She sits herself down in a chair.

It is not the gruesome act of Downing having inserted her husband’s shellacked eyeballs into the eye sockets of a gigantic stuffed aardvark that bothers Rebecca Ostlet; it is her certainty that the ghost of her husband is looking for them, is still looking for them, that it could be nearby, which is why she glances nervously out the shopwindow, whispers faintly for the Brontës to come to her side, but the Brontës whine louder, scratching at the door leading upstairs to Downing’s flat, and Rebecca suddenly struggles to breathe in the cuirass.

Potter and Skinner both look to the German man, malingering in the corner. “Get water,” they say.

The German points at the aardvark. He knows all about them, he says, and has been to the south of Africa several times. He is about to go there again. Because Germany has a shot at a trade surplus. France now owns Algeria. Britain’s at the Cape. Even Portugal’s in Angola, Mozambique—but aardvarks, he says, do not have blue eyes, and points again. “Blaue Augen,” he says, perversely delighted, this aardvark has blue eyes, and it’s the same delighted look that he, thirty-six-year-old Heinrich Göring, will in three years give nineteen-year-old Franziska Tiefenbrunn, the young Bavarian peasant with astonishing bright blue eyes that, when she looks at him in the moronic way she does, will remind him of the aardvark which is about to come into his possession; “Fanny” Tiefenbrunn, soon to become Fanny Göring, will, halfway into their marriage, bear a fourth child, Hermann, who will inherit, to his father’s equal delight, the same bright blue eyes of his mother.

“Are you sure you’re all right,” Walter Potter says to Rebecca, and at that moment the Brontës, united in their cause, at long last manage to force open the door.

In a flying train of pink tongues, of rust-colored fur, the panting dogs tear up the staircase into Downing’s flat. The staircase is narrow, the dogs fight into a line, making headlong for Downing’s bedroom to reunite with their master, Sir Richard Ostlet, who is, as exactly no one could have guessed, lying bare-assed and prostrate upon a canopied bed decorated only with lush velvet drapes the color of aubergine.

* * *

Murphy & Milliken’s Funeral Home is a flat, one-story brick building that looks like something that survived the Eighties, but barely. It gets a 1.2 rating on Yelp. There is a sad little roundabout in front of the joint, a place for the Bereaved to pull up fancily in their cars, and the roof is gray, broad, its overhang sort of too-big, trying lamely to imitate the roof of a cozy thatched hut, and it’s all reminiscent of those motels you’ve seen along rural highways, like it’s the sort of place that might be a place in the outskirts of Roanoke, Lynchburg, but here, in Alexandria, the building has been forgotten, overshadowed by its more industrious neighbors, which are two seven-story parking garages, a long-abandoned stripe of the Metro, and a Crate & Barrel outlet that takes up most of the acreage and glows whitely behind the funeral parlor like some kind of alien spacecraft.