They see a dinosaur skeleton, ride a double-decker bus, and Hillary visits a makeup counter at a department store and returns with matching swirls of blue paint around his eyes, and Rex teaches Zeno about different brands of gin, and Hillary is always with them, rolling tight little cigarettes, dressing in platform shoes, in blazers, in an epic, monstrous prom dress. Soon it’s the fourth night of his visit, and they’re eating meat pies in a cellar after midnight, Hillary asking Zeno if he has reached the part in Rex’s book yet where he writes about how every lost book, before it vanished forever, got down to one final copy somewhere, and how it made Hillary think about seeing a white rhinoceros in a zoo in Czechoslovakia once, how the sign said the rhino was one of the last twenty northern white rhinos in the world, the only one left in Europe, and how the beast just stared out through the bars of his cage, making a moaning sound, while flies swarmed his eyes. Then Hillary looks over at Rex and wipes his eyes and says that every time he reads that part, he thinks about the rhino and cries, and Rex pats his arm.

On Saturday Hillary heads off to “the gallery,” though Zeno does not know what to imagine—art gallery? shooting gallery?—and he and Rex sit at a café table surrounded by women with prams, Rex in a black tweed vest still dusted with blackboard chalk from the previous days’ classes, which makes Zeno’s heart race. A tiny waiter who makes no sound as he moves brings them a teapot painted all over with raspberries.

Zeno is hoping the conversation might come around to the night, in Camp Five, when Bristol and Fortier loaded Rex onto the flatbed truck, hidden inside a fuel drum, that he might hear the story of Rex’s escape, and whether Rex forgives him for staying behind, but Rex is enthusing about a trip he took to the Vatican Library in Rome where he combed through heaps of ancient papyrus salvaged from the dumps of Oxyrhynchus, little pieces of Greek texts buried in sand for two thousand years. “Ninety-nine percent of it is dull, of course, certificates, farm receipts, tax records, but to find one sentence, Zeno—even a few words—of a literary work that was previously unknown? To rescue one phrase from oblivion? It’s the most exciting thing, I can’t tell you: it’s like digging up one end of a buried wire and realizing that it’s connected to someone eighteen centuries dead. It feels like nostos, do you remember?” He’s waving his nimble hands and blinking his eyes, the same gentleness in his face he carried all those years ago in Korea, and Zeno wants to leap across the table and put his mouth on Rex’s throat.