They emerged from Brasileira’s famous green door into a tiled square where Fernando Pessoa sat bronzed for all eternity, his punishment for being Portugal’s most famous poet and man of letters. A cold wind from the Tagus swirled in an amphitheater of graceful yellow buildings; a tram clattered past in the Largo Chiado. Gabriel imagined Quinn sitting in a seat in the window, Quinn of the surgically altered face and merciless heart, Quinn the prostitute of death. Lavon was heading up the slope of the hill, slowly, in the manner of a flâneur. Gabriel fell in beside him and together they wound their way through a labyrinth of darkened streets. Lavon never paused to take his bearings or consult a map. He was speaking in German about a discovery he’d made recently on a dig beneath the Old City of Jerusalem. When he wasn’t working for the Office, he served as an adjunct professor of biblical archaeology at Hebrew University. Indeed, owing to a monumental find he had made beneath the Temple Mount, Eli Lavon was regarded as Israel’s answer to Indiana Jones.

He stopped suddenly and asked, “Recognize it?”

“Recognize what?”

“This spot.” Greeted by silence, Lavon turned. “How about now?”

Gabriel turned, too. There were no lights burning anywhere in the street. The darkness had rendered the buildings shapeless, without character or detail.

“This is where they were standing.” Lavon walked a few paces up the cobbled street. “And the person who snapped the photograph was standing here.”

“I wonder who it was.”

“It could have been someone who passed in the street.”

“Quinn doesn’t strike me as the sort who would let a complete stranger take a photo of him.”

Lavon set off again without another word and climbed higher into the district. He made several more turns, left and right, until Gabriel had lost all sense of direction. His only point of orientation was the Tagus, which appeared sporadically through gaps in the buildings, its surface shining like the scales of a fish. Finally, Lavon slowed to a stop and nodded once toward the entrance of an apartment house. It was slightly taller than most buildings in the Bairro Alto, four floors instead of three, and defaced at street level by graffiti. A shutter on the second floor hung aslant on one hinge; a flowering vine dripped from the rusted balcony. Gabriel walked over to the doorway and inspected the intercom. The nameplate for 2B was empty. He placed his thumb atop the button and the buzzer sounded clearly, as if through an open window or walls of paper. Then he placed his hand lightly upon the latch.

“Do you know how long it would take me to open this?”

“About fifteen seconds,” answered Lavon. “But good things come to those who wait.”