Rat feels ridiculously deflated. It’s like having your fortune told: you know you shouldn’t, but once you’ve broken down and done it, you want to turn up trumps. “You sure there’s really nothing?” she asks.

“Let’s try something else,” he says. “How about your grandmother? Wasn’t she some famous actress or something? What was her name?”

“Celia Kidd. K-I-D-D,” spells Rat.

Jérôme taps in Rat’s grandmother’s name, and they watch the machine hit jackpot. Hundreds of thousands of entries, all in English. Swingingsixtieschicks. Fan sites. Biography, awards, filmography.

She’s even got her own entry in Wikipedia, on which Rat double-clicks. “Born in 1942 in Wiltshire … David Bailey picked her up on the street … Ken Russell gave Kidd a part in his …”

Jérôme switches seats with Rat, so she can flick through the material at her own speed. It’s like sorting through boxes of used clothes in the market.

Then she catches the name she’s looking for. “Son Gillem, by her first marriage to Canadian retail heir Malcolm McKane, started his artistic career working for …” Her heart’s knocking hard, the blood’s booming in her ears. She’s scared to keep on reading, lest it say he died in a car crash or something.

“Hey,” she says, “we were spelling it wrong. It isn’t Guillem, it’s Gillem. He’s an artist.”

“Oh, really? How do you spell that? Putain, what kind of name is that?” Jérôme taps the two names together.

One thousand eight hundred seventy-nine entries. This time the first name and last name are highlighted together. “Now we’re onto something.”

Rat scrolls.

Gillem McKane’s name appears in a list of artists showing in a gallery, at an art fair in Switzerland and another in Belgium. Someone’s offering a drawing of Gillem McKane’s on eBay. She tries to scroll up a photograph of the drawing, but it’s too small to see properly.

“I guess he must be a big deal,” Rat says, wondering. She’s never met a professional artist.

Jérôme’s looking over her shoulder. “Has he got a Web site?”

“I don’t think so.”

He takes the mouse from her, scrolls down. “Yes, he does. Here’s his Web site. gillemmckane.co.uk. That’s got to be him.” He clicks, clicks, double-clicks.

A pale green wave fills the screen. At the center of it is a little red hand, such as you see on Moroccan amulets, whose fingers waggle.

“Pretty,” says Rat.

“Do you want to try to get in touch with him? Try zapping ‘Contact.’”

“No. I’d just like to see what his work is like.”

Friday night. Vanessa has invited Cristel and Laurent and the Cabreras over to celebrate Rat’s birthday. Thierry, tragically, cannot make it: he’s been spending the week up in Brix.