The File on H.

2

DULL BAXHAJA, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS “THE EAVES,’ was the best informer on the books at N-- and had therefore been entrusted with the task of keeping an eye on the arrival and the subsequent words and deeds of the two foreigners. He wrote up his report for the governor on Saturday evening, that is to say on the day of their arrival After standing about waiting for four hours at the travel agency opposite the bus station, on the lookout for suspicious characters waiting to rendezvous with the foreigners, he wrote, he had noticed nobody who tallied even remotely with such a target. In fact, his meticulous observation of the site had revealed that apart from the usual porters, there were in all nine people waiting for the bus from the capital, which came this far only once a week, namely on Saturdays, and that all nine had indeed greeted relatives immediately on their arrival via the aforementioned bus service, their shows of appropriate emotions demonstrating that their wait at the station had been fully justified. Save for the Gypsy Haxhi Gaba, of whom the governor had perhaps heard speak but whom the author of the present report failed to mention previously since it was a well-known fact that the aforementioned waited regularly for the Saturday bus in the hope of finding among the travelers some person who might be inclined to slip him a few coins in return for his customary trick — “Your Honor will pardon me the expression “ — namely the performance of an impressively long sequence of farts. As the honorable governor presumably knew, the above individual had been investigated several times for bringing the town into intolerable disrepute, etc., etc., but as far as the author of the present report was aware, the case had not yet received a satisfactory solution. In sum, apart from the doings of the aforementioned Gypsy, nothing suspicious had been uncovered by the investigator.

Although his particular branch was aural, Dull went on in his long-winded way, he had tried to accomplish his mission as scrupulously as possible, that is to say keeping watch on the foreigners from a distance, which in his humble opinion (if His Honor the governor would pardon such forthrightness) belonged more to the ocular branch.

So without claiming to offer advice to anyone, and certainly not to the governor, he would have thought that for this first phase of surveillance it would perhaps have been more sensible to employ the services of his colleague Pjeter Prenushi, an old hand at the oculars, whose abilities in this branch had long been unrivaled and had reached new heights on the day when — the honorable governor would perhaps recall — he had managed to spot from a distance of thirty meters that despite her exaggeratedly heavy makeup, the wife of the French consul, on a visit to their ancient city, was making eyes at someone.

Notwithstanding the aforesaid, and never wishing to question orders from above, he felt no awkwardness about taking on a task that was perhaps not strictly within his purview. On the contrary, deeply encouraged by the confidence that had been placed in him (even if it was perhaps on this occasion a confidence not entirely warranted on the part of His Honor the governor), he had as always spared no effort in fulfilling his mission as conscientiously as he could and in reporting the facts as laid out above with the greatest precision.

As for the two foreigners, it could not be asserted with absolute certainty that their behavior aroused no suspicion at all In fact, it quickly became apparent that they were not at their ease, as evidenced by their constantly turning their heads this way and that, their weary faces, their hesitant gestures, almost certainly the symptoms of the anxiety, not to say the fear, that was torturing them.

They spoke first to Haxhi Gaba, in Albanian, making mistakes that were more likely the result of confused feelings than of genuine ignorance of the language. They took the Gypsy for a porter, whereas Haxhi Gaba thought he was being asked for his usual disgusting performance and was preparing to oblige, that is to say he was limbering up his whole body, so to speak, in order to expel the required quantity of air with sufficient force and sound — “I must ask Your Honor to pardon me once again" — so as to produce the sequence of farts that he imagined the two foreigners had ordered. The aforementioned was thus ready to perform his outrageous action — which he would have perpetrated this time, without a doubt, on what could indeed have been considered an international stage — when the present author, moved solely by a sense of patriotic duty and disregarding the fact that he was in no way authorized to do so, intervened and shooed the Gypsy away.

As for the suitcases and especially the metal trunks that the foreigners were lugging with them, the present informer had some difficulty in ascertaining anything about them on the basis of mere sight, especially as it was a well-known fact, as he had had cause to recall just a moment ago, that his field of action was essentially auditory, etc., etc.

On this point, while it was not his habit to meddle in other people’s business, his sole concern being the smooth running of affairs of state, and while he would not wish to cast the eagle eye of his colleague Pjeter Prenushi in the slightest doubt, he felt obliged to point out that even Pjeter’s gifts would hardly have sufficed to assess exactly the weight of the suitcases and especially of the metal trunks, let alone establish some relationship between the aforesaid weight and their contents. That said, he would take the liberty of suggesting that it might be appropriate to seek the opinion of the man who had hauled the load on his back, to wit, the porter Cute, also known as Blackie.

