The pink Post-it note was still sticking out of the book on the desktop, but it was the book at the bottom of the stack that had caught Schäfer’s attention. He pushed the stack of history books aside, and they fell to the floor with a bang. He grabbed the book and looked at the cover.

It was titled Abélard et Héloïse: Lettre d’amour. It was in French, and Schäfer didn’t understand a word of what was in it. But the author’s name on the spine of the book had sent a cascade of adrenaline coursing through his body.

Kaldan, it said.

Nick Kaldan.

CHAPTER

35

THE BLACK UBER driver in the freshly pressed dark-blue suit opened the car door for Heloise, who climbed out onto the gravel path at the Place des Vosges. She thanked him and crossed the street, pulling her little silver-gray wheeled suitcase behind her.

The building lay hidden behind the arcade and wasn’t visible from the square, but Heloise knew the place. She had stayed there before.

She opened the big glass door and stepped into the atrium, where the facade was revealed to her. It was overgrown with malachite-green ivy, which had been trimmed only around the small mullioned windows and the white shutters and towered up before her, beautiful and lush. The whole building oozed innocence and beauty and looked like a young girl waiting to be asked to dance.

“Welcome to Paris, mademoiselle,” said a female reception clerk wearing a striped tailcoat. She spoke English with a strong French accent, so the city’s name sounded more like “Bari” than “Paris,” and she gave Heloise a key card to a small room on the hotel’s third floor.

Heloise took an elevator the size of a tin can up to the floor and let herself into room 311, where she collapsed onto the bed’s crisp, white rustling bedspread.

She lay there for a while, looking around the room. It was a small room, a small room in a lovely, expensive hotel. The mattress practically touched the gilded wallpaper on either side of the bed, and the bathroom, which opened right beside the nightstand, contained a tiny shower stall instead of a bathtub. From the open double window, there was a view of a courtyard and a large hazelnut tree, whose branches reached right up to the rooftop. You could pick the nuts right from your bed if you wanted to.

Heloise didn’t.

Instead she stretched her leg over to the minibar next to the headboard and pushed open the door of the minifridge in a quick motion. It hit the doorframe behind it with a bang, and the liquor bottles clinked on the shelves. She sat up and reached for one at random and looked at it.

Black rum.