Description:
Morel visits an old contact, Julien Mercier, a former codebreaker with a pianist’s hands and a memory full of secrets. As the melody is played aloud, hidden messages begin to surface — and so do old betrayals.
Chapter 6: The Code in the Keys
The Conservatoire de l’Ouest, tucked behind a line of withered plane trees near Avenue Mozart, looked more like an abandoned chapel than a music school. Its windows were fogged with time, and a rusted sign swung gently above the iron gate, groaning with each breeze.
Morel rang the buzzer twice. No answer. He pushed the gate. It creaked like a complaint.
Inside, the air was stale with varnish and chalk dust. The hallway was lined with fading portraits of composers — their eyes watching like witnesses.
He found Julien Mercier in the main hall, sitting alone at a grand piano with one hand resting on the keys and the other holding a cigarette trembling with age.
“Lucien,” he said without turning. “I wondered when the music would bring you back.”
Morel stepped closer. “Still playing, I see.”
Julien exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. “Still decoding the dead.” He gestured to the bench. “Sit. What is it this time?”
Morel unfolded the sheet and slid it onto the stand. “Play it.”
Julien adjusted his glasses. He scanned the notes, then looked up. “You know this isn’t just a composition. Someone wrote this to be heard by the right ears.”
“Yours?”
“Or Sophie Lemoine’s. We used this format during the war. She was one of us. Brilliant ear. Flawless timing.”
Morel’s eyes narrowed. “So she’s alive.”
Julien said nothing for a long moment, then placed his fingers on the keys.
The melody began — soft, haunting, drifting through the empty room like fog from another world. Then, halfway through the second measure, he slowed. Played a wrong note on purpose. Again in the next phrase. Then again. A pattern emerged.
He stopped playing. “There. It’s not music. It’s Morse.”
Julien reached for a pencil and began to mark the score.
Morel leaned over. The first phrase: “Violin is not the target.”
Second: “Intercepted at Saint-Cloud.”
Third: “Target is woman. Coordinates follow.”
Julien looked up. “This isn’t just a message. It’s an assassination order.”
Morel stood, the air tightening in his lungs. “Émile wasn’t the courier. He was the decoy.”
“And Sophie…” Julien added quietly, “is the one they’re after.”
Outside, thunder cracked above Paris, and the lights in the conservatory flickered.
The game had changed. Now it wasn’t about finding a missing violinist.
It was about saving a ghost — before the wrong people realized she was still alive.