“That’s it, your cover’s been blown, Mr. Potboiler,” said Stéphane Pianelli, sitting down beside me. “Give it a few minutes and they’ll be getting you to autograph books.”

I was careful not to encourage him, but he continued.

“They’ll ask why you killed off the hero at the end of A Few Days with You. They’ll ask where you get your ideas, and—”

“Give me a break, Stéphane. What is it you want to talk about? What’s this business about an article?”

Pianelli cleared his throat. “When did you get here?” he asked.

“I flew in this morning.”

“Okay. Have you heard of the Ice Saints?”

“No, but I’m guessing there are no statues of them in Antibes Cathedral.”

“Very funny. Actually, it’s a meteorological term for the late frost you sometimes get in spring.” He took an e-cigarette from his jacket as he spoke. “The weather on the Côte has been completely shit this spring. First freezing cold, then days of torrential rain—”

I cut him off. “Keep it short, Stéphane, I don’t want to hear weeks’ worth of weather reports!”

He jerked his chin toward the colorful boarders’ buildings, shimmering in the sunshine. “Some of the dorm basements were flooded.”

“That’s nothing new. Have you seen how steep the slope is? Even back in our day, they flooded every other year.”

“Yes, but on the weekend of April eighth, the water rose as high as the ground-floor entrance halls. The school had to have the basements cleared out as an emergency measure.” Pianelli puffed on his e-cigarette, releasing plumes of vapor scented with grapefruit and verbena. Compared to Che Guevara chomping his cigar, a revolutionary vaping herbal tea was faintly preposterous.

“During the clear-out, they brought up some old rusty lockers that had been there since the mid-nineties. A moving company was contracted to take them to the dump, but before they could, a bunch of students thought it might be fun to open them up. You’ll never guess what they found.”

“Tell me.”

Pianelli paused for as long as possible for effect.

“A leather sports bag containing a hundred thousand francs in hundreds and two-hundreds! A small fortune that had been stashed away for twenty years.”

“So the cops came to Saint-Ex?”

I imagined the turmoil created at the school by the gendarmes showing up.

“You could say that! Like I say in my article, they were pretty worked up about the whole business. A cold case, a stack of cash, a prestigious school; it didn’t take much to persuade them to search the whole place with a fine-tooth comb.”

“What did they find?”

“They haven’t released the information, but from my contacts, I know that they found two clear sets of fingerprints on the bag.”

“And?”

“One set of prints was on file.”

I held my breath as Pianelli prepared to land the next blow.