Blackie the porter: Suitcases? Don’t talk to me about them suitcases, for God’s sake, they nearly broke my back! Forty years I've been at this job, I never carried anything that heavy. Heavier than lead, I tell you! What was inside them? Don’t ask me — stones, iron, maybe the devil himself, but definitely not shirts and ties, I’ll swear to it. Unless they were clothes of iron, like knights used to wear in the old days, the sort you see in the movies — but these were modern gentlemen, nothing to do with suits of armor, and they didn’t look like madmen either. No, no, those weren’t no ordinary suitcases of clothing… Blackie can tell what’s in a suitcase just by handling it. Soon as he hoists one up on his back, he can guess whether it’s a rich man’s, full of heavy, silver-embroidered cloth, or a padre’s or a mufti’s, with holy books inside, Bibles and Korans and the like. Nothing misses Blackie’s eye where suitcases’re concerned. He just has to stroke one to know if it’s got a bride’s clothes in it, all buoyed up with joy, or a widow’s rags, weighed down with grief. Blackie’s carried a heap of cases — the cases of happy folks, crazy folks, exiles running from the king’s fury, desperate people expecting to hang themselves the next day with their luggage straps, the trunks of thieves, painters, women with their minds on only one thing (you can feel that right down your spine!), officials’ traveling bags, hermits’ packs, and even madmen’s luggage half full of stones. Blackie has seen it all, he has, but those two, they had suitcases like Blackie has never carried in his life, for the love of God. They took my breath away. I thought I was going to split in two, and I said to myself, “Blackie, old man, you can say good-bye to this lousy job! Fall down and die rather than bear the shame of having to say: I can’t carry that!” ‘Cause Blackie once had a dream that was sadder than death. A traveler with a suitcase appeared on a road made of green and brown sticky cardboard and said, “Hey! Porter!” Blackie tried to lift the suitcase but didn’t have the strength. There you are, it was just like in that dream — I was soaked in cold sweat under them damned cases. Those weren’t suitcases but the devil himself!

The manager of the Globe Hotel: The suitcases were really heavy, but the trunks even more so. In order to get them upstairs to the room on the second floor — dear me! — I had to involve not just the usual bellboy but also two chambermaids and the cook.

The foreigners spoke to me in Albanian, but truth be told, the language they spoke was not our usual way of speaking at all. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was like a tongue that was frozen in places, hard as ice, if you see what I mean. My job as a hotel manager involves meeting quite a few foreigners, so Fm used to all sorts of peculiar pronunciations. I don’t mean to boast, but the truth is, because of these peculiarities I can tell straight off, without even looking at their papers, whether customers are Italian, or Greek, or Slav. Well, as for these two foreigners, it wasn’t any of those kinds of accents. No, it was something completely different. Maybe I'm not making myself clear. They spoke a language that was … how shall I put It like it had cooled down. A bit like the way my mother — may her soul rest in peace — came back to talk to me in a dream a few years ago. And I was so taken aback that I remember saying to her, “What have I done to you, Mother, to make you speak so?” Forgive my digressing like that, I beg you….

Then what? Sorry, I almost lost the thread of my story! Well, they went up to the room we agreed to give them. Following your orders, we had sprayed it three times with insecticide, but dear me! I must confess I wasn’t sure we’d managed to get rid of them all They could have got in from the rooms next door, or under the doors, or especially they could have come down through the ceiling. But that’s another story. … I just wanted to say that the foreigners stayed up there on their own until a messenger came from the governor, with an invitation to a game of bridge.

The governor’s greeting, together with an invitation to drop in for a game of bridge, had been brought to the newly arrived travelers at around seven in the evening by the city surveyor. The surveyor’s evidence, corroborated by the hotel manager (he had been up to knock on the door to announce that they were being asked for by an official gentleman), was that the travelers were rather surprised by the invitation: not only were they not expecting it but it had seemed so odd, not to say bewildering, to them that they took a little time to grasp what exactly was meant. The surveyor (like the hotel manager, of course) refrained from revealing, on reporting the foreigners’ reply to the invitation, just how the governor’s kind request had been greeted. But that did not prevent both of them from telling their friends that the travelers had hardly been eager, that they were fairly reserved, you could even say cold, and when they heard the word bridge, they seemed distinctly irritated. According to the city surveyor (and the hotel manager, of course) — this account had reached the governor’s ears fairly quickly through the latter’s own informers — the two travelers accepted the invitation more out of politeness than from any wish to play bridge. Oddly enough, far from being offended in the slightest by these comments, the governor mentioned this fact with evident satisfaction in his weekly report to the Minister of the Interior stressing the degree to which the witnesses were honest and reliable folk.

