An open razor; a man dressed so well he couldn't be recognized.
  'I was terrified.'
  'Did he hurt you?' She shook her head. 'I screamed and he ran away.' 'Didn't say 
anything to you?' 'No.'
  'Maybe a friend of Phillipe's?' 'I know Phillipe's friends.' 'Then of the girl. A 
brother.' 'Perhaps. But -''What?'
  'There was something odd about him. He smelt of perfume, stank of it, and he walked 
with such mincing little steps, even though he was huge.'
  Lewis put his arm around her.
  'Whoever it was, you scared them off. You just mustn't go back there. If we have to 
fetch clothes for Phillipe, I'll gladly go.'
  'Thank you. I feel a fool: he may have just stumbled in. Come to look at the 
murder-chamber. People do that, don't they? Out of some morbid fascination. . .'
  'Tomorrow I'll speak to the Weasel.'
  'Weasel?'
  'Inspector Marais. Have him search the place.'
  'Did you see Phillipe?'
  'Yes.'
  'Is he well?'
  Lewis said nothing for a long moment.
  'He wants to die, Catherine. He's given up fighting already, before he goes to trial.'
  'But he didn't do anything.'
  'We can't prove that.'
  'You're always boasting about your ancestors. Your blessed Dupin. You prove it. . .'
  'Where do I start?'
  'Speak to some of his friends, Lewis. Please. Maybe the woman had enemies.'
  Jacques Solal stared at Lewis through his round-bellied spectacles, his irises huge and 
distorted through the glass. He was the worse for too much cognac.
  'She hadn't got any enemies,' he said, 'not her. Oh maybe a few women jealous of her 
beauty. . .'
  Lewis toyed with the wrapped cubes of sugar that had come with his coffee. Solal was as 
uninformative as he was drunk; but unlikely as it seemed Catherine had described the runt 
across the table as Phillipe's closest friend.
  'Do you think Phillipe murdered her?'
  Solal pursed his lips.
  'Who knows?'
  'What's your instinct?'
  'Ah; he was my friend. If I knew who had killed her I would say so.'
  It seemed to be the truth. Maybe the little man was simply drowning his sorrows in 
cognac.
  'He was a gentlemen,' Solal said, his eyes drifting towards the street. Through the 
steamed glass of the Brasserie window brave Parisians were struggling through the fury of 
another blizzard, vainly attempting to keep their dignity and their posture in the teeth 
of a gale.
  'A gentleman,' he said again.
  'And the girl?'
  'She was beautiful, and he was in love with her. She had other admirers, of course. A 
woman like her -'
  'Jealous admirers?'
  'Who knows?'
  Again: who knows? The inquiry hung on the air like a shrug. Who knows? Who knows? Lewis 
began to understand the Inspector's passion for truth. For the first time in ten years 
perhaps a goal appeared in his life; an ambition to shoot this indifferent 'who knows?' 
out of the air. To discover what had happened in that room on the Rue des Martyrs. Not an 
approximation, not a fictionalized account, but the truth, the absolute, unquestionable 
truth.
  'Do you remember if there were any particular men who fancied her?' he asked.
  Solal grinned. He only had two teeth in his lower jaw.
  'Oh yes. There was one.'
  'Who?'
  'I never knew his name. A big man: I saw him outside the house three or four times. 
Though to smell him you'd have thought -'
  He made an unmistakable face that implied he thought the man was homosexual. The arched 
eyebrows and the pursed lips made him look doubly ridiculous behind the thick spectacles.
  'He smelt?'
  'Oh yes.'
  'Of what?'
  'Perfume, Lewis. Perfume.'
  Somewhere in Paris there was a man who had known the girl Phillipe loved. Jealous rage 
had overcome him. In a fit of uncontrollable anger he had broken into Phillipe's 
apartment and slaughtered the girl. It was as clear as that.
  Somewhere in Paris.
  'Another cognac?'
  Solal shook his head.
  'Already I'm sick,' he said.
  Lewis called the waiter across, and as he did so his eye alighted on a cluster of 
newspaper clippings pinned behind the bar.
  Solal followed his gaze.
  'Phillipe: he liked the pictures,' he said.
  Lewis stood up.
  'He came here, sometimes, to see them.'
  The cuttings were old, stained and fading. Some were presumably of purely local 
interest. Accounts of a fireball seen in a nearby street. Another about a boy of two 
burned to death in his cot. One concerned an escaped puma; one, an unpublished manuscript 
by Rimbaud; a third (accompanied by a photograph) detailed casualties in a plane crash at 
Orleans airport. But there were other cuttings too; some far older than others. 
Atrocities, bizarre murders, ritual rapes, an advertisement for 'Fantomas', another for 
Cocteau's 'La Belle et La Bete'. And almost buried under this embarrassment of 
bizarreries, was a sepia photograph so absurd it could have come from the hand of Max 
Ernst. A half-ring of well-dressed gentlemen, many sporting the thick moustaches popular 
in the eighteen-nineties, were grouped around the vast, bleeding bulk of an ape, which 
was suspended by its feet from a lamppost. The faces in the picture bore expressions of 
mute pride; of absolute authority over the dead beast, which Lewis clearly recognized as 
a gorilla. Its inverted head had an almost noble tilt in death. Its brow was deep and 
furrowed, its jaw, though shattered by a fearsome wound, was thinly bearded like that of 
a patrician, and its eyes, rolled back in its head, seemed full of concern for this 
merciless world. They reminded Lewis, those rolling eyes, of the Weasel in his hole, 
tapping his chest.
  
  'Le coeur humain.'