I uttered a nervous laugh. What was going on here? “Of course,” I said. “Come on. Come in and keep me company.”

“No,” she said, rising to her feet. “I’m going to bed. And you can’t come, you dull man. Call for me at eight tomorrow. Good night.”

There was indeed a note from Lokhande waiting for me under the door. Right to the point, he’d written that I couldn’t hide forever. But he didn’t summon me to the station or threaten me in any way. I was determined to avoid him as long as possible.

There was nothing to eat besides tea biscuits, ketchup, chakli, and shankarpala—Indian snacks that Ramu had squirreled away in his cubbyhole. The chakli were a new experience, crunchy orange rounds of I don’t know what, but they were my dinner. The shankarpala was sweet. That was my dessert.

At midnight, I bedded down in the wet heat. I fell asleep and dreamt a lewd dream of Sushmita. Not as wet as the night air, but it was close.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 1975, 10:12 A.M.

A telex from my friend Gary in the New York office was waiting for me when I arrived at my desk. He’d checked news archives for the name Willy Smets, and called in a favor with a contact in the State Department and another at the CIA. Both dead ends. Then he did some nosing around in Belgian phone directories on microfiche in the library. Nothing.

“This guy’s a ghost,” he wrote. “Must be using an alias.”

I twirled my pencil back and forth between my fingers, debating whether I should get my roll of film developed. At a random photo-processing shop? I couldn’t risk it. The story was too dangerous. The film would have to stay in the radio for now.

That reminded me of Bikas and Eric Nielsen’s notebook. I’d only read a fraction of it. I returned to the pages I’d been reviewing a couple of days before when Janice had interrupted me.

This Eric the Red was an asshole, if his opinions of Indian women were any indication. More descriptions of being shot down in flames by university students. That seemed to be his hunting ground, the university. Maybe because the students were single, and older women were not? Or maybe because he thought younger women were an easier target. Who knew? But he came across as a loser in his own words.

Janice appeared above me. I dropped the notebook on my desk, thinking I’d take it home that night to study at my leisure. She invited me to lunch at Britannia, a Parsee eatery in nearby Ballard Estates.