“How do you know about them?”

“I was a member of their order,” he said, his eyes brightening playfully, as he smiled again. “They kicked me out of it. They accused me of using my powers for gain. What else is there, Monsieur de Lioncourt? What do you use your powers for, if not for gain?”

So, Louis had been right. I didn’t speak. I tried to scan him but it was useless. Instead, I received a strong sense of his physical presence, of the heat emanating from him, of the hot fount of his blood. Succulent, that was the word for this body, no matter what one thought of his soul. I disliked the feeling because it made me want to kill him now.

“I found out about you through the Talamasca,” he said, assuming the same confidential tone as before. “Of course I was familiar with your little fictions. I read all that sort of thing. That’s why I used those short stories to communicate with you. But it was in the archives of the Talamasca that I discovered that your fictions weren’t fictions at all.”

I was silently enraged that Louis had figured it right.

“All right,” I said. “I understand all this about the divided brain and the divided soul, but what if you don’t want to give my body back to me after we’ve made this little switch, and I’m not strong enough to reclaim it; what’s to keep you from making off with my body for good?”

He was quite still for a moment, and then said with slow measured words: “A very large bribe.”

“Ah.”

“Ten million dollars in a bank account waiting for me when I repossess this body.” He reached into his coat pocket again and drew out a small plastic card with a thumbnail picture of his new face on it. There was also a clear fingerprint, and his name, Raglan James, and a Washington address.

“You can arrange it, surely. A fortune that can only be claimed by the man with this face and this fingerprint? You don’t think I’d forfeit a fortune of that size, do you? Besides, I don’t want your body forever. You don’t even want it forever, do you? You’ve been far too eloquent on the subject of your agonies, your angst, your extended and noisy descent into hell, etcetera. No. I only want your body for a little while. There are many bodies out there, waiting for me to take possession of them, many kinds of adventure.”

I studied the little card.

“Ten million,” I said. “That’s quite a price.”

“It’s nothing to you and you know it. You have billions squirreled away in international banks under all your colorful aliases. A creature with your formidable powers can acquire all the riches of the world. It’s only the tawdry vampires of second-rate motion pictures who tramp through eternity living hand to mouth, as we both know.”

He blotted his lips fastidiously with a linen handkerchief, then drank a gulp of his coffee.