New York Groove

Cyprian N flew to Rome the day after his father’s death.

He was staying in a decent hotel near his father’s old apartment; the hospital where his father had died was nearby as well. The hotel was really old-fashioned. There was a marble fountain in the lobby. The elevator had a metal lattice-grill and wooden doors you pushed open at your floor. In the corridor on his floor, they provided large ashtrays mounded up with dirtyish white sand on heavy-looking brass stands, one to each side of the elevator entrance. 

Given his previous experiences in Italy, he was expecting bureaucratic problems at the hospital. But it was easy enough to arrange a time to take possession of the body over the phone. All they needed was basic information: temporary address, phone number, date of birth. When he arrived at the hospital and explained why he was there—luckily, he spoke Italian well—he found the desk nurse helpful and well-informed. His father was in the RECENT DEATHS zone of the morgue; Cyprian N needed to go to the basement and find the attendant, who would show him exactly where the corpse was so that he could identify it and effect the transfer to take possession of the departed officially.

In the morgue lobby, Cyprian N found a paper map tacked to the wall across from the elevator. The morgue was divided into three “zones,” and one was RECENT DEATHS just as the nurse had said. He set off down the long, cold hallway, which smelled of esters and formaldehyde.

The attendant’s desk in RECENT DEATHS was empty. Cyprian N stood and waited for a while. Through the narrow door he saw a large room filled with steel-legged, wheeled tables. White sheets, arranged into uneven contours near their peaks, fell past the tabletops he could see and halfway down the shining legs. The air was cold enough to condense Cyprian N’s breath. The attendant did not appear. Then Cyprian N noticed a small, silver bell on the desk. There was a similar one on the concierge desk of his hotel.

The bell sounded a short, clear note when he tapped the button on top of its dome. And a moment later, accompanied by the musical rustle of a toilet flushing, an attendant appeared wiping his hands on the too-tight white smock he was wearing.

The attendant said: How can I help you?

Cyprian N said: I am here to collect my father’s body; upstairs they told me it was in recent deaths.

The attendant said: I see—you’re here to effect a transfer?

This technical-sounding phrase puzzled Cyprian N. Then he remembered the desk nurse had used it; it referred to his taking possession of the body. He gave the attendant the relevant information—his father’s full name, date of death and age. The attendant listened with wide, ready eyes; when Cyprian N finished, he introduced himself: Italo C. He offered his hand for a shake.

Sometimes grief can distort our perceptions.

This made Cyprian N uneasy, but he accepted the hand and followed Italo C into the RECENT DEATHS zone. The room was even larger than Cyprian N had guessed. It extended for a hundred yards in three directions. The tables, he saw, were placed uniform lengths apart—the distance marked by deep, regular gouges in the black linoleum of the floor. Not every table was occupied; some were empty, with a white sheet folded into a gleaming triangle at each empty table’s foot. Cyprian saw that the bare tabletops had a raised edge, almost as high as the walls of a feeding trough. 

The attendant escorted Cyprian N to a table near the western wall. He whipped aside the white sheet. On the steel tabletop was a clean-looking corpse. It was not Cyprian N’s father.

Cyprian N said: There must be some mistake.

Italo C said: What do you mean, mistake?

Cyprian N said: That man is not my father. I never saw him before in my life.

The man on the steel table was short and plump, with faint, silver hair and a nose made purple by broken capillaries. Cyprian N’s father had been tall and thin, with still-black hair. He had a wide scar on the back of his right hand. The dead man’s hand—also small and plump—had no scar.

Italo C said: Let me check the name one more time. What did you say it was?

Cyprian N repeated his father’s name as the attendant examined a paper tag tied to the dead man’s toe and then several sheets of paper affixed to a clipboard hung from the foot end of the steel table.

Italo C said: No, it says so right here—look.

He offered a sheet of paper on which, Cyprian N saw, his father’s name had been printed.

Cyprian N said: But that’s not the point, the man isn’t my father.

Italo C checked the papers again, looked from the dead man’s face to Cyprian N’s, and stroked his own roundish chin.

Italo C said: Are you sure?

Cyprian N said: Yes, there’s been some filing mistake.

Italo C leaped back and struck the steel table with his hand. His rubbery face swelled up.

Italo C said: I assure you we never make mistakes. I have a 100 percent correct record on my job and I won’t allow you to say otherwise.

Cyprian N, because he had been expecting something like this, was prepared. He had a number of his father’s identifying documents with him. He had picked them up from his father’s apartment that morning before coming. He showed Italo C his father’s passport, an expired driver’s license, and a few family photographs in which Cyprian N was also present. Italo C stared at the documents and compared the face of the old man in them to the face of the old man on the tray. His beady, blackish eyes—like the button eyes of a shitty toy—moved in syrupy concentration from the dead face to the face in the photograph.

