Star gave a long, slow sigh. He drew Gini back against his body, and Pascal, watching Gini’s face with horror, knew why he had done that. He watched the blood drain from her face. She closed her eyes; her fists clenched. Star’s right hand held the gun to her throat; he moved his left hand so it rested on her breast.

He had listened to the sirens. Now he seemed to listen to the silence.

“I guess the audience just arrived,” he said.

At eleven-thirty, as fuchsia-dressed Quest swung out along the runway, Rowland moved up the aisle of the salon to its exit doors. He looked at the rows of pale faces, at the line of operatives circling the rear tier, and every instinct in his body said wrong. This scenario was too neat, too convenient, whatever Mina had been told. He left the building at once. This was a piece of theater, he thought—and wherever its director was, he was not, had never intended to be, out front.

As he left the building, his sense of being an extra in someone else’s production increased. The arrival of the GIGN had, inevitably, intensified the interest of the press. Outside the courtyard of the Cazarès building, a huge mob of reporters and photographers and TV crews were engaged in a series of running battles with the police. They would spill across the barricades at one point, then be forced back, then advance again. Rowland cut around behind them and turned into a series of side streets. He passed a mews with locked gates, where the fleet of Cazarès Mercedes were presumably garaged, then found his way to the rear staff entrance.

It could not be long, he thought, before this gate came under press siege as well, but for the moment it was quiet. The surly guard on the gate did not take his appearance well; he informed Rowland that only authorized personnel were admitted here, and only authorized personnel had been admitted. Reaching for a telephone, he told Rowland to leave, and leave now, before he called his security backup. Rowland left: he could think of only two other places where Star might have gone—Mathilde Duval’s, or Chantal’s. But Mathilde Duval would be at Cazarès’s now, watching the collection from the rear room Juliette de Nerval had described to him. Chantal’s, then, he thought. Less than ten minutes later he was getting out of a cab in the rue St. Séverin. He paused by the church, then crossed the street. The entrance door was open. He paused in the doorway, looking up the flight of stairs that led to Chantal’s apartment. The door above was also open. He tensed.

He knew what had happened, what must have happened, before he pushed the door back. He could see the blood smeared on the wall opposite; he could hear frantic scratchings and the yowling of the cat.

The cat had been shut up in one of the cupboards under the sink. The cat, for some reason, had been spared; Chantal and Jeanne and their small, thin gray dog had not. Jeanne had tried to put up a fight. She was sprawled at the base of the blood-spattered wall; Chantal, who might never have known what was happening, had been shot while in bed. The bed was soaked in blood; there was blood on the floor, the net curtains, the walls. It could only have been Star who had done this, and he had signed his handiwork in blood: there was a crude blood star on one wall, above Jeanne’s body; there was a second blood sign by Chantal, a daubed crucifix of blood, just above the bed. Next to the dog’s body was a pile of clothes—black jeans, a red scarf, the student uniform Star had told Mina he would wear to Cazarès’s. Rowland averted his eyes from the bodies. The sink, the surrounding worktops, and floor were all stained with watery blood; he thought—this was planned; he came here and he did this, and then he changed and washed.