in Korean, was “Same place, tonight at nine.” Today was the fourth, an even-numbered day. That meant I was supposed to subtract two hours from the time in the message. Or was it three? Which would mean we were supposed to meet at 6:00 P.M., assuming I remembered the code right. Sohn thought codes were indispensable. To me, they were confusing and easy to forget. Maybe a code with bread in it had advantages.

I arrived at the Sunflower at six, right on time. The bartender looked at his watch, then pointed to the same table Sohn and I had occupied a few hours earlier. I waited. People came into the bar, and left. The tables near me filled up with groups of three or four. I hadn’t paid much attention to the neighborhood, but it didn’t seem to be a very bourgeois crowd. A couple of women with lots of makeup and long lashes came in and surveyed the scene. One of them caught my eye. If she was Portuguese, I couldn’t tell and didn’t want to find out. I shook my head.

Three hours later, it dawned on me that Sohn wasn’t going to show up.

4

“Tell me the truth, Inspector, do you prefer New York to Geneva? You have been to New York, haven’t you?” M. Beret and I were standing in a tiny park. I didn’t like being there. It was a small piece of land sandwiched between the lake and the street, the sort of thing city architects like because it meets their quota for green space. There were lots of trees—a circle of maples around a fountain, lindens along the path, a couple of big beeches off by themselves. The beeches looked like they felt crowded and wished they were somewhere else.

“Can’t we find another spot?” The more I looked around the little park, the more I didn’t like what I saw.

“How about the airport? I can have your bags shipped later.” M. Beret sat down on a bench facing the water. I especially didn’t like that. It put our backs to the street.

“What makes you think I’ve been to New York?”

“A friend of a friend of a friend. A very long chain of friends. They met someone who talked to someone who saw you walking down a hill to Third Avenue. You looked lost, they said.”

“Small world. I had no idea you had orthodox friends.”

“Given your thought patterns, I’ll take that for a yes. But how am I to interpret such information? A mere police inspector, going here and there, there and here, all in the space of two or three months? It’s very odd, is it not?”

“I thought so.” I hadn’t been walking down the hill, I’d been walking up. The other man had been walking down, the friendly man who had stopped. A friendly old man with distant connections to M. Beret?

“Again I ask, what am I to make of your frequent travels? More to the point, why is your passport so light on visas if you travel so much? Do you just slip across borders like the March wind?”

“My passport? Can we walk a bit? It’s getting cold on this bench.” The wind was whipping the lake into frantic wavelets that smacked against each other. In the sunlight they might have sparkled, but not under the leaden gray of the early morning clouds. When I passed by Ahmet’s place on the way to meet M. Beret, it had been closed; no sign in the window, but the shades were down and the door was locked. Maybe Ahmet was out getting his knife sharpened. That meant Dilara was alone, in her bedroom upstairs. Or was she not alone? It was an interesting question, but not as interesting as the one occupying my mind at the moment. When could I get something to eat? I waited for M. Beret to produce a roll from his pocket. This was how dogs were trained, and I could see why it was so effective.

“Obviously, you’ve checked,” I said. “Funny, I examine other people’s passports with some care, but I never look at my own very closely, and it’s not something I keep at home in a drawer. Surely you know that much about my country. I am handed a passport, it has my name and picture in it, a birth date. That’s good enough for me. Is it the same one as last time? Who cares? Maybe they lost the last one after I handed it in. Maybe