All Chapters of FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY: Chapter 71 - Chapter 74

He walks slowly, which I didn't expect from him. Vincent moves with purpose, always somewhere to be, always the next thing. Mikhail walks like he has decided the street is exactly where he wants to be and the rest of the world can organize itself around that.I tell him about the Allard situation. Not all of it, not the Marco complexity, but the shape of it, the Weis inventory, the restitution claim, the voicemail with its careful language about reaching an understanding.He listens without interrupting, the coffee warm in my hand, Belleville moving around us in its afternoon way, the market stalls and the noise and the particular light of a Paris afternoon that can't decide if it wants to be winter or spring.When I finish, he is quiet for half a block."He'll try to reframe the documentation," he says. "Position it as a legitimate wartime acquisition through some intermediary that no longer exists and can't be questioned. It's the standard approach for collections with this kind of

He is shorter than his voice suggested.That's the first thing I notice when Bernard Allard walks into the hotel lobby on Thursday morning, the Lutetia, naturally, because men like Bernard Allard do not meet inconvenient young women in neutral locations.He chooses the ground. He is maybe five foot eight, silver-haired, beautifully dressed in the way of men who have been wearing good clothes so long they've stopped thinking about it. He has a warm handshake and direct eye contact and a smile that reaches his eyes completely, and if I didn't have twelve pages of documentation in the bag on my shoulder, I might find him entirely charming."Mademoiselle Chen," he says, in French, then switching to English when he clocks me, smooth and immediate. "Thank you for making time.""Of course," I reply.He steers me toward a seating area at the back of the lobby, quiet and upholstered and selected for privacy, and a waiter materializes before we've fully sat down. Allard orders tea without consu