Star, bent over him, clutching at him, saw his face contort as Lazare tried to speak. He began to kiss his father’s dying face. He watched his lips start to form a word, or words, and clung to him, waiting for this final message, which he knew had to be recognition, and love.

Lazare’s lips moved; he coughed slightly; from his mouth came a gush of bright arterial blood. Star waited. Nothing happened. Lazare did not slump. His eyes did not close. It wasn’t like the movies, Star thought, shaking him. He waited some more. The room spun and jumped. Gradually, he realized that there would be no words, no final gesture, and that Jean Lazare was dead.

He wept, then he stood, then he paced. Bad, bad, bad, he thought. He could feel his mind slipping, none of the gears would mesh. He felt outrage and anguish. Accelerating forward from the back of his brain with vast and rushing momentum came another idea: he had been robbed.

This made him shake, then laugh, then weep. He bent down over his father’s body, and then—even though he didn’t much like its design—he stole his watch. He buckled it around his own wrist. He took Jean Lazare’s black overcoat from the coat-stand and put on Jean Lazare’s black leather gloves. The gloves were too tight, but they hid the blood on his hands. The overcoat was too short and too small, but he found that by slinging it over his shoulder it could be made to cover the blood on his shirtfront. He inserted a new magazine into his gun, thrust it into his pocket, and opened the door.

He could hear the tides of the audience in the distance, and see poor, half-blind, half-deaf Mathilde in the room across the corridor, milky eyes turned to the television screen. The passageway was deserted. He crossed into the room opposite, picked up a white silk cushion, pressed the barrel of the gun into it, and fired twice into the back of Mathilde’s neck. Point-blank. She died better than his father. She slumped forward in her chair at once. No noise from the gun, just this huge white open silence, a great sky of silence. He could feel it again now—invincibility, very close.

He left the room, turned left, and walked out through the rear staff exit doors. They led out into a small alleyway, at the end of which were gates, and a security guard in a small glass-and-wood sentry box.

He could see no police at this entrance. From here, the mews, the garage, and fame were less than a four-minute walk away.

He could feel his own cunning coming back, seeping along his veins. He stopped at the sentry box and smiled at the guard, who recognized him from earlier that morning, he thought. Just testing; he asked directions to the nearest pharmacy—Madame Duval was a little overcome. Then this struck him, under the circumstances, as funny; he gave a snort of laughter. What she needed, he went on, leaning against the open window of the sentry box, was this special tisane. He watched the security man, who said—a little too fast—that yes, old women could be like that, fixed in their ways, and there was a pharmacy—a very good pharmacy—nearby, just two streets away on the left.