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of Saint-Ange’s extortion, or the friend or relative of a victim. Brother, lover, perhaps a husband.”
    “The bastard,” muttered Brasseur. “Well, we’ll see what the mousetrap brings in.” He glanced at his watch. “Nothing for you to do now, until we know more, and I have to write my report. Care to join me for supper afterward? Marie’s stewing a hare.”
    “What is it you want?”
    Brasseur grinned. “Why should I want anything?”
    “You always want something of me when you offer to give me dinner.”
    “Well then, I want you to lend me a hand with that hotel murder from last month.”
    “Man robbed and stabbed in his bed, probably by the whore he came in with?” Aristide shook his head. “Not interested.”
    “The whore he came in with, who was wearing men’s clothing. A bit unusual, don’t you think?”
    “Certainly, but I’m still not interested.”
    “Ravel—”
    “You know me better than that. I’m glad to accept what you pay me for providing information or evidence; but only because I find the interactions that lead to one human being killing another eternally fascinating. What do I care about a lecher who went looking for an anonymous whore and found a thief and a killer instead? I want justice for that girl, who died merely because she was in somebody’s way.”
    Brasseur turned to a coffee seller on the street and tossed her a sou. “You take care, Ravel,” he continued, turning back to him, a battered pewter cup in one hand. “You lose all sense of proportion if you let an affair like this bedevil you.”
    “I’m not—”
    “I’ve seen it happen before. It’s happened to me, once or twice. Don’t let it—and her—possess you. I warn you.”
    “Never you mind about me,” Aristide said. He searched his pockets for coins as the coffee seller hopefully thrust a second small cup toward him.
    “Saints, woman, what do you put in this, mud?” Brasseur exclaimed with a grimace. “Did you go to the Place de Grève yesterday?” he continued, more softly, to Aristide, as he sipped gingerly at the coffee.
    “It was just as abominable as I’d expected.”
    “How did Lesurques behave?”
    “Like a man resigned to what he hadn’t deserved, I thought … but what do I know?” Aristide drank his own tepid coffee in a few swallows and handed the cup back to the peddler. “There’s the essence of it; what do I know? I would dearly like to believe as confidently as the judges and jury did, that he was guilty as sin, but I can’t … and then I begin to wonder how many other innocent people the police—you and I included—may have mistakenly delivered over to the courts, and perhaps even to the scaffold.”
    Brasseur nodded. “I know; that’s the hell of our work. But all you can do, every day, is to learn the truth as best you can. You can’t go on brooding about something you had nothing to do with and can’t fix, or you’ll go mad. Forget it, and move on; find the killer who murdered that man and girl instead.”
    They parted outside the commissariat on Rue Traversine. Aristide stood a moment in the street, pulling his collar more snugly about him in the autumn chill as wagons and fiacres rattled past toward the busy artery of Rue Honoré and impatient pedestrians elbowed by him. Despite Brasseur’s words, he could not banish the scene at the Place de Grève from his memory. At last he set off toward the Île de la Cité. To learn whether or not the law had made a terrible error, he mused, who better to ask than one who had seen more than his share of men condemned to die?
    Many of the windows were dark by the time he arrived at the Palais de Justice. He bypassed the Grand Stair to the public halls and instead went straight to the far right-hand corner of the May Courtyard and the door in a small lower courtyard below ground level that led directly to the Conciergerie.
    “Where can I find Citizen Sanson?” he asked the surprised turnkey who answered the