Half a block from there he let himself into the foyer of a rundown but once-grand apartment building where he’d found an unoccupied flat. It was just before midday and the building seemed quiet. He’d placed his name—C.J. Vinier—on the letterbox in the portico from which he pulled seven letters, two of which were in his name. There were credit card offers and a letter from a person in the neighbourhood with a long-term parking spot to sublet. He climbed the stairs to his assumed apartment on the second floor, where he checked his bouletage, a needle squeezed into the hinge side of the door. It was in place, meaning no one had been in the apartment since he last checked ten days ago. He used the key he’d had made and let himself in. The apartment looked untouched. It had a varnished wooden floor, so having shut the door he kneeled and looked across the living room floor and saw undisturbed dust reflected in the sunlight. No one had walked the floor. Next, he checked the three-point alignment he’d made between the transistor radio on the kitchen counter, the trinket box on the coffee table and the leather-bound copy of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris in the bookcase. He walked to his ‘bullseye’, or the place the operative would stand which would be used as the reference point. From the bullseye he could define three axes, one in front of him, one on his right and one on the left. When a premises had been checked over, at least one of the three axes would be slightly changed. His alignment was intact. He remained at the rear of the main room, focusing through the gap between the partially pulled curtains and on the building opposite his apartment. He was looking for large camera lenses or people with binoculars lifted to their face.

He dropped the Empire magazine on the coffee table and moved to the kitchen, took the bottle of milk and loaf of bread from the fridge and placed them in the rubbish bin under the kitchen sink. He put one of the pastries in the fridge and ate the other as he moved to the bedrooms. In the master bedroom he rearranged the sheets of the bed so the turn-down was different from how he had left it, and changed the book on the bedside table from Proust to Flaubert. In the shelf under the table he put the copy of Variety, opened to page nine. He brushed his teeth in the bathroom, taking care to allow bits of toothpaste foam to hit the mirror. Then he washed his face and, having dried his hands, he left the towel on the vanity counter. As he was leaving he turned on the hall light in the small entryway to the apartment, and jammed a bouletage into the door as he eased it shut.