She looked at the old man when she spoke. "It was at my home in Los Angeles, most of you know the place. I went outside to watch the fire brigades pass. I was closing the door behind me on the way back in when I heard the gunshot. I knew the shot was close but dismissed it along with all the other shots I'd heard in recent years. I wasn't concerned until my servant alerted me to a loud knocking on the basement door. Gun in hand, I went down to investigate. Evan Michaels turned out to be the source of the noise. He had been shot in the foot by the police while fleeing the scene of a fire." Poppy stopped to take a drink of water and I noticed the rotund man I'd met at the front door the night before perk up and lean forward in his seat in the gallery.

"I was about to fire a shot next to his head to give him a good scare when he first tipped me off. I remember he had the most peculiar reaction when I leveled the gun at him. He became angry, no furious is a better word. He shouted over and over at me to kill him. He had this crazed look in his eye that was unnerving. 'Kill me, Kill me,' he said. 'I'll probably just come back again anyway.' Those were his exact words. That was my first clue obviously.

"I took him in, attended his wound and encouraged him to stay in the hope I could pursue my hunch."

"How precisely did you do that?"

"The second clue came the same night," she said reaching under her robe. She produced a pack of cigarettes and held them out toward Diltz, who came over and handed them to the Egyptian. "Can you read the Turkish on that?" she asked.

He tilted his narrow head back so that the light from the torch on the wall behind him illuminated the pack. "The Pride of the Turks. Why?"

"It used to say 'Centuries of Flavor'. Evan knew that. The slogan changed in 1960. I called the company the following day and checked. He knew that. I found out later because he smoked those same cigarettes while living in exile in Istanbul after the Second World War. Two days later I took him to my funerary vault in Los Angeles and told him about myself. More accurately, he figured it out when he saw the concurrent dates on the monuments. That was the same day I called Diltz."

"What was his reaction when he figured it out?" the Egyptian asked as though I were an inanimate piece of furniture.

"He was quite visibly shaken. He sat down and was motionless for some time. After he came around he was very inquisitive about me and about this," she said, looking around the grotto.

"Is it your opinion that the candidate to your right is a palingenesist?"