I stood alone in the cool shadow of a foyer. It was not one private home but another apartment building with an elevator in an attractive wrought-iron cage ascending through the middle of the foyer while a red-carpeted staircase snaked up around it. Beside the front door were four bells, the bottom one with the name Bryce beside it. I was tempted to press it and see if I could summon Mr. Bryce for myself, but at that moment a door opened and my policeman returned, this time followed by a thin, middle-aged man dressed in a dark suit. He had a long lugubrious face with bags under his eyes that made him look like a bloodhound.

“Madame?” he said. “I understand that you come from the family of Monsieur Bryce in America?”

I decided that this little lie would be the only way of getting information. I pushed the word perjury to the back of my mind. “That is correct. I was asked to deliver a message to him from his family.”

“May I ask what that message was?”

“Certainly not,” I said. “It is a private message, meant for Mr. Bryce’s ears alone, and I am growing rather tired of being thwarted like this. I’m sure Mr. Bryce would not be happy if he found I’d been kept waiting in the front hall.”

He stared at me, looked around, then said, “You had better come in.”

He led me through to the ground-floor apartment. Once inside there was a grander foyer than the communal one—furnished with two gilt chairs with a small bronze sculpture of a ballerina between them, potted palms, and gilt-framed paintings lining the walls.

“We will sit here, if you don’t mind,” he said, indicating the two chairs. “My men are still working in the other rooms.”

A door was open on my left and I saw the back of a policeman who appeared to be dusting the back of a chair with a feather duster. I had seen this done before. “You’re looking for fingerprints,” I said. At least I tried to say it, but the word was outside the scope of my vocabulary. I tried saying, “impressions de doigts” meaning “impression of fingers.” He looked confused. I mimed the making of a fingerprint and he nodded, understanding.

“Ah. Les empreintes digitales—this is new science for us. How in the name of God do you know of such things?” he demanded.