LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Chapter Twenty-Seven

The cabin was finally quiet.

Its original inhabitant hadn’t been much of a Company Man; the little building would have strained to hold three, if one of them hadn’t been a ghost who – still mindful of the mild arthritis he’d had in his corporeal joints, once upon a time – preferred to do his sleeping in a reclining armchair. Accommodating two more guests of the three-dimensional sort was even more of a stretch.

Hermione wasn’t sure, but she thought Snape had taken himself off to the hammock in the back yard, leaving Neville to arrange himself as best he could on the living room’s diminutive loveseat. His own bed he’d left to her, under the proviso that she share it with Joséphine; it was definitely large enough to sleep two comfortably, but now Hermione was having trouble nodding off.

She plucked her watch off the beside table and glanced at it blearily. Twelve-fifteen. On the other side of the bed, Joséphine let out a sigh and snuggled her pillow closer. Even with her braids tied up in a kerchief and her face scrubbed bare, she was the most elegant woman Hermione had ever seen. Which was just the tiniest bit depressing. Judging from the way she and Neville had been eyeing each other over Sal’s pot roast tonight, Snape had gotten the sleeping arrangements wrong. Of course, that would have left Hermione stuck with the loveseat – and charity only extended so far.

Not that box springs and feather down did you any good when you couldn’t sleep anyway. Yawning, she threw her legs over the side of the bed, dodged the recumbent Cleo, and headed for the kitchen, being careful to step over the squeaky board in the hallway as she edged past the parlor door.

As sleep aids went, she would have settled for a glass of water and twenty minutes of Communion With Nature from the front porch steps. Instead, she got Severus Snape, sitting at the table in full Bat-regalia as if he’d never intended to sleep at all, and brooding into a juice tumbler half-full of some dangerous-looking dark amber liquid. He looked up as she came in.

"You’re still wearing my pajamas."

As opening lines went, this one was fairly random. Nettled by his accusatory tone, she struck a deliberately defiant pose and fluttered her eyelashes at him.

"Want me to take them off?"

His eyes flickered for a second at that, but he didn’t rise to her bait. "I did bring you your own things, you know."

Hermione immediately felt foolish.

"Sorry," she said, chastened. He shrugged.

"Don’t be sorry. Just wear your own clothes from now on."

There was a high spot of colour on each sharp cheekbone, as if he thought he’d betrayed something by his reaction. He turned away abruptly, swirled the syrupy-looking liquid in the glass, and took a gulp. "Can’t you sleep?"

"Not so much." Hermione gestured toward his heavy black robes. "Looks like you didn’t even try."

Instead of answering her, he took another drink. "I was about to leave, actually."

"Leave?" Hermione raised one eyebrow. "For good?"

He sucked his teeth and shot her a narrow look. "No."

"Can I come along?"

Silence, as he drained the glass and set it down with a heavy-sounding chunk. "It’s on your behalf," he said finally, standing to rinse the tumbler and put it on the drying rack by the sink. He didn’t look at her. "I don’t see how I can stop you."

She decided to take that as a ‘yes.’

**

Their destination was Cairo, a city she allegedly knew – or at least had known – by heart. She didn’t recognise anything straightaway, but it did feel more comfortable than she would have supposed to edge her way down its crowded mid-morning sidewalks after him.

"Where are we going?" she asked, and Severus paused mid-stride to look back at her.

"Gringotts. Wizarding bank."

"Oh." That made sense. "We’re looking for my research, then?"

Another half-exasperated glance. "We’re looking, at this point, for anything we can find."

Hermione shut up.

They plowed through the heaving morass of closely-pressed bodies around them and ducked into a blessedly cool little storefront with drawn Venetian blinds over its dusty windows. Inside the small space was a single battered desk, manned by a man in a red turban and a melancholy monkey holding a tin cup. The man nodded to Severus, who gave him a nod in reply and then dug in his pocket for his wand.

A murmured word, a flash of light, and the monkey was transformed, before Hermione’s astonished eyes, into a free-standing door frame with a shiny tin knob. Another nod to the red-turbaned guard, already pulling out his own wand to effect the reverse transfiguration, and they walked through the door frame and straight into Gringotts Cairo.

Seeing ghosts didn’t really prepare one, Hermione thought, for processing the idea of goblins. Oddly enough, she wasn’t alarmed by the guards at the bank’s entrance; their diminutive height, paired with their crisply pressed bush khakis and their severe expressions, gave them a bizarre sort of dignity. The goblins in the teller’s cages wore blue uniforms and were even more severe yet. It was to one of these that Severus presented a small silver key.

It became apparent, as soon as the teller checked the number engraved on the key, that this was not to be a routine visit. A slight widening of the eyes, a pursing of the thin lips, and the goblin backed wordlessly away from the window and back behind an opaque glass screen. Severus and Hermione exchanged perplexed glances, but didn’t have time to do much more than shrug at each other before the goblin was back again, this time accompanied by what was plainly its superior.

This newest goblin was dressed in a severely tailored Muggle pinstriped suit and smart black leather pumps. Tasteful silver hoops bracketed the tip of each pointy ear. Her voice was low and gravelly.

"Follow me, please."

They trailed her across the grand Art Deco lobby and through a plain frosted-glass door marked STAFF ONLY in English, Arabic, and what Hermione could only assume were goblin-runes. Through the door was a narrow corridor lined with offices. The goblin shepherded them into one of these, gestured for them to sit, and took the chair opposite them, behind a meticulously polished teak desk.

She regarded them for a long moment before speaking, during which Hermione fought the urge to fidget under her searching, beady-eyed stare. Finally, the goblin sighed, rose from the chair, and held out her hand across the desk.

"Mrs. Weasley," she said. "My name is Linchpin, though I don’t imagine, given recent events, that you’ll remember me. You late husband worked in my department."

