Private Paris (Private 10)

Langlois looked ready to argue further, but I said, “Louis, don’t we have that other appointment anyway? The art lady?”

“What art lady?” the investigateur asked.

“Another case,” Louis said, brightening and moving toward the door. “On my honor, we will not breathe a word of what we have seen here.”

“Louis, you have no honor,” she said.

“You wound me,” he said, opening the door, and we left.

Outside on the street, I said, “So what do we tell the wife and mistress?”

“Officially, we say that we cannot continue under orders from La Crim,” he said. “Unofficially is another story. As you have just heard, I have no honor.”

“I, for one, disagree.”

“You have not known me long enough,” Langlois grunted, and laughed.

He lit a cigarette, and we walked along the Rue Popincourt.

Recalling that Del Rio was trying to track Kim Kopchinski through her finances, I suggested we do the same for the opera director. Louis said that it was certain Hoskins had frozen access to the accounts.

“Even his wife couldn’t get at them now,” he said, and then smiled and blew smoke rings. “Ah, but I bet a dog I know could get to them.”

Chapter 25

20th Arrondissement

3 p.m.

LOUIS SAID WE still had almost an hour and a half before we were due to meet with his friend the graffiti expert, so we took a short Métro ride and came aboveground at the Philippe Auguste station.

We headed north along the Boulevard de Ménilmontant until we reached the Rue de la Roquette, where we headed west to number 173. Louis rang the bell of an apartment on the second floor of the small building, but no answer.

“No problem,” he said to me. “I know where Le Chien will be.”

“Why are we looking for a dog?” I asked as he lit another cigarette.

“Not a dog, Jack. The Dog. And if he is not home, he is usually sniffing around gravestones.”

We crossed the boulevard and entered Père-Lachaise cemetery.

“This place is huge,” I said. “How are we going to find him?”

“He usually orbits between the tomb of Héloïse and Abelard and the grave of Jim Morrison.”

I’d never been in the famous cemetery before, and as we walked the paths I had to hand it to the Parisians. They knew how to commemorate their dead. Each headstone or tomb face was carved in some bas-relief or fitted with the statues of angels, or children, sleeping men, or women whose bronze faces were streaked with green patinas so they seemed to be weeping.

We passed tourists gathered by the tomb of the ill-fated twelfth-century lovers Héloïse and Abelard, but spotted no one who fit Louis’s description of Le Chien. For several minutes I thought we were on a wild dog chase, but then we looped toward a crowd around Morrison’s

grave.

Many of the pilgrims wore pictures of the dead singer on their shirts. Others were lighting candles. A speaker cabled to an MP3 player was blasting “Peace Frog,” which caught my attention because the song had played a part in a bizarre series of crimes in Los Angeles the year before. In any case, Jim Morrison was chanting about ghosts crowding the child’s fragile eggshell mind when Louis said, “And there he is.”

Mouthing along with the lyrics and carrying a filthy green book bag, the Dog moved outside the perimeter of the crowd, seeming to know which monuments he could step up on to get a better look at the people in front of the rock singer’s grave. There he’d pause a second, make a slight sideways twitch of his head, pop the tips of the fingers on both hands together, and then move on a few feet and repeat the ritual.

Louis cut him off. “Chien?” he said.

The Dog stopped and looked afraid, but then relaxed a bit and said, “Louis?”