"Bien sr, medicine is difficult, Aimee," said Morbier, striking another match. "Stick to it. You're smart, you'll make it. Nothing worth doing doesn't have its potholes."

Her father said the same thing.

"You'll be using your skills to treat those in need. It will be a secure income, rewarding work. You'll spend your life surrounded by esteemed physicians."

She dropped her demitasse spoon. "Like I want that. Medical school and the esteemed physicians are as corrupt as the prefecture."

Morbier examined the cuticle of his left thumb. Danger signal. "And you know this how, Leduc?"

From Morbier, that counted as an insult. "Since when am I 'Leduc'?"

"As long as you talk to me like those I put in lockup-all attitude and mouth."

She swallowed. "You don't understand. Why don't you ever listen to me?"

"Classique. That's the line of poetry they all quote."

She slammed her fist on the table, scattering papers. "Four old men murdered-two I warned you about-and you rake me over the coals? Instead of treating me like a child, why don't you investigate the case? I've done all the work, put the pieces right in front of you."

She stood, grabbed her bag, and wheeled around, bumping into the leering sergeant, who was hovering at the door. "Bad day in school, mademoiselle, or that time of the month?"

She almost slapped him.

"I'm keeping this file in my desk," said Morbier, reaching for the phone. "No tantrums, Leduc, or you'll get a spanking."

Mortified and seething, she kicked the bollard in the courtyard. Wished she had Morbier's head to drop-kick instead.

Her stomach knotted. She'd been shot at and did he listen? Mais non, dismissed with a warning of a spanking, as if she were five years old.

She'd show him-all of them. The killer was on the loose, and she was going to stop him. Stop him before he stopped her.

That photo Morbier had shown her of a bound Dufard and Royant with the old mill in the background haunted her. Twinges of guilt rustled like the plane tree leaves on the quai. Had she stirred up Georges Ducray to revenge? Or Clement, who'd said . . .

He who pees in the wind wets his teeth.

Hopefully Rene had found something she could use. She needed to get to the bottom of this. Money, she had to trace the money.

Would she trace the money to Elise?

Behind the Palais de la Decouverte, she passed through a crooked stone arch. Rene was waiting for her on a bench in a garden whose entrance she'd passed a million times and never known existed. A weeping beech and a pond with a waterfall, all sheltered below the street, quiet but for the sound of water. The leaves had changed-brown, copper, and orange. Evergreens, bamboo, and maples surrounded them. Carp fed at the surface among water lilies, leaving trails of glistening silver bubbles.

"Private investment banks are a league of their own, Aimee."

"Tough security at Banque Lazare?" She hoped it wasn't more than he could handle.

"Break-ins are easier when you have the dial-in bank number. Which you handed me."

"I did?"

"Going on the assumption that Pinel, the bookstore's directeur financier, would access the bank's computer directly through a dedicated line, I found the bookstore's leased line on one of those transfer orders with the bank account number."

"How did you break this? Did you need a password?"

"No, that's too hard. Did it the easy way and analyzed the floppy. I knew what kind of programs they were using and how to crack them. It's a pretty routine bit of cryptanalysis."

All geek to her but she nodded.

"Pretty obvious crib."

"Crib?"

"Crib means routine stuff, like a predictable series of numbers." Rene sat up straighter. Happy to show off, she could tell. Fine by her. "I knew the first couple of bytes from the files copied onto the floppy probably come from a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. A standard for accounting data. They all have a beginning in common. I used several trial keys, the crib, until the program fell over like a dead canary." He gave a proud little smile. "I did it the easy way."

He called that easy?

Rene handed her a printout. "Here you see the shareholders, board member percentage holdings from off the floppy disk. That what you wanted?"

Yes and no. This told her Elise reigned as financial queen-her family holding eclipsed the other men's family share holdings, and she was now the only living board member. Mentally, Aimee underlined Elise in the suspect column.

But it didn't tell her the source of the money. Or prove it came from Nazi gold.

