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address?” she asked.
    Waves of passersby darted around her as she scribbled the address inside the cover of her checkbook.
    She shouldn’t impersonate a flic, or do the Brigade Crim-inelle’s work, she told herself. But she hated to deal with Vichon. She chewed her lip. On the other hand, she would relish seeing the look on Vichon’s face when the woman was traced and her identity established. Not only would they get the shooter and her motive, but Aimée would be off the hook.
    But would René? Running down the Métro steps, she pulled out her cell phone, punched in the Brigade’s number, and reached for her lipstick.
    * * *
    S HE FOUND THE taxi dispatch office in the crumbling, stone-blackened Passage de la Reine de Hongrie—Passage of the Queen of Hungary—near the sixteenth-century Saint-Eustache, in the midst of Les Halles on the fringes of the professional kitchenware district. But she wasn’t here for sauce pans or Le Creuset enamelware; she was here to find out where the taxi had dropped the woman who’d shot René.
    “ Alors, not a place one finds in the guidebooks. But atmospheric,” a voice said. “The old Paris, eh?”
She knew that voice.
Melac.
Wasn’t he off duty?
    “But I’m not here for a tour.” Melac stepped around garbage and discarded newspapers blowing over the stones. A more rested freshly shaved Melac in a black turtleneck sweater and tapered black jeans. He cleaned up well. At least she’d applied fresh lipstick in the Métro.
    “I need to talk with you, Mademoiselle.”
    “After you view this evidence,” she said. “I hope they passed on my message. Did you bring the camera?”
    He pulled a compact video camcorder from his pocket. “Going to give me an explanation?”
    “Better that you see this first.” She inserted the tape that she’d bought from Hilaire at the parfumerie and played it.
“That’s you,” Melac said. “So?”
“It’s someone disguised as me, buying a helmet.”
“It looks like you.”
“From a distance maybe, Melac. Wrong shoes.”
“Wrong?”
    A gust of wind wrapped a newspaper around her leg. She kicked it off.
    “You wouldn’t catch me dead in beige crocodile loafers,” she said. “And I already own a helmet. This one.” She showed him the helmet she was carrying in her bag. “Why would I buy another one? Luigi saw a woman wearing a helmet very like mine. Of the seven stores in Paris selling this Blue Fever model, only ToutMoto sold one in the last eight months. Yesterday. To her. We have to hurry.”
    Melac took out a small notepad. “Who videotaped this?”
    “Monsieur Hilaire, who owns a parfumerie next to Tout-Moto. He has a video surveillance camera outside his shop.”
    Impatient, she strode toward the ground-floor taxi office fronting the passage. “The dispatcher will give you the address the taxi took this woman to. You’ll need backup, a stakeout team . . . who knows how many—”
    “Telling me my job?” But he reached for his phone.
    In the taxi dispatch office, a man sat at a phone console, chewing a pencil.
    “ Mais , Madame. I don’t speak Hungarian,” the man said into the phone. “Understand? It’s just our dispatch office address. Where do you want to go?”
    He rolled his eyes, gestured for them to wait. A two-year-old Marie Claire magazine and a thick, much-thumbed Le Redoute mail order catalogue from last Christmas took up the only seat. She preferred to stand. Melac edged into the corner, deep in conversation on his cell phone.
    “No Hungarians here,” the dispatcher said. “But my drivers will take you anywhere. Quoi? Non, that’s just the name, Madame!”
    Like every schoolchild, Aimée knew the ironic history behind the passage’s name. Julie Bécheur, a vegetable seller who had lived in this passage, petitioned Marie Antoinette to better market women’s conditions. Taken with Julie’s likeness to her own mother, Marie-Thérèse, Queen of Hungary, Marie awarded Julie’s audacity by naming her