I had not, between the first package and the second, eaten anything.
I had drunk two coffees and one Sagres and a glass of tap water at the Tasca. I had bought thread and ink. I had pinned eleven photographs to a wall. I had drawn a circle. I had sat at a desk for what may have been three hours and may have been five. I had not, in any of that time, eaten.
I tell you this because the second package, when I picked it up, weighed more than the first by perhaps the weight of one sheet of paper, and the weight of one sheet of paper, when you have not eaten in twenty-four hours and have spent twelve of those hours in the country of small numbers, registers in the hand. The first package had weighed almost nothing because the photograph had weighed almost nothing. The second package weighed almost nothing because it contained nothing else. I do not know how I knew this before I cut the twine. I knew it.
I had gone to the door at the knock and the knock had been the sound of paper. I had stood in the doorway for a count of seconds I did not count. I had picked up the package. I had carried it to the desk. The lamp had been on since four-eleven that morning, fourteen hours of warm amber on the same patch of brown paper, and the second package had looked, on the desk, like the older sibling of the first.
I cut the twine with the folding knife I had finally found a use for.
There was nothing inside but a single sheet of paper.
It was typed.
The typing was old.
I will get to that.
The paper was onion-skin. Onion-skin is the paper a person uses when they expect to make carbons, which is what most paper of that thinness was used for in the years before xerographic copies were trustworthy. The paper had been folded once down the middle. The crease was not new. The paper had been folded for at least a year and possibly for thirty. The paper had yellowed at the upper-left corner the way a thumbprint of human oil yellows paper across decades. Someone had touched this paper many times. Someone had unfolded it and refolded it and unfolded it again.
The typing was the typing of a manual typewriter — not a daisy-wheel typewriter, not an electric typewriter, not an inkjet pretending to be a typewriter — a true manual, with the characteristic small variations in vertical alignment that come from the slight independence of each typebar in its rest position. The font was the font of a European typewriter from the 1960s or the early 1970s — a particular sans-serif with a closed lowercase a and a hooked tail on the lowercase g. I knew the font. I had seen the font in a thousand letters and reports in the archives of a thousand institutions that did not, until 1989, have a budget for an electric machine. The font was the font of an Olympia SM7. The Olympia SM7 had been manufactured in Wilhelmshaven until the year I had been born, and after the year I had been born by various successors, and the Olympia SM7’s typebar alignment had been the most consistent of any continental manual typewriter of the century, which meant that when a misalignment showed up in an SM7 page it was a misalignment introduced by the typist and not by the machine.
There were two misalignments on the page in front of me. One was on the third line, the third character — a slight bump up. The other was on the sixth line, the second character — a slight bump down. These were typist’s misalignments. They were the misalignments of a typist who had been working with carbon and had pressed once too hard with the third finger of the right hand and once too gently with the second finger of the left hand. They were not the misalignments of a typist who had been in a hurry. The page had been typed slowly. The page had been typed by someone who had been concentrating.
The ink was fresh.
I held the page up to the lamp. The strikes on the page had the characteristic small puddle at the bottom of each character that you get when a ribbon has been recently advanced. I had spent enough time in the document rooms of bureaucracies to know the difference between a forty-year-old strike and a four-month-old strike. This was not a forty-year-old strike. The page had been typed within the past six months. Possibly within the past six weeks.
So I was holding a sheet of onion-skin that had been folded for thirty years and typed in the past six weeks.
Someone had kept blank onion-skin in a drawer for thirty years and had used it to type a list.
The list was the only thing on the page. There was no header. There was no date. There was no salutation. There were no annotations. There were seven names, each on a separate line, each separated from the next by a single typed dash. The names were in no order I could identify at the table that night — not alphabetical, not chronological by anything I could verify in the moment, not grouped by nationality. The names were simply written down, with the deliberate untidiness of a list that meant something to the person who had written it and nothing yet to the person who would read it.
I read the first name twice and did not know it.
I read the second name and recognized it instantly, with the cleanness with which I had recognized the man on the cover of The Economist, because the second name was the man on the cover of The Economist, and the writer of the list had put him in the second position, which I have thought about since.
I read the third name and did not know it.
I read the fourth name, which was a Greek surname I had heard before in some other context but could not at the table that night place.
I read the fifth name, which was a Hungarian surname with the Hungarian convention of family-name-first, and which I did not know.
I read the sixth name, which was a name with the consonant cluster of a Slavic language and which I did not know.
I read the seventh name, which was an Italian surname with a regional inflection that suggested Tuscany or northern Lazio, and which I did not know.
I read the list a second time. I read it a third time. Each time the second name said itself out loud in my head and the six others did not.
