In her place, balanced on the stool she had recently vacated, was an object I recognized, a slim leather briefcase, its gold buckles glowing faintly in the candlelight. I looked around me, to the dimly lit couches, but she was nowhere to be seen.

“Excuse me, did you see the woman who was sitting here?”

I had spoken to the bartender, who had materialized in front of me, tall and unfriendly-looking, with a grid-like tattoo peeking out from under each shirtsleeve. In answer to my question, he gave me a quizzical look.

“Yes,” he said. His voice was deep, and not a jot friendlier than the look of its owner.

“Do you know if she’s staying here at the hotel?” I asked, attempting a breezy tone. I was met with silence, then an arch look, and then the bartender began polishing a glass with a white cloth napkin. It occurred to me suddenly that because of the way my question was phrased, he might suspect me of harboring romantic inclinations toward the guest lecturer, and I hurried to acquit myself of this suspicion.

“It’s just that I think she may have forgotten her bag,” I said, with a gratuitous gesture at the briefcase.

We studied the bag together. The implausibility of it was immediately apparent. The briefcase, as I had remarked earlier on my first visit to the Old Mission Hotel, just did not go with the woman.

“Or,” I said, “it may be mine, come to think of it.”

Now that I had embarked upon this grotesque conversation, I was having trouble drawing it to a close. The bartender seemed not to have even a glimmer of interest in what I did with the briefcase in front of me, and yet words continued to pour out of me like water from a tap.

“The man at the front desk told me someone had picked something up for me. I wonder if this could be it?”

Some time ago, over by the front desk, the little boy who’d knocked over the flowers had begun to wail, his high voice rising against the background of the ambient music like a mourner’s, and now he grew louder and more piercing, making it difficult to think clearly. And yet, I thought, what is there to think? The bartender was still blank-eyed, polishing his glass. I made a pretense of looking the briefcase over, of lifting it by the handle and turning it from side to side, and then, feeling more and more like a third-rate understudy, I produced a little crowing noise of recognition.

“It is mine!” I said. I lifted it by the handle and brought it to rest at my side. It had a pleasing weight to it. The bartender continued to watch me with elaborate disinterest.

“I’ll be on my way, then,” I said, stepping back from the bar, briefcase in hand. “Thank you for your help.”