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stub of a pencil; a packet of matches; a worn brown wallet made of cheap, cracking leather; fifty-seven
leks
in paper and coins; a small frayed ledger logging sales of cheese in a cramped and tiny hand; a snapshot of a woman; and a personal letter that seemed written in a hurried but stately script: these were the contents of the Prisoner’s pockets that were found by his captors in the village of Quelleza.
    Vlora stared at the photo of the woman. Worn and faded, its borders were ragged, as if it had been scissored from a larger scene. The woman looked young, in her twenties, though her features were clouded from the softness of the focus, and, through a veil, from a place where the air was all tears, glowed great dark chestnut eyes filled with anger. Vlora put down the photo, resting it close to the paperweight heart; and then his hand dipped gingerly into the box, pinched a corner of the letter with his thumb and forefinger, and then slowly and soundlessly lifted it out like a miniature crane in a penny arcade. Folded over several times, it was a single small sheet found tucked between the pages of the ledger. With the back of his hand Vlora nudged the box aside and bent the lamp head lower, adjusted its beam, very carefully unfolded the letter, and read it.
     
My universe! Who knows if this letter will reach you? Enver has died. May God be good to him, for always he treated me kindly. But now you must come to me, my heart! Oh, Selca, my morning light, my angel! Have you any idea how much I have missed you? Oh, come to me! Come now, sweetest boy!My love, my youth, my very soul! I must hold you. Come quickly. I am free but I am not.
    Morna
     
     
    At Theti every villager had told the same story: that Selca Decani and Morna Altamori had dangerously and recklessly loved one another since the earliest days of their youth, and that nothing—no parental threat, no punishment—could keep their laughter apart. But when the girl had reached seventeen years of age her parents married her off to another, a quiet and stolid-eyed irrigation expert in comfortable employ of the State. His soul snatched out of his body, torn open and robbed of day, the young Selca Decani abandoned the village and settled far away near the marshes of the south, and soon time lost track even of the lovers’ names. But then Death spoke. First, Morna’s husband was killed by a lightning bolt when surprised in the field by a storm. Almost a year before that stroke, however, the mournful, hollow-eyed Morna had herself begun to languish in the arms of an illness that, while nameless and un-diagnosed, was quietly and steadily eating her breath. On her husband’s passing she sent for Decani, who arrived back in Theti to find her dead, and after grief too immense for human thought to contain, Decani resumed his life in the village where soon he, too, was stricken dead by an illness for which no doctor had a name, but which anyone in Theti, when asked, could tell you was surely nothing other than a broken heart.
    I am free but I am not.
    Vlora stared at the words. What was their meaning? Amid the tumble of his thoughts the now-hesitant raindrops tapped at the windows like a blind man’s cane. Complex analysis had shown that the letter had been folded and unfolded againand again; in fact, innumerable times. Who would cherish and reread such a letter repeatedly other than the man to whom the letter was addressed?
    The dead man. The phantom. Selca Decani.
    Vlora’s eyes flicked up. An eerie whipping wind had arisen behind him, softly moaning and thumping at the window-panes. Uneasy, feeling watched, the Interrogator swiveled his chair around and looked through the windows to the flickering north where thick black clouds were scudding toward the city from the mountains like the angry belief of fanatical hordes, and in a moment they would darken the Square below and its anonymous granite government buildings, the broad streets drearily leading nowhere, and the