Such a simple object, a black lacquered chair, Oriental design, vaguely Chinese, mostly functional, obviously expensive.

Dora rose, her legs seeming to unfold beneath her. She wore a thin, long gown of burgundy silk, just a simple dress, the artificial warmth surrounding her obviously and keeping her safe. Her arms were bare and white. Her face was filled with worry, her cap of shiny black hair making two points on either side of her face, mid-cheek, the fashionable bob of eighty years ago and of today. Her eyes were the owl eyes, and full of love.

"What happened, Lestat?" she said. "Oh, please, please tell us."

"Where is the other eye?" asked Armand. It was just the sort of question he would ask. He had not risen to his feet. David, the Englishman, had risen, simply because Dora had risen, but Armand sat there looking up at me, asking the direct question.

"What happened to it? Do you still have it?"

I looked at Dora. "They could have saved that eye," I said, quoting her story of Uncle Mickey and the gangsters and the eye, "if only those gangsters hadn't stepped on it!"

"What are you saying?" she said.

"I don't know if they stepped on my eye," I said, irritated by the tremour in my voice.

The drama of my voice. "They weren't gangsters, they were ghosts, and I fled, and I left my eye. It was my only chance. I left it on the step. Maybe they smashed it flat, or smeared it like a blob of grease, I don't know. Was Uncle Mickey buried with his glass eye?"

"Yes, I think so," Dora said in a daze. "No one ever told me."

I could sense the other two scanning her, Armand scanning me, their picking up the images of Uncle Mickey, kicked half to death in Corona's Bar on Magazine Street, and the gangster with the pointed shoe squashing Uncle Mickey's eye.

Dora gasped.

"What happened to you?"

"You've moved Roger's things?" I asked. "Almost all of them?"

"Yes, they're in the chapel at St. Elizabeth's, safe," Dora said. "St. Elizabeth's." That was the name of the orphanage in its lifetime. I had never heard her say it before. "No one will even think to look for hem there. The press doesn't care about me anymore.

His enemies circle his corporate connections like vultures; they zero in on his bank accounts and floating bank drafts, and safe-deposit boxes, murdering for this or that key. Among his intimates, his daughter has been declared incidental, unimportant, ruined. No matter."

"Thank God for that," I said. "Did you tell them he was dead? Will it all end soon, his story, and what part you have to play in it?"

"They found his head," said Armand quietly.

In a muted voice he explained. Dogs had dragged the head from a heap of garbage, and were fighting over it beneath a bridge. For an hour, an old man watched, warming himself by a fire, and then gradually he realized it was a human head that the dogs were fighting over and gnawing at, and they brought the head to the proper authorities, and through the genetic testing of his hair and skin discovered that it was Roger. Dental plates didn't help. Roger's teeth had been perfect. All that remained was for Dora to identify it.