After standing up to examine their creations, they clapped the snow off each other’s backs. It was the first time Gessen had seen Vidor look relaxed and happy, and he couldn’t help but wonder if this might be his first instance of spontaneous laughter in years. As he watched them head off in separate directions, Libby turned and waved at the turret. Did she guess he’d been spying on them? She couldn’t possibly know he was up here. Cheeky girl.

Back in his office, Gessen plotted his next move. To prove his suspicions of a dissociative disorder, he would have to call the alter forth. In the case of an acquired – and repressed – identity, he would need to puzzle out when the one had become the other. According to Vidor’s sister, their lodger Malik had moved out of the Sovàny home in April 1969, never to be seen or heard from again. Had he returned to where he came from, or moved to another city in France? He could easily have disappeared into the immigrant communities of a teeming city like Marseille. Perhaps with a new name. Impossible to trace.

If Vidor’s true identity was indeed Malik Sayid, when had he become Vidor Kiraly? According to Katerina Chabon, by the time her brother vanished, and was later presumed dead, Malik had been gone from their lives for several weeks. With the anguish about the fate of their beloved brother and son, the family’s one-time lodger would be a distant memory. Who would have given him a thought? Had Malik, after learning of Vidor’s disappearance, devised a way to reinvent himself as a Hungarian? After which he slipped across the English Channel to begin a new life? But why bother to change his name and identity? Why not remain Malik Sayid?

The potential number of permutations made his head ache. He turned to the window and pressed his forehead against the glass. The falling snow, having started again, would soon erase Vidor’s and Libby’s snow angels.

Age regression therapy might provide some answers. If Malik was lurking in Vidor’s psyche, a certain amount of poking around might ferret him out.

* * *

He tested the water with his toe before wading into the pool, blissfully alone. Vidor hadn’t learned to swim until late in life, and not very well. As a child, he remembered splashing in the baths with his mother at the Gellert in Budapest, that glorious Art Deco confection that had lately become a mecca for tourists. Poor swimmer that he was, he still enjoyed feeling weightless when he floated on his back, and the delicious sensation of water sluicing over his arms and legs.