Nestled on the baize, like the egg of some giant hornet or dragonfly, was the capsule – shiny blue and shiny red. He picked it up. It was almost weightless, its little load of pharmaceuticals just visible through the slightly dented glycerin skin. The hair prickled on the back of his neck, and he swung round as though expecting to catch Larry or Ella or, God knows, Alice, standing by the door, watching him, seeing the expression on his face, and knowing what he must be thinking. But he was quite alone. Nobody was going to disturb him.

He placed the capsule between his lips, tore a strip from the evening paper, wrapped the capsule, and slid it into the breast pocket of his shirt. Then he put away the cups, closed the box, turned out the lights and went upstairs, pausing for a moment, in a kind of passion, outside his mother’s room.

10

At 8.45 on a morning of dazzling sunlight, László Lázár stepped down on to the platform at Westbahnhof. In one hand he carried his old blue ‘pilot’s’ bag; in the other a black holdall of tough imitation leather handed to him at the Gare de l’Est the previous evening by a middle-aged man he had never seen before.

It was not, of course, the money – that would come later – and when he had looked inside it, locked into one of the toilets on the train, he had found it to contain nothing but a dozen newspapers – Le Monde Diplomatique – and two large white bath towels, presumably for the sake of bulk. In Vienna he kept it with him, depositing the blue bag at left luggage and taking a taxi to the Opera House, killing time in Kärntner Strasse, Singer Strasse, the Hoher market. Several times he paused to watch the street in a store window, trying to catch from out of the animated sheen of passers-by a glimpse of any figure that stopped when he stopped, but the only persistent face, the only face his trick surprised into a guilty stillness (a face like milk splashed on dark wood), was his own.

At 12.30 he returned to Westbahnhof and took a seat in the station restaurant, a table between a pillar and a large pot plant, from where he had a clear view of the glass and steel doors. There were still twenty-five minutes before the rendezvous, but this time he did not intend to be startled by an unseen approach, as he had been at the station in Paris, turning to find a face too close to his own, a stare like a policeman’s, a voice reciting, ‘Françoise said to give you this,’ in an accent he was starting to be familiar with.