“You thought you’d just check in.”

“Telepathic too, God he’s amazing i’n’t he.” But the fishy eyes will not let up. It is a rather bare room, the address behind Gallaho Mews ordinarily reserved for cash transactions. They have summoned Eventyr up from “The White Visitation.” They know in London how to draw pentacles too, and cry conjurations, how to bring in exactly the ones they want… . The tabletop is crowded with glasses, smudged, whitish, emptied or with residues of deep brown and red drinks, with ashtrays and with debris from artificial flowers which old Sammy here has been plucking, unpeeling, twisting into mysterious curves and knots. Trainsmoke blows in a partly opened window. One wall of the room, though blank, has been eroded at, over years, by shadows of operatives, as certain mirrors in public eating-places have been by the images of customers: a surface gathering character, like an old face… .

“But then you don’t actually talk to him,” ah, Sammy’s so good at this, softly-softly, “I mean it’s none of your telegraphers in the middle of the night having a bit of a chat sort of thing… .”

“No. No.” Eventyr understanding now that they’ve been seeing transcripts of everything that comes through from Peter Sachsa—that what Eventyr himself gets to read is already censored. And that it may have been this way for a while now… . So relax, grow passive, watch for a shape to develop out of Sammy’s talking, a shape that really Eventyr knows already, as we do working out acrostics—he’s called up to London, but they aren’t asking to be put in touch with anyone, so it’s Sachsa himself they’re interested in, and the purpose of this meeting is not to commission Eventyr, but to warn him. To put a part of his own hidden life under interdiction. Bits, tones of voice, choices of phrasing now come flying together: “… must’ve been quite a shock to find himself over there… had a Zaxa or two of me own to worry about… keep you out of the street at least… see how you’re holding up, old Zaxa too of course, need to filter out personalities you see from the data, easier for us that way… .”

Out of the street? Everyone knows how Sachsa died. But no one knows why he was out there that day, what led up to it. And what Sammy is telling Eventyr here is: Don’t ask.

Then will they try to get to Nora too? If there are analogies here, if Eventyr does, somehow, map on to Peter Sachsa, then does Nora Dodson-Truck become the woman Sachsa loved, Leni Pökler? Will the interdiction extend to Nora’s smoky voice and steady hands, and is Eventyr to be kept, for the duration, perhaps for his life, under some very sophisticated form of house arrest, for crimes that will never be told him?