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When in the morning I went back to Franco Bartoli's apartment he was not there, or at least did not appear, and instead Kristina received me, still in her black dinner dress, more ashen and red-rimmed than ever. She said she had not slept, but had spent the night at Cass Cleave's bedside. This seemed perfectly natural to my ears, as natural as the fact that I had, without any intention that I can now discern, packed Cass Cleave's bag and brought it with me from the hotel. I do believe that at these times our thinking is thought for us. Kristina when I handed her the bag made no comment. She led me into the dining room where we had eaten dinner the night before and bade me sit down at the table. In the spiked sunlight of morning the place had a slightly sweaty, panting atmosphere, as if the night's revels in the streets had broken in here and had only lately been quelled. Cass Cleave was right, it is the different air, the different smells, that mark a place as foreign. This room, fusty and watchful, was meant to be lived in only after dark, and the sunlight coming in at the window was scandalously bright and brash. Odd to think that for others, for Franco and his mother, for the old cook, this place was as familiar as the palms of their own hands. I have never belonged anywhere… I cleared my throat and enquired after Cass Cleave, diffident as a hospital visitor. Kristina was pouring coffee for me and did not lift her eyes from the cup. I could see my face reflected in the polish of the dining table, foreshortened, indistinct, the upper part of it seeming sinisterly masked. I was trying, inconse-quently but with some irritation, to recall the exact distinction between the terms gemutskrank and geisteskrank. "She wishes to be alone," Kristina Kovacs said. "For a while. She has things to consider." I nodded, not seeing how else to respond. There seemed a nice point of etiquette in play here, an etiquette to which I was not party. I felt distantly a dull, dragging sense of sundering and release, as the ship must feel in the first moment of heaving away from the dockside; it was, I realise now, an initial, premonitory twinge of the coming pains of loss. "I love her, you know," I heard myself say, almost peevishly, and would have gone red all over if my ancient hide were less leathery. Now it was Kristina's turn to nod, pursing her lips. I could hear the old cook scratching about in the kitchen. "Nevertheless," I said, overly loud, sounding to my own ears like a Victorian paterfamilias reluctantly acceding to a fortune hunter's request for his homely daughter's hand, "nevertheless, I shall let her go, if that is what she wants." Kristina, still looking down, pondered my words for a moment, and then looked up at me and smiled. "Oh, Axel," she said softly, "only someone incapable of love could love so selflessly."

Later, when I saw Cass Cleave, she was in Bartoli's garden, a cramped, sunless box of stubby grass and wilting foliage wedged between two high, stuccoed walls and the blank-windowed rear of another, looming apartment house. She was sitting on a wrought-iron chair in a corner beside a blue-blossoming bush, very straight, her slender neck extended and her hands calmly folded in her lap. Her hair, I noticed, had grown appreciably longer in the months that she had been with me, and was gathered now and tied behind her head in what I believe is called a chignon. She was barefoot, and was wearing an old-fashioned white linen night-gown, lent to her by Bartoli's mother, no doubt. Placed there, all pale and russet, in front of the stained white wall, she might have been posing for a photograph, or awaiting, indeed, the arrival of the firing squad. As I approached, she looked up, her gaze not quite focused, and smiled vaguely, as if she were not sure whether I was real or only a comfortably familiar hallucination. I stood before her in the still and lifeless air, jabbing at the coarse grass with my stick. She waited, incurious, directing her blurred smile here and there. I said that I had heard that she wished to be left alone, and was unable to suppress the unexpected note of pique in my tone. I said she should know that Kristina Kovacs was ill, that she was, in fact, dying. I said that I had slept with her once, long ago, in Prague. "Yes," Cass Cleave said, "she told me." So. "And what," I asked, "did you tell her, in return?" She did not answer. I sighed. I had my little speech prepared. A livid cloud was creeping stealthily toward the sun. "You must understand," I said, "I shall have to go back to my life, and so must you go back to yours." I lightly laughed. "I have spent so much money here," I said, "my agent in Arcady, who handles my financial affairs, believes I am being blackmailed – which," with an archly frowning smile, "I am, in a way." I paced a step to right, to left, pivoting on my stick. I said that of course I loved her, but love is only an urge to isolate and be in total possession of another human being. "By loving you," I said, "I took you from the world, and now, I am giving you back. Do you see?" She listened to all this in silence, her head judiciously inclined, and now she nodded. I sighed again, impatiently. "Are you going to betray me?" I said. "Those newspaper things – will you reveal them, and betray me?" She sat quite still for a moment, then looked up with a little shiver, smiling, as if she were waking from a brief, refreshing sleep, and glanced about, in pleased surprise, it seemed, at the blue bush, and the white wall, and at me, standing before her, leaning on my stick. "We never saw the Shroud," she said. She rose from the iron chair and linked her arm in mine, and together we started back across the garden, toward the open garden window, where Kristina Kovacs stood, waiting for us, with her arms tightly folded under her bosom. "I have," Cass Cleave said softly, "something to tell you."

