Of course he wanted to be remembered? What man did not?

‘You want to be remembered, don’t you?’ she repeated.

‘Not particularly. At least not for the things that people know me for – the big events of my life. If I am to be remembered, I want to be remembered for the quieter, truer moments of my life. I don’t need a story for those. I need someone.’

Saskia smiled at him, playing along with his performance of humility and modesty.

‘Luckily for me, I already have someone who retains those moments,’ Emil Coetzee said, walking back from the window.

‘Your wife?’ Saskia asked, thinking all the while of Zora Neale Hurston.

As soon as Emil Coetzee sat down at his desk, he noticed that one of the azure-coloured notes was missing and that the folded letter was now half-open. Saskia saw him notice these things, and instantly regretted not having put back the azure-coloured note.

‘Did you take one of the notes on my desk?’ Emil Coetzee asked, obviously fighting for civility. ‘Miss Hargrave?’ he said when she did not immediately respond. There was a hint of severe reprimand in his voice and Saskia felt like a child caught in the middle of some mischief. She felt chastened, not by the man she had been flirting with and flattering, but by Emil Coetzee, The Head of The Organisation of Domestic Affairs and one of the most powerful men in the country.

She had no choice but to retrieve the azure-coloured note from her notebook and hand it to him. ‘It is such a pretty colour … I was just admiring it … forgot it was there. I was so absorbed by our conversation,’ she tried to explain. As she was speaking, Emil Coetzee stared at her discoloured tooth, and as he did so, she felt the sting of his withering look. To him, she was obviously nothing more than someone nonsensical who had wasted his most precious time – a nuisance. He wanted her to feel small. He wanted her out of his life now. As he, with a look of complete contempt, watched her walk out of his office, he almost succeeded in making her feel inconsequential.

Almost.

Saskia would get the better of him yet: she knew she would, which was why she was now, many hours later, cramped in her lime-green Renault 5, parked discreetly some distance away from Marion Hartley’s front gate, just in front of the road’s intersection with 3rd Street. She was parked there lying in wait for Emil Coetzee in the pitch-black darkness that existed just before the dawn because of his best kept secret – Zora Neale Hurston, the woman Emil Coetzee loved so much that he treasured the handwritten notes she had given him.

Saskia felt that she simply had to see the woman who had captured the erstwhile untouchable heart of Emil Coetzee. Instead of attending a ceasefire party at her editor’s home, she had followed Emil Coetzee to what she had hoped would be Zora Neale Hurston’s house, but had instead turned out to be Marion Hartley’s. Marion Hartley was no discovery because the entire City of Kings had long known that Emil Coetzee was having an affair with his best friend’s widow. Saskia sat patiently in her car waiting for Emil Coetzee to drive out the gate and take her to Zora Neale Hurston.