His first reaction had been to drop it into the wire tray on his desk – both his ‘in’ and his ‘out’ tray – where he collected all those matters he did not intend to look at for a very long time. There was work to do. His Hrabal lecture, a dozen postgraduate essays to wade through. But several times during the next hour he had reached for the note and examined it as if the message, which could hardly have been more blunt, more laconic, were somehow encrypted. Finally, with a grunt of impatience, he had screwed it into a ball and lobbed it into the waste basket on the other side of the room, only to fish it out a few minutes later, carefully fold it, and put it in his wallet next to the photograph of himself holding his mother’s hand outside the old house on Szechnyi Rakpart.

Back at the apartment – it was Kurt’s yoga night – he had held the note under the lamp in the study. He had, of course, been expecting something of the kind since the call the night of the dinner, but now that it had come he felt suddenly and unreasonably implicated, as if he had agreed to it all, even solicited it. He decided to destroy the note by tearing it into pieces so small it could not possibly be reconstructed (by whom? Kurt? The Garbargs, fingering the communal rubbish?). Alternatively, it might be wiser, more complete, to burn it in an ashtray, or even to flush it away in the toilet, though in the first case there would be the lingering odour of paper smoke, and in the second, he risked the reappearance of scraps of paper from the mysteries of the U-bend. The plumbing of the Fifth Republic – or in the case of his own toilet, possibly the Fourth – was good but far from perfect.

He had paced about the study, laughed at himself, read a paragraph from the previous days Libération (Kurt kept all the papers for recycling), then flicked through a dozen pages from the last draft of his latest work-in-progress, L’un ou l'autre. To be absolutely safe he resolved to throw the note away in a street bin a good distance from the apartment. People threw things away all the time. There could be nothing remotely suspicious about it.