“Why didn’t you just take the presidentes over and declare peace?”

“It may be,” she said, looking insufferably patient, “that you are fifteen, after all. Because the cabinet, the generals, and the God-damned janitorial staff would have blown El Presidente’s brains out and declared a change of government. Do you think a nation wages war because of one person in a big leather chair in a nice office?”

“Having never lived in a nation,” I said, “I wouldn’t know.”

Frances turned her face away, as if I’d slapped her. “Don’t worry, you’re not missing much. A wretched anthill of peaceful, productive, useful life with hardly any invigorating biting and scratching. Where people flossed once a day and mowed the lawn on Sundays.”

I watched her, and said, “It wasn’t your fault.”

One emphatic black eyebrow went up, and her straight mouth crimped with irony at the corners. “Thank you, I feel ever so much better. I suppose my sense of social responsibility makes up in vigor what it lacked in timeliness.”

“Could you have stopped them then?”

She paused to think about it. “Yes. Which is why I’m so assiduously stopping them now. Have been stopping them. It’s my penance. Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord Is With Thee would be easier, but it seems a shame to waste all that good marksmanship.”

My hands closed over the arms of the wing chair. “You mean, it’s not just this Tom Whatsisname. You’re hunting them all down.”

“Have hunted. Past tense. I’m nearly done.”

“All the Horsemen?”

“God, no. Besides, the populace at large has mostly taken care of that. I only wanted the refined gathering that thought, for their various reasons, that lobbing one in would be a good idea. The populace did take care of one of them, as it turned out. I dispatched four more.” She spread her hard, browned fingers in the air between us. “And all the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten this little hand. Well, not specifically this hand.” Then, suddenly: “That bothers you, doesn’t it?”

I swallowed, with an effort, and said, “That I’m sharing a room with someone whose life’s work has been to find people and murder them? Why would you think that?”

“Whatever you’re good at, it’s not sarcasm. They were four people who had never done a decent thing in the world and never would. They were the highest accomplishment of a subset of humanity who gloried in degradation and cruelty, who saw everyone — even each other — as lab rats and Judas goats.”

She was so calm. Maybe she’d lived long enough with righteous anger that it had smoothed into something else. But it drove me to say, “What’s the matter? Were you jealous?”

She leaned forward, and there was something in her face that made me shiver. “I had nothing to be jealous of. Listen and be made wise. Once upon a time in New Mexico, there was an MP named Stedmon. One dark night he annoyed me. I don’t remember the offense. The next evening he walked in on an edifying scene involving his fiancée and four men from his unit. Four being the most I could collect, from my vantage point on his fiancée, on short notice.