Chapter 69: Montmartre

We spent the second day in Paris simply being there.

No museum business, no logistics, no exhibition preparation. Isabelle had insisted on this too, with the same gentle firmness she had applied to the rest day. "You came for the work," she had said, "but you should also have one day for the city itself, before the work takes over everything."

Daniel offered to be our guide.

He knew Montmartre the way people only knew places they had lived near for thirty years, not as a tourist destination but as a neighborhood with its own private logic, and he led us up through narrow streets that climbed steadily toward Sacre Coeur with the unhurried confidence of someone who was not consulting a map.

Noah insisted on walking the entire way himself, refusing the stroller Eleanor had brought, and by the time we reached the steps below the basilica his cheeks were pink from the cold and the climb and he announced, with great satisfaction, that he had walked the whole mountain.

"It is not really a mountain," Damien said.

"It felt like one," Noah said, which Damien apparently decided was not worth arguing.

We sat on the steps for a while, looking out over the rooftops of Paris spread below in the pale winter light, and Eleanor produced, from her seemingly bottomless bag, a thermos of hot chocolate that she distributed with the quiet efficiency of someone who had traveled with children before, decades ago, and had not forgotten the lessons.

Marcus was on the phone with Victoria again, turning his camera to show her the view, and I could hear her voice through the speaker, delighted, asking him to turn slowly so she could see all of it.

Catherine sat slightly apart, sketching the rooftops in a small notebook with quick confident lines, and when I looked over her shoulder she seemed almost embarrassed to be caught at it.

"I used to draw," she said. "Before everything. I had not done it in years."

"You should keep doing it," I said.

She looked at the sketch, then closed the notebook, but she did not put it away.

We wandered down through the square near the basilica, where artists had set up easels along the edges, painting tourists and selling watercolors of the city, and Noah stopped in front of nearly every single one, conducting his own informal critique with the seriousness of a junior curator in training.

"That one is good," he said at one easel, pointing to a watercolor of the Eiffel Tower at sunset. "But the light is wrong. It should come from inside."

The artist, an older man with paint stained fingers, looked at this small American boy with genuine surprise.

"From inside," he repeated.

"Like this," Noah said, and pointed back toward where the museum sat, several streets away, holding thirty four paintings that did exactly that.

The artist looked at Daniel, confused, and Daniel explained briefly, in French, what Noah meant, and the artist's face changed into something thoughtful.

"He is right," the artist said, in English now, looking at his own painting with fresh eyes. "The light should come from inside."

Noah nodded, satisfied that his point had been received, and moved on to the next easel.

It was near the third easel that the unexpected happened.

A woman was standing a few feet away, watching the artists with the particular stillness of someone observing rather than shopping, and when Noah wandered close to her, examining a painting she was standing near, she looked down at him with an expression of sudden recognition.

"You are Noah," she said.

Noah looked up at her, surprised but not alarmed, the particular fearlessness of a child who had been taught that strangers were sometimes simply people who knew things about you.

"Yes," he said. "How do you know me."

The woman looked up, and her eyes found Damien first, then me, and something complicated moved across her face.

"My name is Elise Moreau," she said.

I went very still.

The journalist. The one who had been tracking the European end of Halliwell's network for years. The one Catherine had coordinated with on the filing timeline. The one we had never actually met, only spoken to through Catherine and through phone calls arranged at careful distances.

"I did not expect to meet you like this," Elise said, looking at me directly now. "I am sorry. I should not have approached so directly. I saw your son and I recognized him from a photograph in the case file, and I." She stopped. "I have been wanting to meet you properly for months, and I did not expect Montmartre to be where it happened."

Damien's hand found my arm gently, a small grounding gesture, and I understood why. This woman knew us through documents and case files and careful professional distance, the same way Catherine had once known us, and the gap between that knowledge and standing in a square in Montmartre with a four year old who had just critiqued a stranger's watercolor was considerable.

"It is alright," I said. "We have been hoping to thank you properly. For everything."

Elise looked relieved.

"I am glad I ran into you, actually," she said. "There is something I have been meaning to tell Catherine, and now I can tell you both at once, since you are here." She glanced at Daniel and Eleanor and Marcus, gathering nearby, and seemed to decide the audience was appropriate. "The investigation into the Singapore accounts has uncovered something new. A connection we did not expect."

I felt Damien go still beside me.

"Tell us," he said.

Elise hesitated, the particular hesitation of a journalist who understood the weight of information before she released it.

"There is a fourth jurisdiction," she said. "Not part of Halliwell's original structure. Connected through one of the Singapore entities, but operating separately, for at least fifteen years." She paused. "It involves art."

I went very still.

"Art," I repeated.

"Stolen and laundered work," Elise said quietly. "Moving through legitimate auction houses using falsified provenance, with the proceeds feeding back into the same financial network." She looked at me carefully. "I do not know yet how deep it goes, or who is involved beyond what I have found so far. But given what is happening in March, given the visibility your exhibition is about to receive, I wanted you to know before it became public, because there is a possibility, however small, that someone connected to this fourth jurisdiction may take an interest in an exhibition receiving this much international attention."

The square around us continued its ordinary afternoon business, tourists and artists and the particular indifferent beauty of Montmartre in winter, entirely unconcerned with what had just been said.

Damien looked at me.

I thought about thirty four paintings, finally found, finally seen, about to be shown to the world for the first time.

"Tell Catherine everything," I said quietly. "Tonight. We have six weeks before the show opens. That is enough time to understand what we are dealing with."

Elise nodded.

"I will," she said. "I am sorry to bring this to you here, of all places."

"It is alright," I said. "We would rather know."

She looked at Noah, who had wandered back to the watercolor artist and was now apparently helping him adjust his palette, gesturing toward the sky with great confidence.

"He is remarkable," Elise said.

"Yes," I said. "He is."

She said goodbye and disappeared into the square, and we stood there for a moment in the cold Paris afternoon, the weight of what she had said settling slowly into the day's quiet.

Eleanor came to stand beside me.

"Another thread," she said quietly.

"Another thread," I confirmed.

She looked toward Noah, still deep in his consultation with the artist, entirely unaware that anything had shifted.

"We have handled threads before," she said simply.

I looked at her.

"Yes," I said. "We have."

And we gathered Noah, and continued down the hill toward the city, the sun beginning its early winter descent, six weeks until March, and one more thing to understand before then.