London Bridges

me, often incomprehensible. I had to assume that the FBI had contacted someone and pulled some strings. Someone had. The new partner was an
agent de police,
a woman named Maud Boulard, who immediately informed me that we would be working in the “French police way,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.
    Physically, she was very much like Etienne Marteau: thin, with an aquiline nose and sharp features—but shiny red hair. She went out of her way to tell me she had visited New York and Los Angeles and didn’t care for either city at all.
    “Our deadline is close,” I told her.
    “I know the deadline, Dr. Cross. Everyone does. To work fast does not mean to work intelligently.”
    What she called “our surveillance of the Red Mafiya” began along the Parc Monceau in the eighth arrondissement. Unlike in the United States, where the Russians seemed to hang out in such working-class neighborhoods as Brighton Beach in New York, the Mafiya was apparently situated in pricier digs here.
    “Maybe because they know Paris better and have operated here longer,” Maud suggested. “I think so. I have known the Russian thugs for many years.
They
don’t believe in your Wolf, by the way. Believe me, I’ve asked around.”
    And that’s what we did for the next hour or so. Talked about the Wolf to Russian thugs Boulard knew. If nothing else, the morning was beautiful, with bright blue skies, which made it excruciating for me. What was I doing there?
    At 1:30, Maud said cheerfully, “Let’s have lunch. With the Russians, of course. I know just the place.”
    She took me into what she called “one of the oldest Russian restaurants in Paris,” Le Daru. The front room was paneled with warm pine as if we were inside the dacha of a wealthy Muscovite.
    I was angry, but trying not to show it. We simply didn’t have time for a sit-down lunch.
    Nevertheless, Maud and I ate. I wanted to strangle her, the obsequious waiter, anybody I could get my hands on. I’m certain she had no idea how angry I was.
Some detective!
    As we finished, I noticed that two men at a nearby table were watching us, or maybe they were eyeing Maud, with her lustrous red hair.
    I told her about the men, and she shrugged it off as “the way men are in Paris. Pigs.”
    “Let’s see if they follow,” she said as we got up and left the restaurant. “I doubt that they will. I don’t know them. I know
everybody
here. Not your Wolf, though.”
    “They’re leaving right behind us,” I told her.
    “Good for them. It is the exit after all.”
    The short rue Daru ended at rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which Maud told me was a window-shopping experience that continued all the way to the place Vendôme. We had walked only a block when a white Lincoln limousine pulled up alongside us.
    A dark-bearded man opened the rear door and looked out. “Please get in the car. Don’t make a scene,” he said in English with a Russian accent. “Get in, now. I’m not fooling around.”
    “No,” said Maud. “We don’t get in your car. You come out here and talk to us. Who the hell are you? Who do you
think
you are?”
    The bearded man pulled a gun and fired twice. I couldn’t believe what had just happened right in the middle of a Paris street.
    Maud Boulard was down on the sidewalk, and I was certain she was dead. Blood seeped from a horrible, jagged wound near the center of her forehead. Her red hair was splayed in a hundred directions. Her eyes were open wide, staring up into the blue sky. In the fall, one of her shoes had been thrown off and lay out in the middle of the street.
    “Get in the car, Dr. Cross. I won’t ask you again. I’m tired of being polite,” said the Russian, whose gun was pointed at my face. “Get in, or I’ll shoot you in the head, too. With pleasure.”

Chapter 79
    “NOW COMES SHOW-AND-TELL time,” the black-bearded Russian man said once I was inside the limousine with him. “Isn’t that how they say it in American schools? You have two children in school, don’t you? So, I’m
showing
you things that are important, and I’m
telling
you what they mean. I told the detective to get in the car and she didn’t do it. Maud Boulard was her name, no? Maud Boulard wanted to act like the tough cop. Now she’s the dead cop, not so tough after all.”
    The car sped away from the murder scene, leaving the French detective dead in the street. We changed cars a few blocks from the shooting, getting into a much less obtrusive gray