“I’ll make a deal. If you—”

“We are not making any deals, Mr. Perrone.”

“Just let me know if he’s okay, that’s all I want. Otherwise”—I met her gaze—“I’ll pursue it on my own, and I don’t see how you can stop me.”

Inspector Cabenal’s eyes narrowed. “I can stop you, Mr. Perrone, and I will. But fine, if he lives, I will let you know. But you will not be in touch with him again. That’s the deal. Are we clear?”

I gave her a barely discernible nod.

“All right then.” Cabenal folded her hands on the table again, all business. She told me they had been through Smith’s computer and notes. “I know you were helping him, a mistake to get a civilian involved—and that was the least of it. He had no authority to be doing any of this.”

“Doing what?” I arranged my face into a mask of innocence.

The inspector raised an eyebrow, the only part of her face that moved. “There is no need to be coy, Mr. Perrone. We know what he was after, that he was on his way to the Louvre Museum. Did he tell you he was authorized to do such a job?”

“No. In fact, he let me know he wasn’t, that he was acting on his own.”

“That is not the way INTERPOL works,” Cabenal snapped. She took a short breath, rearranged her features back into a cool mask, smoothed a hand over her tight-fitting jacket. “He would surely have been fired for that alone.”

“I don’t know anything about INTERPOL,” I said, “but I can tell you Smith is a good man, a dedicated man.”

“INTERPOL will take over the case now, working with the Paris police. That is the way it is done. We have a red notice out for the man who attacked you and Analyst Smith.”

Cabenal asked what I could tell her about him. I started to describe him, and she stopped me, disappeared, and returned with a forensic artist, the old-fashioned kind, one who worked with charcoal and a sketch pad. He asked Cabenal to leave us alone.

“I find it works better if I’m alone with a witness,” he said.

Cabenal hesitated, lips pursed, but she left.

I sat with the guy, an American named Nate Rodriguez, on loan to the Paris police for some big case he was not allowed to discuss. An intense though likable guy about my age, a New Yorker who made me miss home and also made me comfortable and got me talking. I gave the description, and Rodriguez stopped me several times to clarify—the shape of the man’s face—“round…no, square and broad”—the man’s nose—“flat, almost as if it had been squashed”—and his eyes—“deep set, pale, blue or gray, almost colorless.”

I watched the sketch artist use an eraser to remove most of the tone from the man’s eyes, the drawing taking shape. “You’re good at this,” I said.

“I’ve been doing it a while,” he said.