All the same the governor knew nothing of all that as he waited for the mysterious foreigners together with his habitual playing partners — the postmaster the magistrate and Mr. Rrok owner of the Venus soap factory he only industrial plant in N—. But even if he had known’ he would have said not a word of it to his friends’ even less to their wives and especially not to his own wife, Daisy, for whom the travelers arrival was the most joyous event of the season.

Wearing a gently rustling sky-blue voile dress. Daisy perhaps because of the rouge she had put on her cheeks or because of the dark circles under her eyes seemed far away, as if she were slightly drunk. She went back and forth between the lounge and the room where the bridge table was set up’ catching fragments of conversations that seemed to her ever more horrendously banal. They were speaking of the travelers who were due to arrive at any moment speculating as to why they had chosen to settle in this town in particular. Daisy found such considerations quite scandalous. The very idea that they might not have come to N—, but could have gone to some other place seemed to her so horrible that the merest mention of that possibility, the miracle having happened, could put the whole thing in jeopardy, and she almost came to the point of fearing that the visitors might ask themselves all of a sudden, “Well, really, why did we pick N—? Isn’t there another town where we could go just as easily?”

“That’s what is really extraordinary,” said Mr. Rrok. “Yes, it is really strange that they decided to settle here. You have to admit this is a godforsaken hole, off any road to other countries. It’s not a historic site or a strategic town, as people say. A place with no name for anything in particular. And, what’s more, stuck fast against the foot of the mountains,"

“It seems they had set their eye on this area even before they left America,” the postmaster asserted. “People say that as soon as they got off the boat at Durres, they hauled a map out of their bag and said, 'That’s where we want to go,'“

As they chatted, they glanced now and then at the governor, but with a slightly weary smile on his lips (good God, how do you manage to keep the same smile on your face for hours at a stretch, for dozens of people?), with his early-evening smile on his face, he pretended not to hear them. In fact, he too had been wondering what made the foreigners choose the area of N-- for their puzzling business. On several occasions he had had an intuition that it would give him a lot of trouble; at other times he felt the opposite, that it could be advantageous to him. When he was feeling low he sometimes imagined that someone who wished him no good had packed these undesirable Irishmen off to him as part of a murky plot. All the same, though they might be wily foxes, they would this very night, the first night of their stay, reveal at least a part of what they were up to. In the confidential letter that he had sent to the minister by return mail on receipt of the latter’s note, he confirmed it to be his view too that it was of the utmost importance to bring the travelers secrets into the light. Yes indeed, the governor sighed, the state is deeper than the deepest well. While he was still wondering when the whole affair would become clear, the doorbell rang. The sound of the bell affected all present like an electric charge. Most of them turned toward him as if waiting for instructions on what to do, others put down their glasses of port on a table or on the marble mantelpiece. All except Daisy became feverishly agitated; she stood stock still, her eyes riveted on the landing.

Meanwhile the maid had opened the door, and everyone could hear first of all the sound of their steps on the stairs — a sound that the governor likened in his mind to the noise of wooden legs (maybe because he had skimmed through the reports that alluded among other things to the stiffness of the foreigners Albanian, or maybe because it really did sound like that). In a flash, he caught sight of his wife’s profile, which manifested her anxiety. Her hair was done up in a chignon, but a few stray blond wisps emphasized the grace of her smooth-skinned neck. With surprise rather than contentment, the governor wondered why he was incapable of feeling any jealousy on her account.

Without even bothering to hide her feelings, Daisy kept her eyes on the two guests as they climbed the wooden staircase behind the servant girl, half turned toward them, who led the way. They did not look anything like what she had imagined. Neither of them had hair that was remotely dark, or soft, or flattened. Nor was either of them redheaded or hairy, as Max Ross had been in her mind; quite the opposite, one turned out to have thinning, fairish hair. As for the other, he had a strong and energetic face and somewhat darker but still unremarkable hair, which was moreover cut short like a boxer’s. That could not be Bill, but on the other hand, with his affable appearance as of a tame hedgehog, he could not be Max either! She almost released a loud sigh: They were completely unlike what she had imagined, but fortunately, thank goodness, they were young men.

