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case.”
    “Which you’ll share with me.”
    Gordon was silent. “I will,” he said finally.
    Vogel summoned the waiter and ordered a coffee and a cognac. “Will you have a coffee, too?”
    “Black,” replied Gordon.
    “There aren’t too many folks who take such pictures,” Vogel began. “Based on what you told me about the photograph, there’s just one person who could have taken it.”
    “I’m all ears.”
    “An ugly old lech, a real pig.”
    “I really do need more than that,” said Gordon.
    “His name is Skublics. Izsó Skublics.”
    “And where does this Skublics roost?”
    “On Aradi Street. Not far from Hitler Square.”
    “I should leave your name out of it, right?” asked Gordon.
    “Feel free to say it, but that will just make things worse.”
    The waiter arrived with the two coffees and the cognac. Gordon was just about to remove his blazer, but Vogel took the coffee, poured it into the cognac, and downed it all in three even gulps. “Are you coming back to the office?” he asked, springing to his feet.
    “No, later on. First I’ll take a look at this Skublics.”
    “You won’t like him, but go ahead and take a look if you’ve got the taste for it.”
    G ordon knew the Circle and environs well; Mór lived there, too, after all. But he was incapable of calling it—the Circle—Hitler Square. If something is a circle, well then, that’s just what it is, he told Krisztina more than once. Not a square. Especially not Adolf Hitler Square. He’d also heard that the Oktogon would soon be renamed Mussolini Square. He shook his head and started off toward Aradi Street. Before turning onto Szinyei Street, he glanced up at a second-floor balcony door of one of the buildings on the Circle. It was closed. He’d try on the way back; by then Mór would surely be home.
    He didn’t even have to go looking for Skublics’s building; he knew exactly which one it was. It was one of the blemishes on Aradi Street: a six-story apartment building with plaster flaking off its façade, a stairwell that smelled of piss, with hungry, stinking dogs in the courtyard and on the inner balconies that circled above it. Every time he’d walked this way, he’d always crossed to the other side of the street.
    He stepped over a puddle full of water from someone’s wash, it seemed, and began climbing the stairs toward the sixth floor. On one floor he heard shouting; on another, dogs fighting over something; and on a third, he saw two kids beating up a smaller child. On the sixth floor he walked the length of the rectangular passageway overlooking the central courtyard, but on not one door did he see the name Skublics. Finally he knocked on a window, from behind which came the smell of thick brown soup made with lard-fried roux. A woman of indeterminate age, wearing a kerchief, pulled aside the curtain. “Whadayawant?” she asked with a toothless mouth.
    “I’m looking for Skublics.”
    “You can keep looking, but I don’t know who that is.”
    “Supposedly he lives here.”
    “No one told me,” said the woman, shaking her head and pulling the curtain shut. Gordon reached inside his pocket, pulled out a two-pengő coin, and with that knocked on the window once again.
    “Whadayawant?”
    “I found this under your window,” he said, showing her the coin in his palm. The woman reached out for it, but Gordon pulled his hand back.
    “What is that name you said, sir?” asked the woman, her eyes on Gordon.
    “Skublics.”
    “Aha! Now that’s different. I don’t know what goes on in his place, but I’m not even interested, I’m telling you.”
    “I didn’t ask.”
    “And I don’t know what sort of girls go to him, morning and night.”
    “Which flat is his?”
    “See the attic door?” The woman pointed. Gordon nodded. “Well, if you open that, you’ll see another door first thing on the right. Knock on that.” The woman reached her sinewy, crooked hand out the window. Gordon dropped the coin into