Private Paris (Private 10)

“The Private guy?” she said. “No.”

“He told me he saw you through the bus window, but didn’t recognize you.”

Haja had gone from a state of relative calm to desperate alertness.

“Why would he?” she asked. “That one time I walked by him I was wearing a robe, head scarf, and contact lenses—a totally different woman than the one on the bus.”

Sauvage paused and then said, “Destroy your burn phone and lay low for a while. It’ll be a few days before I can come see you.”

“Done,” Haja said simply, and hung up.

She went to the bedroom window, breaking the phone and removing the SIM card. There was scaffolding outside the window. The building’s owners were having the exterior plaster replaced and painted.

Haja opened the window and looked down through the scaffolding, past a flower box on a lower floor, to a Dumpster in the alley below. She tossed the phone parts, watched them fall, all the while wondering whether she should be in a hurry to be long gone from Paris.

Chapter 91

18th Arrondissement

10 a.m.

“WE ARE HERE to see my nephew,” Louis said when we reached the nurses’ station outside the intensive care unit at Bretonneau Hospital. “Alain Du Champs?”

The nurse on duty grimaced bitterly and said, “Doubt they’ll let you in to see him. He’s got a police guard. They think he firebombed the mosque before he was beaten by people trying to save it.”

“A horrible thing,” Louis said. “I don’t know how he came to this. But perhaps I should talk with the police officer? I used to work for La Crim.”

She shrugged and then gestured with her chin down the hall. “Down the hall, left, then first door on your right.”

I hung back while Louis spoke with the officer sitting outside Du Champs’s room. At first I thought he was going to turn us down, but then Louis gestured to me. The officer had changed his mind.

“Merci,” he said, nodding at me as we went by him toward the door.

“What’d you tell him?” I whispered to Louis in English.

“The truth,” Louis said. “You saved that police officer in Sevran last night. It was enough to get us a few minutes.”

We went through hospital curtains and found Alain Du Champs lying in a bed, looking as though he’d been everyone’s favorite punching bag. His face was swollen almost beyond recognition. A few of his front teeth were missing, and his arm had six or seven pins jutting out of it.

“Detectives?” he slurred. “I’m not saying nothing ’til I talk to my attorney.”

“We work for Private Paris,” Louis said. “You’ve heard of us?”

Through the swelling, Du Champs’s eyes moved to study us.

“I’ve heard,” he said.

“Speak English?” I asked.

“Little,” he said.

“How long have you been a photographer?” I asked.

“Not about the mosque?” he said.

“No,” Louis said.

“Ten years,” Du Champs said, running his tongue along the gums where his teeth had been. “Since I got my first camera, when I was nine. Loved it.”