“No.” She pressed her lips to his face. “No, Pascal—please, he’ll kill you. He wants to kill you first. We should wait—keep him talking.”

“We have to try. You can see how unstable he is. The police will try to tire him, wind him down. We don’t have time for that…”

He stopped as Star laughed, listened, then began speaking again. Pascal looked down at Gini’s blanched face. How long did they have? Ten minutes, fifteen?

“Pascal.” Her hand closed over his. “Why didn’t you run? Out in the street, with Marianne. You had time—you could have gotten away—oh, Christ…”

She stopped. She already knew the answer in any case, and had she doubted it, she could read it in the tenderness that flooded his face.

“The question didn’t arise,” he said simply; she heard his voice catch. “Gini—nothing is altered. I love you so much. You know that.” As he said this, he bent and kissed her mouth, turning her away so she was shielded from Star’s view. Her mouth opened under his, and her eyes closed. He could feel the love and the desperation to communicate love in her embrace.

He kissed her deeply, thinking it might be the last time he would ever do this. He listened to the language of her response. He looked down and could read the alteration, the new resolve in her face.

Star’s voice rose; he laughed again. Pascal drew back a little; he said, against her throat, his words only just audible to her: “The pink bedroom, Gini. In there. I want him in the room that upsets him the most. The room with the least light.”

In the communications van, Rowland adjusted his headphones. The police psychologist, who had introduced himself to Star by his first name only, Lucien, had been talking to him now for almost five minutes. Rowland could see exactly what the man was doing—trying to calm and extract information at the same time, trying to delay, trying, more specifically, to establish a relationship of dependency and trust. It was Rowland’s impression—and the psychologist’s, he suspected—that Star knew precisely why he was doing this.

Star was being too cooperative, Rowland thought—but his cooperative replies—they had both switched from French to English—were being made in an increasingly insolent, mocking tone of voice.

“Food?” Star said now, and laughed. “Oh, hey—yes. I mean food would be really good. There’s a larder here, and a fridge, and they’re both stuffed with food, so I guess, if I wanted, I could stay on here for days—even weeks. I mean, I wouldn’t starve, right? And neither would Gini or Pascal. We’d share. But when you say food, I guess you have something pretty special in mind, yes? You know what I really like? Langoustines. There’s a restaurant in St. Germain, L’Age d’Or, it’s called—it does langoustines this really special way. Now, if you got some of those sent in… Not immediately. Maybe in an hour. If you called me back in an hour. No—half an hour. No—twenty minutes. No, let’s take a rain check on it, okay?”