Beside her, Severus tensed. He looked, Hermione thought with a quick sideways glance, as surprised as she herself felt. Linchpin, on the other hand, seemed completely unruffled by their confusion and dismay.

"Never fear," she said drily, dropping the hand Hermione had been too shocked to take and reseating herself primly behind the big desk. "Your protection charm hasn’t failed you – yet, anyway. And your secret is safe with me."

Hermione swallowed hard. "Then … how …?"

A faint, rather superior smile quirked the corner of the goblin’s thin mouth.

"Your diamonds," she said. "You didn’t think we would send Bill Weasley’s widow out into the hands of would-be murderers unaided, did you? We’ve been watching you. And the day the Fidelius Charm, even Albus Dumbledore’s Fidelius, stands against a goblin-made tracking spell, is the day I hand over my keys and go back to the mailroom. We’d hardly be successful bankers if we couldn’t find people when we needed to – now, would we?"

Her eyes dropped pointedly to the bare vee of skin at Hermione’s throat. "We’d have been able to keep even closer track of you, had you decided to actually wear one of them; that was the point, you know. Even so, their presence in your jewelry box in Paris gave our Department of Employee Records enough to go on so that we could locate you. We’ve been wanting to contact you – and I daresay we would have too, in relatively short order, if your Secret-Keeper hadn’t whisked you away in such a precipitous fashion."

At this, Hermione glanced quickly at Severus, who was looking carefully blank. Clearly, his body language suggested, this was her conversation, not his.

"You needed to contact me," she repeated slowly. "Why? Is there some problem with my account?"

Linchpin shook her head.

"Not your account," she said, as though it were obvious. "Your instincts."

"Sorry?"

"Your instincts," Linchpin repeated patiently. "Specifically, your survival instincts." She swiveled to face Severus and tipped her horn-rimmed spectacles to a sharper angle. "You have told her, I presume," she continued, "that that Memory Charm was just about the most ill-advised stunt she could have pulled?"

Severus didn’t react. Hermione, however, scowled.

"Why do you care what I do, anyway?" she demanded, and Linchpin turned to face her, her small black eyes blazing with sudden ire.

"Because," she said icily, "I remember your husband. Even if you don’t. He was mine to command, and therefore mine to protect – a task at which I failed." She studied her bony hands somberly. "Now, he is mine to avenge – an undertaking I accept out of remembered friendship at least as much as duty, if not more. I told you once before that we take care of our own. And you, as his widow, are under the Gringotts umbrella as well, like it or not."

Her eyes narrowed. "I must say that from what I knew of you, Hermione Granger Weasley, I expected you to prove more help than hindrance in the matter. You gave up your greatest advantage over your attackers – fifteen years of magical memory and skill – in one foolish moment of self-pity. I had thought better of you."

Hermione bristled, then wilted under the goblin’s penetrating black stare.

"It was weak of me," she admitted. Linchpin softened slightly.

"I understand your grief," she said stiffly. "But weakness is no longer something you can afford to indulge. If you are ever to reclaim your true name, ever to face your old friends without a barrier of lies between you, you must first bring Bill’s killers to justice. Your Fidelius was not meant to buy you a permanent alias, just a bit of breathing room. Do you understand me?"

Hermione nodded.

"Perfectly," she said, then paused, brought up short by a sudden new thought.

"You were going to contact me in Paris," she said. "That must mean you’ve found something out about the murder. What do you know?"

Linchpin smiled. The smile was not altogether pleasant.

"Now you’re thinking," she said. "We may indeed have something. You know that a militant group of pure-blooded wizards calling themselves the Knights of the Golden Wand have claimed responsibility for the crime."

It was a statement, not a question. Hermione nodded.

"Well," Linchpin said with a trace of satisfaction, "though the identity of the Knights may be secret, the location of their money is not. They hold an account at Gringotts London, and we’ve been monitoring it."

Hermione’s eyebrows rose. "And?"

"And a review of their accounts for the past few hundred years or so," Linchpin said, drawing a thick file toward her on her desk, "brings to light a very interesting pattern. They’ve been receiving large but irregular infusions of cash from one of our Nameless accounts."

"Nameless?"

"A financial version of Unplottability," Severus said. It was the first time he’d spoken since they’d entered Linchpin’s office. "No name on the account. Expensive to maintain – if I’m not mistaken, the bank charges a hefty monthly fee for the privilege of anonymity – but undeniably useful, for those who for one reason or another wish their finances to remain untraceable. Voldemort had several such accounts – probably still does, if one of his erstwhile minions hasn’t taken it upon himself to clean them out."

He steepled his fingers in front of his face and frowned pensively through them. "There’s a password, though, if I remember correctly. Some sort of sigil or pictogram, in addition to the key. Takes the place of a name."

"Really." Hermione leaned forward. "What about this account?" she wanted to know. "What’s the mark? If it’s okay to ask, that is."

"It’s not," Linchpin said, and smiled that cold satisfied smile again. "Goes against every non-disclosure policy we have." She reached for a quill, dunked it, and scraped off a blot of excess ink. "But …"

"But what?"

The goblin was scrawling something laboriously on a bit of spare parchment. "But the non-disclosure policy be damned," she said, and smiled, tight-lipped, at Hermione’s surprise. "Wizards say that goblins have no loyalty," she said. "But that is untrue. Our loyalty is to our own, and it is unshakable. Here."

She pushed the parchment across the desk to Hermione. "There’s the mark," she said, and Hermione gasped.

The circle was a tad lopsided, the square approximated, the central X a bit askew. But the mark on the parchment was identical to the printer’s mark she and Sal had discovered not twenty-four hours ago in Phineas Sturbridge’s autobiography.

**