He turned into the street immediately behind the quay, walked a hundred yards one way, a hundred the other, tried the next street, then a third. He began to remember how cities can be: places both open and completely shut; places you can move about in freely but cannot always enter. He tried a fourth street. He was growing tired of carrying his bags; he was also very hungry. He paused at a junction thinking he should pick out one of his fellow pedestrians and ask advice, directions, then saw, near the corner of the street diagonally opposite him, an open door between a pair of well-lit windows. A man came out, put on his hat, adjusted it with a vast amount of care, then tottered away, smiling. Lacroix crossed the street behind a nightman’s wagon (careful to hold his breath as he did so) and peered in through one of the windows. A smoky room. People sitting companionably at tables. Bottles, dominoes, pipes. There was even the drift of music, though the singer was not in view.

He went in, moving through a maze of jutting knees and drowsing dogs, until he found a place for himself at the end of a bench at the back of the room. He nodded to his neighbour, a man with a pitted, gingery face who, glancing at the fiddle case, made movements with his fingers as if plying a tiny bow across a tiny instrument.

A girl came. She had a squint eye or she was blind in one eye. Lacroix asked for brandy but she returned with something else which, after tasting it and liking it, he decided was whisky. He looked round to see if anyone was eating. No one was. They were drinking and smoking and talking and sometimes they paused to look at the singer, a boy more than a man, who sang pleasantly, songs Lacroix imagined the others all knew.

He held his empty glass up to the girl. When she filled it he asked her about food but she just looked at him blankly and when he repeated the question he could make no sense of her reply, though he thought he had heard it clearly enough. It amused him more than frustrated him. Perhaps he should try speaking to her in Spanish. He had learned a little while they were waiting to go out, the officers passing round a dog-eared copy of Mordente’s Spanish Grammar. Algo para comer, señorita? Tengo mucho hambre. Su pais es muy interesante. Anyway, the whisky seemed to be a type of food and later, at his lodgings, he would send out for something. Oats. A fish. More whisky.

His neighbour, he realised, was speaking to him. He was, at least, leaning forward and working his mouth. Lacroix nodded, said the first things that came into his head. “A ship! From the south!”