“Yes. It was.”

“Take it. You keep it. Show it to the police. I don’t care anymore. I hid it for her, because she was afraid they’d find it—she knew they’d search her room. And then, when she still didn’t come back—I went through it. I’ve been through it a thousand times.”

“His address must be in here? That’s why she was so worried, why she called, why she asked you to hide it?”

“Yes.” Fricke drew in an unsteady breath. She lit another cigarette. “Except it isn’t in there—or I can’t find it. There’s no entry for Star. There’s a thousand names and addresses in there. All her pen pals, France, Germany, Italy, England, Belgium, America, Africa… she’d been into that since she was nine. She got seven, eight letters at least every week. You find him, if you can—but I’m telling you, it’s impossible. It’s like looking for one pebble on a beach.”

Gini reopened the notebook. It was a typical teenage girl’s book, untidy, covered with doodles and scribblings, and crossings-out. It was partly typed and partly handwritten; it was a mess.

“Fricke—I’m very grateful. But I can’t read Dutch.”

“You don’t need to. He wasn’t Dutch, he wasn’t based in the Netherlands. You can read the foreign addresses—look, that one there, that’s in France, and there’s one in San Francisco. You might find something. You’re a journalist. I thought…”

Fricke, so hostile a short while before, was now looking at her with pleading, as if Gini and her putative skills were her last hope. Gini, who was not optimistic, did not want to disappoint her or raise those hopes.

“I’ll try, Fricke. I promise you that. I’ll go through this tonight. If necessary, the police here can look at it.” She added, “You do realize, don’t you, Fricke—for your sake as well as theirs, you’re going to have to tell your parents this?”

“I know.” Fricke lowered her eyes and fiddled with the cigarette. “You think they’ll be angry?”

“No. I don’t. I think they’ll understand. They love you very much, Fricke.”

“I know they do. Oh, shit…”

She began crying again. Gini waited quietly until this new fit of tears ceased. She took out the props of her trade, her tape recorder, her notebook, and as she had hoped, they seemed to give Fricke new confidence.

“You want to interview me? You really think I can help? I told you—Anneke said very little.”

“That doesn’t necessarily matter. If you can remember what she said, Fricke—the little details, the ones that seemed unimportant, irrelevant at the time. Those are the ones that often help the most.”

“I’ve got a good memory. Pretty good, anyway.”

For ten minutes after that Gini took her carefully through the sequence of events: the first meeting in Paris, the correspondence. Star’s arrival in Amsterdam, their departure, the two subsequent telephone calls Anneke had made, the long silence that came after them, the months of waiting, and then the news of her death. As Fricke spoke, Gini could feel some memory, some echo of this, inching its way forward from the back of her mind: school trips—it was connected to that; someone, somewhere, recently had mentioned something similar, but Gini could not recall who or when.