How little you really know, thought Zelda. Even so, she felt a surge of anger at the way Danvers laid out his facts as if they were accusations, or evidence of moral lapses on her part, at the very least. “You say you were abducted.” An artist “going by the name of Zelda.” Like the artist previously known as Prince, she thought. “More than forty years your senior.” She never thought of Raymond in that way. He was Raymond—bright, solid, brilliant, bubbling over with enthusiasm for life. Raymond. She said nothing. She was certainly not going to fill Danvers in on the details missing from his files. She folded her arms. “I don’t see what any of this has to do with you,” she said.

“Why are you so hostile?” Deborah asked.

“Hostile? How would you feel if you arrived at work to find strangers in your boss’s office who tell you he’s dead and start interrogating you about your past?”

“I’d feel I was only doing my duty by answering their questions.”

Zelda paused, then said, “Well, I suppose that is one difference between you and me.”

“Nelia Melnic,” Danvers said. Deliberately pronouncing the final “ic” as “itch” again. “You’re not British, are you? That’s not a British name, is it? And, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I detect a slight accent.”

“I’m a French citizen. I have a French passport.”

Danvers frowned and turned to his folder again. “Ah, yes, for ‘services to the French government.’ ”

Zelda smiled. “You could call it that.”

“What else? How did you really get French citizenship? They don’t give it out with the garlic, you know.”

“The French value their whores, Mr. Danvers. Didn’t you know that? They offered me the Légion d’honneur, too, but I turned it down. I thought that would be going a bit too far.”

Danvers banged his fist on the desk. “Don’t be flippant with me, Ms. Melnic. This is a serious business and you’re wasting my time.”

“Then don’t ask me stupid questions. I applied. They granted it. It did no harm that I had done the police a few favors, that’s all.”

“What kind of—”

“Not that kind of favor. I helped them take down some very dangerous men. Same as I try to do here.”

“Are you sure you didn’t have some dirt on someone?”

Zelda smiled. “You’d be surprised how many people I have dirt on, Mr. Danvers. That just means that a lot of people are dirty.”

“You’re not answering my questions.”

“It’s the best answer you’ll get from me.”

Zelda had to keep reminding herself that, however much they knew, they didn’t know everything. And she certainly wasn’t going to tell them anymore than she had to. She wasn’t even going to tell them about Hawkins meeting Keane. She said nothing.

“Before France,” Danvers said, calming down. “Is that an Eastern European accent I detect? Romanian, is it?”

Zelda sighed. “I was born in Moldova, Mr. Danvers, as you can no doubt see for yourself from my file, in a town called Dubăsari, in Transnistria, on the river Dniester, not far from the Ukraine border. It’s not a part of the world many people know well. And the ‘c’ in Melnic is hard, more of a ‘k’ than a ‘ch.’ It’s a common enough surname in that part of the world.” Zelda paused, tired of the pointless sparring. “If you think I know anything, and you want to find out what it is, why don’t you tell me what happened and then ask me what I think about it?”