“It’s that building across there. It’s the one next to Helen’s.”

“Helen’s?”

“Helen Lamartine-that-was. These apartments are huge, Rowland…” She hesitated, and he could see how tense she had suddenly become.

“There’s no point in our both going up.”

“You want me to go?”

“I’d rather you did. I’ll give you ten minutes—then I’ll wait around the corner. There’s a café there, just up on the right. You can’t miss it.”

“Very well. In any case, Lazare’s thorough. I doubt I’ll be as long as ten minutes.”

He was right. Gini waited, shivering. She turned up the collar of her coat and paced. She stared hard at the sidewalk, the trees, the porticos of these buildings, fixing on their details and refusing to allow the past back. Rowland returned six minutes later.

“As we thought. There’s some damn woman from the Cazarès press office standing guard. She gave me her card and told me to call their offices tomorrow if I had any queries. She was extremely charming. Then she shut the door in my face.”

“She did?” Gini looked at him in a curious way, a speculative way. “What sort of age was she?”

“Age? God knows. Forty? Forty-five? What difference does it make?”

“It might make a difference.” Her voice was dry. “You have certain advantages, Rowland, and you tend to underestimate them.”

He was already beginning to walk away. “What are you talking about?”

Gini looked at his tall figure, at his extraordinary eyes, at his hair. She linked her arm through his.

“Just around this corner, Rowland,” she said, “next to that café I mentioned, there’s a flower shop. One of the best in Paris. Filled with the most exquisite roses, lilies, narcissus…”

“So? What of it?”

“You may work for a very reputable newspaper, Rowland, and you may be very good at your job, but even you can learn. Come with me.” She smiled. “You remember what you said to me on the telephone in Amsterdam? Well, let me just show you a few tabloid techniques.”

It was not yet six in the evening, and Mathilde Duval, a woman of entrenched habits, was already preparing for bed. Juliette de Nerval, appointed her guardian and protector by Jean Lazare himself, watched this process with some pity, and a great deal of revulsion.

She did not know Mathilde Duval’s exact age, but she looked eighty at least. She was, of course, of peasant stock, and peasant women, particularly from the south, aged quickly—so she might be younger. Whatever her true age, Mathilde was the embodiment of everything Juliette most feared. Whatever it took, she told herself, watching the old woman, she herself was never going to end up like this.

Mathilde was no more than five feet tall, if that, and bent as a witch. Heavy black clothes, head to foot; thinning hair scraped back against her scalp; a bristle of hairs on her chin; a face etched with deep lines, not just beneath the eyes and around the mouth, but everywhere. Her hands were twisted with arthritis; her ankles were swollen; she was virtually blind; she moved around this ghastly apartment at a snail’s pace, fingering a rosary, touching little sacred pictures, and muttering to herself.