THE A RMENIANS LIVING ABOVE THE wig-maker and below Jack did not appear to have any intermediate settings between killing strangers and adopting them into the family. As Jack had come recommended by St.-George, and had further established his bona fides by bargaining shrewdly with Christopher over coffee, they could not very well kill him – so: Jack became the thirteenth of thirteen brothers. Albeit something of an estranged, idiot half-brother, who lived in the entresol, came and went at odd times and in odd ways, and did not speak the language. But this did not trouble the matriarch, Madame Esphahnian. Nothing troubled her, except for suggestions that anything was troubling her, or could theoretically trouble her – if you suggested that anything was troubling her, she would look taken aback, and remind you that she had borne and raised twelve sons – so what, again, was the difficulty? Christopher and the others had learned simply not to bother her. Jack, likewise, quickly got into the habit of entering and leaving his shack via roof-tops so that he would not have to say good-bye to Madame Esphahnian when he left, and hello when he returned. She spoke no English, of course, and just enough French to enable Jack to impregnate her mind with colorful, grotesque misunderstandings whenever he tried to say anything.