Her turn came to shake hands, and to her great astonishment, the blue-eyed one with blond hair, as he took her hand in his, gave out in antiquated Albanian:

“Fair lady, to thee I bow, thy servant Bill Norton.“

“Daisy,” she replied.

The visions that had come over her in her bath a few days before, her speculation about it all ending up at the gynecologist’s, dozens of equally insane details, flooded back to her mind and made her blush.

So that’s the one called Bill, she thought after a moment, as they completed the round of introductions. She had certainly expected them to be different, but she could not say that she was disappointed. That would not have been fair, especially when she imagined the possibilities for scientists — venerable duffers in slippers and ridiculous nightcaps readying themselves for bed. For the time being, what remained from all that was a sense of losing her balance.… She should have shown herself equally attentive to the other one, Max Ross, but though he had brown hair and his companion was blond, she felt herself inclining toward the latter, the one called Bill It certainly was not his name but something else about him that decided hen Maybe a kind of gentleness, though very reserved and as it were constrained, together with his way of speaking, which seemed made of stone and which cast a cold shadow all around it. Daisy could not bear to be disappointed. Anyway, each is as handsome as the other, she thought by way of consoling herself, and what’s more, both are young, even younger than she had expected. As for language, quite apart from speaking Albanian after a fashion, they both seemed to be in perfect command of English. Darling… My dear

She felt suddenly that if she should have a sleepless night, her insomnia would be caused not by her being attracted to one or the other of them, as she had hoped, or by bitter disillusionment, but by something else, by the effort she was making to come to terms with the real appearance of the two visitors. During the night, and maybe for many more nights, she would suffer the changes that were needed to make her just as receptive to the reality of the Irishmen as she had been to her imagination of them.

Meanwhile the introductions were over, and the two foreigners felt that momentary awkwardness of blundering into a social gathering that had been in progress for some time. They smiled again at everyone, then once more at various individuals, until the governor seeking to put everyone at ease, asked:

“Would you care for anything to drink, gentlemen?”

The thought of drinks and prospect of the visitors choices relaxed the company somewhat. Everyone expected the foreigners to be connoisseurs of fine wines. Oddly enough, they were not. Perhaps this was what prompted the regulars to notice that the guests attire was also quite surprising. It was, so to speak, rather casual, to put it mildly. All of which contributed to loosening the governor’s tongue:

“I learned of your arrival in our fair city and I thought, They are far from their families, in a foreign land, in the back of beyond, and quite alone. That’s right? So then I thought you might like to come to play bridge, that way you would feel less cut off….”

The governor spoke slowly and articulated his words so as to be understood, and the foreigners nodded their heads.

"We thank thee, good sir." said the one with the crew-cut hair. “Albanians are for hospitality renowned.”

“Do you expect to stay for a while?” Mr. Rrok inquired.

The foreigners shrugged their shoulders.

“Methinks a goodly length of time.”

“We are delighted." the governor replied.

“Thank you, good sir.”

Daisy thought that she recognized something familiar about their intonation … classes on ancient Albanian versification at the girls’ school. But she found it hard to concentrate.

“From what I have heard about you, you intend to study our folklore?” said the governor.

One of the visitors raised his eyebrows as if to delay replying, while the governor exchanged a rapid glance with the magistrate, the only person with whom he had shared his suspicions.

“How can I put it? Verily, indeed … and perchance other matters too,” came the reply, from the one called Bill Norton.

“I'm sorry, but I did not quite understand.”

The other foreigner furrowed his brow once again, “We purport to have much ado with your ancient song,” he explained. “And perchance …”

“'Dawn came up from the couch of her reclining …,’“ Daisy recited to herself, the opening line of one of the epic poems in all the anthologies. That was the rhythm she could hear in the speech of the two visitors.

“… and perchance with something most closely allied to it,” the fair one went on. “We mean to say: Homer,"

“Your good health!” said the postmaster’s wife, as she raised her glass of port.

Despite her powdered face, she was visibly impatient to have these boring questions and answers come to an end and to learn more interesting things from the foreigners. Daisy had mentioned something about their having brought with them the very latest in gramophones. So what were people dancing to these days over there, from New York to California?

“You mentioned Homer?” the governor continued. “As far as I recall, a blind old Greek poet?”

