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“He’d have hidden them fairly recently,” said Armand. “Since they forged Daniel’s name. That’s in the last five weeks.”

Madame Lenoir took them over to the archivist’s desk. “The requests are logged here, but there’d be thousands from all over the world. You can’t possibly go through them all.”

“Can we search by name?”

“Of document?”

“Of the person requesting it.”

“Yes.” She showed him how.

Armand’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. “He wouldn’t have used his own name, or Plessner’s. Still—” He put them in. “Worth a try.”

It came up empty.

“Who else’s would he use?” asked Pinot. “Yours?”

Armand tried it. Nothing.

They huddled around and watched him put in names. Reine-Marie’s. Daniel’s. Annie’s. His desperation growing. Showing. In the increasingly unlikely attempts.

Zora. Florence. Honoré. He typed. Pinot.

Nothing.

Then Rodin. Calais. Burghers. Ariel. Ferdinand. Canaris. Lutetia. Eustache de Saint-Pierre. Luxembourg. Rosiers.

He was running out of ideas.

“What, what,” he mumbled. “Stephen, what name did you use? What would you use?”

Armand stared at the screen. At the black slash of cursor throbbing.

What name, what word?

Remembering his conversation with Stephen in the garden of the Musée Rodin, and his godfather’s apparent mistake. Stephen knew perfectly well that he hadn’t proposed to Reine-Marie in the jardin du Luxembourg.

It was in the jardin—

“Joseph Migneret,” Armand muttered as he typed.

And up flashed a request.

CHAPTER 40

Joseph Migneret,” read Judith de la Granger. “Who’s he?”

“One of the Righteous,” said Gamache, as he clicked through.

“The document was taken out at eleven twenty-five a.m., then almost immediately returned,” said Madame Lenoir, pointing at the times. “He had it out for only twenty minutes.”

“But what’s the document?” Judith asked.

They could only see the file number.

The head archivist typed in the reference number and shook her head in amazement and some amusement.

“He managed to request the most obscure of our documents. No one except your friend has asked for it in decades, probably centuries. Maybe ever.”