Faint, seductive chiming. “Thanks for the tickets.” He wanted to shake the man’s hand to make him go.

“Tell Franklin I say hello,” the man said, as if he meant it sarcastically. By smiling he made his great unusual jaw look like Mussolini’s jaw. Franklin, Wales wondered. Who was Franklin? He remembered no one at the college named Franklin. He felt drunk, although he hadn’t been drinking. An hour before he’d been teaching. Trapped in a paneled room with students.

Bing … bing … bing. Elevators were departing.

“Oh yes,” Wales said, “I will,” and for a third time smiled.

“So,” Jim said, “you be good now.” All his front teeth were false teeth.

Jim wandered into the crowd that had begun moving more quickly toward the banquet room. Just at that moment Wales could smell a cigar, rich and dense and pungent. It made him think about the Paris Bar in Berlin. Something about smoke and this brassy amber arcade light was almost the same as there. He’d gone in one night with a woman friend for a drink and to buy condoms. When he’d stepped into the gents, he’d found the dispenser was beside the urinals, which were in constant use. And somehow—nervousness possibly, anticipation again—somehow he’d let drop his Deutschemark coin. And because he had been drinking then, and because he wanted to buy the condoms, badly wanted them, he’d squatted beside a man who was pissing and fetched the fugitive coin off the tiles from between the stranger’s straddled legs. The man smiled down at him, unbothered, as if this kind of thing always happened. “I must have dropsy tonight,” Wales said, fingering the hard little silver D-mark, which was not at all dampened. And then he’d started to laugh, peals of loud laughing. No one in the gents could possibly have known what “dropsy” meant. It was very, very funny. A typical problem with the language.

“Viel Glück, mein Freund,” the man said, zipping himself and looking around, pleased about everything.

“Yes well. Der beste Glück. Natürlich,” Wales said, depositing the coin into the machine.

“Now everyone will know,” his woman friend said as they exited the bar into the warm summer’s night along Kantstrasse. She laughed about it. She knew everyone there.

“Surely no one cares,” Wales said.

“No, of course not. No one cares a thing. It’s all completely stupid.”

Jena had given him the key, a crisp, white card which, when inserted in a slot, ignited a tiny green light, provoking a soft click, after which the door opened. Room 839.

“Oh, I’ve been dying for you to be here,” Jena said, her voice rich, deeper than usual. He couldn’t quite see her.