“Why, yes!” Bill exclaimed in English, to Daisy’s great joy. She turned triumphantly to the other women in the room, as if to say: Now you can see that they’re real foreigners, speaking in English like that!

“Really, Homer? For three hundred years there has been some debate about whether there was one or several Homers….”

Mr. Rrok, the factory owner, straightened his bow tie, spread a smile across his face from ear to ear, and shyly intervened:

“Pardon me, gentlemen. Out here in the back of beyond, we do not have much by way of scholarship. Myself, for instance, as I told you a few moments ago, I deal with soap — Venus soap, toilet soap for ladies.… Ha ha, that sort of thing I have at my fingertips. But as for deep questions of philosophy, Homer, Verdi, or what have you, I haven’t got a clue. So please excuse my ignorance, but tell me: what connection can there be between Homer and your esteemed journey to Albania? If I am not mistaken, Homer lived four or five thousand years ago and quite a long way away from here, didn’t he?”

The postmaster’s wife could not restrain herself from a loud sigh of exasperation. Daisy had always told her that Mr. Rrok had no more brains than his bars of soap had legs.

The foreigners exchanged smiles that the governor judged to be full of meaning.

Verily, about three thousand years ago, good sir,” one of them said. “ And far away from this place. But the connection exists nonetheless.”

The shadowy smiles that the governor had thought full of meaning returned to their faces. Hmm, now they’re making fun of us openly, he thought. They’re definitely trying to pull our legs. How could one believe that they were really looking for a solution to the mystery of Homer in a small town that had never had any connection whatsoever with the poet? Couldn’t they have found a more plausible excuse for coming? But even on that score they didn’t seem to have made much of an effort. Provincial they must have thought peasants living in a backwater…. Ha! We shall see who has the last laugh! You two may have seen all sorts of things., the governor continued to himself while maintaining his unwavering smile, you may have looked at skyscrapers and things of that kind, but what you’ve never met before is Dull Baxhaja. When he gets on your tail he’ll stick there like a leech, no matter where you are — on top of a skyscraper or in the ninth circle of hell!

The thought of Dull calmed him down for a moment. Then his mind went back to the note from the Minister of the Interior, or rather to the phrase about their being "caught in flagrante,” after which, the minister said, "your mission will be terminated, the remainder being my concern.“ To tell the truth, the governor had no clear idea of what would constitute being "caught in flagrante.“ On this point the minister’s epistle seemed to have been written hurriedly, even impatiently: he had gone so far as to give the bizarre advice to treat the foreigners well “even after they’ve been nabbed,” “Treat them as before, but get them to understand that they’ve been caught in the act and that there’s no point trying to get off the hook."

Now that he thought about it, the minister’s letter seemed even odder than it had at first sight. It all might have seemed part of a game, if the minister hadn’t repeated how important the whole matter was, much more important that a provincial official could imagine.

Taking pains not to be noticed, the governor looked at his watch. At the present moment, Pjeter Prenushi should surely have managed to open the suitcases and to photograph the piles of notes and documents that the customs report said they contained. And then, following the orders he had been given, he would have what looked like the most interesting texts translated, so as to get them on his boss’s desk by dawn.

Feeling content, the governor was able now to smile without effort at everyone, including those who in his view did not deserve his attention. Pjeter Prenushi would definitely be running over to the ridiculous shack above whose front door a signboard announced in blue hand lettering, Photo Lux, while the owner of the premises, bent double by his painful piles, would be waiting inside in a state of terror. He would stop trembling only when he saw that he had to deal with texts written in English. Shots of corpses, of stolen bracelets, and especially of naked women, gave him the shakes.

The governor was now visibly at ease. The thought of his two best sleuths in action outside in the dark, the cold, and the wet gave him special satisfaction. Others, he knew, were jealous of the perfect duo that afforded him his “ears” and his “eyes,” but as for himself, he had a distinct preference for Dull. And whenever rivalry between them was at issue, either because of some spat or on a question of pay, though he always tried to appear fair, he generally took Dull’s side.

We are not a very developed country, he liked to philosophize from time to time, and as in any country of this kind, the eye does not play a preponderant role as far as intelligence is concerned. Most people here are illiterate, and even those who do know how to read and write do not like to do so often. Very few write their memoirs, keep a diary, or have a regular correspondence. Even wills, which are hard to imagine as not written down, signed, and sealed, are still frequently oral And do you know what stands in lieu of initials and the duty stamp? Curses! “May you never know a single day of happiness in this world or the next if you do not carry out my wish!” “May you turn into a tree!” “May the earth never accept your corpse!” And so on and so forth.

