“What do I get in return?”

“My protection, INTERPOL’s protection—and you’re going to need it.”

He had a point. If he hadn’t come along, that thug would have blown my brains out. I took a moment, then said okay. Smith lit another cigarette and sat back. I told him how Valfiero had lured my great-grandfather into stealing the painting, how Chaudron had made copies, and how the pair had schemed to make forgeries and sell them as the original. When I stopped, he asked again why I’d come to Paris to see Étienne Chaudron.

“I wanted to see if he could add anything to what I’d read.”

“There’s something else you’re not telling me.”

I told him he was wrong, that there was nothing else.

He stared at me, said he knew all about me: my past, my present, the school suspensions, the arrests for breaking and entering.

“Ancient history,” I said. “Who cares?”

“I think a judge and jury will. Your delinquent past isn’t going to play well in your murder case.” He added a mean grin. “Your prints all over the townhouse, the girl’s blood on your phone—”

“What’s my motive?” I folded my arms across my chest, trying to hide my anxiety.

“How about art theft? It runs in your family. You were in Chaudron’s home earlier, saw the Vermeer, wanted it, and went back to steal it. But you know, Perrone, that hardly matters. Your DNA alone will convict you.”

I kept my mask of cool in place best I could, but I knew he was right.

“I want your full cooperation, and I want it now. Starting with why you went to see Étienne Chaudron and what you learned from him.”

“I already told you.”

“There’s more. You know it and I know it!”

I was pretty sure he was bluffing. The way he kept threatening, then backing down, my Kill Van Kull radar reading him like it would any punk on the street. Something was off. Smith had a secret, same as me.

62

I walked fast, shoulders hunched, head down, no direction in mind. I just had to keep moving. The rain was coming down hard now. It soaked my hair and streaked my face. I didn’t think Smith was following me or having me followed, but I couldn’t be sure and wanted to put as much distance between us as possible. He’d let me go with a threat to turn me in for the murders of Étienne Chaudron and his girlfriend. I knew he was bluffing, or he’d have already done it. Letting me go had been the proof.

I crossed streets, turned corners, and cut through alleyways, always checking over my shoulder, consumed by one thought—reading the pages I had found in the back of the Vermeer painting. I kept my hand flat against them, wedged in my pocket to keep them dry, to make sure they were there. I replayed the way I had tricked the man with the gun into taking the wrong page—the intentional feint toward my breast pocket, a decision made in a split second, directing him to the page I’d torn out of the journal and brought with me to Paris, not the ones I had just found hidden behind the Vermeer. It still amazed me that I had pulled it off, and I was pretty damn proud of myself.