He wondered if she would come to dinner, or if she would find some excuse to stay away. He had to admit, he would be disappointed if she wasn’t there. What he had said to Evelyn was true, he felt no physical attraction to the tight-faced young woman, with her little sharp features and narrow, beady stare. He was curious, that was all. He wanted to know who she was, and why he was convinced he had some unremembered connection with her. It was as simple as that. But he knew it wasn’t. It wasn’t simple at all.

He came in from the balcony and lay down on the bed. After a while he fell into a doze for what he thought was no more than a few minutes, but when he woke and looked blearily at his watch, he was surprised to find that almost an hour had passed.

Doctor Cruz had not called back. Dinner was set, then.

Picking up his cigarettes and the door key, Quirke walked along the corridor to the lift. Instead of going directly down, he pressed the button for the top floor. The iron cage around him juddered and clanked as he ascended. He felt both exhilarated and sheepish. Evelyn was right, part of him would for ever be a child. It was at least in part her fault, he told himself. She had made him happy, or so it seemed, and where happiness was concerned, seeming was the same as being. But it was a dangerous thing to do to a man of Quirke’s saturnine and bodeful temper. Laughing will end crying, he thought, trying to remember the old nun’s name. Sister Cataclysma, let’s call her, he thought, and grinned at himself in the framed looking glass on the back wall.

Christ never laughed. Who was it had told him that? Nowhere in any of the accounts of the Evangelists does the Messiah allow himself even a chuckle. But then, he had a lot on his mind. The certain prospect of crucifixion would hardly be conducive to the belly laugh.

In the bar, he ordered his first glass of wine of the day, while Evelyn went and requested the concierge to book a  table for four at the Restaurante Zurriola.

She was puzzled by Quirke’s uncharacteristic insistence on dining with these two doctors, but she had made no objection. She was happy to go out to dinner to a nice restaurant. She smiled to herself. Jealousy, according to Herr Professor Zwingli’s big fat book that she was reading, was one of the affects that she lacked. Secretly, she considered Doktor Zwingli something of a Scharlatan. It did not matter. Even frauds had some wise things to say, despite themselves.