The Paris Librarian Read Free

full of questions. Someone I did some genealogy work for gave me access to his apartment as partial payment. We can even use his Smart car, though I can’t imagine driving around Paris is a lot of fun. Anyway, we got in yesterday and we went to your apartment and then the embassy to find you. Tom was talking to the security people and heard me asking. He said we should surprise you here this morning.”
    â€œHe’s like you in that way,” Hugo said. “Always a bundle of fun.”
    â€œHey, be grateful I’ve included you at all.” Tom winked but didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to—sitting at a café with two pretty girls was about the only thing in the world likely to get him out of bed in the morning.
    Miki rummaged in her bag and then stood. “I don’t smoke much, but something about being here . . .” She gave an embarrassed smile, and Tom stood to let her out.
    â€œMaybe I’ll join you,” he said, ignoring Hugo’s So you smoke now, too? look.
    When they’d gone, Merlyn reached over and squeezed Hugo’s hand. “It’s really good to see you again, you look good.”
    â€œSo do you.” Hugo smiled.
    It had been several years but she looked the same, that hint of Asia around her eyes, the smooth olive skin. Her black bob was now streaked with a line of blue, but otherwise she looked the same as when she’d stumbled into the first investigation he’d conducted as an RSO, when he was heading up security at the US Embassy in London. Merlyn had been friends with a movie star Hugo was supposed to babysit, one who disappeared moments after they’d met. Without Merlyn he’d have had no idea where to look for the man. With her, he found himself chasing through the English countryside and, to his chagrin, wearing leather pants and a matching vest at a secret party at an English mansion. She’d opened his eyes to a different way of living, and loving, testing the unjudgmental part of himself that he so valued. In her world, anyone could be anything, and sexual exploration was to be encouraged, no matter how out-there it seemed. Hugo had gone along, mostly out of necessity, and had gained a valued friend in the process. They’d swapped a few e-mails after that case but, as often happens with hurriedly formed friendships, the lines of communication had thinned out and they’d not corresponded in almost a year.
    â€œSo tell me why you’re here, and for how long,” he said.
    She released his hand and sat back. “I’m really just tagging along with Miki. She’s a journalist and wants to write about the movie star Isabelle Severin. She lives here, and apparently her papers are now available at some local library. She’s a little obsessed, seems to think Severin was a spy during the war.”
    â€œA spy for whom?” Hugo knew that the 1940s actress, now in her late nineties, lived somewhere in Paris, after having moved here in the 1970s when she upped and left Hollywood, ending her career on a high note and on her own terms. She’d never attended any embassy events despite numerous invitations, but Hugo’s boss, Ambassador J. Bradford Taylor, claimed to know her, a little anyway. She’s still beautiful, Hugo, I promise you. The sweetest, kindest, and most elegant woman I’ve ever met , he’d said. And something of a recluse, Taylor acknowledged, attended to by one or two close friends and a carefully vetted and fiercely loyal personal assistant.
    â€œFor the Allies,” Merlyn said. “Her theory is that she used her stardom to buddy up with top people in the Vichy government, then passed on secrets to the Americans, British, and even the Resistance.”
    â€œYou know, I may have read about that somewhere, many years ago.”
    â€œThere’s even a dagger involved.”
    â€œHow so?” Hugo asked.
    â€œThe story goes that she was