“That’s a lot of high-priced talent for what sounds like a police matter,” the Scorpion said, scratching his stubbled beard.

Harris sighed and sipped his drink. Dark sweat stains were beginning to grow under his arms.

“The congressman is an important man,” Harris said pointedly.

“What did the Sûreté come up with?”

“Nobody at the party knew this Gerard character.”

“Naturally,” the Scorpion shrugged.

“The Mercedes was stolen, of course. It was found a few days later in St. Germain en Laye. No signs of a struggle. The Sûreté checked with the Duane and sure enough, the girl and two men boarded an Air France flight to Rome the night of the party. By then the trail wasn’t exactly red-hot, but they did come up with something. According to some unconfirmed reports from the SDECE, someone known as Gerard Aupin was rumored to be supplying choice white females out of Paris and Marseilles to the Middle East. He was supposed to be quite a lady-killer.”

“Literally, it seems,” the Scorpion remarked. Harris nodded.

“According to the Air France passenger list, the name of one of the two men with Kelly Ormont was Gerard Dupin.”

The two men looked at each other. The one-letter name change was the easiest kind of a passport fix. The Scorpion picked up the girl’s photo and studied it again. It was an action that was to become obsessive with him in the days to come. He felt the faint stirrings of something that he couldn’t put a name to, almost as if something was coming to life inside him. Not curiosity or attraction. Not a quest, with a sword in an anvil at the end of it. Something else. A kind of second chance. He thought of Tuyet and the child and that last night on the Saigon River, the night the world ended for all of them. He shook his head to clear away the memory, but there was no escaping the past for any of them. He remembered once, a long time ago, Sheikh Zaid teaching him to hunt with the falcon. Although the bird was trained and tethered, it began to wildly flap its powerful wings the moment its hood was removed. Zaid released the falcon and they watched it soar to a pinpoint in the empty blue sky of the desert.

“You see, little dhimmi,” Zaid had said. “Even the falcon born in a cage never forgets the sky.”

“What did the Italians come up with?” the Scorpion asked.

“A girl answering Kelly’s description boarded a flight to Bahrain, under the name Lucy Morton. The Alitalia flight hostess remembered her because she was so pretty and because she slept during the entire flight.”

“Drugs?”

“Who knows?” Harris said, raising his eyebrows.

“Was this Gerard with her?”

Harris shrugged. From somewhere the sweet smell of hashish came floating on the hot dead air.

“What about the girl?”