“Those were my false starts, all right? That duke—the movie star—I always knew there was something different about me, that I wasn’t just anybody, you know? I tried tracing my mother—as soon as I was old enough, and they’d let me, I tried. But, of course, Maria had covered her tracks. You know what they tried to make me believe?” His voice was filled with derision. “They tried to make me believe my mother was this hooker, this two-bit fucking hooker, now deceased. Well, I wasn’t about to buy that. In Quebec I saw this fucking social worker bitch, and she brought out all these papers, a birth certificate—there wasn’t even a father’s name on the fucking thing—and she said I couldn’t meet my mother because my mother was dead, got beaten up good by one of her johns, some shit like that… And the way she looked at me, with this kind of fucking pity on her face. I wanted to kill her right then, I just wanted to snap her fucking neck, because she was feeding me all these fucking lies. And then I saw—she was just part of the conspiracy, that’s all. So I let her live. Smug fucking dumb lying bitch…”

He shuddered, and Gini flinched.

“After that—I had to find them, my parents, right? And they’d made it really hard for me—so I followed a few false leads, and then I got lucky; just like that. I met Mathilde. I was in Paris, I’d just come here from Amsterdam and I was down on my luck, the cards weren’t good, I had no money—and this friend of mine, Chantal, we’d had a fight, so I had no place to go—and then I met Mathilde. A few blocks from here. She was in this little park, feeding pigeons—and I got talking to her. I just wanted a meal. A place to sleep. I wasn’t feeling too well—I get these pains in my head. So she brought me back here and she cooked me this food—and Mathilde was all right. I liked Mathilde. She was lonely, and she started talking—about Maria. And I knew who Maria was, of course, because I’d read about her in the magazines, and so—slowly, I began to see. A week later, maybe less, maybe a day later, I don’t remember—but Mathilde told me how Maria had lost her baby son, way back, in New Orleans—and then, light, I mean, I saw. Everything fit. The dates fit. I’d been in New Orleans one time, for a while. My hair—it’s black, like hers, like that pig Lazare’s. Yeah—my hair, and my eyes… I look like my mother. Don’t I?”

“I can certainly see a resemblance,” Pascal said.

He kept his eyes on Star. His attention seemed intermittent now, his gaze wandering like his words. He’d look at Pascal, then Gini, then the gun, then he’d stare off into space. Pascal had the sensation that this conversation was familiar, that it had been repeated many times, and that mostly it was a conversation Star was having with himself.