“Yes, I think that’s right, sir,” Hoskins said.
“I wish to speak with the manager and the employee,” Fromme said. “Any leads on who was with her in the club before she entered the tent?”
“Yes,” Hoskins said. “Several patrons and the bartender said Madame Latrelle was watching an orgy when she was approached by a large francophone African male with a gold upper front tooth and a pale, brunette Caucasian woman with green catlike eyes.”
This was the first Louis and I had heard of the couple, but I remembered that someone at Chez Pincus had mentioned that the woman Henri Richard had brought to the restaurant once wore cat-eye contacts.
I said, “You catch them on tape?”
“God no,” Louis said. “A place like this, Jack, is based on anonymity, and a belief in personal space. The French do not like security cameras.”
“Especially in their sex clubs?”
“Now you understand,” Louis said.
“Sketch artists?”
Hoskins said, “That we can take care of.”
When the investigator and magistrate moved off to discuss matters off-limits to Private Paris, I checked my watch. It was nearly five in the morning, and I was running on fumes.
I was about to tell Louis that I was going back to the hotel for a few hours of sleep when something he’d said earlier came back to me.
“Wasn’t Henri Richard a member of L’Académie Française?” I asked.
“Oui,” Louis said. “But if you think there is a connection, it stops with Lourdes. Chef Pincus, as highly regarded as he was, was not a member.”
“That shoots that.”
Then Louis stared off into the distance and muttered, “Unless…”
“Unless what?” I asked.
“Come, Jack,” he said, hurrying toward the exit. “We must go talk to the only other Parisian I know who gets up and goes to work as early as I do.”
Chapter 47
6th Arrondissement
5:15 a.m.
LOUIS AND I climbed from a taxi on the Quai de Conti across the Seine from the Louvre. In the glow of streetlamps, I could make out the massive curved bulwark of a building and the silhouette of a domed tower that loomed above it.
“What is this place?” I asked, feeling irritable after dozing off in the cab.
“The Institut de France,” he said. “The epicenter of French culture.”
“What does it do?” I said, following him across a courtyard in front of the grand building.
“On a practical level, the institute oversees about ten thousand different foundations concerned with everything from French historical sites to museums and castles,” Louis said. “The five academies within the institute were formed back in the days of Louis XIV, and designed to preserve and celebrate the French culture, language, arts, sciences, and our systems of law and politics. The members represent the best of France, and must be voted in.”
“There’s a nomination process?”
He bobbed his head. “Anyone can be nominated. You can even nominate yourself. But then you must run a quiet campaign, almost like a political race, in which you prove that you are one of les immortels, the best of France.”
Louis stopped before a door. “Hold on a second.”
He punched in a number on his cell phone, waited, and laughed. “It’s Louis. I knew you were up. Listen, I’m out front. Can you buzz us in? It’s a matter of great importance, and potentially involves the institute.” Louis listened and said, “We shall meet you there.”