Chapter 4: The Old Man

Augustin Lasker asked me to breakfast through a porter with a silver tray.

I went because the dining room had forty people in it, and forty people are a kind of wall.

He sat at a corner table with his cane hooked on the chair and a soft-boiled egg in front of him.

Lucan was not there.

"Miss Corrigan," Augustin said. "Sit. You look like a woman who has been fed on adrenaline."

I sat.

A waiter poured me coffee and left.

"My son is impulsive," Augustin said. "He frightened you, and I apologize. I came to make it right."

He slid an envelope across the white cloth.

Inside were a plane ticket to Lisbon, a passport-sized photo of me from my delivery badge, and a bank card.

"Fifty thousand dollars is on that card," he said.

"A year of your life in Lisbon. All you must do is forget one corridor."

"And the notebook?"

"What notebook?"

He ate a piece of egg with perfect manners.

I looked at the people at the other tables.

A banker with his wife.

Two women in business suits.

A boy of about ten with a sticky chin, eating pancakes.

I picked up the envelope and tore it in half.

I tore it again, and again, and I laid the pieces on his saucer.

The whole dining room heard it.

"Mr. Lasker," I said, loud enough for the banker's wife, "your son shot a man in this hotel two nights ago."

"I'm not forgetting that for fifty thousand or fifty million."

The room went quiet.

A fork rang on a plate.

Augustin set down his spoon.

He did not look angry.

He looked like a man who had just been told the price of something and had decided it was worth paying.

"Enoch keeps good company," he said softly. "Eat your breakfast."

I walked out with my heart in my teeth.

At midnight the kiss was shorter, because Augustin sat in an armchair ten feet away watching with his chin on his cane.

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