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again, I don’t know what.”
    “But he wasn’t…”
    I’m about to say he wasn’t in the house. And then I’m stopped by the memory of him— here —bestriding this very chair. Swearing and glugging wine and spitting out macaroons and half-eaten potatoes. Just the thought of it tickles my lips apart. I think I may even be on the verge of laughter when I hear Nankeen’s voice, ever so faintly curdling.
    “Monsieur Hector. You haven’t yet told us what this Vidocq fellow wanted with you.”
    I clear my throat. I clear it again.
    “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty.”
    He doesn’t pursue the matter. He doesn’t need to. Rosbif and Lapin gladly take up the chase.
    “Not at liberty, he says!”
    “Come now, Monsieur Hector!”
    “Must we drag it out of you?”
    “The royal family needs a new physician, is that it?”
    “Ha! Everyone knows the king’s gout is getting worse.”
    “I’m sure once King Louis has had a dose of—I’m sorry, Monsieur Hector, what’s that business you’re looking into? It always escapes me.”
    I explain that my research would likely be of no interest to them. In a voice of soft astonishment, Nankeen cries:
    “Now why do you say that? Don’t you know you’re the talk of the École? Why, my intern friends inform me that Monsieur Hector, when at last he bursts the trammels of his laboratory, will astonish the world with his findings.” Puzzlement creases his brow as he turns to Rosbif. “They do say that, don’t they?”
    “Oh, yes. Great things are expected of Monsieur Hector.”
    “And aren’t we fortunate to have gotten him at the ground level? We must be sure to record all our impressions for the sake of future biographers.”
    It’s not that I lack for defenders. There is Charlotte, for example, who has been standing all the while in the doorway, glowing like a coal.
    “For your information,” she declares, “Monsieur Hector was praised just the other evening. By a very important personage.”
    “And who would that be?” asks Nankeen, his eyes ghoulishly glittering.
    Too late to stop her. She squares her shoulders, charges.
    “The Duchesse de Duras!”
    In the face of such laughter, the chandelier over the table actually rattles. The air wrinkles round, and the curtains dance in tune. I sit in the heart of the noise, where, if one can attain the right level of abstraction, everything becomes quite still. Tonight, however, I glance up and, to my surprise, find Father Time looking back. A second or two, no more, but there flashes between us—well, call it a shared condition.
    “Hector,” says Mother. “I don’t know where that horrible man took you, but you smell like a sewer or worse.”
    Stunned, I raise my cuff to my nose, and the aroma of Vidocq comes coiling through my sinuses. That strange, animate scent.
    He’s marked me, I think, sinking back into my chair.
    And in the same instant comes the overtone of Leblanc’s dying breath.
    He’s here .
     
    I T’S A LITTLE after nine o’clock, and I’m taking my evening walk. The same walk I take every night, as Vidocq has pointed out, at the same time. Around the block and no farther.
    Tonight, it’s true, I briefly consider changing the pattern. When I come down the steps, I could decide to turn left instead of right. I could take the Rue des Postes south to the Rue de l’Arbalète. Or take the Vieille Estrapade de Fourcy toward the Panthéon. If I were really feeling bold, I could walk east all the way to the Jardin du Roi. Cross the river into the Faubourg-Saint-Antoine! Why not?
    In the end, I do what I always do.
    I smell like myself now.
    There’s a moon: a half-nibbled peach. Patches of pocked sky, too, where the clouds have yawned clear. For the first time in weeks, it seems, the higher architecture is declaring itself, and as the plaster housefronts and the piles of garbage rear up on every side, I’m visited with that old feeling of walking through an alpine pass.
    And then, as if I had