In his room Jobbing checked the bathroom to see if anyone was hiding there and also checked under the bed and also in the many wardrobes and grandfather clocks arranged around the walls. He also picked out the phone and listened any noises on it and looked out the dirty window down at the street beyond net curtains where a line of taxis were waiting for the nearby ‘Star of Night Cinema & Multiplex’ to kick out and a steady stream of persons carrying umbrellas on the pavement were negotiating the flow of each other, all moving in the crowds and rain and clichés of an unknown town.

Jobbin fell asleep on the bed, still wearing his overcoat and winter shoes and when he woke it was to the sound of voices from the street or room below. They seem to be talking about a recent (?) experiment with animals that had gone wrong or a complex case of Patent Law or a local footballer that had been punched in the face in a nightclub after calling one of his friends an idiot, no one could be sure. Pulling himself away from the voices Jobbin tried to move but found that he was momentarily paralysed and as he lay there exerting all power to move he still could not and having no choice really, instead just stared upwards at the pattern of the mouldings on the high ceiling, where many years of overpainting on the decorative coving had morphed it beyond recognition, the artist’s intentions (or whatever) buried almost forgotten in the deep layers of time and trade price discount emulsion. Staring up there like someone paralysed Jobbin fell eventually back to sleep and then, when he woke (the second time), he found he could move again and he got up and got ready to go out for dinner.

It was only on leaving the room that he noticed his luggage had arrived from the indolent servants he had observed that made their home downstairs and that pinned to the top of his travelling trunk was a note written in a almost ineligible scrawl. Jobbin picked up the note cautiously and scrutinised it carefully over his glasses like a old drunkard scholar of Oxford College Cambridge, slowly deciphering his own name from out of the letters that were impersonated on the front, opened it and read further inside.

The note was a warning from a unknown stranger telling Jobin that he was in danger and being pursued and furthermore the person writing the note, what only signed a name on the bottom with a letter X, was instructing Johbin to an assignation in the Café Myopia on the Corniche. Jobin went back down the long way to the reception, took a carriage to the Opera, where, when the crowd was grown to its very very thickest, he switched cabs by subterfuge and went directly down to the Corniche.