"Any luck from what I found at the mairie?"

"That gets interesting. The business license dates back to 1946, the year the four same men purchased the bookshop. But it incorporated under the business titled Foundry as of the sixties."

"They wised up, hired a financial advisor," she said. A spiked chestnut pod crunched under her feet. Brittle and dry-like her investigation. If she could call it that. "Say they'd melted the gold, traded in gold futures and bundled it up in this private investment bank. Any way I can trace this fortune back to the gold?"

"Time travel?" Rene shrugged. "Or a confession?"

"A little late, Rene. All the conspirators are in the morgue."

"Alors, firms keep ledgers. Maybe there is a double set of account books?" Rene raised his hands. "I'd say either Elise Peltier's next or she engineered it."

Neither a good prospect. She hated to admit it, but it looked that way.

"Or the fifth German."

"You're back to a Ludlum thriller," said Rene, pulling a tartine out of his bag. "Even if there were a phantom fifth German, why would he come back now?"

She liked bouncing ideas off Rene-no judgment, no bias. He actually tried to help, unlike Morbier.

"The Wall just came down. Say he's been stuck in Germany and now he can return to exact revenge."

Rene tore his tartine aux jambon et fromage in half, handed it to Aimee.

"Merci." Delicious. She hadn't eaten since the brioche at dawn.

"That doesn't explain the murder of Baret, a month before the Wall came down." Good point. "But put that aside for a minute. I don't buy that it's revenge. Not with gold involved." Rene chewed. "Greed more like it. Say the fifth German returns for the gold after all these years, extorts a payoff, blackmail."

"Why kill his golden geese?"

"The men refused to pay up? Or like a tontine scam-remember in that movie with Lino Ventura? What if there is no fifth German-they're killing each other off, last man standing keeps the big payoff?"

Therese Jagametti said the same thing. "But who's left standing now?"

"Who knows?" Suddenly Rene hit his forehead. "That's right. I knew he looked familiar."

"Who?"

"The man in that old village photo you showed me. He reminds me of an actor I saw in a performance a few weeks ago-the name escapes me. One of those theaters on rue des Mathurins, just up from the chapel where the monarchists congregate."

Her mind perked up. Renaud de Bretteville? "Chapelle Expiatoire. Elise lives right across from it. Remember the play?"

"Which one was it? I've seen so many lately. Maybe I still have the ticket stub . . ." Rene rustled through his wallet. "Mais non. Oh well. The photo reminded me of him, that's all. Life's funny, eh?"

A coincidence? Never in an investigation, her father would say. Build your case by wearing down your shoe leather, getting statements, checking out each detail. If it doesn't pan out, file it away because that detail might just come back to bite you.

And the most important advice: if it niggles at you, go scratch that itch.

Right now her itch was Banque Lazare, the private investment bank. Not for the likes of her-one needed a minimum of a million francs to open an account. The no-nonsense lobby breathed wealth, all white marble and understated bronze accents.

She asked to speak to the bank officer who dealt with Foundry.

"Do you have an appointment?" the receptionist asked her.

"Mademoiselle Peltier sent me," she lied. "I need to speak to the account manager before the police do." How easy this lying had become. Aimee flashed her PI license.

The receptionist blinked and checked something on her screen. "Your name again, s'il vous plat?"

"Aimee Leduc."

"The account liaison is Madame Fontaine, but she's out until this afternoon."

"I didn't want to disturb her, but it's urgent."

"Un moment."

But it was more than un moment before the receptionist, who made several phone calls, explaining the situation each time, said "Understood" and passed over an address on a piece of paper.

"Madame Fontaine's at Thetre des Mathurins. She can spare you five minutes."

At a theater? Another coincidence?

"It's around the corner from the department store Printemps."

Aimee knew it well.

The sky was a dove grey, amber traffic lights gleamed on the buildings. She kept to broad Boulevard Haussmann-the business hub of the upscale, yawn-inducing commercial section of the eighth arrondissement. Buses and bicycles passed; office workers on break smoked on the pavement. A few cafes, shops, and the characteristic Haussmannian buildings-limestone facades and wrought-iron balconies.

