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covered with a thick, fine dust, so he wet his index finger and drew a line through it, revealing a color that had once been that of bitter chocolate but was now faded by sun and time. Next he saw that the seams were hand-sewn; fine, sturdy work using a thread he suspected was also handmade. The satchel was of the portmanteau style—like a doctor's bag, the two sides opened evenly and were held together by a brass lock. Using a damp towel, he cleaned the lock and found a reddish tracery etched into the metal surface. This was vaguely familiar. Where had he seen it? In a moment it came to him: such work adorned brass bowls and vases made in western and central Asia—India, Afghanistan, Turkestan. He tried to depress the lever on the underside of the device, but it was locked.
    The handgrip bore half a tag, tied on with string. Peering closely, he was able to make out the date the satchel had been deposited as left luggage: 8 February 1935. He swore softly with amazement. Almost three years.
    He put one finger on the lock. It was ingenious, a perfectly circular opening that did not suggest the shape of its key. He probed gently with a match, it seemed to want a round shaft with squared ridges at the very end. Hopefully, he jiggled the match about but of course nothing happened. From another time the locksmith, perhaps an artisan who sat cross-legged in a market stall in some souk, laughed at him. The device he'd fashioned would not yield to a wooden match.
    Szara went downstairs to the hotel desk and explained to the young clerk on duty: a lost key, a satchel that couldn't be opened, important papers for a meeting on Monday, what could be done? The clerk nodded sympathetically and spoke soothingly. Not toworry. This happens here every day. A boy was sent off and returned an hour later with a locksmith in tow. In the room the locksmith, a serious man who spoke German and wore a stiff, formal suit, cleared his throat politely. One didn't see this sort of mechanism. But Szara was too impatient to make up answers to unasked questions and simply urged the man to proceed. After a few minutes of meditation, the locksmith reluctantly folded up his leather tool case, put it away, and, reddening slightly, drew a set of finely made burglar's picks from the interior pocket of his jacket. Now the battle between the two technicians commenced.
    Not that the Tadzik, the Kirghiz, the craftsman of the Bokhara market—whoever he'd been—didn't resist, he did, but in the event he was no match for the modern Czech and his shining steel picks. With the emphatic snick of the truly well made device the lock opened, and the locksmith stood back and applied an immaculate gray cloth to his sweaty forehead. “So beautiful a work,” he said, mostly to himself.
    So beautiful a bill, as well, but Szara paid it and tipped handsomely besides, for he knew the apparat could eventually find out anything, and he might have signed this man's death warrant.
    At dusk, André Szara sat in his unlit room with the remnants of a man's life spread out around him.
    There wasn't a writer in the world who could resist attributing a melancholy romance to these artifacts, but, he argued to his critical self, that did not diminish their eloquence. For if the satchel itself spoke of Bokhara, Samarkand, or the oasis towns of the Kara Kum desert, its contents said something very different, about a European, a European Russian, who had traveled—served? hidden? died?—in those regions, about the sort of man he was, about pride itself.
    The objects laid out on the hotel desk and bureau made up an estate. Some clothing, a few books, a revolver, and the humble tools—thread and needle, digestive tea, well-creased maps—of a man on the run. On the run, for there was equal clarity, equal eloquence, in the items not found. There were no photographs, no letters.No address book, no traveler's journal. This had been a man who understood the people he fled from and protected the