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targeted her.”
    “Hadn’t he done that before?” Aimée remembered him being interviewed on television, delivering a tirade against the “establishment.” He had distinctive blue eyes and a long face. A potent cocktail of literary talent and liberal political blunders.
    “Papa said there were documents,” he said. “I think he was working on something to do with that. The research had been his reason for living. After that he took his life.”
    “Are you sure the book was about Interpol … not about the terrorists?” What if he’d been researching Haader-Rofmein, something dealing with Jutta, or with her mother? She leaned forward, interested. “Did he mention the Haader-Rofmein gang?”
    “Haader-Rofmein? Maybe, I’m not sure. He’d had a dry spell,” Christian Figeac said, looking down. He knocked cigar ash into the Ricard ashtray. The ashes missed and particles floated onto his pants. “And then I heard him working.”
    “Working on what?”
    “He never talked about what he wrote. Taboo. A jinx, he said.”
    Aimée thought she could see sadness in Christian Figeac’s eyes. And a kind of defeat. Had he felt sidelined, growing up in the shadow of famous parents who’d been obsessed by the unborn child? Aimée felt sorry for this man.
    “Why would your father take his life now?”
    Instead of answering her, Christian Figeac shrugged. “Late at night,” he said, his long lashes fluttering, “the time Papa used to work in the breakfast room, I think I can still hear him pounding on typewriter keys. Strange, because he wrote everything in longhand first. I open the door and it’s empty, of course, but it’s like he’s trying to tell me something.”
    “Rational consideration would preclude that, Monsieur Figeac,” she said.
    Christian Figeac was delusional but maybe she could turn it to her advantage. Find the link to her mother, figure out what Jutta Hald had really wanted. “If you’re the literary executor for your father’s estate,” she said, “may I go through his papers?”
    Christian Figeac pulled a crumpled paper from his jacket pocket and smoothed it out on the marble-topped cafe table.
    “How much?” he asked, writing her name on the check.
    “For what? My field is computer security, data recovery for firms and corporations.”
    “Someone’s stalking me,” he said, his eyes huge. “Twenty thousand do for a retainer?”
    “A retainer for what?”
    “Find out who’s stalking me.”
    That got her attention. She leaned back against the banquette. If she took his check maybe she could pay the rent as well as find out about her mother.
    Outside the cafe window, a Pakistani man with a pushcart full of cloth rolled his eyes at a burly man making deliveries whose truck blocked the street.
    “I’ll take the job on the condition that I can have access to your father’s papers,” she said. “They may contain information about my mother or Jutta Hald.”
    “ Tant pis but I’ve never heard of them.”
    “Think back. Didn’t an older woman, Jutta Hald, come to your …?”
    “But it’s so like something my father would do,” he interrupted. “I’ve even heard their noises.”
    “Noises?” Aimée felt like standing up. “Is that why you think someone’s stalking you?”
    “The funny thing was, when I checked in the morning, the room had been disturbed. Discreetly, but I could tell.”
    “How’s that?”
    “The dust, of course.” he stared at Aimée. “Footprints in the dust.”
    A IMÉE AND Christian Figeac reached the door of 107, rue de Cléry, a block away. The building occupied the corner of the narrow street where it met rue des Petits Carreaux. The inner courtyard, with ivy-covered facades and deep balconies, seemed like another world, an oasis far removed from the hookers on Saint Denis, from the Metro and the bus exhaust.
    Inside the tall-ceilinged apartment, once an industrial workshop she figured, stood a few rattan café-style chairs. Apart from the