Then I head back outdoors and light a cigarette, which I smoke in long, deep drags, staring through the fronds of the palm to the blue sky above.

After our last walk through the streets of Paris, Velázquez delivered me to my room at the Scribe, but he kept his clothes on. He said I had had too much to drink, and would neither enjoy nor remember the occasion properly, and he wanted our last time in bed to be memorable, like it had been four days ago when I had driven out to the airfield to meet him. I asked if he would lie with me until I fell asleep. He hesitated and then agreed.

I remember I put on my nightclothes and swallowed some aspirin with water before I climbed into bed, as was my habit when I was drunk. Velázquez stayed dressed atop the covers, so he wouldn’t be tempted, he said. He put his arm around me, however, and I laid my head on his chest. I told him I was sorry about his fiancée, and he thanked me gravely.

“But it was selfish of me to tell you that story,” he said. “It’s a terrible, tragic story, and I should not have added to your burden.”

“Why did you tell me, then?” I asked.

“Because I want someone else to remember her, in case I am killed. I want someone else to know that she was alive, and how she died.”

“Don’t say stupid things like that. You won’t be killed.”

He reached for his cigarettes on the nightstand and lit one. He told me to go to sleep, and that’s the last thing I remember about Velázquez, his solemn voice commanding me to sleep, and the smell of his cigarette, those pungent Gauloises he used to smoke, the smell of good-bye.

I make straight for the cottage when we return to Coolibah. The yellow Ford is parked out front—Olle’s come home—and so is Leo’s moped, and I can’t face either of them, I really can’t. I am only just held together by a thread.

I run a bath and emerge an hour later, wrinkled and shivering, to wrap myself in the bathrobe that appeared on the hook one day, no explanation, a typical Lindquist maneuver. I badly want a drink, but to fetch a drink means returning to the main house and Olle’s library, and that is impossible in my present condition, so I light a cigarette instead. I lie on the bed like this, in my bathrobe, smoking in long, deep drags as I stare at the dark wooden beams of the ceiling, and I feel this terrible hole in the bed, where the cat used to sleep, and also a terrible hole in my chest, as if someone has reached inside and torn away some piece of flesh. The cavity grows and grows, splitting my ribs apart, until at last I spring from the bed, crush out the cigarette, and sit down in the chair before the desk, where my life’s work lies in neat stacks of manila folders, carefully labeled.