After a while, Italo C handed the documents back.

Italo C said: Well, there’s a definite resemblance.

Cyprian N said: Where is my father?

Itsalo C said: Are you sure it’s not him? Really sure?

Cyprian N said: Yes, I am sure.

A little more silence. A pipe was dripping somewhere.

Italo C said: it wouldn’t hurt to make absolutely certain. Come on.

Italo C gestured for Cyprian N to come with him and set off down the rows of covered steel tables. At the first covered table, he stopped and held out his hand for Cyprian’s father’s passport. Then he whipped up the sheet.

Under it was a woman, a large birthmark on her upper thigh.

Italo C said: Well, is this him?

Cyprian N said: No, that’s a woman.

Italo C said: I suppose you’re right.

They repeated the process at all the other “occupied” tables. But none was Cyprian’s father.

At the last table, Italo C whipped off the sheet. He had a special face he made for this, Cyprian N noticed: the teeth set together, the lips skinned back. This table’s “occupant” was a young man. Much younger than Cyprian, hardly more than a boy. He had a muscular chest and arms. He was missing his right leg above the knee. The leg ended in a scarlet-purple knot of flesh with the yellowish bone of the femur sticking out, frayed like a broken broomstick.

Italo C said: Is this your father?

Cyprian N said: He’s younger than I am, look at him! How could he be my father?

Italo C covered the “occupant” back up. He rubbed his roundish chin again and smiled. As if something had occurred to him.

Italo C said: Then the first guy must be your father. We’ve looked at everyone else who’s here.

Cyprian N said: That man is not my father. There’s been some mistake. Who can I speak to about this?

Italo C said: I don’t know. This never happened before.

Without saying anything, Cyprian N left the RECENT DEATHS zone and went back up to the entry floor of the hospital. He found the desk nurse who had directed him in the first place and explained to her, as clearly as he could, what was happening.

The desk nurse said: Are you sure it isn’t him? Sometimes grief can distort our perceptions.

Cyprian N said: Yes, I am sure. And you or someone else needs to clear up this problem.

The desk nurse said: We have rooms reserved for the bereaved to spend a last few moments with the departed. Also on the third floor. And one is free now. Would you like to wait there while I look into this matter? When we find the departed, we can bring him right to you?

The room itself was small and bright. The walls yellow, yolk yellow. A tooth-colored phone was fixed to the plaster near the door. There was a green sofa, covered with faint stains. A desk and a hard plastic chair, the same green. On the desk a paper tablet and a pen that when he tested it—as all people do with public pens, no matter the circumstances—proved to be dry. The furniture was all on one side of the room; the other half, closest to the wide door, was empty.

Two windows (dull and brutal, like a socialist’s eyes) looked into the barren expanse of ground bordered by the four walls of the hospital. Three gray benches surrounded a dead fig tree. As he stared, he saw Italo C come trudging out and light up a cigarette, then answer his phone, shouting and laughing with the cigarette still in his mouth.

A sudden shrill noise drew him away from the window. The room phone was ringing. He answered it.

A voice said: Is this room 356?

Cyprian N said: Yes, I think so.

The voice said nothing more. The line disconnected. Cyprian checked the room number on the plate in the corridor and found that it was 356. Then he went back inside to wait. When he checked the window, Italo C was gone from the courtyard.

For a long time, nothing happened. Administrative nothing. You know all about it. The room was stale and too hot. One of the windows opened a little, but the air it let in was insufficient. Worse still, the same sweet, esteric scent Cyprian N had smelled in the RECENT DEATHS zone he smelled here. Even more strongly, he thought. Though he attributed this to nerves. At last, when almost an hour had passed, he decided to go speak to the nurse and ask what was going on. As he was rising from the green chair, which cried out, someone knocked on the door.

When he saw Italo C, he was not surprised. But Italo C gave no sign of having met him before. He was pushing a gurney, covered by a white sheet.

Italo C said: Are you the bereaved?

Cyprian said: Yes—did you find him?

Italo C wheeled the gurney into the empty half of the room and whipped off the white sheet. The orderly wore the same dead grin.

Lying on the gurney was the plump, almost hairless old man. The one he had shown Cyprian N the first time. Except that, Cyprian N saw, the sparse white-silver hair on the man’s head had been dyed the color of a policeman’s shoe. As had the scant hair on his chest and pubis. One of his arms was a little askew, and Cyprian N saw that the armpit hair was dyed as well.

