"Yes. Perhaps seated like this. In uniform. And should it turn out all right, I'll certainly make a point of passing on your name to friends."

Gray laid down the glass in case it suddenly shattered in his hand. "I don't do commissioned work, colonel."

"Not even for two thousand francs?"

"I'm sorry."

"What about for Margaretha?"

"Margaretha?"

"Well, inasmuch as you still seem to want her, perhaps I might be persuaded to let you have her back, for a night . . . Now what do you say to my portrait?"

Although he must have said something, he would remember nothing except the man's face somehow filling the entire room. While out among the white forms of trees he also must have been ill, because in the morning he was still filled with the stench of it.

So perhaps this is how we should remember her? One more pretentious dancer in costume jewelry and a low sarong to reveal her hips and slender thighs ... her failing: frivolity, not a devious scheme . . . her passion: men, not money.

After yet another performance at the home of the Rothschilds, she was seen at the better salons trailing a scarf and too much perfume. And after her association with Colonel Rolland Michard of the French General Staff, she was always seen dining on the better terraces.

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

GRAY first saw the stranger from a distance: a blackened figure against the bricks, a shadow of a dangling umbrella. This had been on a Monday, the first week in October. It was a time of fine sunsets, and Gray often sketched the nightscape of roofs and chimney pots from his balcony. Then from nowhere came this stranger, watching for a quarter of an hour, and then withdrawing.

He saw the stranger next on a Wednesday, a damp morning filled with the scent of coal and drying streets. There, among the pools of rainwater the man was hardly more than a brief reflection: a homburg and dark flannel. And again Gray saw him, or thought he saw him, along the boulevard Saint-Germain—a solitary gentleman in an overcoat.

The stranger was like any apparition in a foreign city: a passing curiosity, a momentary thought. Meanwhile, life continued much as it had before. Gray painted through the better hours, chatted with friends in the slack time. His sketches indicated that by the fall of 1906 he was already obsessed with the expressionist spirit. The colors were muted, the details subservient to the mood, and he was obviously fascinated by, say, the subtle despair of a half-deserted street.

It was still quite early when the stranger finally emerged. Traces of a pre-dawn mist were still suspended above the drains. The milk wagons had not yet completed their rounds. Gray had gotten up into the cold, drunk another cup of foul coffee, then moved out with his sketchbook into the narrow slums along the rue de Bierre. As one more unknown artist, no one ever bothered him.