone again on the grey street.

In the Kaffeehaus, a utilitarian establishment heated by a coal stove, he debated on a coffee. Went with the biere. With his change he went to the phone cabin by the dirt-streaked window. Seventies prefab blocks, anonymous and drab, were scattered between rundown nineteenth-century buildings.

He tried Leduc Detective. No answer; he left a message. Worried, he tried Aimee's pager. The phone ate up his coins before he could put in the hotel's number to retrieve his message.

What had Aimee been up to, calling Gerhard in the middle of the night? For now he put that aside as he sat at the gouged wooden counter. He had to keep the desperation at bay, to count on Gerhard succeeding, as he always had.

From force of habit his mind went to Monday's upcoming surveillance at Place Vendome. Ticked off the boxes again, mentally checking each task. Each dreaded task.

A reminder had arrived in this morning's telegram with the message No one ever leaves. He'd thrown back, Watch me.

He pulled out Soli Hecht's card. Pushed it back and forth between his fingers. But why would Soli offer him a contact when Soli could go for Sidonie's files himself-as eager as he appeared for her Hezbollah connections? Or would he use Jean-Claude to do the work while he had bigger Nazi fish to fry?

Or . . . Sidonie was the Hezbollah contact and Soli planned on pressuring him to make her cough up the others.

He pushed a twenty-mark note across the counter. The walrus-mustached barman looked up. "Beer or change?"

"Both, bitte."

Coins in hand, he turned and saw the phone cabin was occupied. But from the corner of his eye, he caught a woman's face outside the window. Only a moment. And then, with that remembered stride, she was gone.

Could it . . . ?

"Forget the beer." Jean-Claude bounded off the stool, grabbed his coat and pushed his way past the heavy draft curtains, through the swing door, and out to the street.

He ran.

At the next street he saw people boarding a streetcar. The flash of a leg, that familiar slant of her shoulder. It was her. Mon Dieu. Sidonie.

He made himself speed up. The tram's doors were closing. He waved his arms, yelled for the driver to stop.

But it took off just as he reached the platform, panting and gasping for breath. He saw her profile, the hint of carmine lips, and then it was gone.

Paris * Saturday, 5 P.M.

Searching the phone book at the corner cafe, with Miles Davis sitting at her feet on the cracked mosaic tiles, Aimee found several listings for the men. After calling a number of them, she whittled them down to three and wrote the addresses in her lab notebook. None of these numbers answered or had an answering machine. She fumed. If only Elise had given her more information. But she was committed now; she couldn't stop.

She'd take the chance there would be a family member at home at Baret's house, given the tragedy. Or maybe Dufard and Royant were there themselves, offering condolences? At least it was a place to start.

She cycled past the Ministry of the Interior's side exit on rue des Saussaies. Whenever she passed it, she thought of the Resistance members who were tortured in its cells. Her father, who had been inside often, had described the messages and names scratched by fingernails into the walls. "What man did to man"-he'd said with a shake of his head-"under the cloak of Vichy . . . The ministry hid this for years."

No one talked about it then. Or now. One never knew what another person's past was, what he might have done during the worst days of the war, or what he might have suffered. Better not to know certain things about your friends, her father once said.

Behind the soot-darkened hulk of Saint Philippe du Roule Church, she saw fragments of the old Roule village, famed for its goose market in the thirteenth century. At the Place Chassaigne-Goyon, once Roule's center, on the side of the church was an allee of wooden nineteenth-century storefronts. Any day it would fall to gentrification, but for now it held small shops. By a cremerie, under a faded boulangerie sign, she spotted a miniscule cafe advertising international phone cards-specialty Asia. Here, in one of les quartiers les plus chics of fabulous wealth, this was no doubt where the help came to make phone calls home.

When she located Baret's address, a three-story limestone affair, she buzzed the tarnished button by his nameplate.

An older woman in an apron answered. The concierge.

"Mais oui, mademoiselle, I clean for Monsieur Baret, but he's out."

Out and he wouldn't be coming back.

"Does Monsieur Baret live alone or have other family?"

"Alone, as far as I know. Family? Outlived them, he once said."

She could rule that out. But she had to reach the two other men.

"Haven't his friends come by?"

The concierge shrugged.

"I don't mean to trouble you. When did you last see him, madame?"

The concierge rubbed her hands on her apron. Took a notepad with her shopping list out of her apron pocket. Consulted it. "Must have been two weeks ago. He's not here much these days."

She hadn't heard about his murder.