Vinca’s mother was Pauline Lambert, an Antibes-born actress with close-cropped red hair—a dead ringer for Marlène Jobert—who had played minor roles in 1970s films directed by Yves Boisset and Henri Verneuil. The highlight of her career was a twenty-second topless scene with Jean-Paul Belmondo in La Scoumoune. In 1973, in a nightclub at Juan-les-Pins, Pauline met Mark Rockwell, an American race-car driver who had briefly been with the Lotus F1 team and had competed several times in the Indianapolis 500. Rockwell was the youngest son of a prominent Massachusetts family who owned a large stake in a major supermarket chain on the East Coast. Knowing that her career was going nowhere, Pauline followed her new lover to America, where they married. Their only daughter, Vinca, was born in Boston shortly afterward and lived there until the age of sixteen, when she was sent to Saint-Ex after the tragic death of her parents. In the summer of 1989, Mark and Pauline Rockwell had been among the victims of a plane crash. Their plane underwent an explosive decompression shortly after taking off from a Hawaii airport. When the fuselage was breached, the six rows of business-class seats had been torn from the plane. Twelve people had died in the accident, and, for once, it was the rich who suffered, a detail that must surely have pleased Pianelli.

Given her background and her manner, in theory, Vinca epitomized everything Pianelli despised: a daddy’s girl from a wealthy American family, a brainy, snobbish heiress interested in Greek philosophy, the films of Tarkovsky, and the poetry of Lautréamont. Slightly pretentious and astonishingly beautiful, she was a girl who did not really live in this world but in a world of her own. A girl who was, unwittingly, somewhat contemptuous of young men like Pianelli.

“For fuck’s sake, don’t you even care?” he snapped.

I sighed, shrugged, and pretended to be uninterested. “It was all a long time ago, Stéphane.”

“A long time ago? But Vinca was your friend! You worshipped her, you—”

“I was eighteen; I was a kid. I’ve moved on.”

“Bullshit, Mr. Potboiler, you haven’t moved on at all. I’ve read your novels, and Vinca’s in every single one of them. She’s there in most of your female characters!”

Pianelli was starting to piss me off.

“Enough with the pop psychology. It belongs on your rag’s horoscope page.”

Now that the tone of the discussion had become heated, Stéphane Pianelli seemed electrified. You could see the excitement in his eyes. Vinca had driven him mad, just as she had other boys before him, though for different reasons.

“Say what you like, Thomas, I’m taking up the investigation again. Seriously this time.”

“You didn’t get very far fifteen years ago,” I said.

“The discovery of the money changes everything! That much cash must be hiding something. I think there are only three possibilities: drugs, corruption, or serious blackmail.”