After the old man had jerked his eyes open (the bus having braked hard at Banquier station), leapt up with a slight delay, and rushed toward the exit, Vito watched hint cross the road toward the community clinic, the unloved-creatureskin shoulder bag hanging from his arm. Then he made the other man's satchel hop onto his knees, patting its secular leather all the way to Place d'Italie, where he dove into the metro. Returning home from there was long, but on a direct line.

Back in his studio in the Laumière neighborhood, Vito Piranese studied the satchel's contents. Typed, almond-green onionskin sheets indicated the first and last names (Chopin, Franck Eric Georges), address (Avenue des Ternes), and daily schedule of the subject he was to watch for one solid week, Piranese's task being to note any departure from this schedule. Two photos showed a relatively thin man with light-colored hair, dressed in a light colored suit, and apparently a bit younger than Piranese; one color photo specified yellow for the hair and pale yellow for the suit. One saw the aforementioned Franck Chopin at the wheel of a coupe or a shopping cart, against a backdrop of Baie des Anges or supermarket. Vito looked at these photos with envy, torment, and a sense of his unhappiness; but the following afternoon he was sitting on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes, not far from the main gate, waiting for the subject to show.

Piranese was a bit chilly, his body dry, his profile sharp. His black hair shone like a wig and his black eyes as if with lever. Sitting on his coccyx, his leg jutting stiffly from his torso, he glanced suspiciously at the sky, squeezing his fists into the pockets of a jacket that would be out of season for yet a few more weeks.

Before the one he was now practicing on this bench, Vito Piranese had held other professions: basketball coach up until his accident, then broker in nonferrous metals, traveling salesman before Martine's departure, and finally photograph retoucher. None of these had ever worked out except for one, the retoucher, when he'd done a favor for some discreet important persons: they had taken an interest in him. He'd had two interviews. Now, thanks to these persons whom he hadn't seen since, Vito regularly watched the people he was asked to watch, following the same protocol established once and for all: the interminable phone rings and the three numbers, the bus, the swapping of bags, never the same bus, always the same bags since the time of Mata Hari. Deriving from this employment just enough to live on, with an occasional movie, newspaper, or weekly television series into the bargain, Vito spent the rest of his life trying to forget Martine.

Of course, there had been the chauffeur's job that the important persons had vaguely promised him, but he envisioned it without much hope, given his leg. And thus without much compassion he pondered the sky, glancing briefly in other directions: to his right, a statue by Emmanuel Frémiet represented a bear in the process of shredding an Iron Age man; behind him, his car, a small, purple Ford automatic, huddled between two enormous royal blue Belgian double-decker tour buses: to his left, overhanging the doorway to the Natural History museum decorated with beasts and bushes, lobsters and lizards, a stone eagle gazed steadily at the Gare d'Austerlitz.

When the museum door opened to reveal the pale yellow suit, Vito rose to precede the man contained therein toward the park exit. Leaving his laboratory, Chopin would pass by the Barbedienne bronze that depicted, in infinite repetition, Emmanuel Frémiet sculpting the homicidal bear, then would head toward his car-a pale, German, trimly designed Karmann Ghia coupe. From inside the compact Ford, Vito photographed Chopin entering his coupe; then he maneuvered into departure position.

The Karmann Ghia followed the river's left bank westward, tailed by the purple Ford, whose radio picked up only two or three stations on medium waves. While trying to tune it, Vito methodically recited Chopin's supposed schedule. He was calm and concentrated, although at a red light, as Chopin was getting ready to cross the Alma bridge, a song that Martine had liked suddenly brought tears to Vito's eyes, and on the other bank it was still raining.