“Flattery?” the psychologist asked.

“Perhaps. Certainly no overt criticism. And he doesn’t like questions, the Dutch girl said that. But the mood swings are very rapid—and he’s almost certainly on drugs. Possibly cocaine, possibly something else…” Rowland stopped. He was desperate, and angry, and out of those emotions an idea came to him. He thought of dead Cassandra, dead Maria Cazarès.

“There is one possibility…” he said, then shook his head. “No. It’s too dangerous.”

The psychologist and Martigny exchanged glances.

“Monsieur McGuire,” said the psychologist, putting on headphones. “In this situation, everything is dangerous.”

“Open the suitcase, Pascal,” Star said. “Stay back there by the table and open the suitcase. That’s great.”

Pascal opened the suitcase, which had been, as Star said, under the pink bed in the pink room, the room filled with pictures of a woman Pascal recognized as the couturière Maria Cazarès.

He glanced up. Star was still jittery, but also careful. He was positioned fifteen feet away, still with Gini in front of him, still with the gun jabbing her neck. On a small table next to him was Gini’s tape recorder and microphone. A tape had been inserted.

It was recording now. Pascal knew, and Gini knew—he could read the knowledge in her face—that this tape was not helping them. This tape was Star’s route to notoriety, to immortality—not any interview Gini might write. Pascal, piecing these events together, could see that whatever Star might have said to Gini earlier, he had never intended her to write up this scene afterward: transcribe his words now, possibly, better still, record them so the world could later hear his voice—but not survive to give her own account any more than Pascal would survive any photographs he might take.

They were useful to him now, Pascal thought, but when the pictures had been taken and the recording had been made, he would kill them. Pascal knew that with absolute certainty; he also knew which of them he would kill first.

The suitcase was crammed with notebooks and press clippings and photographs. They were in disarray. With extreme care he began taking them out and laying them on the table in front of him.

“Don’t muddle them up, okay?” Star said sharply. “They’re in order—all right? On the top there’s all the stuff about my mother and father—and the notes I wrote, after I realized, when it all started to make sense…”

His mother and father, apparently, were Maria Cazarès and Jean Lazare. Pascal piled the notebooks in one place, the dogeared cuttings next to them.

Beneath them, he saw, were bundles of tattered miscellaneous papers and other press clippings. There was a collection on Monaco’s royal family, including his own stolen pictures of Princess Caroline to which Star had referred; there was a section on the Kennedy family, one on an English duke with a Canadian wife, one on an Australian-American press magnate, and several on various American movie stars. He laid each of these out in neat piles. Beneath them, at the bottom of the case, was a collection of pornographic pictures, much-handled and of extreme violence. Pascal closed the lid of the case on them. Star made a peculiar wiggling movement, gestured toward the secondary piles of press clippings, then smiled.