6

When I got back and sat down, I couldn’t tell if the man in the brown suit was in the room. It was completely silent; I couldn’t even hear my own breathing. His voice came out of nowhere. “Well, we’ve established a few useful things, but there remain a few questions.”

“I’m ready.”

It was a long list, and they came at me from what seemed like every direction. He refused to stand in one spot. Maybe he thought it would disorient me; maybe he was agitated and felt the need to pace. Abruptly, he stopped. “At this point, Inspector, you should have something to eat, while I do some more checking.”

I was exhausted and still in pain. Food was not on my mind. Prague hadn’t come up again, not directly, not implicitly, not even in an echo or a reflection. It had seemingly dropped down a well, but I knew it was not going to be erased from that chart. Something like that is never erased. They would keep it in my file until I had been dead so long that there was no one who would remember my face.

“Since we’re colleagues now”-I turned in the direction of his voice-“perhaps I could go to sleep. I mean, natural sleep, blissful, restful, restoring, lying down somewhere. You know, knitting the raveled sleeve.”

“Good, Shakespeare. Good. And why not? Sleep will do you good. Consider this your room, and all that it contains at your disposal.” The room, as far as I could tell, was bare except for the lamp and the chair I sat on. “The concrete is not so comfortable; we’ll have to look for a pad. I know we have blankets, somewhere.” He was suddenly fussy, the solicitous innkeeper, and judging from the way his voice moved, he had resumed pacing slowly back and forth in front of me. “We don’t usually entertain guests overnight, you see.” From out of the shadows to my left, the man in the brown suit walked toward me with his arm extended. First his hand, then all of him was in the light. He was tall, a little stooped; even in the lamplight, he had a sallow face. Brown was not a good color for him. We shook hands; he smiled in an odd way, then limped toward the door. Before he reached it, he turned. “Ah, one thing. What do you know about the clerks at the Gold Star Bank?”

“Nothing.” If he thought I would let down my guard when I saw him about to leave, he was mistaken. Even as tired as I was, my guard would never get that far down.

“You were following one of them,” he said. It was incredible to me, how much detail he had at his fingertips.

“Yes, but I lost her.”

“Strange. An experienced person like yourself, you lost her? Pity.” He put his hands in his pockets and walked outside. I heard the ash club tap on the floor behind me, then a footstep; the door in the back of the room opened, and I was alone.

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