That is what he liked to say on the matter of eyes, but as soon as ears were the issue, he changed his tone completely. Ah, ears, gentlemen, are a quite different matter! The ear never rests, for people always want to talk and to whisper; what is said and especially what is muttered is always, as you all know, much more dangerous to the state than what can be seen. At least, in our country, he would add. And if the governor was among a group of very close or very reliable friends, he would indulge in recalling his one and only real failure in intelligence matters. A failure due., of course, to the “eye”: in letters from a provincial Don Juan to a Tirana tart called Lulu (the correspondence was naturally checked because of the king’s open flirtation with the aforementioned tart), he had read the words organization and secret (“I swear it, those really were the words that I thought I deciphered, hidden like two hares in a thicket made of allusions to Lulu’s belly, to her delta, to her thighs!”), whereas what was actually written was orgasm and secretions! Good God, he still blushed as red as a beet whenever that misadventure came to mind.…

Mr. Rrok’s conversation with the guests was still in progress, and the governor took a few moments to pick up the thread,

“Verily, there is a true and real connection, good sir,"the fair one was saying, “but it grows late, and there is not time to give the reason tonight.”

“Some other time, without fail,” the other one said, in an odd kind of lilt. “Weary we be, for our voyage was long…."

“But of course,” the governor said to himself. “It’s time you worked out your cover stories! You didn’t even bother to do it in advance. Ah, my unhappy province, to be so despised by mere spies!”

Someone suggested a hand of bridge, but the foreigners shook their heads. They repeated their litany about the tiredness caused by such a long journey; but the biggest surprise of all was that they did not know how to play! That was just too much!

Once the idea of bridge had been abandoned, the ladies took charge of the conversation. By far the most talkative among them was the postmaster’s wife, beneath the half-patronizing, half ironical gaze of Mrs. Rrok, the soap manufacturer’s spouse.

“I am deeply shocked to see how our own dear friends can hardly wait to meet the foreigners, so as to put on airs and graces and lead the young men on,” Mrs. Rrok whispered to Daisy, who turned away abruptly toward the fireplace, so as to hide her blushes. After busying herself for a moment at the hearth, she could turn back to Mrs. Rrok and show entirely justified bright-red cheeks. “I find this thirst for adventure quite revolting!”

Daisy smiled absentmindedly. She realized that Mrs. Rrok was irritated at not being able to show off her knowledge of Italian, but that at least allowed the magistrate’s indolent wife to feel smugly satisfied. It was she who asked the visitors

“Will you be settling in at the Globe Hotel?”

“Nay, ma’am,” they replied together, almost as one.

The magistrate smiled sourly.

“So where else do you expect to stay? The Globe is the only decent hotel in our town,”

“Nary in town,” said Bill “We shall go hence.”

“What?” Daisy cried out, as if something had burst inside her heart. She had avoided looking into the eyes of her guests, as one puts off one of life’s enhancements until later, but now she turned a wild stare straight at the man who had chilled her heart by uttering such an ice-cold sentence. Daisy’s glance was at once heated, reproachful, and enticing, a combination that ought to have led the man to change his mind, but the foreigner only repeated his merciless words.

The governor had moved away from his guests momentarily, but now he came back to lend an ear to what was being said about the newcomers accommodation. And what he heard was really odd. The foreigners were explaining quite openly that notwithstanding the pleasure of present company, they had no intention of hanging about in the town, No, they weren’t off to any other town, certainly not to any other area; they were going to stay in this zone, for sure, but not in the town of N--, and anyway, they wanted to have as little as possible to do with towns. They would lodge in a wayside inn far from any other houses, a remote hostelry or, more exactly, one of those coach houses located where major routes intersect. If the cold weather had not already come on, they would have gone up into the highlands to carry out their research but as the hills were now deep in snow, they would have to settle for a lodging at the foot, beside the old highway, as they said, one of the places where traveling singers usually put up. In fact, they had already pinpointed the inn they had in mind, and it was not very far away.

“Ah! You mean the Cross Inn,” the soapmaker butted in, “It’s beside the main road, about halfway between Shkodér and Tirana,”

“Nay, sir,” replied Max Ross, “Tis called the Inn of the Bone of the Buffalo, or, for short, Buffalo Inn.”

