And is he my age?

No, he is but 3. Although (I cdnt help but add) he knows at least 200 words.

I shd like. . . .

Here Charles stopped.

To meet him? I conjectured. Someday you will. No, he said, I shd like to take care of him. As you have me. If you took me home w/ you, we cd be brothers, he and I, and I'd keep very close watch on him, youd never have a moment's worry.

God willing, I said, you shall enjoy far greater comforts than my humble home cd offer.

No, he said. Yrs wd do very well. CHAPTE R 22

The Fox and the Rabbit Th e in terrogation of Tepac's assassin takes place in the dead man's scullery. I am not invited in, and so, like a child straining to hear his parents, I press my ear to the door. This is what I hear.

Nothing.

No, that's no t quite right. A series of tiny soft implosions, the sort a kettle might make on a wet hob. The door opens then to find our counterfeit sailor bound by the feet to an old spindleback chair. Vidocq, his cravat loosened, stands over him; off to the side leans Goury, whose hands, for reasons mysterious, are coated in f lour. On the assassin, no obvious signs of violence, except for the droop of his head, just outside the normal axis, and a roiling afterecho, as though the air itself had been singed.

Later I will learn just how Vidocq did it.

Remembering the man's name was the easy part. Just a quick rummage through his inner archives, and out it pops.

"Monsieur Noel, isn't it?"

A twitch is all the confirmation he needs. From there, he reconstructs Noel's dossier card, line by line.

"Stole twenty-three streetlamps in the Rue Fontaine-au-Roi. . . . Fifty-eight pieces of calico from Trouf lat's Novelties . . . Oh, that's right, you've got a mother. Distinguished artiste, with a charming apartment on the Rue Saint-Claude. Gives piano lessons, doesn't she? Ooh, I'd hate to see her lose her livelihood."

Amazing. You take out one brick, the whole wall falls. In the very next second, Noel has coughed up the other assassin's name.

"Herbaux, eh? That's funny, I thought he was still counting cockroaches in La Force."

Turns out this same Herbaux managed to stroll out of prison two months ago, dressed in his sister's petticoats. ("That old trick," mutters Vidocq.) A few weeks after that, he approached Noel about a job in Saint-Cloud.

"And who was the brain behind it?" asks Vidocq.

Don't know.

"Who was the bank?"

God's truth, he doesn't know. The only one who ever talked to Monsieur was Herbaux.

"Monsieur? "

That's what they were told to call him. No first name, no surname. Just a title.

"Did Herbaux ever describe him?"

Couldn't. Monsieur was just a voice, that was all.

"Herbaux never saw him?"

He only ever met the man at Saint-Sulpice. Monsieur sat in a confessional booth the whole time with the curtain closed.

"He's a priest ?"

No idea.

"Old voice ? Young voice ? "

Herbaux never said.

"How much did this Monsieur promise you?"

A hundred francs up front. Two hundred on completion. "Ha! Knowing Herbaux, it was probably double that. This Monsieur . . . he never gave a reason for wanting Tepac gone?"

Not that he knew of. A fellow learns not to be curious about such things.

"When'd you get the go-ahead, then?"