Silence. Silence as if the air had turned to mercury, heavy, thick, and poisonous. The candles burned straight up, not moving. I was watching Mick Skinner’s lips so hard, I thought I might be sucked into his mouth if they opened. The whole room might; the space behind his teeth was such a vacuum, it would take the whole room to equalize the pressure. I thought I felt a drop of sweat crawl from my forehead, past my ear, to my jaw.

The liquid in the shot glass burst into flames, and the glass shattered.

I was halfway to the sink for water before I realized I wasn’t holding still anymore. The teakettle was full, and I grabbed it. Nothing we did in this room could harm the contents of the other, of the third room, except fire. Except fire. I bolted back toward the mess on the floor.

But when I tried to fling the contents of the teakettle on it, I couldn’t. I looked down and found two huge brown hands closed around my wrists. “That will only spread it,” Mr. Lyle’s whistling voice said above me. “Look.”

The corpse was burning. The black, oily smoke of it rose straight up and stained the ceiling. But where the flames should have splashed around it with the burning alcohol, there was nothing. The nine black candles stood untouched, like everything outside them. I couldn’t even smell the smoke.

The woman was on her knees, bent double, and Dana hovered over her, her hands stretched out and falling a little short of La Maitresse’s shoulders. Then the black-wrapped head lifted. The woman looked straight into my eyes and said, “He wasn’t there.”

The sunglasses had come off. Below the line of the scarf, at the bottom of the sweat-marred forehead, were her eyebrows, two arcs of silver metal inlay in her skin. I hugged my teakettle and stared.

“He wasn’t there. Where has he gone?” She rose and advanced on me, her eyes very wide under those bright, motionless brows.

I edged around the smoking corpse. “Who?” I croaked.

“The one who was in there. Le chevalier,” she spat. Her hand snapped sideways and down, toward the body.

“He’s dead.” Even in my own ears, I sounded hysterical. “What do you expect?”

On the left, around the pillar of smoke, I saw Mr. Lyle moving carefully toward me. Dana was on my right, looking back and forth between me and the woman in dark blue on the other side of her.

“You are an ass, an ass,” the woman said to me. “Where is he now? Tell me, or I’ll wring it out of you like water from a rag.”

I didn’t kick Dana, exactly; I pushed her hard with my foot. She stumbled into the black woman. And I threw the teakettle at Mr. Lyle, and plunged for the front door.

It seemed to take five minutes to turn the knob and pull the door open, half an hour to run down the hall, with the sound of footsteps coming fast behind. The elevator control box took a week, and I looked up from the crossed wires to the sight of the doors closing on a huge brown hand, with an angry face behind. Two fingers stuck through the rubber door seal, so I bit them. They disappeared and the car lurched downward.