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I'll tell you why I did it," said
Johns, and for the first time his body relaxed, abandoning its stiff, martial
stance, and he bent toward Morini, saying something into his ear.

Then he straightened up and went over to
Espinoza and shook his hand very politely and then he shook Pelletier's hand
too, and then he left the cottage and the nurse went out after him.

As he turned on the light, Espinoza
pointed out, in case they hadn't noticed, that Johns hadn't shaken Morini's
hand at the beginning or end of the interview. Pelletier answered that he had
noticed. Morini said nothing. After a time the first nurse came and led them to
the exit. As they crossed the grounds she told them a car was waiting for them
at the gate.

The car took them back to Montreux, where
they spent the night at the Hotel Helvetia. All three were tired and they
decided not to go out to dinner. A few hours later, however, Espinoza called
Pelletier's room and said he was hungry and was going to see whether he could
find anything open. Pelletier told him to wait, he'd come too. When they met in
the lobby, Pelletier asked whether he'd called Morini.

"I did," said Espinoza,
"but no one answered."

They decided the Italian must already be
asleep. That night they got back to the hotel late and slightly tipsy. The next
morning they went to Morini's room to get him and he wasn't there. The clerk
told them that according to the computer Mr. Piero Morini had settled his bill
and left the hotel at midnight (as Pelletier and Espinoza were having dinner at
an Italian restaurant). Around that time he had come down to the reception-desk
and asked for a car.

"He left at midnight? Where was he
going?"

The clerk, of course, didn't know.

That morning, after they made sure Morini
wasn't at any of the hospitals in or around Montreux, Pelletier and Espinoza
took the train to
Geneva
.
From the
Geneva
airport they called Morini's
apartment in
Turin
.
All they got was the answering machine, which they lavished with abuse. Then
each caught a flight back to his city.

As soon as he got to Madrid Espinoza
called Pelletier. The latter, who had been home for an hour, said he had
nothing new to report. All day long, both Espinoza and Pelletier left short and
increasingly hopeless messages on Morini's answering machine. By the second day
they were
in a state of anguish and
even considered catching the next flights toTurin and notifying the authorities
if they couldn't find Morini. But they didn't want to be rash or look foolish,
and they didn't do anything.

The third day was the same as the second;
they called Morini, they called each other, they weighed several courses of
action, they considered Morini's mental health, his undeniable maturity and
common sense, and did nothing. On the fourth day, Pelletier called the
University
of
Turin
directly. He spoke to a young
Austrian who was working temporarily in the German department. The Austrian had
no idea where Morini might be. Pelletier asked him to put the department
secretary on the phone. The Austrian informed him that the secretary had gone
out for breakfast and wasn't back yet. Pelletier immediately called Espinoza
and gave him a detailed account of the phone call. Espinoza said he would try
his luck.

This time it wasn't the Austrian who
answered the phone but a German literature student. The student's German wasn't
the best, so Espinoza switched to Italian. He asked whether the department
secretary had come back yet. The student replied that he was alone, that
everyone had gone out, presumably for breakfast, and there was no one in the
department. Espinoza wanted to know what time people had breakfast at the
University
of
Turin
and how long breakfast usually
lasted. The student didn't understand Espinoza's poor Italian and Espinoza had
to repeat the question twice, the second time in slightly offensive terms.

The student said that he, for example,
almost never had breakfast, but that didn't mean anything, everyone did things
their own way. Did he understand or not?

"I understand," said Espinoza,
gritting his teeth, "but I need to talk to someone in a position of
authority."

"Talk to me," said the student.

Espinoza asked whether Dr. Morini had
missed any of his classes.

"Let's see, let me think," said
the student.

And then Espinoza heard someone, the
student himself, whispering Morini . . . Morini . . . Morini, in a voice that
didn't sound like his but rather like the voice of a sorcerer, or more
specifically, a sorceress, a soothsayer from the times of the Roman Empire, a
voice that reached Espinoza like the dripping of a basalt fountain but that
soon swelled and overflowed with a deafening roar, with the sound of thousands
of voices, the thunder of a great river in flood comprising the shared fate of
every voice.

Yesterday he had a class and he wasn't
here," said the student after some thought.

Espinoza thanked him and hung up. That
afternoon he tried Morini again at home and then he called Pelletier. There was
no one at either place and he had to content himself with leaving messages.
Then he began to reflect. But his thoughts only returned to what had just
happened, the strict past, the past that seems deceptively like the present. He
remembered the voice on Morini's answering machine, which is to say Morini's
own recorded voice, saying briefly but politely that this was Piero Morini's
number and to please leave a message, and Pelletier's voice, which, instead of
saying this is Pelletier, repeated the number to eliminate any uncertainty,
then urged whoever was calling to leave his name and phone number, promising
vaguely to call back.

That night Pelletier called Espinoza and
they agreed, after each had dispelled the other's forebodings, to let a few
days go by, not to fall into vulgar hysteria, and to bear in mind that whatever
Morini might do, he was free to do it and there was nothing they could (or
should) do to prevent it. That night, for the first time since they'd returned
from
Switzerland
,
they had a good night's sleep.

The next morning both men left for work
rested in body and easy in mind, although by eleven, a little before he went
out for lunch with colleagues, Espinoza broke down and called the German
department at the
University
of
Turin
, with the same
futile results as before. Later Pelletier called from
Paris
and they discussed the advisability of
letting Norton know what was going on.

