"Who?"

"The man who could conclusively identify this missing king." "And who was this man?"

A touch of exasperation abrades her voice now.

"Dr. Hector Carpentier, of course."

Until this moment, I believe they've even forgotten I'm in the room. And as they give me the full gift of their attention, I feel the air around me warming and cooling at once.

"It's absurd," I mutter.

But the air won't stop roiling, and my voice climbs once more into that register of guilt.

"He had the wrong man, I tell you. I was-I was three when Louis the Seventeenth died. I never-how could I possibly speak of someone I've never met?"

"No," muses the Baroness. "You couldn't be expected to do that."

She turns toward her looking glass now. Brief ly tousles her strawberry-blond curls, stretches the skin across her cheekbones. Fingers away every last corruption of city air. And still she neglects to arrange her mouth, which is slightly askew as she turns back to me.

"And now, Doctor, at the risk of being trite, may I ask: What did your father do during the Revolution?"

CHAPTE R 1 2.

The Reeducation of a Parrot G rowing u p in a quiet house on a quiet street, I became, through no choice of my own, a connoisseur of silence. From the earliest age, I could distinguish early-morning from late-evening silence. A husband's silence from a wife's. Hope versus despair . . . if you listen long enough, everything gives off its own timbre of quiet.

But I've never known anything quite like Vidocq's silence, which lasts from the time we leave the Baroness's apartment to the time we turn up the Rue Souff lot. A silence of containment, with all manner of emotions vying against it. Imagine a pig's bladder, noiselessly expanding before your eyes. This silence grows quite terrible, and there is, if anything, a profound relief when it breaks.

"Why didn't you tell me your father had the same first name? "

Still in his old-man garb is Vidocq, but there's nothing old about this voice, which rattles off the market stalls, knocks the melting pot from a street tinker's charcoal fire . . . claws through the shawl of fog that still hovers round the Pantheon's dome.

"Why didn't you tell me there was another Dr. Carpentier in the world? You didn't-you didn't think I might want to know such a thing?"

"But he wasn't a doctor."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means-it means he gave up medicine when I was still quite

young. He ground glass for a living. For as long as I knew him, no one ever called him Doctor Carpentier."

And he re I m us t interject and call myself . . . a liar.

Because, every once in a while, about as often as the sun aligns with the moon, someone not too deeply ingrained in my family's circle-a mason, a mendicant, a functionary with the Ministry of Justice, someone concatenated to him in ways too obscure for me to fathom-would slip and call my father "Dr. Carpentier." To his face.

I always studied him closely in those moments, and yet I find it hard even now to describe his reaction. He never corrected the mistake, he simply let it hang there in a perfect suspension. At first you might have thought him insulted; only later would you realize he was embarrassed, as if an old nanny had reemerged and called him back, with a single name, to the days of chasing pigeons.

What I mean to say is it cowed him, this name.

You will understand, then, why I learned never to associate my father with the word doctor. And why, when I made it my life's goal simply to break through the carapace that surrounded him, I could think of no more effectual mallet than to declare myself . . . a doctor.

"Hm."

That was my father's first response when I told him I was enrolling in the ecole de Medecine. The second was this:

"Hm."

I will confess that his usual veil of abstraction did lift for a few moments. His eyes were pinked with alarm, as though I had coughed up

sputum. And then he could no longer look at me.

He would have been less concerned, maybe, if he'd known how

long it would take me to become a physician. Indeed, in these early

days of the Restoration, it seems unlikely I ever will.

So when a dead stranger, a certain Monsieur Leblanc, chooses to

grant you a title before you've earned it, you may be excused, I hope,

for accepting the promotion. Yes, I've quite enjoyed being Dr. Carpentier, if only for a few days. I like to think I've been enjoying it for

both of us.