On his return to Paris he found that nothing much had really changed except that perhaps the memory of Zelle was a little less insistent. He followed her career through the newspapers now, and through gossip at those cafes where they had known her. It was said that her performance in Madrid had been an enormous success, and that from Madrid she had moved on to Monte Carlo, where she had appeared in LeRoi de Lahore with Geraldine Farrar and the incomparable Zambelli. A photograph later published in the local press showed her smiling from the deck of a yacht. He received a postcard from Nice with a photograph of gulls on a boardwalk and a barely legible message: Still wishing you the best! Anything for a friend.

Defined only by these blurred photographs, these stray notes and newspaper clippings, she no longer seemed quite real. Rather she had become what he suspected she must have always wanted to become—a dream without a focal point, everyman's woman. While the Spanish kept comparing her to Isadora Duncan, the Italians found her virtually incomparable. While some Russian duke was apparently asking for her hand in marriage, the prince of Monaco was rumored to have asked her to stay at his summer villa. Accounts of her past remained obscure. Accounts of her love life tended to vary depending on her mood, or the mood of the reporter.

And if only it could have ended here, between the harmless lies and the drab truth, then perhaps she would have been remembered as just another trivial entertainer from those riotous years before the Great War. But toward the end of January came the sort of incident that would ultimately shatter all the dreams, a signpost to the black year that no one would ever forget. . . .

It began on a minor note with an announcement in the newspaper concerning the liquidation of property from the estate of Rolland Michard. Presumably the auction had been authorized by convening solicitors in order to cover outstanding debts. Interested parties were encouraged to arrive early.

Gray supposed that it was curiosity as much as anything else that finally drove him to the auction house that day, an odd desire for one last look at the colonel's scattered life. He arrived late, well after the bidding had ended. The floor was nearly deserted. All that remained were a few odds and ends that no one seemed to want.

He entered cautiously, still not certain what he was looking for. Merchandise that had been sold lay in an adjoining warehouse, each item tagged for shipment. There were long columns of dusty light from a rank of windows above, mounds of furniture under dust-cloths, brass lamps, candlesticks, and porcelain figurines. Finally there was only one path forward, one clean line to that first crucial portrait of Zelle.