"Move a fraction," he growls. "Move a fiber."

Panting, he kneels beside me. His eyes lock onto mine.

"How is he?"

"I can't-he's too-"

With a dark wonder, I hold my hand up to the light, and it's someone else's hand: palsied from effort, painted with blood. Vidocq is already stepping round me . . . leaning over the dying man . . . purring raspily into his ear.

"Help's on the way. You'll be just fine, your-your kingship. . . ."

I'll never know exactly how he means that title. I can only testify to the change it produces in the dying man. A violent bucking rhythm that takes him from his bluchers to his shoulder blades but concentrates itself most intensely in the head, which swivels from side to side, like a clock pendulum-repelling the title Vidocq has granted him.

And this denial, finally, is what costs Monsieur Tepac his last drop of force. The eyes, having lodged their objections, scroll up. The head falls still. The lower lip rolls down.

"The game's done," says Vidocq.

CH APTE R 21.

A Garden Grows in Saint-Cloud Gou ry comes back alone. Nothing to tender but apologies. "Sorry, Chief, he was a fast one for being so tall . . . made straight

for the woods . . . I kept at him. . . ."

But Vidocq is locked in a silent colloquy with the dead man. "Well, now," he says, to no one in particular. "Bastards learned

their lesson, eh? Didn't want any dying speeches, like the late Monsieur Leblanc. So they took out his throat. Ah yes," he says, nodding.

"But they couldn't keep him from talking, could they, Hector?" "He was saying . . ."

"He was saying no. He was saying you've got the wrong man,

brother."

Frowning, he kneels once more by the dead man. Circles his finger

round a small pond of sepia by the temples.

"Iodine?" I guess.

Vidocq shakes his head. Thrusts his hand deep into the dead man's

locks. A single brute swipe, and then the fingers reemerge in the morning light, with a phantasmal coat of gold.

"Hair dye," whispers Goury.

"Mm," grunts Vidocq. "Bit young to be coloring his roots, isn't

he?" He wipes his hand on his trousers. "Someone's been made an ass

of. Damned if I know who."

For the first time, the sound, the spectacle of the waterworks impose themselves on his senses. His nostrils twitch like a salamander's.

His eyelids quiver down.

"Goury? "

"Yes, Chief."

"Keep a watch on our little prisoner over there. Hector?" "Yes."

"I wonder if you'd join me for a bit of exercise. . . ."

W hen C hateaub riand was first presented at court in 1785, he was favored with a smile from his queen, Marie-Antoinette. It must have captivated him because, twenty years later, he could still pick it out from the bones exhumed from the mass grave near La Madeleine. One sight of those enameled tiers, blazing forth from a skull, and he could say in perfect faith: That was her.

As for me . . . well, no queens have ever smiled on me. How, then, should I know a Hapsburg lip when I see it? Maybe I stumbled across it in a textbook. (Pathology: mandibular prognathism.) Maybe I glimpsed it at the Louvre. But when I see Vidocq sprinting away from the dead man, I don't have to ask where he's going. My mind is already traveling back there.

To the strange cottage we left just an hour ago, where a young man-a man-of-all-work, or so we thought him-came striding through a doorway with an armload of wooden chips and thrust his chin toward Monsieur Tepac.