Confessions: The Paris Mysteries Read Free

as a corpse until my little brother, Hugo, ran past with his arms outspread.
    He was giving himself landing instructions—“Control tower to Hugo One, runway six is cleared for you now”—and making truly annoying engine noises. He saw me in the parlor, made a U-turn, and flung himself across my lap.
    “Where were you last night?” he asked me.
    “You think I have to tell
you
?”
    “Jacob thought you were about to blow off the most important meeting ever. He’s pretty mad.”
    “I was right here,” I said, shoving Hugo onto the floor.
    “That’s a lie,” he said. “Oh, I took the bedroom facing the street. Me and Matty. There’s a smart TV in that room, and I can get like ninety thousand stations and post my blog.”
    Matty was our twenty-four-year-old big brother, Matthew Angel, cornerback for the New York Giants. Fierce, strong, as handsome as a movie star, and most of all, Hugo’s hero.
    At that moment, Matthew was looking out the windows into the front garden and speaking on his phone in a very animated way. In the kitchen to my right, my twin brother, Harry, was reading the back of a cracker box.
    He said to me, “You’re in big trouble, you know?”
    Just then, our uncle Jacob stalked into the room and stood until we gave him our attention.
    Shortly after our parents’ sudden and gruesome deaths, just weeks before our home and all our possessions were sold to settle their debts and we were
this close
to becoming
homeless
, Jacob Perlman had appeared.
    Jacob was an Israeli ex-commando and our father’s long-lost oldest brother. And now he was our guardian. He was the one who had brought us to Paris to live in Gram Hilda’s house and had told us about the inheritance she intended for us.
    He stood in the center of this fantastic, modern-style room until our eyes were fixed on his. Then he said, “Tandy, I’ve told you.
Never
turn off your phone.”
    “Uncle Jake, believe me, I had a good reason.”
    “There’s no exception to ‘never.’ We’ll discuss it later.”
    Jacob took his wallet out of the back pocket of his khakis.
    “Harry, please go out and bring back lunch for all of us. Hurry. The bankers and lawyers will be here shortly—and, kids, please trust me when I tell you to bring your A-game.
    “Especially you, Tandoori. Snap out of it—whatever ‘it’ is. Good or bad, the results of this meeting will determine how comfortably you live the rest of your lives.”

At half past one, nine of
the seats around the mirror-polished steel table in Gram Hilda’s dramatic, black-lacquered dining room were taken. We kids lined up along one side, Jacob took his seat at the head, and four gray-suited, middle-aged lawyers and bankers sat stiffly across from us.
    The suits were all humorless, well pressed, and rather full of themselves. And the one who looked least likely to eat Popsicles in his underwear or sing and walk on his hands at the same time was the senior man, Monsieur François Delavergne.
    Monsieur Delavergne was fat and bald, with hair shooting out of his cuffs and sprouting like weeds on hisknuckles. “Pleasure to meet you,” he said grimly, shaking hands with each of us.
    “Don’t be so sure,” Hugo said.
    Matty grabbed our bad boy by the shoulder. “That was rude, Hugo. Apologize.”
    “Just being honest,” Hugo said. “Matty, are you afraid of this dude?”
    Matty shook his head and said, “Sorry, Monsieur Delavergne. Hugo comes uncensored.”
    “Real, you mean,” Hugo said. “Straight shooter, you mean.”
    He then bet our visitors that he could lift any of them over his head, but got no takers. Once the nonsense stopped and the presentations were under way, I turned my scattered thoughts to my beautiful, brilliant, and somewhat capricious late grandmother, Hilda Angel.
    Although she died before any of us were born, we’d heard stories about her wild summer on a kibbutz when she was seventeen, her intrepid trips abroad on tramp steamers, and her high-flying life