“I see,” he said, momentarily downcast before perking up again and slapping me on the shoulder. “Well, we’ll see each other again sometime, I’m sure.” We shook hands and he was gone, dashing down the steps three at a time. I went back into the apartment to see Madeleine, lying on my bed, turn her head sleepily in my direction.

“Who was that?” she asked.

I crossed the room, sat on the side of the bed and squeezed her hand. “No one.”

That day and the next, she finished recounting the tale of the albatross. The nearer she was to the conclusion of her story, the harder it was to ignore the chasm of belief that divided us. The saga’s denouement was a first-rate paranoid delusion, in which Madeleine’s fantasies were so thoroughly entangled with the real world that it was hard to imagine her ever extricating herself from the web. She seemed to believe that Gabrielle Chanel, better known as Coco, a high-society dressmaker who lived at the Ritz Hotel, was also President of the Baudelaire Society, and that the two of them were enmeshed in a decades-old rivalry. She was convinced Chanel wanted her killed, and that the auction of the Baudelaire manuscript was somehow a part of her plot, with the manuscript as the lure that would entrap her. By the time she finished her story, I was so concerned by what I’d heard I couldn’t return her gaze. She must have sensed my despair.

“Why don’t we try it?” she said.

“Try what?”

“Crossing.”

I gave a heavy sigh. “I don’t think that would be wise.”

“Why not?”

I’d never challenged her about her beliefs—what purpose would it have served? There were worse—she wasn’t a Fascist, after all. I had friends who believed in a god, in an afterlife, or in Stalinism—why couldn’t I tolerate Madeleine’s beliefs?

“Well, for one thing, I don’t think you’d want to end up in this body.” I pointed to myself. “I’d clearly be the one with the most to gain, but it wouldn’t be fair on you.”

She let out one of her long, throaty chuckles. “I don’t want to end up in your body either. We would cross back.”

“That’s possible?”

“Of course. I would see to it.”

“I thought crossing was a one-way affair.”

“Most of the time, for me, it is. But there’s more than one kind of crossing. There’s the blind crossing, where afterward you have no idea what just happened. Then there’s the wakeful crossing, where we cross in such a way that at each moment you are wholly aware of everything that is happening.”

She was beginning to frighten me. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

“Are you worried about ending up a woman?” she teased.

“I would have no problem being a woman.”