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protective sheets of rice paper between them, and secured them with a loop of fine thread she had teased from the hem of her blouse. Tying the knot was difficult, for the leaves of newsprint and the rice paper all kept trying to uncurl, and she had to make three attempts before she succeeded. She was careful too in screwing back the barrel of the pen; at one of the turns it snagged somehow on its threads and made a cracking noise, and she had the sensation of something soft and warm flipping over in the pit of her stomach. But then it was done. Resting fatly in her fingers the pen felt as full as a loaded pistol. To test it she wrote her name with a flourish on the pad beside the bed; the nib was too fine for her liking. She screwed on the cap again and clipped the pen into the pocket of her blouse and went and stood before the wardrobe mirror and looked at herself for a long time. Her own reflection always fascinated her, and frightened her, too, this inescapable person standing there, so known, so knowing, and so strange.
    Tonight the voices in her head were silent.
    Now there was nothing more to do; she had made all possible preparations. Axel Vander would have had her letter by this time, over there on the far side of the world, they had assured her of that at the post office. She had asked for the swiftest possible delivery; it had taken another dismayingly large handful of her dwindling store of bank notes. She went and leaned by the window and looked out into the night. In the square there were rain puddles, shiny and black as oil, and a line of trees, plane trees, she supposed, throwing ragged, oblong shadows across the pavement. She could hear a barrel organ playing somewhere, with mechanical and sinister cheeriness—a barrel organ, at this time of night?— and there was a faint, sickly aroma of what it took her a moment to identify as vanilla. She liked being here, in the unfamiliar city, the isolation of it. She was sure he would come. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow. He might even have set out already. She pictured him, tried to picture him, hurrying through the airport, flustered and petulant, banging his fist on the ticket counter and shouting out his name, demanding attention, insisting he must have a seat on the very next flight; he was famous for the violence of his temper. A tremor of excitement ran through her and she shivered. The only face she could put on him was the one from the newspaper cutting, with its youthful grin. He would be angry, and frightened, too, perhaps; he might offer her money; he might even threaten her. But she was not afraid. The prospect of his rage, his threats, did not alarm her; on the contrary, it made her feel calm, as if she were flying, somehow, suspended on firm air, unreachable, beyond all peril. What did she want from him? She did not know. There was something to be desired, certainly, she felt it inside her, like a vague and not unpleasurable distress; it was the feeling she imagined of being newly pregnant. She held his fate in her hands, his future; she had found him out. Yes, he would come, she was sure of it.

CHAPTER 2
    It was after midnight when I got into the city at last. There had been flight delays and missed connections, and the limousine that had been supposed to meet me at the airport was not there, the driver having tired of waiting and gone away. Then they told me my suitcase had not arrived, that it must have been sent on to somewhere else. At the lost luggage desk a swarthy clerk with his cap pushed to the back of his head and an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear pretended not to understand my Italian—which, I might have told him, I learned from Dante—then shrugged and said the bag could be anywhere, and gave me a sheaf of incomprehensible forms to fill in. I threw the papers back in his face and for a horribly thrilling moment it seemed, from the truculent way he lowered his already low brow and scowled, that he might turn violent, and I took a step