A pale half-moon hung in the blue of the twilight, and in some quarter of the sky the comet Hale-Bop, that vast event of ice and dust, was making its passage back towards the celestial equator. In the early spring he had often watched it from among the TV aerials on the roof of his flat, and had found it hard to believe that its great ellipse would not provoke some happening in the world, or many happenings – countless individual fates falling in an astral rain from the comet’s wake – but for the moment at least the sky was unexceptional, the usual faultless machine with nothing extraordinary or dangerous happening in it.

He lit the storm lantern and looped the wire handle over a metal bracket beside the kitchen doors, for though it would not be quite dark for another hour, he liked the tang of the paraffin and the companionable hiss of the filament. He intended to work. Alcohol did not agree with him and he had never learned how to smoke. Work was his refuge, and sitting in one of the old canvas chairs he tugged the manuscript, dictionaries and marker pens from the satchel and began to read, holding the script close to his glasses, struggling at first to concentrate, his mind still snared in the room above his head where his mother lay. But at last the work drew him down into the orderly double-spaced world of the text, and under his breath he sounded the words of a language he had made half his own.

2

In the narrow kitchen of his fourth-floor apartment on rue Delambre, László Lázár was preparing a dinner of veal escalopes ‘en papillote’. It was a recipe that called both for delicacy and good timing, so he was more irritated than alarmed when one of his dinner guests, Laurence Wylie, informed him that her husband, the painter Franklin Wylie, had brought a gun with him and was waving it about in the dining room. The escalopes, tender pink, almost translucent, were laid out on the slab of the chopping board. He was about to hit them with a mallet.

‘A gun? Where the hell does he get a gun from?’

‘From some cop he drinks with at Le Robinet. For God’s sake, László, tell him to put it away before there’s an accident. He’ll listen to you.’

She was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, wide-eyed, straight as a dancer, her hair held back from her face by a silver clasp. She was smoking: one of those cigarettes that come in white or almost white packets, and which to László seemed completely pointless.

‘Franklin listens to nobody,’ he said.

‘But what if it goes off?’