He was too smart for them, of course. Gessen would have anticipated that Vidor might guess it was a scam. That Egyptian boy must be in on it too. How could he be sure he was really dead? Where was the proof? Gessen’s word was all he had. Wasn’t it only yesterday, just before dusk, that Vidor had seen Ismail lurking at the edge of the Zen garden, partly concealed behind the boxwood hedge? It wasn’t a ghost. When he looked up and saw Vidor at the window, the boy had taken flight and vanished into the trees.

Sweat soaked through his shirt. Blood beat in his neck. As he lurched from his seat to open the window for air, the attendant’s head snapped up, mildly alarmed. But the windows were shut fast. Air. He clawed at the zipper of his jacket. He needed air. Darkness closed upon them as they entered a narrow chasm where water gushed through cracks in the rock, and pine branches scraped the window. By the time they finally ground to a halt, Vidor had pulled off his coat and hat. When the driver cranked open the door, he stumbled from the car and flung himself into the frigid air, gasping for breath.

The attendant stared at him goggle-eyed. ‘Shall we go back? You don’t look well.’

‘No.’ Vidor coughed and straightened up. ‘I’m all right.’ He clumsily patted the man’s shoulder. ‘Just a touch of… never mind. I’m fine.’ And he was, more than fine, now that he was away from the suffocating pall of the clinic and once again in the bracing sphere of normal life. The contrast so great that only now did he realise how badly the atmosphere of the clinic had crushed his spirit, as if he’d been forced to live and breathe the fetid air under a bell jar. No amount of gourmet food and luxury accommodations could make up for that.

He stepped off the platform and headed into the village, a place he’d only glimpsed from the clinic’s eyrie high above. A scattering of houses with steep roofs and painted shutters. A narrow road that snaked through the valley, hemmed in by pines. Up ahead, not thirty metres away, the red-and-white sign of the national railway shone in the grey light. Bless the industrious Swiss for building a railhead in the back of beyond.

As he hurried into the street, the hapless attendant in tow, he could sense the local villagers and shopkeepers turning their heads to stare at him. Wondering, perhaps, what flavour of crackpot he might be. Debilitated and dangerous, or merely deranged? There was nothing up the mountain but the clinic. Dressed in their standard-issue clothing, his status as a patient would be obvious to all. The jacket and trousers he wore, even his socks and underwear, were courtesy of Gessen, as if the man owned his very skin.