I picked up the pencil I had brought back from the stationer’s. I drew a small dot beside the second name.
I had recognized one. I had six to go.
I have, since that night, thought a great deal about the order. The order has, on the calmer days, looked random to me. The order has, on the harder days, looked like a code I have not yet broken. I have, at one or two two-a.m.s in years since, wondered whether the order was a meaningful arrangement of the kind that someone in a building with brass chandeliers would have considered amusing to construct. I have, at the same two-a.m.s, decided that the answer to that question was probably no and was probably also yes. The order was, I think, the order in which the typist had wanted the list to be read. The typist had not been in the building with the chandeliers. The typist had been one floor below it, mentally, and had used the order to send a small private signal to anyone capable of receiving it. I was not, that night in Lisbon, capable of receiving it. I am now.
Sebastian Hawes is the name of a city editor I had worked with at a Frankfurt paper between 2011 and 2014. Sebastian Hawes is the kind of editor who answers his phone at any hour of any day because he has not, in the twenty-three years I have known him, slept more than four consecutive hours. I called Sebastian Hawes at fourteen minutes past midnight on the morning of the Saturday after my Friday, having waited until the Continent was at last asleep around me, and Sebastian answered on the second ring with the kind of irritation that means he had been awake.
“Wren,” he said.
“Sebastian.”
“Where.”
“Lisbon.”
“Still.”
“Still.”
He waited.
I read him the third name.
The third name was the name of a banker. Sebastian had, in 2013, killed a piece I had drafted about a Frankfurt private bank that had been moving funds for a regime in West Africa that had been killing its own opposition. The piece had been killed not because Sebastian had wanted it killed but because the bank’s lawyer had been on the phone with the paper’s publisher within an hour of Sebastian having seen the second draft. Sebastian had bought me a beer that evening at the Maingau and had told me, in the particular German manner of telling you something while pretending to be telling you the wine list, that the name on the door of the bank’s general counsel’s office was a name I should remember and not for the bank.
The third name on my list was the name on that door.
Sebastian did not speak for a count I would describe, if I were a writer of cleaner prose than this, as long.
“Where,” Sebastian said again.
“On a list.”
“Whose list.”
“I don’t know.”
“How long is the list.”
“Seven names.”
He thought.
“Read me the others,” he said.
I read him the others. The second name — the Economist man — he knew, because anyone in finance had known the Economist man’s name for the past three years. The fourth name, the Greek, he placed within four seconds — the man had been the Greek defense minister between 2003 and 2007 and had since gone into a consulting business that operated, Sebastian said, between Athens and the kind of Mediterranean capital cities at which Greek defense ministers do not usually have second residences. The fifth name, the Hungarian, Sebastian did not know. The sixth, the Slav, did not stir him. The seventh, the Italian, he repeated to himself once, then said I’ll come back to that in a voice that suggested he would not.
“Sebastian,” I said.
“Wren.”
“Is the third name on a list of seven names a man I should be writing about.”
“No.”
“Why.”
“Because the third name on a list of seven names with the second name being the Economist man is a list of seven names you should be running away from.”
I did not answer.
“Get a flight,” Sebastian said. “Berlin. Stockholm. Anywhere. Not Frankfurt.”
“I’m not going to Frankfurt.”
“Good.”
“Sebastian.”
“Wren.”
“The Hungarian name.”
He waited.
“It has the family-name-first order,” I said. “It’s K-A-R-A-D-Y. Karády. The first name is Lajos.”
There was a pause. Sebastian moved the phone to his other ear; I heard the small fabric sound of the move. He had moved the phone to his other ear because he had wanted to think with the side of his head that he did not use to listen.
“Karády,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I knew a Karády,” he said. “Not Lajos. Margit. She had been a translator at a literary foundation in Budapest in the nineties. She had died in 2004. She had told me, in 1997, that her uncle had been a man named Lajos Karády who had disappeared in Vienna in 1981 under circumstances she would not, when I asked, explain. I had not asked her again, because Margit had been a translator who had also been a person, and the person did not want to be asked. Lajos Karády. He was an academic. He had been writing about medical practice in the non-aligned countries. He had been killed.”
“It says here he disappeared,” I said. “Not that he was killed.”
“He was killed,” Sebastian said.
I did not answer.
“Wren.”
“Sebastian.”
“I am going to hang up the telephone now,” he said. “I am going to forget that you called me. I am going to forget I gave you the Greek minister’s name. I am going to forget Lajos Karády. I am going to wake up tomorrow and remember that I have not heard from you in eighteen months. You should also forget. You will not. Get out of Lisbon.”
He hung up the telephone.
