László switched on the lamp and uncovered the gun. It was a small black Beretta .32 with a snub barrel of the type designed for more covert use, a gun for spies and undercover cops and nervous housewives. He lifted it from its nest in the white damask. It was a long time since he had held a gun – a lifetime – and the thing’s mysterious energy intrigued him. It could not have weighed more than an old-fashioned silver cigarette case, or one of the bulkier Livres de Poche – Les Misérables, say – but there was no doubting the purity of its purpose, nor the power it conferred on him as he closed his fist around the cross-hatching on the grip. He could go downstairs with it now and shoot the Garbargs, the neat tap-tap of death’s index finger on the back of their necks, so that they fell face first into their soup plates. Or if his dinner party should not be a success, if the veal were spoiled or the conversation dull, it would take only a moment to massacre his guests. Then again, if the world offended him so, it might be simpler to shoot himself, as some years ago a friend of his father’s had done, a fellow doctor, leaning out of the window so as not to splash his brains on the carpet, and leaving behind no note, no statement other than his own corpse draped over the windowsill. Was it possible that anyone went through life without, for an hour or two, contemplating the thick blue line of suicide? Se donner la mort. To give oneself death. And what was the distance you had to travel between the idea and the act? Not far perhaps, not far at all when you had a machine like the Beretta and nothing more wearying to do than squeeze the trigger. As a young man, when, for obvious reasons, the idea had come to him more than once, come in its most seductive guise, as the resolution to an exhausting and insoluble inner debate, he had known he could never go through with it while his mother was still alive. But she had been dead since ’89, buried in Vienna where she had spent her final years with Uncle Ernö, and he remembered how it had indeed entered his head as he travelled to Vienna on the train for the last time, that vestigial death wish which suddenly he was free to enact, for there was no one other than her who would not survive it, who could not recover. He raised the gun and brushed his temple with the satiny blunt of the barrel, imagining (with a certain pleasure) the conversations after the funeral, when friends would stare at each other, shake their heads and say: ‘He had so much to live for! Do you know why he did it?’