On the sidewalk, near Place Saint-Augustin, she noticed the weekly wine-tasting signs under the awning of Les Caves Auge, her grand-pere's favorite wine shop. She peeked inside, inhaled the musky oak-barrel smells from one of the oldest wine merchants in the city: the nineteenth-century dark-wood interior patinaed with time, still crammed from floor to ceiling with every kind of wine, aperitif, liquor. The owner had laughed when her ten-year-old self said it belonged in the Guinness Book of World Records. "More like in a Balzac novel," he had said. "Balzac lived just up the hill, you know. They say he'd nip down here."

She hurried past Berteil's washed-out yellow facade, a boutique for old-lady types who think they're tres sportives, according to Martine. A block further was Square Louis XVI with its dark foliage and shadowed vaulted stone, an overgrown ruin-like appearance in the middle of Paris emitting damp leaf smells. She turned on rue de l'Arcade. A few minutes later she stood in the foyer of Thetre des Mathurins.

The playbill windows were empty. Merde. She had no clue if it was the theater Rene had mentioned. Inside the Italianate lobby-deserted apart from the nymphs carved overhead-she caught the sound of someone talking inside the theater. Shrieks from a microphone.

A woman with a sleek bob stood on the stage giving directions in a cut-glass accent. Tres grand bourgeois.

"Madame Fontaine?" Aimee asked when she finally got her attention.

The woman nodded to the sound-crew tech, a bored twenty-something who sucked a hand-rolled cigarette. "Ah, the bank called me, but, mademoiselle, I can give you five minutes only." She called to the sound-tech crew, "Adjust the mic volume, s'il vous plat." She said to Aimee, "Give me une petite seconde."

Aimee wondered at the woman's focus on the situation here-whatever it was. The stage was vacant apart from an armchair, a side table, and a microphone apparatus. Madame Fontaine realigned the chair with a stage mark.

"We're preparing for a talk in our philosophe series. C'est immense, standing room only when the big hitters lecture. Eat la brown bag-something I saw on New York's Wall Street-you know, get your culture at lunch." Madame Fontaine was clearly impressed with herself and her trendy, forward-thinking copycat ideas. "Banque Lazare sponsors this little series," she said, "our petit bouillon de culture. I'm easing the transition since Monsieur Peltier's passing. It was a priority to him and to the bank that we stand by this important piece of culture."

Benefitting from a nice tax write-off too, Aimee figured. But that fit in with the theater foundation reception that Renaud mentioned Bruno Peltier sponsored. Rich people loved tax write-offs that made them feel like they were contributing to a cultural legacy.

Madame looked at her pointedly. "Now if that's all?"

Where were the five minutes?

"I'm here about an investigation into the Foundry corporation and its ties to the bank."

"That's confidential. I only discuss bank business with clients."

Aimee scrambled to come up with something to get the woman to talk. "But madame, why's that?"

The woman's face had turned stony. "Silly of you to come and waste my time."

"Then you'll deal with the police, who have questions," she lied. "Didn't the bank tell you Elise Peltier hired me?"

"Get authorization in writing." She waved a dismissal and returned to readjust the microphone, obsessed with her flurry of minutia.

Stupid, what had she expected? A forthcoming banker? As if they existed.

Frustrated, Aimee looked around for playbills of upcoming performances. In the lobby, a short man in overalls with a cigarette hanging from his mouth stood over a box of electrical wires.

He shook his head at her query, the long ash of his cigarette threatening to fall on the theater's mosaic tiles. "Playbills go up this afternoon."

She didn't know for sure this was the theater Rene had meant, anyway. She'd try the theater next door.

But before she left, she'd take one more shot.

"Do you know Renaud de Bretteville?"

The electrician nodded. "He's the troupe director. Those photos in the side foyer are all his productions."

"What's he like?"