Claude and the Geography Lesson
The départements and overseas territories of France. By the time I was asked to find Claude and Marie Dexter* in France, I had pulled a few unclaimed property rabbits out of unclaimed property hats so that I had become the company's patron saint of hopeless cases. Typically, when they finally got around to assigning me a case like Claude's, they had exhausted all their own resources yet had not been able to find their man. My first stop was my favorite website www.numberway.com, with links to telephone directories worldwide. France's online Pages Blanches were tedious to navigate back then. You had to individually search each of the 96 "départements" (France's equivalent of US states) and overseas départements and territories. [...]