And with that, he turns his back on me and charges down the street-daring me not to follow. It is then that the question, the obvious question, startles my lips apart.

"Where are we going?"

But the hope of receiving an answer is negated by the sound of my own voice: bleating and braying, cracking me open, as it were, to reveal the small green quivering heart-fruit beneath. I resolve never again to ask him where we're going. And I never do.

Tr uth be to ld, we don't seem to be going anywhere. The drizzle has stopped for the time being, and a dandelion glimmer has plumped out the drifts of cloud. It's a fine time for a walk.

And what a pair of strollers we make. Me in my black trousers, shiny at the knees, and the black coat vented at the elbows. Vidocq, striding like a deposed king in Bardou's sodden rags. After some time, he pauses at a street corner to realign the leather scraps that pass for boots, and in his best honey-and-cloves voice, he says: "I hope I haven't distressed you unduly, Doctor."

"Why should I be distressed?"

"Oh, some men don't like being thrown off their schedule." I tell him I don't really have a schedule. To speak of. He shakes his

head.

"Doctor, may I submit that that's horseshit? I've spent no more than a day following you, and I've already got you dead to rights. ecole de Medecine in the morning, nine-thirty to eleven. Followed by Le Pere Bonvin, where you buy your single cup of coffee, followed by a sugarand-water. You sneak your little newspaper into your coat. (They don't chain down the papers at Bonvin's, do they?) You go straight home. A little catnap, some afternoon puttering. Dinner with Maman and her boarders. A walk just before bed, with a pinch of tobacco in the left cheek. You walk around the block and no farther. You go to sleep, repeat next morning. Do I have it about right?"

So many ways to protest. I could tell him that, some mornings, I stay at the ecole all the way to noon. That I treat myself now and then to a chocolate at the Cafe des Mille Colonnes. That I only take tobacco at night if Charlotte's cooking doesn't agree with me.

But these are all just different ways of admitting he's right. So I remain silent, which is in itself a confession.

"Yes, you're a man of regular habits, Doctor, considering you've no-"

Job, he means to say. Life. Something stops him from finishing.

"Yes indeed," he says, nodding slow. "I could set my watch by you."

And then, perhaps because this strikes him as too close to an assertion of faith, he adds: "It's the same with all criminals."

We cross the Pont St.-Michel, we trot up the Rue des Arcis, a right on Neuve-St.-Mederic . . . and almost at once the streets begin funneling down. Which is to say the old Paris closes round. The roar of the boulevards gives way to the clatter of paving stones. The streets wind and dart, turn their backs on you, stop you dead. Sewers split open before you like unsutured wounds, and houses built centuries ago totter forward in raiments of black.

No great plan at work, here in the Marais, but there is a kind of unnatural order. As sure as the sun rises and sets, the late-winter rain will leave brackish tides pooling against the corner posts, and this water will merge with the slops toiling downward through blackened gutters to produce that peculiar mud, so Parisian in its odor and provenance. If you kick in your boots too hard, you'll actually taste some, f lying into your mouth like a retracted insult. You'll smell it, too, and feel it with every step: a squelch beneath the stone and a slight release, as though the city is giving way beneath you.

Where are we going?

Not even two in the afternoon, and there's a candle in every window, and the light seems to partake of the same medium as the air and the ground and the water, so that even when your eyes are open, you have the strangest feeling that they're closed.

Never mind, my companion knows the way. He takes his bearings not from celestial but from human bodies. Washerwomen, wheelwrights. A ragpicker with a basket and hook. Beldams, in groups of four, gossiping on doorsteps. Vidocq knows where they'll be before he's even seen them. Already calling out to them, isn't he, with the swagger of a stagecoach driver pulling into the courtyard of an inn.

"Good afternoon, ladies! Saying our rosaries, are we? . . . Hey, Gervaise, you pile of shit! You still owe me thirty sous on that cock of yours. Never mind, just keep a place for me at next Sunday's fight, will you? And bring a bird with some heart in him! . . . Ah, is that the sun I see or Mademoiselle Sophie? Why, you're better than the sun, it's true. . . ."

Even his gait changes as he approaches them. The right foot drags slightly behind him, like an embarrassed child, and the left foot skates through the drifts of mud, and his hands, those great bear claws, tease the air.

"Oho, it's Tambour! Haven't seen you since you went to the bagne. But what are these phials you're foisting on the public? Herbal panaceas? Why, Tambour, I had no idea you were such a philanthropist- hey now, do any of these potions give a fellow bigger balls? My friend here might want some. . . ."

They all stand stock-still as he approaches, with the frozen halfsmiles of guests at a Tuileries garden party. It comes as a surprise when we turn onto the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux to find a man not just standing but coming toward us, with a turnip sack over his shoulder. "Chief," he says, in the mildest of tones.

"A llard."

They stand there, staring over each other's shoulders, making scraps of small talk, lofting an oath or two at the weather. And then Allard, without altering his cadence, murmurs:

"He's inside."

"How long? "

"Since eleven."

Vidocq cuts his eyes north. "Woman, too?"

"Whole family."

"Give."

Allard swings the turnip bag off his shoulder. Before I can protest, Vidocq stuffs it into my arms.

"Don't jiggle it, Doctor, if you'd be so kind."