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apparently taken a sharp horizontal turn.
    I told Ravier I’d been to a party given by an old friend of mine, a fellow American called Alan Dove. Monsieur Dove dealt in art, I said. I gave his address. There’d been a disturbance at the party, the police had been called. Afterwards I’d come to the studio with a friend of Monsieur Dove’s, whose name was Helen Raven. She’d invited me back for a drink. There’d been two other Americans there, a painter called Rillington and a black man whose name I didn’t know. What was the relationship between these people? They were all friends of Monsieur Dove’s. But beyond that? I didn’t know. Did they live at the studio? I didn’t know that either. And had we been drinking or taking drugs? No, I’d had a glass or two of champagne at the party, that was all. But hadn’t I said the woman had invited me there for a drink? Yes, but we never got that far. Oh? Why was that? Because I got hit over the head first. And who had hit me over the head? The black man. But why would he have done a thing like that? I had no idea, maybe he didn’t like white people. Oh? And what had happened then? I had no idea, between getting hit over the head and waking up was a total blank. Or what had happened to the other people? No, not that either. Then would I take a good look at the studio and see if anything was different or missing?
    One of the bloodhounds had been taking notes in a small crabbed hand. The motion made me sick to my stomach again. I lifted my head. The Rillington was still on the easel, the mess on the work table. The rest of the place had that same unlived-in look. But then, on the other hand …
    I was staring into those huge walk-in cupboards that lined one wall. They were deep all right, with vertical built-in racks, but clean as a whistle except for some sheets of paper on the floor. Again, that unused look. But then it suddenly hit me that I was staring into them, and that the night before the sliding doors had been shut and locked.
    I got up, wobbly. They were deep all right, but the racks were empty. I noticed some kind of thermostatic deal that could have been a temperature control. Could have been used to store paintings , a smart-assed little voice said inside me. Could have been, I answered. (Kingsized paintings. Rillingtons? Blumenstocks?) I heard Ravier asking something behind me, but my stomach was already scrambling, and I felt an upward rush of dizzying heat, and the smart-assed voice opined: Having a little trouble working the pedals, honh, Cagey babe ?
    At which the little trouble became a big trouble and down I went again.
    It was getting to be a habit.
    Weak as my story sounded at the studio, it played even less well at the Quai des Orfèvres. It wasn’t my idea to go there. I mean, I’d already seen the gold-spiked gates of Paris justice from the outside, which was close enough for me. Besides, as far as anybody knew, no crime had been committed, had it? Other than the one perpetrated on yours truly? And yours truly was ready to be big about it and forget the charges.
    Then they had to go and switch audiences on me. Monsieur le Commissaire Ravier, it turned out, belonged to something called the Service de la Répression des Fraudes Artistiques, which means the guys who tap you on the shoulder when you start carrying the Mona Lisa out of the Louvre. But the Monsieur le Commissaire who took over at the Quai des Orfèvres was Police Judiciaire, which means plain old garden-variety crime cop. His name was Dedini, and he’d been at it for twenty-eight years. He didn’t seem very proud of it either. He had the belly that went along with the job, and bulldog jowls pinched by his shirt collar, and a pair of rimless specs stuck on a massive head, and a dusty desk squeezed between filing cabinets and metal closets, and every time he said he’d been at it for twenty-eight years, his tone added: