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said, of a certain minor reputation. Also a professor somewhere on the West Coast. But what interested him was the precise nature of her relationship with Al Dove.
    Somebody ought to have warned me, though, about large men with small laughs. A clever operator, Monsieur Bernard Lascault. He had help from his checkbook too, but when you’re handing out the gold stars, don’t forget that across from him was a stud whose palms went sweaty, just a little, at the mention of certain names, and the memory of old, unsettled scores not all the stews and partouzes and other sweet diversions of Paris, France, had quite managed to bury.
    Rusty, like I said.

FOUR
    The pain started right behind my eyeballs. It stayed there pretty much as long as I didn’t move, but I was being dragged up toward the light like a hooked fish, and the brighter it got, the more the pain scorched my nerves. The insides of my eyelids went from purple to orange to a searing white and the empty space between my ears started to smoke like dry ice. Somewhere near the light I wrenched and lurched, and there was a blinding, tearing sensation when the hook pulled loose, and after that I must have drifted off for a while, down toward the cool swooning depths where the ones that get away swap stories in their old age.
    Until it started getting lighter again.
    Somebody groaned. That was me. I was looking at sky. The sky was a bright and sickish gray, and only a thin, slanting shield separated me from it.
    I blinked. It hurt to blink. Something moved between me and the light, then away again. That hurt too, and I tried to lift my head up to tell whoever it was to cut out the movement.
    Instead I threw up.
    Whoever it was leaned over me, registering the event like an ichthyologist in an aquarium. Around in there, in no particular sequence, I realized that I had no sensation below my elbows or my knees, that the rest of me was sweating and shivering at once, also that the thin shield was the slanting skylight of the studio, only a lot closer than the last time I’d seen it.
    After a while the ichthyologist hunkered down near me. He was a little guy with a wizened turtle’s head, and he wrinkled his nose in distaste like he’d never seen one like me before. We stared at each other. He started asking me questions in a flat, functional language. After a while I realized it was French.
    He had small, impervious eyes. Patient eyes. He wanted to know how I’d gotten there. I wanted to tell him too, but the nausea kept getting in the way. It came and went in clammy gusts, hot and cold. Not only had I been thorred but trussed and shot full of puke and thrown up on the loggia for good measure. I was spread-eagled on a mattress and left to bake under the skylight and Bernard Lascault was telling me Paris wasn’t Chicago and Al Dove was paying his debts.
    The ichthyologist called out from the loggia railing. A pair of voices answered from below, and I heard heavy footsteps on the staircase. Then I was flipped over, the mattress with me, and a minute later I rolled free.
    I got to my knees, tried to stand up and fell on my face. They had to help me down the spiral stairs and hold me over the kitchen sink while I threw up again. Then they emptied me onto a couch and we started playing 20 Questions.
    They were cops all right, but there was something different about the ichthyologist, even though it took me a while to find out what. His name was Ravier and he was a commissaire, but it was pretty clear he didn’t like the sight of blood any more than he liked my story. For that matter, I didn’t much like his either. The Law, it seemed, had gotten an anonymous tip, complete with address. A couple of bloodhounds had been sent over to check it out. They’d found the studio wide open, and me. They’d called for help, and the help had called for help, until it got to Monsieur le Commissaire. Only somewhere on its way up the totem pole, the news had