I grab the Taser and my bag, then clamber out the door. Cedar incense burns somewhere in one of the apartments and snakes into the hall. I reach the stairwell and cast a glance above. Jean-Luc hasn’t come down after his angry goodbye this morning. Probably for the best, considering he can’t like what I exposed his budding career to. If he is home and hears me, he doesn’t stir.

As my sandals slap the hard tile of the foyer, the door marked CONCIERGE moans inward. A mop of gray-streaked black hair emerges. Madame Chang.

She beckons me with a hand. “Venez.” I look behind me and feel even dumber when I turn back to her and she’s rolling big brown eyes magnified by thick glasses. “Allez,” she adds. C’mon.

She opens the door wider as alarms ring in my head not to trust strangers, even tiny ones that reach my shoulder and recall my Chinese grandmother. But she waves me in in a way that is charmingly familiar. The front room of her apartment is both living room and kitchen, and she mutters, “Aiyaa,” then something in Cantonese I don’t understand. Warmth spreads in my chest at this sound of home—my mother’s preferred exclamation. She motions to a plate of individually wrapped almond cookies and a pot of tea all prepped and ready on the modest coffee table. A coup of courtesy. After sitting in a sofa chair with a blanket buffering the plastic covering beneath, she points to the love seat. “Là.” Now I don’t know if she speaks Chinese or French again, but I sit, anyway.

“I’m sorry your sister is missing. She always lights up a dismal day.” Perfect English. She tucks a strand of black hair back, artfully cut asymmetrically to complement a round face. I wonder how many languages she must speak, and whether being multilingual is just a thing here. Like inexpensive madeleines.

“Thank you,” I reply, automatically at this point. “I’m Shayna, by the way.”

She extends a small hand and shakes mine in a dying-fish wiggle. “Louise Chang. If there is anything I can do for you while you’re here—I assume to handle some paperwork—let me know.”

The ring she wears on her left hand looks like one of my costume jewelry pieces, but I doubt hers cost only twenty dollars. “Thank you. Were you and Angela very friendly?”

“Amicable, yes. We talked shop occasionally. I was very intrigued by her research on the catacombs.”

“How so?”

“They’re such a storied part of Paris’s history. Now they’ve been reduced to a tourist attraction—or a hub for traffickers in Europe, depending on who you ask.”