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closest thing Paris has to Elaine’s. You’ll want to try the choucroute, and beer is good with it.”
    “Order for me,” Rick said.
    “Is ‘commercial attaché’ your usual handle when you’re out and about?” Stone asked.
    “It is if I’m to be with businesspeople. If I’m with the artsier types, then I’m the cultural attaché. Whatever works.”
    “That could be the Agency’s motto,” Stone observed.
    “And a good one at that.” Rick’s eyes flicked to the mirror above Stone’s head. He was sitting with his back to the room.
    “See someone you know?”
    “Someone I’d like not to see me. The man in the pin-striped suit.”
    Stone glanced across the room. “Who is he?”
    “Opposition.”
    Stone offered his sunglasses. “Will these help?”
    “Thanks,” Rick said, slipping them on. “You don’t want him to see me with you—that might cause unwanted attention to be paid to you.”
    “You’ve been here less than a month, and already you know the opposition and they know you?”
    “I read the files on all of them as soon as I hit Paris,” Rick said, “and I expect they’ve had a look at my file, too. It’s par for the course. It’s also interesting that that guy is frequenting this particular place—the headwaiter seemed to know him. I’ll put that in my report.”
    “You write a lot of reports, do you?”
    “It’s a big part of what I do.”
    “Try and keep me out of them, will you?”
    “Are you kidding? You float in over our transom in a drug-induced coma, and you don’t want anybody to notice?”
    Stone shrugged. “I guess that was naive of me.”
    “It was.”
    The choucroutes arrived—a bed of sauerkraut covered with slices of pork and veal.
    “Very, very good,” Rick said after a couple of bites.
    “Don’t eat it all, you’ll sleep through the afternoon.”
    “Good advice.”
    “Rick, can you run a name through your computers for me?”
    “Does it relate to this trip?”
    “Yes. The name is Amanda Hurley.”
    “Who is she?”
    “I’ve no idea. She called the hotel and said we met on the airplane and invited me to dinner. I can’t even give you a description, except of her accent, which was mid-Atlantic.”
    Rick produced a smartphone and typed for thirty seconds, then put it away. “Soon,” he said.
    “How’d you get into this racket?” Stone asked.
    “I had a misspent youth,” Rick said. “I left home at sixteen and got into all sorts of trouble, did a little local time, nothing felonious. A guy came to see me, said his name was Jim. I got the impression that a detective who had busted me a couple of times had said something to him about me. He asked me if I spoke Spanish—asked me in Spanish—so I conversed with him in that language. He knew that I’d just barely gotten through high school and asked where I’d picked up the tongue. I told him on the street, and he seemed impressed.”
    “He was Agency?”
    “He must have bailed me out, because when I hit the street he was waiting for me. He bought me some clothes—even then I dressed unsuitably—and took me to dinner at a big-time steak house, where the conversation ranged over everything I had ever done—crimes, sports, hobbies, whatever—then it turned to what I was going to do with my life.”
    “How old were you at the time?”
    “Nineteen, going on forty-five.”
    “Did he make you an offer?”
    “He asked me if I’d give him a few weeks of my time, and I didn’t have anything better to do, so I said sure. I figured I owed him. He asked me if there was anything in my rented room that I couldn’t walk away from, and I thought about it and told him no.”
    “What happened then?”
    “When we left the restaurant there was a car and driver waiting for us. We were driven to JFK, and Jim gave me some cash and a ticket, said I’d be met at the other end. Next morning I found myself in Monterey, California, at a language school, learning Russian. I aced that, and after a couple of