I sat at the desk in the small room with the small lamp and the list on the desk and the photograph still pinned to the wall over the desk, and I crossed off, in pencil, three names. The second. The third. The fourth.
I underlined Karády.
I had a printout in the third drawer of the filing cabinet I had been keeping under the bed at the Borges. The printout had been compiled by me in 2017 from the index of a journal called Acta Medica Centralis, which had been published in three languages out of Prague between 1962 and 1991 and which had carried, between 1976 and 1981, a series of essays on the medical practices of non-aligned states by a particular set of authors. I had compiled the printout for a piece I had never written about the Romanian children’s hospitals. I had kept the printout because I never threw away an index.
The Karády byline appeared four times in the printout. The first three were essays I had read at the time. The fourth was an essay that had been listed as forthcoming in the autumn 1981 issue and had never appeared, because the autumn 1981 issue had run with a note saying that Lajos Karády would not be filing further essays for the journal, and giving no further explanation, and listing no replacement.
I had not, in 2017, gone any further than the note. I went further now.
By one a.m. I had found a Hungarian-language obituary in a 1981 archive that had been digitized in 2009 by a foundation I had once written about for entirely separate reasons. The obituary was three sentences long. It said that Lajos Karády, born Budapest 1947, an academic affiliated with the Karl-Franzens-Universität in Graz and a contributor to the Prague journal Acta Medica Centralis, had disappeared in the city of Vienna on the night of the twenty-seventh of October, 1981. It said that his daughter, Eszter, who was nineteen, had reported him missing on the twenty-eighth. It said that no further information was available.
I sat with the three sentences.
I have not, in the years since, ever forgotten the three sentences.
I went back to the list. I sat with the four names I had not identified.
The first name. The fifth name. The sixth name. The seventh name. I read each of them out loud at the desk because reading a name out loud sometimes told me something the page did not. The first name was a name that did not match any common European convention. The first name was, on first encounter, a name I would have assigned to someone of Greek or Ottoman extraction, but with a Latinate first name that suggested a Catholic baptism. I did not know it. I tried two databases. The databases gave me nothing.
The fifth name was Hungarian, by the family-first convention. I had now identified one Hungarian on the list — Karády. The convention suggested the fifth name and the Karády name might be from the same milieu. I did not know it. I tried the Acta Medica Centralis index. I got nothing.
The sixth name was Slavic. The consonant cluster suggested Serbian or Croatian rather than Polish or Czech. I did not know it. I tried, at one in the morning, to telephone a fixer I had used in Belgrade in 2014. The fixer’s phone rang four times and went to a voicemail that had been recorded in 2019 by a different fixer who said that this number had belonged to my fixer who had died in 2020 and that condolences could be sent to a postal address in Niš. I left no message.
The seventh name was Italian. The seventh name was the name Sebastian had said he would come back to. I did not, that night, try to chase it.
I had four names left to crack and three names cracked and one name recognized, and the time, by the small Casio bolted to the bedside table, was now one-fourteen in the morning, which is to say twenty-one hours after the first package had come under the door.
I had not, in any of the twenty-one hours, eaten.
In the building that did not appear on any map of the city in which it stood, Simeon Hospodar sat alone at one end of the long oval table.
The room was not, at this hour, lit by the chandelier. The chandelier was lit only on Tuesdays and Fridays. The room was lit, on the off-nights, by a single floor lamp in the corner that had been brought into the room in 1968 by a Chair whose preference for a lower wattage had survived him by half a century. The light from the lamp did not reach the far end of the table. The far end of the table existed in darkness, which suggested to a person sitting at the near end that the table was longer than it was, and which had been, in the assessment of every Chair who had sat at it since 1968, the point.
In front of Hospodar was a single sheet of paper. The paper was the report of an asset in Lisbon.
The asset had been retained in Lisbon since the spring of 2019. The asset had been instructed, three weeks earlier, to redirect attention from a port matter to the door of the Hotel Borges. The asset had filed, on the evening just past, a single-page report containing the movements of the female guest of room 412 between the hours of four a.m. and six p.m. on the Friday. The asset had recorded the morning purchase of newspapers. The asset had recorded the afternoon trip to a stationer’s on the Rua Garrett. The asset had recorded the purchase, at the stationer’s, of red thread and India ink and white card stock. The asset had recorded the brief stop at a Tasca in Bairro Alto. The asset had recorded the return to the Borges at five-fifteen p.m. The asset had recorded the second package — having observed it from a distance — being delivered to the door of room 412 by a courier the asset had not previously seen. The asset had not identified the courier. The asset had observed the courier enter the Borges from the south door and exit by the same door three minutes later, and then walk three streets in the direction of the Mercado da Ribeira and there enter a taxi the asset had not been able to follow.
