The key had left a mark on the blotter paler than the surrounding leather, an oval of brass polished by fingers Adrien could not name.
He turned it beneath the lamp. The octagonal head bore three fine scratches near the ring hole; the teeth, blackened in their hollows, were unremarkable. An old key, a little too heavy for a modern lock, attached to a brown calfskin tag stamped with a simple V. He had spent an hour softening the leather without erasing its folds. His father would have called it wasting a morning saving a label.
“You’ll end up stroking it,” Samira said without looking up from the washing table.
“I’m checking the consolidant.”
“For eight minutes.”
Adrien placed the key in the padded box. Through the studio windows, Carouge was beginning to take on its late-September light, a clean clarity that made facades almost too sharp. A tram squealed at the end of the street, then the sound vanished behind the extractor hood’s steady breath.
The box was to return to the Vautrin family office with two folders of restored documents. Officially, a private commission. In practice, another way for Étienne Vautrin to bring his son into his affairs while reminding him he was not part of them.
Samira squeezed a brush against gauze.
“Are you billing him for the trip?”
“We bill him for everything.”
“Let me rephrase: does he pay for everything?”
Adrien smiled. She knew the answer.
On the next table, a botanical atlas had waited under weights since the day before. A university from Neuchâtel was due late that morning to approve Japanese-paper repairs to three torn plates; Adrien had promised to be there. Samira had prepared the fiber tests, humidity levels, drying times. This was their real week, the one that paid salaries and concerned no member of the Vautrin family.
“Ten thirty,” she reminded him. “Not ten thirty-five with your father in your ear.”
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