They weighed the pros and cons and decided
to shield Morini's privacy behind a veil of silence, at least until they had
more concrete information. Two days later, almost reflexively Pelletier called
Morini's apartment and this time someone picked up the phone. Pelletier's first
words expressed the astonishment he felt upon hearing his friend's voice at the
other end of the line.

"It can't be," shouted
Pelletier, "how can it be, it's impossible."

Morini's voice sounded the same as always.
Then came the delight, the relief, the waking from a bad dream, a baffling
dream. In the middle of the conversation, Pelletier said he had to let Espinoza
know right away.

"You won't go anywhere, will
you?" he asked before he hung up.

"Where would I go?" asked
Morini.

But Pelletier didn't call Espinoza.
Instead he poured himself some whiskey and went into the kitchen and then the
bathroom and then his office, turning on all the lights in the apartment. Only
then did he call Espinoza and tell him he'd found Morini safe and sound and
that he'd just talked to him on the phone, but he couldn't talk any longer.
After he hung up he drank more whiskey. Half an hour later Espinoza called from
Madrid
. It
was true, Morini was fine. He wouldn't say where he'd been over the last few
days.
 
He said he'd needed to rest. To
collect his thoughts. According to Espinoza, who'd been reluctant to bombard
him with questions, Morini seemed to be trying to hide something. Why? Espinoza
hadn't the remotest idea.

"We really know very little about
him," said Pelletier, who was beginning to tire of Morini, Espinoza, the
phone.

"Did you ask him how he felt?"
Pelletier asked.

Espinoza said yes and that Morini had
assured him he was fine.

"There's nothing we can do now,"
concluded Pelletier in a tone of sadness that wasn't lost on Espinoza.

A little later they hung up and Espinoza
picked up a book and tried to read, but he couldn't.

Then, as the gallery employee or owner
kept taking down dresses and hanging them up, Norton told them that during the
time he disappeared, Morini had been in
London
.

"He spent the first two days alone,
without calling me once."

When she saw him he said he'd spent his
time going to museums and wandering through unfamiliar neighborhoods,
neighborhoods that were vaguely reminiscent of Chesterton stories but no longer
had anything to do with Chesterton, although the spirit of Father Brown still
hovered over them, not in a religious way, said Morini, as if he were trying
not to overdramatize his solitary ramblings, but really Norton imagined him
shut in his hotel room, with the drapes open, staring at the drab backs of
buildings and reading for hour after hour. Then he called her and invited her
out to lunch.

Naturally, Norton was happy to hear from
him and to learn he was in the city and at the agreed-upon time she appeared in
the hotel lobby, where Morini, sitting in his wheelchair with a package on his
lap, was patiently and impassively deflecting the flow of guests and visitors
that convulsed the lobby in an ever-changing display of luggage, tired faces,
perfumes trailing after meteroidian bodies, bellhops with their stern jitters,
the philosophical circles under the eyes of the manager or associate manager,
each with his brace of assistants radiating freshness, the same freshness of
eager sacrifice emitted by young women (in the form of ghostly laughter), which
Morini tactfully chose to ignore. When Norton got there they left for a
restaurant in Notting Hill, a Brazilian vegetarian restaurant she had recently
discovered.

When Norton learned that Morini had spent
two days in
London
already, she demanded to know what on earth he'd been doing and why he hadn't
called. That was when Morini brought up Chesterton, said he'd spent the time
wandering, praised the way the city accommodated the handicapped, unlike Turin,
which was full of obstacles for wheelchairs, said he'd been to some secondhand
bookshops where he'd bought a few books he didn't name, mentioned two visits to
Sherlock Holmes's house, Baker Street being one of his favorite streets, a
street that for him, a middle-aged Italian, cultured and crippled and a reader
of detective novels, was timeless or outside time, lovingly (although the word
wasn't lovingly but immaculately) preserved in Dr. Watson's tales. Then they went
to Norton's house and there Morini gave her the gift he'd bought her, a book on
Brunelleschi, with excellent photographs by photographers from four different
countries of the same buildings by the great Renaissance architect.

"They're interpretations," said
Morini. "The French photographer is the best," he said. "The one
I like least is the American. Too showy. He's too eager to discover
Brunelleschi. To
be
Brunelleschi. The
German isn't bad, but the French one is best, I'd say. You'll have to tell me
what you think."

Although she'd never seen the book,
exquisite in paper and binding alone, something about it struck Norton as
familiar. The next day they met in front of a theater. Morini had two tickets
that he'd bought at the hotel, and they saw a bad, vulgar comedy that made them
laugh, Norton more than Morini, who couldn't follow some of the cockney slang.
That night they went to dinner and when Norton asked how Morini had spent his
day he said he'd visited Kensington Gardens and the Italian Gardens in Hyde
Park and roamed around, although Norton, for some reason, imagined him sitting
still in the park, sometimes craning to see something he couldn't quite make
out, most of the time with his eyes closed, pretending to sleep. Over dinner,
Norton explained the parts of the play he hadn't understood. Only then did
Morini realize it had been worse
than
he'd thought. The acting, however, rose greatly in his esteem, and back at the
hotel, as he partially undressed without getting out of the wheelchair, in
front of the silent television where he and the room were mirrored like ghostly
figures in a performance that prudence and fear would keep anyone from staging,
he concluded that the play hadn't been so bad after all, it had been good, he
had laughed, the actors were good, the seats comfortable, the price of the
tickets not too high.

The next day he told Norton he had to
leave. Norton drove him to the airport. As they were waiting, Morini, adopting
a casual tone of voice, said he thought he knew why Johns had cut off his right
hand.