We sipped small paper cups of coffee at a little table. The seating area was inside the train terminal. Blocked off by poles and a fabric banner with the coffee shop’s logo. All around us the train station was buzzing with activity. A regional hub in a small town. People disembarked at Alencourt. They got off their train and went over to the departure board. Then they got back on to trains going other places. Most of them didn’t even get out of the train station. I thought about the dead guy with the shirt. Qayoumi. An asylum seeker from Afghanistan. I said, “What do they do with the body?”

“What body?”

“The dead guy today. Qayoumi.”

“I’m not totally sure. He’s registered with the state as an asylum seeker. So the state might pay for a burial. Also, he has a name, which is a good thing.”

“Everyone has a name.”

“Many people travel through here unregistered and without documents. So if they are found dead they just get buried with a number.”

“But if they have a name,” I said, “I guess someone in some office somewhere does a search before they bury them.”

“I suppose they do, sometimes. But, if the name is common the search won’t yield much.”

“Why’s that?”

“For one thing he’ll be in the French system as Gulam Qayoumi, so they’ll track those records easily enough. If he had registered at the time he entered Europe, most likely in Greece or Italy, he could be tracked there as well. But because Qayoumi registered as an asylum seeker in France, the trail ends here.”

“That’s already a trail.”

“True,” Nazari said. “But it’s unlikely that Qayoumi arrived in France first. More likely he was illegal from his point of arrival to the moment he registered in France.”

“You said, ‘for one thing’. What’s the other thing?”

Nazari adjusted the brim of her hat. “The translation from the original language to French usually makes it difficult to continue the search in the country of origin, using the documents that we have.”

“The Afghan script or whatever.”

“Right. There are many ways to do transliteration. Let’s say Qayoumi speaks zero French. The official asks him to spell his name in French, well he can’t. So the official just writes it as it sounds to him.”

“And maybe the next official decides it’s got a U in the name, QU in Qayoumi.”

“Or a Y at the end instead of an I at the end,” Nazari agreed.

“So tracing him is a mess.”

“Yes. Precisely.”

“And why would he register in France if it’s not the point of entry into Europe?”