“We received your package.”

“Good,” he says, picturing himself taking the painting off the wall and placing it under his jacket, recalls the rich woman’s expensive smell, how he had demanded that she tell him what the two men wanted and how she told him they had been there about a painting and showed it to him, a forgery, a joke, she said, adding that the men had photographed it and that they were INTERPOL agents. That surprised him. Maybe the other guy, but not the American, at least he doesn’t think so.

“The boss was pleased,” the middleman says.

“What did you think of it?”

“Me? I didn’t open it. I just sent it.”

He knows the middleman is lying. No question he opened the package and looked at the painting. In this business, everyone is a liar and a cheat, and knowledge is power.

“Are you watching them?”

“Yes,” he says, still distracted by flickering images of the rich woman and the sound of her protests as he twisted her pearls until she was quiet. A shame. He didn’t mean to. The moment got the better of him. Though he always needs to protect himself. Never leaves a witness, someone who can identify him. He does not tell the middleman any of this. Why should he? He has gotten them the information they want, plus the painting, a gift, free of charge. What do they care if he has a little fun, as long as the outcome is the same? They should thank him.

“Are you there? Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” he says, glancing up at the hotel window, its incandescent glow pulsing against the Paris night.

“They have the diary,” the middleman says. “The boss says it’s time you retrieved it.”

Finally, he thinks, though it doesn’t feel like enough. What about the American and the other man, the one who may be working for INTERPOL? He cannot just let them walk away.

76

We walked a few blocks, Smith needing to clear his head before his appointment at the Louvre. I shivered, pointed out that it was snowing.

“It never snows in Paris,” he said.

I turned my hands up toward the night sky, snowflakes melting in my palms. “This is called snow, Smith. And I’m freezing.”

He told me to stop being a wuss, patted my head like a dog.

I shrugged his hand off, tugged my jacket tighter. All I wanted was to go with him to the Louvre. “Everything that’s happened,” I said, “it has to mean something.”

“I don’t know,” Smith said. “Sometimes things just happen. We make our choices and have to live with them, but we can’t control our destiny.”

“Wow, that’s deep,” I said, mocking him, but it made me think about the choices and risks I’d taken and my uncertain future, my destiny, looming.

Smith asked if I thought I’d made a bad choice in pursuing my great-grandfather’s story. I told him I didn’t know—and that was the truth.