He spent that evening with Laurence Wylie in a bar on the boulevard Ménilmontant, the same bar in which Franklin had acquired the gun from the policeman. She had quite obviously been drinking at home before coming out, and it did not take more than a glass of Ricard before she began to repeat herself. Franklin had not been keeping his appointments with the doctor. Franklin was mysteriously sick in the night. Franklin made ‘jokes’ about killing himself. Most recently there had been a row with the gardienne, Madame Barbossa, whom Franklin had accused of snooping. She probably was, said László. Snooping was part of her job. But Franklin had made the poor woman weep by calling her a ‘collabo!’ This to a woman whose father had died heroically in the street fighting of August ’44, saving his comrades, saving France. Naturally the neighbours had become involved. It was a miracle the police had not been called. László agreed it was a mess, a tangle, and had promised that he would have another talk with Franklin, though he drew the line at Laurence’s suggestion that he also talk to Franklin’s doctor, a German of indeterminate sexuality whose waiting room was always full of painters and novelists and dancers with their STDs, their imaginary brain tumours.

At midnight he walked her home to the rue du Deguerry, hugged her in lieu of any more substantial consolation, then caught the Metro from Parmentier. There were bins in the Metro station, bins on the street, but the note had remained in his wallet. He could not quite understand it, this sudden blossoming of the neurotic. Was it some old reflex of secrecy? After all, he had grown up with Rákosi and the ÁVH, where it was taken for granted that there were informers everywhere. But he had lived in France for forty years! Was it possible that the old instincts were so easily provoked? He was not convinced, and as he took the cage elevator up to his apartment, it struck him that he was acting like a man who had decided upon a course of action he could not yet justify to himself, as though reason – or what passed for it, those little narratives of self-justification – were loping behind his true intentions like an idiot.

Kurt was at home, standing in the kitchen in his underwear eating a slice of bread and honey. He demonstrated a new contortion from the yoga class. László passed on the story of Franklin and the gardienne which, in the retelling, lost its character of melodrama and seemed merely comic. They sat up a while, then retired to the bedroom and went through the preliminaries of love-making, but after twenty minutes, such was the laming effect of his secret, László, lying over Kurt’s back like the last survivor of a disastrous cavalry charge, was forced to admit defeat.

‘Too much wine,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’