Ithilmir: Patience, young Padawan. All that needs be explained will be explained. :)

Javert twirled the cellophane sandwich baggie in his long fingers. His face bore an expression of vague disgust, as if the bag contained a squished scorpion instead of a business card with the blue Citibank logo.

"'There can be only One,'" he read out loud in accented English. "Predictable," he added, dropping the baggie onto the center of the table and spearing more ravioli with his fork. "Make me happy - tell me you didn't touch it with your bare hands."

"Of course I didn't. He left this in my mailbox two days after he hung the bunch of dead rats up on the kitchen light fixture. Since then I've been well-stocked with surgical gloves."

"Excellent," said Javert and shoveled more food into his mouth.

"I wonder why he chose a business card to write the message on. It has his name on it, after all."

"What makes you think it's his card?" asked Javert with interest.

"Well... Oh... Okay, I guess it doesn't have to be."

"Of course it doesn't have to be. Ten to one it was lifted off a teller's desk. They have whole stacks of them available for customers."

"So he banks with Citibank." Valjean finished the dregs of his second Radler. "Well, I guess that's something."

"You keep saying 'he', 'he'. Are you sure that it's a man following you?"

"I somehow can't picture a woman leaving decapitated animals in my house," shuddered Valjean. "It's just… too vile."

Javert flicked a breadcrumb at him.

"How many times must I tell you? Don't ever underestimate the potential vileness of women. So you don't know it's a man?"

"I think I do… I think I've seen him, but I could easily be mistaken. Two weeks ago, the first time I felt him, I was sitting on a balcony in Marseilles reading, and I saw someone dart into a shop across the street. A tallish fellow with blond hair, but obviously dyed blond, you know? - dark in the middle and bright yellow at the tips. And I think I saw him again in Zurich on the day of my arrival. I was on a moving walkway, and I turned around because I thought someone had called my name. They were calling someone else, but it appeared to me that I saw him again. He was walking away from a bookshop and flipping through a magazine.

"It 'appeared' to him…" Grumbled Javert. "When things begin appearing, it's best to cross oneself." He scratched at the back of his head with two fingers. "And then after one crosses oneself, even more things might appear."

"I could've been mistaken," easily conceded Valjean.

"He could've been mistaken," echoed Javert again in a murmur. Then suddenly, he set his stein hard on the table:

"Don't be stupid with me, Valjean! If there's one thing I hate, it's when you are pretending to be stupid! I understand hair, but can you not tell one Presence from another? Was it or was it not the same man?"

"I don't know. Look, the first time I saw him, there was a Presence. The second time I saw him, there wasn't! I guess I must've been too far away from him. It looked like the same man, but at that distance, I have only hunches for evidence. The way he walked, the way he held his arms close to his body, the length of his strides… The hair, obviously. And the rest of the times, he didn't make himself visible -just felt."

"Was the Presence you felt just now on the beach the one from Marseille or not?"

"Yes, it definitely was. Of that I am certain."

"Did you two ever make eye contact?"

"No. He didn't seem to take any note of me. He just walked into the shop and began walking around. I was surprised: I can't help jumping every time I feel a Presence, but he seemed perfectly unperturbed. I thought that perhaps it wasn't him, so I sat there for another couple of minutes trying to read, but I couldn't concentrate with the Presence buzzing in my skull like that. I went back inside and immediately stopped feeling it."

Javert knit his brows, then pulled a short, thin chrome stick out of one of the small cylindrical pockets under his breast-bone – the ones that Valjean thought might have been designed with some sort of ammunition in mind. The stick telescoped open into an even thinner pen. A slightly wider pocket yielded a very narrow leather-bound notebook.

"You said 'distance'," he said, pushing the empty plate in front of him to the side. "How far would you estimate the balcony on which you stood from the shop door?"

"I don't know… Not very far, but not very close either. A four-lane two way street, with a green divider in between. Wide sidewalks with bus stops on both sides. Proper bus stops, with glass booths and everything."

Javert paused with the tip of his silver space pen hovering above the delicately lined paper.

"That's… let's see, that's four into seven, plus the divider makes thirty or so, plus the sidewalks, thirty-four meters. That sound about right?"

"I suppose so."

"Do not suppose." Javert sounded irritated. "Leave supposing to the amateurs. Are you an architect or not? Answer precisely. Does this or does this not represent the apparent width of the street hereby discussed as measured from the door of a house on side A to that of the directly opposing house on side B?"

"Yes. Perhaps even a bit more than that – the divider was pretty wide."

"Let's say, thirty-five meters, then." Javert began constructing and labeling various geometric figures. "How far apart would your balcony and the shop door have been if they'd been on the same street?"

"Almost none - we were directly opposite each other."

"And the height of your balcony?"

"Third story, so...about ten meters"

"Ah hah." Javert punished the delicately lined page with more inky gashes. "So the direct horizontal distance between you would have been, thirty-five in the square plus one hundred, to the one-half power… Let's see, under root one thousand three hundred and twenty-five…" Javert scribbled furiously for several seconds, then pronounced: "Well, it doesn't matter, since we need the square anyway: thirteen twenty five to the one-half gives us just a bit over thirty-six." He bit the end of his pen, then released it and repeated: "Ah hah."

"What?"

Javert took a breath, then slowly exhaled a low-pitched question:

"Valjean, how many heads have you taken in your life?"

"How many… heads…? What on Earth do you mean?"

Javert sighed and leaned in closer, clutching the pen to his breast as if he were afraid of someone running up and snatching it away:

"You know perfectly well what I mean. How many immortals have you decapitated in your life? How many Quickenings have you absorbed?"

Valjean's eyelids twitched.

"None, of course. I don't believe in all that nonsense, and well you know it."

"I do know it. I was just checking. So, no heads?"

"None."

"That's interesting..."

Javert leaned back again, collapsed his nifty writing implement between his thumb and forefinger and re-introduced it gingerly into one of the many cylindrical compartments above his waist.

"What?"

"Did you know that I had to take a head several months ago?"

Valjean's face fell.

"My God... Who was it?"

"I have no idea. Some thug accosted me in an alley in Bombay with the same "There-can-be-only-One" nonsense - which, incidentally, sounds positively silly in Bhindi. In the end, I simply couldn't risk having him follow me around."

"So you killed him?"

"What choice did I have? He was swinging a razor-sharp blade at me."

"You could've just killed him and left him to revive somewhere."

"Why? So that he could go after someone else? Someone less capable of defending themselves? Or stalk me around the city for the whole time I'm there? No, Valjean, no. He knew what he was asking for - he challenged me - he lost. All perfectly fair, according to the rules of the Game."

"I thought you didn't believe in the Game."

Javert leaned forward once more; an ugly grimace twisted his face.

"Oh yeah? Well, guess what, I don't believe in Allah either, and yet for some reason that didn't stop two terrorist shitheads from blowing up one of my London colleagues last July and crippling two others. The world is bloody unfair like that."

"So what do I do?" said Valjean quietly. "I won't kill him. That's out of the question."

"I think you've already made your decision, Valjean," said Javert and stood up, dropping a crisp bill on the table and taking his jacket off the back of the wooden bench. "You called me."