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backwards and hefted my stick defensively. He only shrugged, however, and jabbered into a telephone, and told me someone would come, and turned contemptuously away. There was another wait then. Fuming, I sculled myself up and down the arrivals area, cutting a swathe through the press of tourists and noisy families and self-important businessmen with their slim briefcases and too-shiny, tasselled shoes. Presently a uniformed young woman from the airline arrived and informed me with a musical little laugh that yes, the
Professore
’s luggage had indeed gone to another destination, but that it would shortly be brought back and sent directly to my hotel. She had a large bust and a faint moustache and unpleasantly protrusive eyes, and reminded me of a celebrated operatic diva of the immediate postwar years whose name I cannot for the moment recall. I swore at her, and she blinked rapidly and ventured a glassy smile, not trusting that she had heard me correctly. She went off and found a taxi for me, and I was driven at astonishing speed—one always forgets how they drive here—through the humid night, into the city, where the last of the Saturday evening crowds were still promenading under the stone arcades.
    Then at the hotel I found that my room had been given away. They pretended to have no record of my reservation, but from the evasively vacant look of the bald old body at the reception desk I knew it was a lie. I raised my voice, and made threats, and stabbed at the floor of the lobby with my stick. The manager was summoned, a preposterously handsome, heavy-set, ageing dandy, mahogany-coloured and shiny-haired, with the puffed-up chest of a heroic tenor—this entire business was turning into
opera
bu fa
—and advanced on me, unctuously smiling, with hands outspread, and assured me that everything would be arranged, everything would be fixed, in just a little while, if I would be patient. So I went and sat on a squeaky leather chair in the deserted bar, under the resentful eye of a tired barman, and drank too much red wine, and when at length I was led up to my room, on the fifth floor, a partitioned-off brown cell with a naked lavatory bowl standing in a corner, I was too tipsy and tired to complain any more. Despite exhaustion and the lateness of the hour, however, I decided I must speak at once, immediately,
now,
to the letter-writer, my mysterious nemesis, and even called the switchboard and asked to be put through to Antwerp, but then I paused and thought better of it—I would have started straight away to shriek at her—and threw down the receiver and crawled into bed, bleared and unbathed, still wearing the underwear I had not changed since setting out half a world ago.
    I passed a restless night; the bed, as so often with hotel beds, was far too small to accommodate me and my stiff leg, and I was woken repeatedly by noises from outside, car horns and revving motorcycles and young men shouting to each other from street to street. Toward dawn the clamour abated and I fell into a doze, beset by violent dreams. I woke early, sweating alcohol, my brain beating, and rose and stumbled to the window and opened wide the curtains and squinted up between the beetling buildings at the dense cerulean sky of Europe.
    After breakfast, with renewed fuss and apologies, I was moved into a large suite on the more salubrious third floor. The rooms were spacious and cool, with floors of black marble, silken smooth. My returned suitcase stood at the foot of the bed, wearing a shame-faced look. I have a fondness for hotel rooms, the air they have of tight-lipped anonymity, the sense of being sealed off from the world, the almost audible echo of whisperings and indrawn breaths and women crying out in helpless rapture. Reclining in a mid-morning bath I concocted a picture of Miss Nemesis: a dried-up old virgin with blue-veined talons and spectacles on a string, and a mouth, with a fan of fine wrinkles etched into the whiskered upper lip,