Italo C said: Did you have any other questions? We like to give the bereaved privacy with the departed, so I will be leaving unless you do.

Cyprian N had to restrain his first impulse, to grab Italo C and prevent him from leaving.

He said: it is not my father and I do not accept responsibility for the body.

Italo C said: That’s between you and the administrative staff.

Then he left. His phone rang again when he was out in the corridor, and he started laughing, loud and high, shrill, even before he answered it.

Once Cyprian N was alone, he sat down and thought about what he should do. He covered up the body. He did not want to look at the dead man’s fat face. After a few minutes of struggle, he managed to force open both windows so that fresh air came in. He felt a little better, a little more clearheaded.

He called down to the duty nurse’s desk from the room phone. No one answered. He tried again and again. Still no one answered.

After five tries, someone picked up.

Cyprian N said: Hello? I need help dealing with an administrative error. I came here to collect my father’s body and the morgue attendant gave me the wrong one.

The person on the phone said: I can’t help you, I’m only a trainee. You should speak to the duty nurse. She handles all administrative requests.

Cyprian N said: Can you connect me to her?

The person on the phone said: No, she went to lunch.

Cyprian N said: Do you know when she will be back?

The person on the phone said: No.

Then she hung up. Cyprian N found himself slamming the phone into the dull receiver. He stopped only when he heard the plastic casing crack. He crossed to the window to get some air. He saw someone else in the courtyard. It was the duty nurse. She had a white paper spread out next to her. There seemed to be some sort of sliced meat laid on top of it, along with a loaf of bread she tore chunks from and shoved into her mouth. Her lips and teeth gleamed.

For a long time, nothing happened. Administrative nothing. You know all about it.

Cyprian N shouted down to her, but she did not respond. Maybe the wind was too loud for her to hear. Maybe she was simply ignoring him. He watched her eat for a moment, with slow, careful movements of her large jaw, and then he rushed down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor. He had calculated where the entrance to the courtyard must be—he could see the door propped open almost directly below the bereavement room’s window. But when he reached the ground floor, he must have lost his bearings, because he ended up wandering round the corridors without finding the courtyard entrance, and everyone he asked seemed not to know what he meant when he asked about it.

Finally, he found himself back near the main entrance. He spotted someone sitting at the duty nurse’s desk. She had her back to him, but the hair looked the same, and he rushed up to speak to her.

When he got there, he saw he had been mistaken. This woman was much older, and her hair was not even really the same color.

Cyprian N said: Can you help me? I am having an administrative problem collecting my father’s body.

The woman at the desk said: I’m only a trainee. You should speak to the duty nurse when she gets back from lunch.

It was the same woman he had spoken to on the phone; he recognized her voice. Cyprian N went back upstairs to check the window once more. But this time he saw no one in the courtyard. There was only a crumpled-up piece of white paper blowing around in the wind. The room, despite the strong, fresh breeze, was starting to fill with the sweet stink from the dead man. It nauseated Cyprian N. He stuck his head through the window to smell the smoky air, and that helped, but as soon as he drew his head back inside, he began to feel sick again. The plump body made a round bulge under the sheet. Cyprian N saw that faint brown speckles were starting to appear on the cloth.

He heard the door bang open below in the courtyard. He ran to see if it was the duty nurse. It wasn’t. It was Italo C, smoking and screaming with laughter as he pressed his cellphone to his simian head. He was dribbling the crumpled-up paper foot to foot like a soccer ball.

Cyprian N knew what he had to do.

He grabbed the gurney with the dead man, closing his throat against the smell, and wheeled it to the elevator. Then he headed back down to the morgue, to the RECENT DEATHS zone. He moved as quickly as he could. When he reached the desk, it was empty. He pushed the gurney back into the place it had occupied before. The air was freezing but the smell was even stronger. Before he left, he grabbed a sheet of paper and a pencil from Italo C’s desk and wrote a note.

This is not my father. I refuse to accept custody of the body presented to me on X/X/XXXX. Sincerely, Cyprian N

He signed beneath his printed name and left the paper on the attendant’s desk. Then he went back up to the entry floor. Now he saw the duty nurse back at her desk. As he tried to hurry past, she recognized him and called out.

The duty nurse said: Mr. N, Mr. N—where are you going? Where is your departed? Don’t you care about your father?

She kept on yelling after him as he raced to the street. Her voice was melodious and clear. He took a cab back to his hotel.

In the hotel lobby, he sat and tried to think of what to do next as the fountain mumbled needlessly to itself. He did not want to abandon his father’s body to whatever public burial arrangements existed in Rome. He had not gotten along that well with him, but they had spoken more frequently during the old man’s illness. Cyprian N had his brother and sister to think of as well: neither had been able to go to Rome as quickly as was needed, and simply giving up in the face of this hurdle would also insult them.

