"One moment, if you please."

Four pairs of eyes. Not three.

The familiar brogue made my subsiding nausea flair up once again, threatening to turn me inside out.

I reached for my hat. I had not wrapped my head today, and the thought of treating His Very Magisterial Mayorness to the sight of my deformed dome was a warm one.

""Excuse me, Mr. Mayor," I said gleefully, raising an awkward salute to the huge dent in my skull. His eyes followed the motion and quickly looked away. I felt slightly better.

Upon hearing me speak, the woman suddenly tore out of the grasp of my two lieutenants, crossed the room in several large strides and, looking old Madeleine directly in the eye, hissed at him:

"Ah! so it is you who are 'Mister Mayor!'"

And she burst into hysterical laughter. Before I could do anything or say anything, she tilted her head up and did something unthinkable: hawked a massive loogie right into Madeleine's agrestic mug.

Two conflicting thoughts raced through my head: "Now you're really in for it, lassie" and "Atta girl, go get him!"

The government agent in me was appropriately horrified: a woman of the town (town! That's the word I was looking for earlier!) had spat into a magistrate's face (nice phthisic spit too, a solid gob of expectoration, probably swarming with little tubercles). Nasty bold girl! Tsk tsk.

But on the other hand, that mayor of ours...

I've seen enough dodgy characters over the five years that I've worked with the Parisian Security Brigade, but this Mayor somehow trumps them all in my head. Everything about him bothers me.

His piety bothers me. Maybe it's because of all those letters Francois has been sending me about how Delavau and his Jesuits have been botching things up in Paris, but lately I've developed a real grudge against church-goers. I mean the really pious ones, the ones that attend low mass every day at blue o'clock in the morning and beat their breasts to their confessors several times a week. Ones like this mayor of ours. That man spends so much time in church that he might as well get a cot installed for himself there. No doubt it was this fashionable piety that got him his cushy job and his Legion of Honor cross. I don't respect hypocrites, especially ones that use their so-called religion to angle for honors.

His indiscriminate openness and friendliness bother me. On this subject, I admit, I am more sensitive and suspicious than most. I've known a grand total of two people in my life that treated me with honesty and kindness because of their innate goodness of heart. The odds that he is the third are slim. Most likely he is just politicking. And while I realize that politicians are a species necessary to our civilized society, that understanding doesn't preclude me from distrusting their motives.

But it's the physical signs that bother me the most.

That sunburned mug of his, for instance. I know that suntan. Oh, people say it's just because he's been lived a laborer's life and passed his days outdoors, but those people haven't spent eighteen years hanging around the Toulon galleys. I have. I've seen this kind of suntan before. Pardieu, I've had this kind of suntan before! I still have it – even the Russian snows had not bleached my mug clean of it. This is prime cut southern seaside tan. It's a special sort of color – like having your face rubbed with the juice of walnut leaves.

And that right leg of his, the one he drags slightly. Well - used to drag when I first met him in 1820 - he doesn't do it nearly so much anymore. I've met dozens of men with that exact infirmity, all of them old hands at Toulon or Brest. It's the chains that do it. A fellow goes in for his five to ten years, tries to escape and gets four added on top of it and spends those four years in double chains as befits a "returned horse." By the time he is finally released, he's so used to dragging his right leg behind him that he keeps on doing so even when the chains are gone. And if you take a good close look at his calves and thighs, you'll mark the uneven muscle development as plain as daylight. (Isaac and I had figured this out during a case of identity fraud that took place back when émigrés were still returning en masse and there was a sea of confusion about who was who.)

A dozens of other trifles about his person scratch at my attention. He is unusualy strong; I've met very few people who could lift a horse and he does it with remarkably little effort. In and of itself, this wouldn't be so suspicious, but I have bad memories connected to a certain glum and nasty galley-slave who was so strong that he became famous for his ability to serve as a jackscrew. Our Madeleine is a crack shot – and that fellow I mentioned had been convicted of the offenses of breaking and entering, theft and poaching. And then there's the fact that our Madeleine appeared in Montrieul, I've been told, around 1815, which just happens to be the year when my unfriendly Jackscrew was released on parole, which he promptly broke.

That is really what I find most curious and most suspicious about our Mister Mayor. He has no past. There is literally not a scrap of paper to be found in the municipal archives documenting who he is, where he comes from, his pedigree or occupation – there is absolutely nothing. I was not present when he first arrived into town, but what I've gleaned about his entry does not set my mind at ease. The captain of the gendarmerie had subjected me on numerous occasions to the recount of how a stranger had rescued his (the captain's) two children from a blaze that had broken out at the town-hall. Who was that man? He didn't know. Where did he come from? He had no idea. But as can be expected after such an incident, he didn't care. Henceforth Madeleine (so the stranger called himself) resided in Montreuil with the air of an honest mechanic and citizen. Oh, I salute him for braving a fire to rescue children; it was a courageous action, no two ways about it. But papers are papers. In my experience, people who lack them usually lack them for shady reasons: for instance, the name in their previous documents no longer suited their circumstances, or the passport had been of a wrong color. The Security Brigade taught me to distrust people who are fond of changing their name. (Hell, if I were not me, I'd be terribly suspicious of my own name. What sort of a name is "Javert" anyway? A made-up one, a child can see that. But were I not me and were I to ask myself about my moniker, I'd be able to give myself – not my named self, my other self, the self that's we're taking to be someone other than me – an adequate explanation of its origins and a number of perfectly sound reasons why I made it my official appellation. And then I'd be satisfied. The other me, I mean. See, it's all perfectly simple.)

I know I'm probably going overboard in being suspicious, but suspicion is my bread. The wolf is fed by his legs, as the Russians say, and I would add that he is fed by his nose as well. And my nose had always been unhappy with Madeleine's odor.

So you can imagine my confusion and alarm when M. Madeleine, as calm as the open sea, wiped his face and said:

"Inspector Javert, set this woman at liberty."