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distractions.” He sighs. “Look, this is a brutal, ugly time. The Inquisition is running around accusing and burning people and saving us from ourselves. People are scared … I was scared most of the time.”

CHAPTER
T HREE
    An Interpol
yellow notice
flashes on his screen and Emile Germain
can’t recall what the hell the yellow alert means—not exactly.
    It’s been a while. He has to look it up. Emile pulls a white binder from the shelf beside his desk and flips to the section that deals with alerts. Yellow, he recalls with the help of the binder, is to assist in locating missing persons, often minors, or to identify people who are unable to identify themselves. His computer beeps. A blue notice pops up attached to the same file. He scans down the open page to blue: to collect additional information about a person’s identity, location, or illegal activities in relation to a criminal matter.
    Merde!
Two alerts on one man. They have no idea if he’s a threat. There was no color code for a person of interest, but Emile could read between the lines: Interpol wanted this guy found.
    The man, his assignment, was declared officially suspicious and off the grid in April. Under the circumstances, it’s understandable that one missing person was shunted down the priority list. The likelihood that he is dead is high. The trail went cold. His file was basically forgotten. The report says he had been seen by several unreliable witnesses, andthen he was gone. A magic trick. A disappearing act. Spain is a vast country—forty million people. This was just one vanished man inside a chaos of people and landscapes.
    Cold trails were Emile’s specialty. Hopeless cases were his forte. His ex-wife used to say it was because he could tap into the artistic side of his brain and make oblique connections.
    Emile pushes his shoulders into the back of the chair and breathes deeply. The wooden chair was a gift from her. She’d found it in an antique shop with a cement Buddha head sitting on it. She was assured by the owner of the shop that the chair was well over a hundred years old and in excellent condition. She probably paid too much but she was in love, and the Buddha head had been there a long time. It had to be good karma to act as a platform for a Buddha, she said—to serve the Buddha in this way. This booga-booga side of his ex-wife was annoying as hell when they were together, but now Emile found he missed her booga-booga: the incense, the strings of tiny brass bells above the bed, soy milk in his Cheerios, the incessantly changing colors on the walls in their bedroom. She had taken most of this away when she left. Though she did leave a small, silver Buddha in the bathroom. And, of course, she’d left the chair.
    Emile has the luxury of working out of his home, a penthouse in the heart of the Right Bank of Paris, the market district of rue Mont -orgueil. It’s a small flat but it’s rare to find an apartment with a private terrace and a view. From the roof, he can see Montmartre and Sacré-Coeur, and the Museum of Modern Art.
    He was up for a glass of water, and on his way back to bed decided to check his e-mail. He was expecting the cases to begin arriving again and this mysterious person of interest was the first.
    Somebody at headquarters in Lyon has attached a brief newspaper story about a baffled stranger in Valdepeñas, south of Madrid—a man asking for directions. Police were called but the man was not found. He’d disappeared. The thing is, he kept asking for directions to differentplaces: Sevilla, Granada, Tarifa, Marbella, and half a dozen other towns, cities, and villages. First he’d ask for food and then directions, always to someplace new. He was very courteous, always grateful. The good people of Valdepeñas were worried about him.
    Emile makes a little whistling sound. Well, that’s a long shot, he thinks. But at least it’s a place to start. Two years of being away, two years of therapy, and now he’s