Yet what was he supposed to do?

He read the hospital website again and again. There was no complaints department; there was only one general administrative number to call. Then—what? The police? The department of public health? He had little experience dealing with the public agencies of the Italians, but he remembered his father recounting the difficulties they had put him through. And his father was— had been—an Italian citizen, perfect in the language and the country’s mores.

He decided to go up to his room and call his sister. If she was not around, he would speak to his brother. Whatever they advised, he would do.

When he reached his room, he found the door ajar. He assumed, at first, that the cleaners must have arrived. But there was total silence inside the room. He coughed, loudly, before he opened the door. No response. He stepped in.

There, next to his bed, was the hospital gurney.

On it, beneath the white sheet speckled with brown, was the plump body of the dead man.

At first, he was dumbstruck. How on earth had they found him? Then he remembered he had given his hotel address to a functionary at the hospital when he called them about making an appointment to effect the transfer. He tried to push the gurney back out into the hall. He would just leave it there. But it did not move. He crouched down to examine the wheels to see if the brake was locked. But the wheels were gone. They had been unscrewed and the gurney now stood on its bare shins. He tried to move it all the same, and the legs scraped against the thin carpet as the table began to tip over. He managed to right it before it fell but a thin stream of brown liquid pooled up against the raised edge and then drooled over in a fine string. The carpet absorbed it. The liquid gave off the sweet smell intensely. It made him sick again, and he rushed to breathe fresh air from the already-open window.

Down on the street, he saw Italo C and the duty nurse. Italo C was smoking and yelling into his phone. The shrill shrieks came clearly up to the window. The duty nurse was tearing hunks from a largish pink meat chunk with her teeth.

Cyprian N shouted: I am going to call the police!

The pedestrians all looked up. An old man’s hat fell off into a shining puddle. But Italo C and the duty nurse paid no attention. And by the time Cyprian rushed down to the street they were gone. The old man with the hat was staring at him. He had picked up the hat and was flicking dirt off the crown. Cyprian N sat down at one of the cafe tables in front of the little restaurant in the first floor of the hotel. To his surprise, the old man sat down at the next table. He stared at Cyprian N as the waiter came by.

Cyprian N ordered an espresso. He felt, suddenly, almost asleep.

The old man ordered a dish whose name he did not recognize: New York Groove. When it came out, it proved to be an enormous ice cream sundae, striped with ribbons of a brown, translucent sauce. The old man grinned at Cyprian N as he dipped in his spoon.

Back in the lobby, Cyprian N asked the concierge if he could speak to her. In private. She led him, with a concerned smile, to a deep niche in the lobby wall concealed behind three fake fig trees that muted the infinite mumble of the fountain. Cyprian N took a deep breath and explained his problem. The concierge listened, her face growing harder and harder as he spoke. When he finished, there was a silence.

The concierge said: I see, Mr. N—and what is it you expect us to do about it? We cannot be responsible for every idiocy of our guests.

Then she pushed her way back through the fake trees. Cyprian N ran after her. The old man, the ice cream eater, was now in a lobby armchair. His hard stare followed Cyprian to the elevators.

The smell was almost chokingly strong now in his room. He stood with his head out in the air, through the window. His phone did not get good reception. Perhaps this was due to his position, but he had no choice. He first tried the department of public health. There was an option for dealing with “issues related to public burials,” or so he thought—the recording of the menu played too quickly for him to grasp every word, and the bad reception broke it up. He had to wait several minutes before anyone answered, listening to the unfamiliar bleat of the phone line. And when someone did answer, he discovered they spoke a dialect of Italian that he could not understand. He put the handset back on the cradle, holding his breath, and then went back to the window.

Someone coughed behind him.

At first Cyprian N had the absurd thought that the plump dead man was trying to get his attention. But as he leaped back into the room—he struck his head on the lower edge of the window sash, scraping the scalp and feeling a trickle of blood start—he saw the old man. The ice-cream eater.

The old man said: Pardon me, but I could not help overhearing you in the lobby as you spoke to the concierge. You seem to be facing a difficult situation and I wanted to see if I might offer my help.

He spoke English, with no trace of an accent. Cyprian N bit back his instinctive shout. He did not want to draw attention to himself.

Instead, he said: What do you mean?

The old man said: I believe I can help you. I have some expertise in situations like this.

Cyprian N guessed at once what the old man meant. His father had told him many such stories about the way things like this got done in Italy. The old man had a connection to the public health department or the police, or some criminal outfit, and he was asking for a bribe in order to deal with the body in the room.

