He braced himself then as he said these words, because he could see their effect. The young man’s face worked, and his hands shook. He was trembling uncontrollably. Lazare could see a terrible combination of emotions work their way through him: rage and disbelief and fear and grief. He expected him to fire then, and felt a grudging respect when he did not.

Lazare bent his head and passed his hand across his face. All the energy released in him by the arrival of this young man had now gone. He felt an absolute weariness of body and soul, a lethargy and an indifference so deep that he was surprised that his obstinate body continued to function, that his lungs circulated oxygen, that his heart beat.

He thought of his son, whom he had loved with such intensity, his son’s continued suffering, making that love poignant from the first. If he could have rewritten his own life, he knew that he would have ensured that Christophe spent his brief life with Maria and himself no matter if Maria, weaker than himself, cracked under the demands of that pain. But he could not rewrite his life.

The decision had been made at a time when he was young, torn between love, shame, and guilt—and the guilt had been so corrosive, so intense. For Maria too, of course. He glanced up at the young man facing him. Could she really have believed his claims? Perhaps she had, with a part of her poor fractured mind at least, though Lazare noted she had still been careful in what she revealed. The boy obviously had no inkling that the parents he was claiming were brother and sister—or perhaps Maria had simply forgotten that fact, displaced it, as she did anything that caused her pain: perhaps.

His own great weakness, he thought, had been his inflexibility. Once decided upon a course of action, he had always judged it weak to countenance change. In trying to protect Maria, he had denied himself closeness to his son—yet that closeness, he now saw, was what he had most craved in life.

He looked up at the tall, strong, and handsome young man facing him now. How ironic, he thought: he is as desperate for a father as I am desperate for a son. Does he not realize that—if miracles happened, and he were my child, I would not be able to speak for joy—I would rise and embrace him, my life would be utterly altered, and I might even believe that there was, after all, a God?

“So tell me”—he raised his head—“tell me why you’ve come here today. Tell me what you want.”

Stammering, boasting, the boy did. He was deeply deranged, Lazare thought; he seemed to have no conception of how impossible his plan was. All that seemed to concern him was that this execution—which he called a killing—should be public. He wanted it to be seen, witnessed, photographed, even filmed. That interested Lazare briefly. Listening to the young man’s tirade, he considered the seductions of fame—to which, as he had mentioned in his final public tribute to her, Maria had been as indifferent as he himself was.