He pushes the carafe away, takes one long step toward me.

"Monsieur Leblanc was killed on the way to seeing you, Doctor, and I'm counting on you to tell me why." He brushes a pebble of damp potato from my coat. "If it's a question of which confessor you'd prefer, I should tell you I'm a much easier touch than God. At the very worst, you'll get a few years of state-supported education in a cell of your choice. Think of it as an exercise in character building. Come now, tell Vidocq all about it. Before"-and here he gives me the most knowing of smiles-"before Mama Carpentier comes home and gets her little white feathers ruff led."

He steps back and contemplates me for a moment. Then, wheeling round, he upends the wine bottle. A single crimson drop touches down on the dining table's surface.

"Oops, we're out! Be a good man and fetch us another, would you ? "

CHAPTE R 3.

The Chamber of the Dead I t's the way of the human conscience, I suppose. A man suggests you're guilty of something, and the more you say you're not, the more it sounds like you are. The voice rings of tin, the heart rattles like a fistful of beans, and every no sounds like a yes, until you can actually feel this yes, inching onto the parapet of your lip . . . when your interlocutor grabs the bottle of Burgundy-the one you fetched for him not half an hour ago-and peers into its jungle green interior and, in a voice tinctured with resignation, announces: "Out again."

Then he waggles his finger at the glass of wine sitting unmolested before you. The one you haven't had the stomach to drink (thanks to him).

"Are you-do you-"

And, seeing you shrug, he hoists it straight to his mouth. A long leak of satiated breath and then a belch, fruiting the air. He looks down at himself. He sees, as if for the first time, Bardou's rags. He draws out a watch.

"Time to go."

For both of you to go, that's what he means. He is moderately surprised to find you remaining in your chair.

"I need to show you something," he says.

And still you don't move, and rather than explaining himself further, he lifts his voice into a gently mocking register.

"Maybe you need to leave a note first? In case she worries?"

And here's the damnable part of it. You were going to leave a note. And all you can do now is squeeze yourself into your boots and stare at the newspaper still lying on the f loor and think (you can't help it): This is all that will be left of me.

Your legacy: a half-read journal, a half-finished monograph. But you can't do more than pause because he's already swung the front door open and stepped out on the stoop with the air of a man surveying his estates. He's waiting for you.

"Coming," you mutter. "Coming, damn you."

La te r today, I will ref lect on the curious fact that he came alone. No other officers, no squad of gendarmes to subdue me. Not even a weapon, as far as I can tell. He'd watched me long enough to know: I could be handled.

And was he wrong? Here I am, climbing without a second thought into the carriage waiting round the corner. Waiting, benumbed, as he barks the address to the driver above.

"Quai du Marche ! "

He pulls the curtains over the windows and yanks up his sleeves- only to remember he doesn't have sleeves, only Bardou's damp rags, which cling to him now in the form of an apology.

The cab must recently have carried a wedding party, for there's a scrap of lace caught in the door and a scattering of hothouse orange blossoms and the snapped-off handle of a Japanese fan. And overlaying everything a ripening scent, like something that would waft from a tannery. His smell, I suddenly realize.

"Where are we going?" I ask.

"Paying a little call at the morgue, that's all." He smiles faintly,

shakes his head. "You still don't believe me, Doctor."

"No, I-"

"You don't think I'm him, do you? Not another word, damn you!

Here ! "

Into my lap drops a round pasteboard card, wedged between two pieces of glass. On one side: the arms of France and the words SUR- VEILLANCE ET VIGILANCE. On the other: a single surname, VIDOCQ, in triumphally raised gold letters.

"Signed by the prefect himself," he says dryly. "If that eases your mind, Dr. May-I-see-your-papers."

It doesn't, how could it? It only gives me leave, finally, to call him by that name. And still I hesitate.

Vidocq. Say it, for Christ's sake. Eugene Francois Vidocq. Come at it in pieces, if you must, syllable by syllable. Vee. Dohk. Vee. Dohk . . .

E ven in these early days of the Restoration, it is a famous name. It comes, you might say, with its own exclamation point. Terror of thieves! Scourge of crime! Bonaparte of the barrieres!

Only a couple of years past forty, and yet he already drags behind him a full complement of legends. There are people, for instance, who swear they were at Denoyes' cabaret the night he raided it. They remember him staring down a dance f loor of knife-wielding thugs and, in a voice that resonated as far as the Bastille, ordering them to quit the premises. One man demurred and lost a finger. The rest obeyed without a murmur. (Vidocq chalked white crosses on the worst offenders as they passed so that the policemen waiting outside would know which to arrest.) And what about the time he tracked down a thief, knowing only the color of the man's curtains? Or when he waded right into a Tuileries reception and plucked a confidence man in the act of bowing to the King? Or captured the fearsome giant Sablin in Saint-Cloud while Sablin's wife lay in the throes of labor? (Vidocq had enough time left over to catch the baby and to serve as godfather.) One night, they say, he insinuated himself into a group of assassins stationed outside his very own door. Sat with them all night, they say, waiting for that accursed Vidocq to show up, then joined them in their despondent trek home-where, naturally, he'd stationed a tribe of gendarmes. (His reward was a tumble in the sheets with the ringleader's mistress.) Legend has it that if you give Vidocq two or three of the details surrounding a given crime, he will give you back the man who did it-before you've had time to blink. More than that, he'll describe the man for you, give you his most recent address, name all his known conspirators, tell you his favorite cheese. So compendious is his memory that a full half of Paris imagines him to be omniscient and wonders if his powers weren't given him by Satan.

And yet he is doing God's work, is he not? To hear the papers tell it, Vidocq, in the space of a few years, has sent hundreds of malefactors to prison. The ones that remain abroad cross themselves at the sound of his name. If a robbery falls apart at the last minute, it's Vidocq's doing. If a credulous old widow manages, against all odds, to keep her jewels, blame it on that scoundrel Vidocq. If an innocent man lives to see another morrow, who's behind it? The accursed Vidocq, that's who.

All it takes some nights is a shift in the wind's direction, a creak on the stair, and the name f lies like an oath from their throats.

Vidocq. Vidocq is abroad.

And now this same Vidocq is pounding on the roof of our cab, as if to gouge out a straighter path for his words.

"Driver! A little faster, will you? Oh, and don't forget to stop at Mabriole's bakery. I want to show this bastard what a macaroon tastes like."

Folding his arms across the swell of his belly, he regards me with a look of naked skepticism.

"You're not a fainter, are you?"

"No, of course not."

"Well, that's a relief. You look like one."

I' ve a lway s thought of the morgue as the fullest realization of democracy. Anyone can enter: man, woman, child; dead, alive. You don't even have to give your name. When Vidocq and I arrive a little after two, I catch only the faintest glimmer of a concierge. I'm already moving, like everyone else, toward the glassed-in chamber that opens off the main hall.

Through the panes, three biers slope toward us like grain chutes. On each bier, a body. To be kept here another twenty-four hours and then, if no one claims it, shipped straight to the medical schools, ten francs a cadaver. And so hundreds of still-living souls crowd round this window every day to keep their friends and relations off the dissecting table-or else to enjoy the spectacle of someone else's death. I've seen more English tourists in the morgue than in the Louvre.

"Come," says Vidocq.