“I’m not a mortal officer of the law, Mr. James. I’m a vampire. Speak in words I can understand.”

He gave a soft faintly ironic laugh. “The body was carefully chosen,” he said. “The former owner had no mind left. Oh, there was nothing organically wrong with him, absolutely nothing. As I told you, he’d been quite thoroughly tested. He’d become a great quiet laboratory animal of sorts. He never moved. Never spoke. His reason had been hopelessly shattered, no matter how the healthy cells of the brain continued to pop and crackle along, as they are wont to do. I accomplished the switch in stages. Jolting him out of his body was simple. It was luring him down into my old body and leaving him there which took the skill.”

“Where is your old body now?”

“Monsieur de Lioncourt, there is simply no way that the old soul will ever come knocking; that I guarantee.”

“I want to see a picture of your old body.”

“Whatever for?”

“Because it will tell me things about you, more perhaps than you yourself are telling me. I demand it. I won’t proceed without it.”

“You won’t?” He retained the polite smile. “What if I get up and leave here?”

“I’ll kill your splendid new body as soon as you try. No one in this café will even notice. They’ll think you’re drunk and that you’ve tumbled into my arms. I do that sort of thing all the time.”

He fell silent, but I could see that he was calculating fiercely, and then I realized how much he was savoring all this, that he had been all along. He was like a great actor, deeply immersed in the most challenging part of his career.

He smiled at me, with startling seductiveness, and then, carefully removing his right glove, he drew a little item out of his pocket and put it in my hand. An old photograph of a gaunt man with thick white wavy hair. I judged him to be perhaps fifty. He wore some sort of white uniform with a little black bow tie.

He was a very nice looking man, actually, much more delicate in appearance than David, but he had the same sort of British elegance about him, and his smile was not unpleasant. He was leaning on the railing of what might have been the deck of a ship. Yes, it was a ship.

“You knew I’d ask for this, didn’t you?”

“Sooner or later,” he said.

“When was this taken?”

“That’s of no importance. Why on earth do you want to know?” He betrayed just a little annoyance, but then he covered at once. “It was ten years ago,” he said with a slight sinking of the voice. “Will it do?”

“And so that makes you … what? Mid-sixties, perhaps?”

“I’ll settle for that,” he said with a very broad and intimate smile. “How did you learn all this? Why haven’t others perfected this trick?”

He looked me up and down and a little coldly, and I thought his composure might snap. Then he retreated into his polite manner again. “Many people have done it,” he said, his voice assuming a tone of special confidence. “Your friend David Talbot could have told you that. He didn’t want to. He lies, like all those wizards in the Talamasca. They’re religious. They think they can control people; they use their knowledge for control.”