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of course, but was ignorant of its mechanics. There were grunts, and the rhythmic slap of flesh upon flesh. It only lasted a few minutes.
    â€˜Good night,’ said the stranger. ‘Tomorrow, I shall bring you a surprise.’
    His voice was genial, magnanimous. The woman said nothing, and Anders hurried up half a flight and cowered behind the corner of the stairs. Once he was sure he could hear the man descend, he dared a peek, in the darkness of the staircase, moonlight falling through the windows of the landing. He saw a man, impossibly fat, and a cascade of furs. There was no hair on the man’s head; a polished dome, smooth as a grape. Above the collar, the neck folded itself into a giant, pallid slug. It seemed to Anders that his step was too soft for a man of his size.
    Anders waited until he heard the door slam on the ground floor, then took up position outside the woman’s door. The ice pick was in his hand. He started counting to a hundred. When he reached a hundred, he swore, he would go and ram the ice pick through her heart.
    She came out somewhere in the high eighties, carrying a box marked with a cross and taking his hand as though he was a child. He did not object. Downstairs, in Pavel’s place, he heard her gag at the stench, but her eyes softened when she saw the sick man.
    â€˜Pavel,’ he said, weighing his weapon in his hand, ‘this lady here will save your life.’
    The sick man did not answer. When the woman asked him what was wrong, first in German, then in fluent English, he mouthed a single word: ‘Kidneys.’ She nodded and walked over to the phone to call a doctor.
    â€˜Don’t worry,’ Anders heard her say into the receiver, ‘I have money and drugs.’
    Then they sat down, one on each side of the bed, and waited for help to arrive.
    There you have it: the piano sounding notes just as death comes a-knocking; a neighbour upstairs who returns after a long absence; a medicine chest draped in a negligee; and a doctor who agrees – grumpily, no doubt greedily – to come out in the middle of the night. Coincidence at the heart of our story. It has bothered me ever since I learned its facts.
    It cannot be helped though, because there she was, dear Sonia, sitting on Pavel’s bed and stroking his brow with a moistened handkerchief. A woman in a tweed dress, in a city where most women still wore the trousers left to them by their husbands and fathers, dead in the war. Perfume on her wrists and in those sensual valleys where collarbones grow into throat; perfume, though no lipstick. She found it whorish, which some found hypocritical, coming from her. It was not something, though, they would say to her face.
    You will want a description, a study in physiognomy. We must learn to know her. I shall try, though I never met her in good daylight, and thus am liable to put too much shadow where it does not belong. Let me conjure her up for you – she is worth it. In truth she was remarkable: a remarkable face. Not by any means an everyday face, though, of course, in its own way, anonymous enough, a face you see on the tram, or in the crowds at railway stations, only this one might give you pause. You’d start studying it, and it would even seem strange to you that you should notice it amongst all the others, a little prettier perhaps, and starker; a woodcut of a face. A face with broad cheekbones, a little too Slavic for her nation and the times she had endured, though her passport made her out the purest of Aryans. The lips heavy; owlish, hooded lids; a smudge of moustache upon her upper lip, though she took care to pluck. Quite beautiful in any case, though it only became so once you had got used to it. Good teeth on her, clean breath, and a throaty voice whose moan would drive you to distraction if you were so inclined. A modern woman in a tweed dress. She wore leather gloves whenever she wasn’t playing the piano.
    Another thing demands