said the man in the T-shirt to René.René, wiping his damp forehead with a handkerchief, noticed the man’s stringy hair and the ASK ME ABOUT THE BERLIOZ OPERA button on his sleeve.Hard sunlight beamed down from the soot-laced skylight. Men hammered and saws whined in the background of the newspaper building.“Someone in charge of investigative reporting, please,” René said, wishing he knew how to word it better. And wishing, too, that he’d foregone his early workout at the dojo.“All reporting’s investigating for truth . . . so you could say, they all would do,” said the man, looking down at the clutter on his reception desk.“How about the city desk?”“If we had one, it wouldn’t be on this floor,” he said.Great. Forty minutes of wading through construction workers and over cables . . . for this René had tramped all over this tank of a building and had ended up in Accounting?“What about the eleventh arrondissement?”“It’s not cheap anymore, eh, especially around the Bastille, but my former girlfriend lives there and still has a great rent.”Frustrated, René threw up his short arms in supplication.