“Oh,” said the postmaster “but that’s a very old inn, and so far away from anything that even telegrams take four days to get there.”

The Irishmen let out a gentle laugh.

“We saw it on the chart,’ said Bill “It is the place that best befits our task.

“Obviously!” the governor muttered to himself, “You couldn’t imagine a better place for your secret machinations!”

“So you have also brought maps along with you” he inquired aloud.

“Aye, a goodly number. And all the epic areas are marked."

Wonderful, thought the governor. They are not even bothering to pretend anymore. He was tempted to ask them what these epic areas were but chose instead to pretend not to have noticed the term.

“Where is this Buffalo Inn, then?” Daisy asked the postmaster’s wife in a whisper.

“How can I explain? I don’t remember very well. I only went there once, with Petro, but it’s such a tumbledown place it makes you shiver just to see it — it looks like a heap of ruins.”

“Unless I am mistaken,” the governor interjected, “it is, with the exception of the Inn of the Two Roberts, in central Albania, the oldest house of its kind and has been in existence since the Middle Ages.”

“And is it very far from here?”

“No, not really. An hour’s drive in a cart, I guess.”

Daisy felt warmer. An hour in a horse-drawn carriage wasn’t the end of the world. The conversation around the foreigners had got livelier.

“You really are amazing,” Mr. Rrok was saying, with his face right up to theirs, smiling under their noses. “Myself, for instance, I deal in soap, and I reckon I understand a bit about the world insofar as well, we all have something to do with soap, don’t we, all day long, from dawn to dusk. So, as a result, when I think about it, I say to myself, Soap is important, universal, and it seems everybody else thinks that way too. Because in fact you know it’s not a joke, it’s something that has to do with the body. There’s soap for shampoo, there’s toilet soap that does its job well or not so well, aside from all questions of scent, not to mention any other qualities or defects, for instance excessive acidity, which can be harmful, as you may well understand, to the delicate skins of ladies, especially when they wash their private … Ha! So anyway, I can have the illusion that everyone thinks of soap just like I do. But then along come two gentlemen like you, who are not in the least interested in my bars of soap and who have got it into their heads to come all the way to the end of the world to stay in a pigsty of an inn and try to find out about a blind guy who lived a million years ago! What a funny world this is!”

“What a dismal idiot," the governor said to himself. The revenue inspector had not been wrong a couple of years ago when, over some card-game squabble, he had told Mr. Rrok to go jump into his own vat and tern himself into a bar of soap.

With the help of her maid, Daisy served coffee. As the governor sipped from his cup, his mind wandered to the hotel manager, who would by now have had ample time to sift through the entire contents of the travelers’ suitcases.

The foreigners’ faces were now showing signs of real weariness. And the evanescence of the face powder of the postmaster’s wife was an unmistakable sign, well known in the tiny social world of N—, that midnight was nigh. Despite everyone’s efforts at stifling their yawns, sleep hovered in the air.

A lull in the conversation gave the foreigners an opportunity to make their farewells. They stood up and bowed and, on the landings were asked by those showing them out whether they remembered the way back to their hotel or if they would like an escort. Then Mr. Rrok declared that he would like to walk them back himself, which aroused both general approval and a degree of regret, though at this late hour of the night no one could rightly say what the grounds of the regret were, or if indeed they had any relevance to soap.

Shortly after, the other guests took their leave, and the house soon resounded only to the couple’s own footsteps. In the tense silence of the night, the sound seemed to take the two away from each other, though they must have ended up in the bedroom together. As she undressed before joining her husband in bed, Daisy tried her best to put the two foreigners (or, more exactly, one of them) out of her mind, but once the bedroom had become totally dark and silent and the faint squares of the windowpanes could be made out opposite the marital bed, at long last, as if she had found the path on which to direct her thoughts, she turned them with complete naturalness toward the man she had just met, just as she used to do when she was a girl. What could he be doing at that moment?

The two Irishmen got back to their hotel a little before midnight, Dull Baxhaja wrote in his report. As per instructions, he had gone up into the attic, and well before they got back from the party, in fact at ten-thirty precisely, he had taken his position over the room where the foreigners were staying. After checking the state of the ceiling (the gaps between the boards would permit him not only to hear whatever might be said but also to see a bit), after checking also what kind of creaking would occur if and when he was obliged to move one or another of his limbs, and, furthermore, after ascertaining the risk of falling through a rotten plank (even now, after so many years, he still felt horror at the memory of the night when his right leg had suddenly gone through the ceiling of the Shkjezis' bedroom, sticking down like a surrealist lamp fixture and giving the old lady the heart attack that took her to an early grave) — after having taken all precautions, then, and despite the fact that the rafters were crawling with bugs and other repulsive creatures, he applied the rules recently issued by counterespionage personnel management (rules intended in the first place to minimize drowsiness and above all actual sleep among on-duty surveillance operatives) and took out his little tin of personal bugs and spread them about his person.

