tightly so that the entire sequence fitted on the one napkin. The coin slipped from my fingers a couple of times and the clatter made the waiter look round. The bar was empty now and I knew I ought to leave but the repetitive action seemed to have possessed my hand and I couldn’t stop. I wrote down the final symbol and looked over the sequence from the beginning, underlining any runs of the same sign. There were series of five, six, even seven of the same sign in a row. So was there, as Kloster had said mockingly, a bias to chance? Even the blind coin yearned for repetition, form, figure. As I tossed the coin more and more times the runs of repetitions grew longer. Perhaps there was even a statistical law that governed their length. And in that case were there other hidden forms, other kernels of causality, within chance? Other figures, other patterns invisible to me, in the sequence I’d just written down? Something that could even explain Luciana’s bad luck? I looked at the sequence again but it was still closed to me like some indecipherable handwriting. You should uphold the thesis of chance, Kloster had said. I felt something inside me falter, as if an essential, personal foundation, of which I hadn’t even been aware, was crumbling. I had withstood the criticism, in a review, that my novel The Random Men was calculating in its careful simulation of chance. But simply tossing a coin in the air had proved more devastating than any of these objections. A throw of the dice will never abolish chance, Mallarme might have said. And yet the napkin spread on the table had demolished for ever what I believed about chance. If you really believe in chance, you should believe in these runs, they should seem natural, you should accept them. This was what Kloster had meant, and it was only now that I fully understood. But at the same time—and this was perhaps the most disconcerting thing, the maddening detail—he, Kloster, didn’t seem to believe that Luciana’s getting tails several times in a row was just a run of bad luck. It was the theory that most favoured and suited him, yet he was sufficiently sure of his innocence, or impunity, to lean towards another possibility. But which one? Of this he had said nothing, merely hinting that it would be set out in his novel. But he had made that strange comparison of the sea to a god’s bath. Kloster, the fervent atheist whom I had admired, had spoken in almost religious terms more than once during our conversation. Could his daughter’s death have affected him that much? He who stops believing in chance starts to believe in God, I recalled. Was this how it was? Kloster now believed in God? Or had it all been carefully staged to convince a single spectator?
I called the waiter, paid my bill and left. It was past midnight and all you could see in the streets were beggars huddling on bits of cardboard, and foul-smelling piles of black rubbish bags. Now and then refuse lorries ground their metal jaws. I turned down a side street, and was irresistibly drawn to the sudden glow from a shop window. I moved closer and stopped. It was a large furniture store and inside, before my eyes, soundlessly, unbelievably, a fire was spreading. The rug at the entrance was already in flames, slowly writhing and undulating and seeming to rise from the floor. It was smoking and giving off sparks that quickly spread the fire to a coat stand and a coffee table by the door, the flames rising higher and higher. The coat stand suddenly collapsed in a shower of fire, touching the headboard of a double bed. Only then did I notice that the display was arranged as the ideal marital bedroom, complete with bedside tables and a baby’s cot. Suddenly the bedcover burst into savage flames. It all happened in the same dauntless silence, the roar of the fire sealed behind the window. I knew the glass might shatter at any moment, but couldn’t tear myself away from the hypnotic, dazzling spectacle. Everything writhed before me but still no alarm sounded, no one came, as if the fire was a message for me alone. The room, the cot, the little fake home—it was all disintegrating, transmuting. The furniture was now simply wood, an elemental material seeking only to submit, obey, feed