The Ministry of Culture received them reluctantly. A junior attaché listened for ten minutes, then excused himself to make a call. Julien saw him glance at his phone twice.
“He’s calling the museum,” Camille whispered.
“Then we leave,” Julien said.
They left the ministry through a back corridor and took the metro to the Bibliothèque nationale. In the reading room, Camille began assembling a report with all the evidence: the casket, the altered files, the wartime ledger, the backup timestamps.
“This is enough to ruin Vasseur,” she said.
“But not enough to make the museum admit it,” Julien replied. “They’ll say it was a rogue curator.”
“Maybe it was. But the system allowed it. That’s the bigger crime.”