I went to the place on the corner and I did not analyze what I was doing and I came back out into the Paris evening with two cups and the specific, uncomfortable feeling of a man who has just been correctly diagnosed by someone he trusts and is not sure yet whether to be grateful or furious about it.
I walked back through the city.
The light was going, the last of it sitting gold on the tops of the buildings the way it does in this city, like Paris is always receiving something, always being given something it knows how to hold. I walked through it and thought about the investigation and I thought about her father in Rome and I thought about the device in the ventilation panel and I thought, beneath all of that, running underneath like something that refused to stay in the register I had
