He pushed past the boy, who made no attempt to stop him. He moved toward the door slowly; the boy still did nothing. Lazare turned. He was trembling now, holding the gun at the wrong angle, his arm extended, the barrel wavering. His face was blanched of color, distorted with emotion. Lazare almost pitied him; he gave him a look of contempt.

“My son had great courage,” he said. “I loved that courage in him. In all the years I knew him, I felt respect, admiration, humility because of that.”

“I’m your son. I’m Christophe. Just stop fucking lying… Maria recognized me—my mother knew who I was.”

“Maria was not sane.” Lazare looked at him coldly. “By the end she was very nearly as crazy as you are. You’re afraid, aren’t you? You can’t even hold a gun steady, let alone fire it. Unlike my son, you’re a coward when it comes to the test. A coward and a boaster and a fool. A nobody.”

With this, he turned his back. As he reached for the door handle, he thought he had failed, even then, and that he would, after all, have to endure the next few hours: the meaningless applause, the emotion, the accolades, and the emptiness after that. It was a pity, he thought with a flicker of amusement, because if ever there was a way of ensuring that Maria Cazarès’s last collection was never forgotten, it was this. Still, it did not really matter. He could go, later this evening, to any of his houses; all were equipped with a pharmacopoeia of Maria’s sleeping pills and painkillers, several of which, taken in the right quantity, preferably with alcohol, would prove as efficacious as a bullet.

He turned the handle, and pain exploded in his back. The room resonated with noise, so as he fell, he thought that perhaps the young man, the nameless young man, had fired more than once. He slumped against the wall and heard himself make a strange liquid noise.

He watched the dying process with an acuity that surprised him: here were its stages, the flowering of blood on his white shirtfront; the warm gush of blood from the groin, so he thought he had lost control of his bladder and felt a second’s fastidious distaste. The words that became blood in his mouth, and then the vision loss as the room rushed toward him, then darkened, then ebbed.

He was aware, dimly, that the young man was frenzied now. He had begun screaming something, words that might have been love or abuse. He was touching him now, Lazare thought; he could feel his hands clasping his chest, then his neck and face. All he would achieve, Lazare thought as his grip on consciousness slackened, would be to daub himself with blood.

Lazare tried to sit up. He felt affection for this young man now, and gratitude. He wanted him to know that the room was soundproofed, so with luck the shots would not have been heard. He wanted to tell him that if he left quietly, by the rear staff entrance, the collection would proceed and he might even escape—for a while at least. He wanted to tell him something else too, something infinitely rich, which he could feel welling in his mind and heart, some priceless secret of life. Its exact nature, however, eluded him.