She left the city that day. Kristina Kovacs came to the hotel to inform me of her departure – her flight – bringing Franco Bartoli with her. When I saw them in the lobby, sitting side by side on the white couch by the indoor fountain where I had caught my first, unrecognising glimpse of the girl, they looked like a pair of errant children miserably awaiting their due of punishment. A thunderstorm that had been threatening for days had broken at last and was striding about the sky in lavish fury, banging its fists together and flinging down bolt upon jovian bolt with scarce a pause. A group of guests and one or two staff were crowded in the open front doorway, watching the palls of rain sweep along the street and sending up a collective sigh of appreciation and awe at each lightning flash. "But you said you would let her go," Kristina Kovacs said, looking up at me and blinking. "I thought – " The noise of the rain from outside was louder than the splashing water in the fountain. I struck the marble floor a blow with my stick. There are times when anger is a kind of pain, whining in one's head, high-pitched and hot, like a toothache. "You thought?" I cried. "You thought? You did not think!" Kristina went on blinking helplessly. No, she did not know where Cass Cleave had gone to; she had given her money, a considerable sum, enough for her to travel on for weeks, for months, perhaps. I made her promise, I made her swear, to tell me at once if she should hear from her. "You do not understand," I said, shaking my head from side to side, old wounded brute. "You do not understand!" I could have broken down and wept for rage. I had walked them to the door. A crackle of lightning lit the street, the crowd said Ahh! Kristina Kovacs went to the reception desk to borrow an umbrella, and Franco Bartoli laid a hand solicitously on my arm. "We thought you wanted to be rid of her," he said. "We thought you would be glad." I nodded wearily and said that yes, yes, glad, I was glad, of course. For a week I heard nothing. I seem to have done little else but pace, up and down my room, along the hotel corridors, from street to street, muttering, talking to myself and to Cass Cleave, railing at her and calling down curses on her head. In my overheated memory, the background to that interminable interval is all rolling, rumbling noise and thunder flashes, as if the storm that broke over the city on the day of her departure had continued on, without abating, day after day, night after empty night, in sympathy somehow with the turmoil in my heart. Then at last, banal as can be, came a postcard, from Genoa, with an antique photograph on the front showing, of course, a panoramic view of the Stagione cemetery. There is to be an eclipse of the sun, she wrote, do you think the world will end? Although she had given no address I had myself taxied at once to the station and was in Genoa by noon. I swung myself off the train and walked out into the sun and set off blindly up the first street facing me. The day was foully hot and the harbour stank. Crowds, cobbles, tottering palazzi.The street, a winding gorge, narrowed and then narrowed again, and then grew narrower still, and soon I was elbowing my way through a sort of souk where enormous, blue-black men in white djellabas lounged at stalls displaying slices of fried food and spilling bags of grain and unskinned kid goats with slashed windpipes hanging up by their little black hoofs. I sat down in a café and drank a glass of anis. The fat Arab proprietor leaned comfortably on the counter picking his teeth and talked to me in demotic French about his wives and his good-for-nothing sons. It was siesta time, the shutters were coming down. A circling fan in the ceiling stirred the drooping twists of flypaper. And at that moment, in that cheerfully alien place, I knew at last that she was lost to me for good. For good: how the language mocks us. I trailed back to the station, where I had to wait a peculiarly agonising hour for the next northbound train. It was late afternoon when I returned to the hotel, exhausted and feeling obscurely ashamed. I pulled the curtains in the room and climbed into the bed that still smelled faintly, or so I fancied, of her.