From old bills he found in the glove compartment when he was cleaning up, Jack learned that the Volks had been purchased in Germany; it had driven around Europe and crossed the Atlantic on a freighter, then it had travelled along the east coast, from the Maritime provinces to southern Florida. In the bottom of the baggage compartment were some shells and coloured stones. The cupboard behind the seat had an odour of cheap perfume, which sometimes drifted into the vehicle at night when it was hot and humid. And here and there, on the walls or inside the doors of the plywood cupboard, were all sorts of graffiti; a mysterious inscription in German, under the sun visor on the driver’s side, read: Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins.

Probably on account of its age, the Volks had its peculiar habits. The seat belts, for example: once they were buckled it was very hard to unfasten them, and you had the impression that the Volks was reluctant to let people go. The same with the windshield wipers: they would stop when you turned the button but then all of a sudden, as if they were afraid they’d forgotten something, they would start up again and make one more pass before they stopped for good. But the foremost characteristic of the minibus was that it very much disliked being hurried. Until it was warmed up in the morning it preferred to travel at a reduced speed. It hated, under any circumstances, to be pushed beyond its cruising speed, which was one hundred kilometres an hour, and the impatient driver who exceeded that limit could expect all sorts of protests: the visor would suddenly drop and block his view, or the roof would come undone and threaten to lift off, or suspicious sounds would be heard from the motor or the gears.

The old Volks had travelled 195,000 kilometres in its lifetime, and it wanted respect for its age, its experience and its odd little ways.

THE SUN HAD ALREADY RISEN when Jack awoke with a start. He wanted to get there before the guard arrived, so without taking time to eat or shave he hurried off to the cemetery.

La Grande Sauterelle was sitting in the sun, her back against the white wall of the chapel.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked.

“Very well,” she said.

“You weren’t cold?”

“No. Just a little, about five in the morning, but then the sun warmed me up.”

“Where’s the kitten?”

“He went for a walk when I started my exercises . . . Aren’t you going to ask if anything special happened?”

“I didn’t want to . . . Did anything special happen?”

“Nothing happened at all,” she said rather sadly. “I mean, I feel exactly the same as before. There’s no difference. Total failure.”

“I’m terribly sorry.”

“Thank you . . . First of all there’s the business about Thayendanegea’s wife who . . . I mean, she has no name and I spent part of the night wondering why, and I asked myself all sorts of questions about the old chief — how he treated his wife and all that — and then I wondered why he liked war, why he fought against the French and against the Mohicans from the Hudson River Valley, and finally, when I ran out of questions, I realized I’d lost confidence in him. And that’s it.”