László shrugged, and carefully filled four small glasses with the Zytnia. ‘Idiot,’ he said, gently, giving Franklin his glass.

Once they had drunk, then wiped their lips with the backs of their hands – something that seemed unavoidable when drinking vodka – László asked: ‘Does anyone know how to take the bullets out?’

But it seemed that no one wished to touch the weapon now, as though it were merely resting, curled on the table next to the figs, a thing with mayhem in it. At last, muttering to himself and feeling that he was the only adult in a room of difficult children, László dropped a napkin over the gun, wrapped it carefully, and crossed the corridor to his study, a room twenty metres square that looked south towards the boulevard Edgar Quinet, and the cemetery where Sartre and de Beauvoir and the glorious Beckett lay. There were two desks in the room: the one nearer to the window was heaped with papers and scrawled-over index cards and a dozen of the black ink fibre-tip Pentels László preferred for writing. The other, a larger desk bought second-hand at a bankruptcy sale, was equipped with a computer, a fax-telephone, and a green-shaded lamp with a solid brass base. On this desk the papers were neatly stacked, and on the corner of the desk a vase of yellow freesias perfumed the room. This was where Kurt worked – typing letters, organizing the diary, fielding the telephone – ensuring the playwright could spend his time on art rather than life.