For another half-hour he drowsed, then dragged off the sheets and went through to the bathroom, opening the complimentary bottles of shower gel, shampoo, conditioner, and standing under the shower with his face turned up to the jet. He had, he reckoned, stayed in over two hundred different hotels in the last twenty years, sometimes for pleasure, but mostly on work trips, ‘business’ (as if he had a business!). Places where he waited for an interview, for a discussion with a producer, a call from home. Rented space where the life of the last tenant was often still apparent in a trace of tobacco smoke or a hair laced around the plug chain. Sometimes much grosser evidence. In a hotel in London he had once found a splash of blood on a bathroom tile, and in a good hotel in Dublin – recommended – an unflushable human turd.

At the Hotel Opera on Révay utca, breakfast was included in the price of the room and served in a restaurant on the ground floor. On his way past the front desk, László raised a hand in greeting to the waist-coated receptionist with whom he had left the black bag the previous evening, though not before he had looked inside it in his room, disappointed to discover that whatever was in there had been thoroughly wrapped: an outer skin of waxed brown paper and beneath it what felt like a thick layer of plastic sheeting. He had been tempted to make a small incision, just big enough to see the stuff itself, but kneeling beside the bag with his nail scissors he had lost his nerve, afraid that his trespass would be discovered and somehow punished. He had the receipt for the bag in his wallet: a slip of green paper like a ticket for clothes at the dry-cleaner’s.

The restaurant was doing a brisk trade. A lot of German was being spoken, some English, some Japanese. When he asked for a table the waitress seemed slightly surprised to be dealing with a Hungarian. She found him a quiet place next to a pair of fine-boned, grey-haired ladies, whom László immediately decided were artistic spinsters heading off for a day at the National Gallery, where they would take an informed interest in winged altar pieces. They bid him a cheery ‘Grüss Gott!'. He nodded to them and smiled, and crossed to the buffet to make his selection for breakfast. Salami, mangoes, little French cheeses wrapped in foil. Sugary cakes. High-fibre cereals. Hard-boiled eggs. Odd how unappetizing it was, heaped together like this, the catering manager’s vision of plenty.