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for the nearest station house.” He blows into the dead man’s ear: two gentle puffs. “But they didn’t let you, did they? Poor old salmon.”
    The étude keeps coming, like a river. And as I drag up horns of my own hair, it seems to me I am knocking the music off balance. Just to give myself company.
    “If Leblanc was coming to see me…”
    “Yes.”
    “And he didn’t want—whoever it was to know…”
    “Yes.”
    “Then why didn’t he just commit my address to memory? Why go to the trouble of keeping it on his person?”
    He smiles down at Leblanc’s bare white abdomen. “I think he had in mind—well, I almost blush to say it, Doctor—someone like me. If the very worst happened, he wanted to put the information where I’d be sure to find it.” He coos into Leblanc’s fleshy ear. “And who better than Vidocq, eh? Who better?”
    I’m sitting down before I realize there’s a chair waiting to catch me.
    “Leblanc was protecting me,” I say softly.
    “Oh, it’s all guesswork, of course, but I look at this. …” His hand describes the length of Leblanc’s body. “I look at that. …” His index finger glances down on the scrap of paper. “I say to myself, ‘Leblanc did everything but cram that piece of paper up his ass.’ And all I can think is he wanted to keep them from doing to you what—what they did to him .”
    I have only a very dim sense of Vidocq now, weaving round me in the darkness—until his hand lands with a light explosion on my shoulder.
    “And a fine job he did, eh, Doctor? Here you are. Still in the flower of your youth, more or less.” He plucks a thread of something from my coat. “How does it feel, I wonder? To have your life saved by a man you’ve never met?”
    I will say this: There’s no judgment in his voice. I think he just wants to know.
    “Old turtle,” he says, bending over Leblanc’s face. “I am honored by your trust. Leave it to us to finish the job, will you?”
     
    O NLY LATER, ONLY much later will I register that shift from singular to plural, I to us . It will dawn on me that this was the moment it turned, although it could well be there was no single moment—nothing that could be called back. Much as I might have wished to.
     
    “G O TO SLEEP NOW ,” whispers Vidocq.
    He pulls the sheet back over M. Chrétien Leblanc. Setting the candle back on the sconce, he pauses one last moment—not in prayer, exactly, but in some kind of suspended thought. Then he stalks out of the room, stopping only to cast the reproach that I am half expecting.
    “Maybe you’d rather stick around with the maggots?”
     
    I NEVER DO see her, the piano player of my imagination. But by way of compensation, her sonata comes after me: a spring tide of notes, catching me as I pass into the main hall. I will never again be able to hear Mozart without thinking of greenbottle flies.

CHAPTER 5
An Astounding Reemergence
     
    V IDOCQ’S MOVING AHEAD from the moment we step out of doors—and with such a bounding gait that I have to jog just to catch up. He scatters plumes of rainwater and mud as he goes, and there I am, following, ever following, mincing round the puddles he’s fording, shielding my hat from the horse droppings that are anointing him.
    “Excuse me…Monsieur Vidocq?”
    “What is it now?”
    “I was wondering if perhaps I might go home now.”
    He looks at me in a state of unvarnished amazement.
    “And why would you do that?”
    “Well, it occurs to me there’s—I imagine there’s no further use for me now.”
    His jaw swings gently open.
    “Insomuch as…” I tender him a propitiatory smile. “I mean, given that I can’t make a—a positive identification of the unfortunate Monsieur Leblanc, I can’t see what more I can do for you.”
    He lowers his head until it’s level with mine—until I can actually feel his breath scalding my cheeks.
    “Listen to me, you little prick! A man’s been murdered, and you know something about it. The more