Hospodar read the report once. He set it down. He read it a second time. He set it down again.
He thought about red thread and India ink.
He had been, for fifty-one years of his life, in rooms where reports were read. He had been, for thirty-five of those years, the person reading them. He had developed, in the way the careful reader develops, an internal index of the small details that meant a report had been written by an asset who knew their work and a separate index of the details that meant a report had been written by an asset who was telling you something they were not allowed to write down.
The Lisbon asset’s report was the report of an asset who knew their work. The asset had not told him anything they were not allowed to write down. The asset, in fact, had not told him a thing he could not have predicted from the events of the prior twenty-four hours.
The detail that troubled Hospodar was not in the report.
The detail that troubled Hospodar was the absence of a detail.
The asset had been instructed to identify any person who entered or exited the Borges between four a.m. and the time of filing. The asset had identified twenty-seven such persons. The asset had identified the night clerk, the morning clerk, six guests checking out, four guests checking in, the maids, the maintenance man, the brief visit of a sister-in-law of the manager, the courier of the second package, and the woman of room 412 herself. The asset had identified twenty-five of these persons by description and by general nationality, and one of them — the courier of the first package — by description only.
The courier of the first package had entered the Borges at three-fifty-seven a.m. and had left at four-thirteen a.m. and had been observed by the asset in profile only, at a distance of approximately thirty meters, as a man the asset described as in his early-to-mid forties, of approximately one hundred and eighty centimeters in height, with a scar that crossed the bridge of his nose from the left to the right.
There was no such operative on any list Hospodar had ever been given.
The asset filing the report was Hospodar’s asset and was reporting what he had seen, and he had seen, in addition to the second courier, a man whose description matched no person Hospodar’s institution had ever placed in Lisbon.
Hospodar set the report on the table. He did not lift it again. He thought about red thread and India ink.
He thought about a man with a scar that crossed the bridge of his nose.
He picked up the telephone on the small side table at his right and dialed a number that was answered, in Vienna, at one minute past two in the morning local time, by a man who said nothing.
“The asset in Lisbon,” Hospodar said. “Maintain. No action. Maintain on the second floor of the building also, but make no contact with the second-floor occupant unless directly initiated. The journalist is to be watched but is not, until further word, to be approached. The plaza camera is to be left where it is.”
The man in Vienna said nothing.
“The man with the scar,” Hospodar said, “you will not write down.”
The man in Vienna said nothing.
“Good night,” Hospodar said, and hung up.
He sat for a long time in the single-floor-lamp dark with the report on the table and the chandelier above him cold and his hand, which was not steady, against the wood.
He had not been surprised by news in seventeen years.
I had pinned, by three in the morning, the typed list to the wall above the photograph.
I had pinned it carefully, with two thumbtacks, in the position above the photograph and below the India-ink circle, in the formation of three flat objects arranged on a wall such that they could be read top to bottom in the sequence: circle, list, image. I had not yet known why I had pinned them in that sequence. I had pinned them in that sequence because the act of pinning had again come from my hands without input from my brain.
I had crossed off three names in pencil. I had underlined the fourth. The fifth, sixth, and seventh — the Hungarian, the Slav, and the Italian whom Sebastian had said he would come back to and would not — I had left clean. The first I had circled.
The first name I had circled because the first name was, on the second reading of the list, the only name that did not, by any of the conventions of European naming, suggest a country. The first name had the Latinate first name and the surname of indeterminate origin and the absence of any social texture that I could grip from across an ocean. The first name was the name of a person who had been intended, by the typist, to be difficult to find.
I will not, in this paragraph, give it to you.
I will, by the end of the book you are now reading, give it to you. I will, when I give it to you, be already in a room I do not at this moment know exists.
I went to the window of room 412.
I looked across the plaza.
The fourth-floor window of the building opposite — the granary that had become an Italian shipping office — was unlit. It had been unlit, I would later realize, since six minutes after the second package had arrived at my door. It had been unlit because the man who had stood at it in the early hours of the morning was no longer in Lisbon, and because Lisbon was no longer the city in which he intended to be useful to me.
I did not know any of this at the window.
I knew only that the window opposite was dark.
I went back to the desk. I sat down. I picked up the camel-hair brush. I dipped it again in the India ink. I drew, beside the India-ink circle on the wall, a second circle that was a little oval at the top and a little thick on the right, where my hand had pressed harder.
I drew, in the space between the two circles, an arrow.
The arrow pointed from the first circle to the second.
I did not, in any of the hours that followed, change the direction of the arrow.
I had four names left to crack.
I was no longer, by any honest accounting of the word, in Lisbon for a labor strike.
I did not know it yet, but I would be in Vienna by Wednesday.