As mentioned at the head of the present report, Dull Baxhaja continued, the two foreigners had returned to their room a little before midnight, and they had begun to pace back and forth, from corridor to bathroom door, as if worried about something. From time to time they exchanged a few words in their own language, which made no sense at all to the present observer, and that was not because some of the words were uttered by one or the other of the suspects while brushing his teeth: as the governor would know, the present observer was able to distinguish words pronounced by individuals having not just a toothbrush but any manner of object in their mouths, be it a pipe, a cigar, or, as in the case of Maria K., who habitually put it there during lovemaking (the governor will pardon the following), an organ that cannot possibly be named in the context of the present report. The present writer was thus perfectly able not only to grasp all such speech but also to understand a suspect who spoke while chewing, or with a sore throat, or with three-quarters of his teeth missing, and in many analogous circumstances, to such a degree that — as the governor must have been informed — Dull Baxhaja, “The Eaves,” was the one and only spy in the whole Northern Zone of the kingdom capable of interpreting the speech of a man struck down with apoplexy. No, to repeat, if he had been unable to understand the dialogue between the two suspects, it was not because they were brushing their teeth most of the time (a dialogue, and a brushing, that went on for some considerable length of time), but for the simple and obvious reason that the conversation took place in English, an idiom that, as the governor must surely be aware the sleuth Dull Baxhaja did not understand.

After brushing their teeth, the two foreigners opened their suitcases, took out their pajamas and went to bed. It must be emphasized that they exchanged yet more words in the dark before going to sleep. Nothing to report for the rest of the night. Nobody knocked at the door; our two customers therefore did not open it; nor did either of them go to the window so no signal was given by lantern by lighter, or by any other means. The only detail perhaps worth recording: one of them went to sleeps as the observer realized straightaway but the other stayed awake, tossed and turned in bed, sighing heavily and scratching himself. With the exception of the last detail whose cause was easily guessed (though the hotel manager had sworn thrice over that there were no bedbugs here), it was hard to understand why one of the miscreants should have sunk into slumber while the other stayed awake and even harder to grasp the reasons for the contortions and sighs of the latter. The sleuth would like simply to observe that his long experience had taught him that in similar cases — in other words., where the miscreants are two in number — it is not unusual for fear, doubt, anxiety indeed even thoughts of betrayal, to prevent one of the partners in crime from sleeping in peace. So that was perhaps the reason for the difference in behavior between the two in the present case also. But there could of course have been other reasons: for example one of them may have had a guilty conscience and as everyone knows that can disturb one’s sleep, whereas the other, the less dishonest of the pair, could sleep like a log; unless it was the other way around — that the really crooked one, hardened to this kind of adventure despite his tarnished conscience, was sleeping soundly, while the one who was but a beginner in the trade and had not yet been blooded was unable to quell his inner torments. These finer points perhaps went beyond the sleuth’s mission, and the governor may well have formed the view that his agent was treading on ground well outside his areas of competence for the pettiest of motives, such as ambition, a desire for promotion, or just vainglory. But he wanted it understood that no such assumption would be justified, and that if he expanded on such and such topic or came close to appearing impertinent by dealing with matters that were not strictly his concern, then he did so not for any of the base motives mentioned but because he was convinced that he was thereby doing his job more satisfactorily, for when all is said and done, did the governor himself not declare, at that meeting he held with us all, that spies were not merely listening instruments but living beings, servants of the state enjoying not only the right but even the duty to interpret what they had been asked to do in as creative a manner as possible?

To come back to the reasons for the sleep of the one and the sleeplessness of the other suspect, the sleuth added, the reasons could be quite different from those suggested above. He was close to concluding simply that the two fellows had maybe arranged to parcel out roles, one sleeping while the other kept watch, for security reasons.

The spy also mentioned which bed each of them was sleeping in and added a sketch of the scene to his report so that with the help of the hotel manager, it was easy to ascertain which of the two researchers did not get a wink of sleep.