Sometimes it is acceptable to admit defeat.

After dinner I washed my dishes, showered, and climbed into bed with my book. It had been a few days since I had picked it up—since, I marveled, the night of the open house. I had missed it, and I soon found myself happily engrossed in the universe of semirural Sweden, where temperatures had fallen below zero, and the murder victim’s brother had just come forward with a surprising story about an illegitimate child. Our detective is dubious, but he also has other things on his mind. He is about to have dinner with his ex-wife, for whom he still carries a torch. They are to meet in a real restaurant, and for the occasion the secretary of his department has had his suit dry-cleaned. I knew, without even reading the rest of the chapter, how the story would unfold; in fact, I could have written it myself. His heart would skip a beat when he first caught sight of her. Candlelight would flatter her familiar features. With hope in his heart he would order a bottle of wine. She would be kind, even solicitous, urging him to eat more healthily, to watch his smoking and drinking, but finally, with a note of regret, she would announce her engagement to her current boyfriend, someone more stable, who worked regular hours, like a lawyer or a financier.

12

I woke to the sound of the phone ringing in the kitchen. I struggled out of bed and felt my way nearsightedly down the hallway.

From the look of the sky, or what I could see of it, dawn had just broken. I sighed inwardly—at this early hour it was most likely to be a wrong number.

Still, I had already made it this far, so I picked up the receiver and said hello.

“Hello,” said a female voice. “How are you this morning?”

“Oh,” I said. “No, thank you. I’m not interested.”

The caller did not respond, and I thought to myself that I should hang up immediately, but some misplaced sense of decorum made me stay on the line, waiting.

“Hang on,” said the caller. “I’m not selling anything. Don’t you recognize my voice?”

And strangely enough, I did. Or I thought I did. I had not had that sense to begin with, but now that she mentioned it, on second thought, yes, there was something familiar about her voice.

“I do,” I said. My mind, still half asleep, was having difficulty putting everything in the correct order. Without my glasses, the view from the window was a blurred grayish green.

“I do recognize your voice, somehow, and yet I’m having some trouble placing you … Who is this?”

“Who I am is not important,” she said. “I have some information you need.”