him to the Marquis? Just to pass the time? Or were you hoping to get

him an audience with the Duchess? Was that the goal all along?" Every emphasis in his voice has a sensual intensity now. How he

desires her! It makes me shudder, imagining the Baroness in that windowless room in the basement of Number Six. No duchesses or doctors

to save her. Just Vidocq, in all his savagery, bearing down. And chasing a fantasy, I tell myself. Noblewomen don't hand over

their own sons to washerwomen. And then try to plant them on the

throne of France.

But then a voice rises up inside me: Why is that any more a fantasy

than your Swiss gardener?

Yes, Vidocq could press the Baroness all he liked, but he would

come, finally, to the question that no one-no one alive-can answer.

Who was the boy my father carried out of the tower that night? And

what happened to him?

I take a bottle of raw Burgundy from the armoire. I pour myself a

tall glass. Behind me, I hear Vidocq's trailing sigh, and I turn to see

him draw a pipe from his pocket.

"Got any matches, Hector?"

Such a painstaking quality to how he fills his pipe now. Measured

and cool, like a sniper taking aim.

"The thing is," he says, "we can't lay everything at the Baroness's

door, hard as we try. After all, the piece of evidence that really carried

the day-well, she had nothing to do with that."

"What do you mean?"

"That little note of your father's! The one we found in the back of

his journal. All that business of the birthmark-I mean, that's what got

us to the Duchess, wasn't it? It's what set everything in motion." "I suppose so."

By now the smoke has formed a nimbus over his head, and the

fumes come rolling toward me, they crawl up the cavities of my head. And then, out of nowhere, Vidocq sets down his pipe and reaches

for a leather satchel. Snaps open a compartment and takes out that piece

of aged stationery, still bearing its creases. Still bearing those familiar

words . . .

To Whom It May Concern:

You may verify the merchandise via the following particular: a

mole, black-brown . . .