“Yes, it was.” She felt Rowland tense, as she did. “What kind of gun, Chantal?”

“I don’t know. Just a gun. He told me he wanted it—I got it. He showed me some pictures, made me write down the name.”

“A handgun?” Rowland said.

“Yes. Small. Some special ammunition stuff. It’s no use looking. I wrote the name down on a piece of paper. I threw it away weeks ago. It was German—no, maybe Italian.”

“Why would he want a gun?” Rowland moved toward her. Her eyes had closed again.

“I don’t know. He likes guns. Always did. He gets off on them, just looking at pictures of them. It was expensive—I know that. Nearly four thousand francs… Serious. That’s what he said. It was a serious gun. Only then”—she swayed again—“only then—I don’t know. The TV was on in the corner while we talked—and then he suddenly got this look on his face. There’s a look he gets—in the eyes. He had it before he did this to me…” She touched the scar on her face. “So maybe, it’s not so good for that girl. I don’t know. Look—I have to lie down.”

She stumbled across the room to the bed and lay down, eyes tightly shut. Rowland looked at Gini, then bent over the bed.

“Chantal. Just try to stay awake. Can you hear me? Does he have a name, a name other than Star? What was he called when you first met him?”

He broke off and stepped back. There was the sound of footsteps running up the stairs, then the door was thrown back. The woman Gini had spoken to the previous evening came into the room, her face pale with fear. She stopped, looked at them both, then pushed past them and knelt down by the bed.

She took Chantal in her arms and began to stroke her hair, talking to her all the while in a low, crooning voice. When she swung back to look at them, there was no mistaking the love and the anger in her face. “How long did they keep her there? Those animals?”

She spoke in French, and Rowland answered her in the same language: “About an hour, maybe more,” he said.

The woman burst into a stream of angry accusations, directed at the police, them, the world.

“Jeanne, wait.” Chantal attempted to sit up, then fell back. “He’s okay. He helped me. I can’t talk. They need to know about Star. Just tell them his name, explain, all right?”

She closed her eyes again and seemed to drift off into some state close to sleep. The woman called Jeanne rose. In heavily accented English she spat out her explanation.

Star was to blame for all this. It was he who first got Chantal on to heroin, he who ruined her face. And Star was just one of his names—the latest he’d selected and the one he now liked the best. He had numerous surnames she could offer them, she said with scorn in her voice: Lamont, Lacroix, Newman, D’Amico, Rivière, Adams, Dumas—they could take their pick. When it came to first names they had a choice of two. He occasionally used the English version of his name, but he preferred the French. This past year he’d been claiming it was his true name, the name on his birth certificate—she doubted he had such a thing, but for what it was worth, the name was Christophe.