For about the twentieth time today, I mourn my absent shirt as the air congeals round us and the cobwebs, one by one, leave veins of ice across my bare arms. Shivering there in the dark, I watch the broad outline of Vidocq sidewinding through the dust. Round and round he goes-until at last, he says, in a not-ungentle tone:

"Good night, Hector."

Many hou rs late r, I awake with a great inrush of air-utterly persuaded I'm drowning.

My hands claw the air for half a minute before the sensation of water begins to ebb. And even then, even after I've tested the f loor and the wall and the mattress and found everything still solid, I can't shake the feeling that the ocean is roaring over me.

As the minutes pass, this sensation funnels down into a sound, and this sound draws me away from the relative warmth of my mattress and sends me crawling across the attic f loor.

There, in a splash of starlight, sprawls Vidocq in all his mass. A single horsehair blanket cushions him against the ground. He lies uncovered, utterly still . . . except for the tidal pulse of muscle along his jawline.

Who would have imagined that the mere grinding of a man's teeth could produce this sound? Like water, yes, storming into a boulder's cranny-and clamoring to be let out again.

Vidocq is legendary, among police and criminals alike, for scorning sleep. And in future weeks, when I think back to this moment, I will wonder if it's because sleep hauls him back to the galleys-the iron collar, the chained ankle. For they are raging, these teeth, toward liberty.

He's awake before dawn.

CHAPTE R 1 9.

The Sad Fate of a Seagull B reakfas t is boi led chestnuts. Punishment enough, but Madame Prunaud, out of some torturer's instinct, has set a marmot, a goose, and a partridge crackling over the kitchen fire. My head, of its own volition, keeps swerving toward the spit, but Vidocq gnaws with a quiet grace, even makes a point of complimenting Madame on her seasoning. And when she declares it's time for us to go, he tenders her a small bow, picks up his knapsack, and bids me follow.

Only when we've left the inn far behind does Vidocq, with a grunt of satisfaction, reach into his knapsack and pull out three strips of grayish bacon, a hard roll, and a slab of white cheese.

"Stole 'em right off her plate," he crows.

We eat on the go, wiping our mouths with our hands, and for the first time, I feel the freedom that a disguise can bring. To be no longer myself! The sun drizzles down my neck. A river breeze ambles through, bearing scent-threads of clover, yarrow, wild oats. In the jasmine, the first drowsings of bees.

And from Vidocq's great frog-throat, a swelling of song. The same Mozart motif we heard in the morgue.

"Tepac," I say, half to myself. "That's a curious sort of name."

"Oh, for the love of-spell it backward, will you, Hector? C-a-p . . ."

". . . e-t."

Capet.

The name of a long-ago landowner who begat a great line of kings. The name that Temple guards hurled at the dauphin as though it were the most loathsome of epithets.

"Do you know," says Vidocq, "I'm very near to being insulted by that name. What a vulgar touch! Tepa c." He bats at a low-hanging alder branch. "That's what I get, dealing with amateurs. Give me professionals anytime. You always know where you are with them."

After five more minutes of walking, we come to a pile of oak logs, fashioned in a pyramid, standing sentrylike atop a long, steeply pitched hill. Vidocq slows his gait-to get his bearings, I assume, until I see him make a quick scan of the horizon and lean over the woodpile.

On the other side is a long, lank, swaddled customer with a lush growth of whiskers and a pair of close-set mole-eyes, gray from exhaustion.

"Ah, Goury! " says Vidocq. "Such a pleasure."

Drawing back his eyelids, Goury takes my measure.

"Who's this?"

"My good friend Dr. Carpentier. Makes very little fuss, you won't even notice him. Tell me, has anyone come and gone since yesterday?"

"Not a soul."

Leaning round the woodpile, I peer down the hill and I see-we'll say two houses. The first is a four-room, foursquare cottage with a steeply cut hipped roof and f lat slate tiles. The kind of door-mad house that looks unabashedly outward and grows grapevines like hair and relishes every ray of sun on its plaster skin and harbors an eternally kindled hearth.

THE BLACK TOWER 135.

Slowly, though, the morning mist superimposes a second house over the first. From nowhere, I see blackened slashes of wall, fissured with cracks. I see two broken windows, stuffed with bales of straw. And nailed to the front door, a seagull, stretching its wings wide in taxidermic rapture. It could be the hideout of an Ostend smuggler.

"And other than that," says Goury, "he's your basic hearth-andhome stiff. Honestly, boss, I don't know what you want with this one. Never stops for a drink. Never bats an eye at the girls. Don't think he's got a single vice."

"I hear he likes to go for strolls."

"Twice a day, yeah. Nine-forty in the morning, four-forty in the afternoon."

"Creature of habit, is he?"

"You could track the sun and stars by this one."

"Well, let's see, that gives us-twelve minutes till the next orbit. Just enough time for refueling, eh?"

From an inner recess of the knapsack comes a small canteen, which Vidocq, after a swig, passes round. Goury downs his portion in half a second; I spit mine out at the first sign of trouble.

"My own recipe," explains Vidocq. "Brandy and stout and a sniff of absinthe. Takes the rust off, don't it? Careful, though. You drink too much, you'll sleep through whole eras, it's true. Hang on now," he says, screwing the cap back on. "I think this is our boy."

We hear him first: a squeaking of hinge, a laboring of door. Then comes a single boot, extending past the plane of the doorframe, in the manner of an Opera-Comique dancer preparing her entrance. In the next second, he's standing there in his entirety: Monsieur Tepac of Saint-Cloud, surveying the planet.

At this remove, nothing remotely dynastic clings to him, unless you count his burgher's air of entitlement. His build is squarish, portly. His hair is the color of late-summer wheat. His feet join at the heels and turn outward at the toes.

"Well, now," murmurs Vidocq, pressing a pair of binoculars to his eyes. "They got the age right, anyway. Thirty, thirty-two. Coloring's close enough. Not that it's any hardship, mind you, finding a blue-eyed Frenchman. But what a spectacle he makes of himself! Look for yourself, Hector."