Cyprian N said: How much?

The old man said: there is no need to be so crude. I do not want any money.

Cyprian N said: What, then?

The old man said: my son is feeling ill. I can’t be with him now, and his mother’s passed on long ago. I’d like you to visit him, see if there’s anything he needs, and help him with it. He’s a modest man. He will not need much.

Cyprian N said: What is it that you are going to do to help me?

The old man said: I have a few friends who know Rome well, and together we will be able to help you. This is my son’s address.

He was holding out a slip of folded paper. The smell was unbearable. Cyprian N felt he would vomit if he did not get out of it. So he grabbed the paper. The old man nodded and put his hands on his hips. He crossed to the gurney and whipped off the sheet. The sheet had bigger, wetter brown stains. The plump dead man looked like he was covered in glowing sweat.

The address was on a street called the Via Nicolo VI. Cyprian N did not know the street, and when he tried to find it on his phone, he discovered that his connection was still weak and spotty: nothing showed up in the searches and the map itself refused to load fully. He tried asking some pedestrians. They seemed sure it was easy to find. He followed their directions and soon found himself walking toward St. John’s Tower and then following the Via Aurelia as it turned sharply southeast. But when he reached the street indicated, he discovered that it was the Via Nicolo V, not VI. And no one he asked now seemed to know where the correct street was. Indeed, a few people he put the question to got angry: He was standing right on it, why was he being so stupid?

He wandered through the streets near the Vatican, heading farther east, and turned south to follow the river. It was leaden in the fall light. He walked along the embankment, scrutinizing every street sign he passed, and asking the occasional passerby if they knew where Via Nicolo VI was. Every single person he asked greeted him with a blank, hostile stare. He ducked into a pharmacy and purchased at an insane price a paper map of the city, then sat on a bench near the river and examined it.

There was no Via Nicolo VI listed in the index and none that he could find as he scanned the map section by section.

Had the old man sent him off on a wild goose chase? So that he could rob the hotel room? The thought at first upset Cyprian N. But then he remembered that he had his passport with him, hidden in a nylon pouch beneath his shirt. His wallet was tucked into his breast pocket and his phone was in his side pocket. If the old man wanted to steal his spare clothes, his razor and toothbrush, and the eyedrops he had to use to stave off his glaucoma, then let him. Let him steal the keys to his father’s apartment too: those were the only semi-valuable objects he had not carried outside with him. A small price to pay. They would give access only to his father’s rotting furniture, his scabious books. The river flowed greasily on. A loud, shrieked laugh caught Cyprian N’s attention. But he saw it had come from an ash-colored bird hopping around on a sharp-looking roof.

He decided that he would leave the next day regardless of whether he had found his father’s body or not. There was no point in staying here, no point in dealing with all this bullshit. Once back in New York, he could contact the Italian authorities and even hire a lawyer. His father’s body itself was likely gone, but that did not mean the people responsible for its loss lay beyond the reach of punishment.

He wanted a drink, he realized. So fuck the old man, fuck his son. And fuck the dead man in his room, too.

The bar he found was empty except for the bartender, a young woman with straight, blonde hair. He asked for mezcal, and he drank one, then another, then another. More and more drinkers came. They were young, like the bartender. Not tourists. He felt it was obvious he was not a native, but no one seemed to object. They ignored him as he sat drinking at the bar’s end. He got drunk quickly. The jet lag combined with the overall disruption made it easy. Yet he did not feel sick, not at all. He felt giddy, felt laughter continually breaking out. A woman close to his own age, who had taken the seat next to him some time ago without his noticing, asked what was so funny, why he was smiling like that.

Cyprian N said: They lost my father’s body. He’s dead, and the morgue lost his body.

The woman stared at him and Cyprian N worried that he had offended her. But then she too laughed.

The woman said: They manage to fuck everything up, right?

She was smiling. A gold canine, something that ordinarily would have unnerved Cyprian N, among her lower teeth. But the canine too seemed excellent to him.

It was three in the morning when he got back to his hotel. He was still drunk, though less so. He was glad he’d bought the map, he doubted he would have been able to find his way without it. As soon as he entered the lobby the concierge—not the woman from before, but a boy with lacquered hair—waved him over. The fountain noise had grown louder, stronger. As though it were nearer clear speech.

The concierge said: Are you Mr. N?

Cyprian N said: Yes.

The concierge said: I need to speak with you about the activities in your room—we have had nothing but complaints all night.

Cyprian N said: I have not been here all evening, and it seems to me that you are the ones who owe an explanation for letting people into my room in my absence.

He walked away before the boy could say anything else. The elevator was out of service, so he had to climb the three flights of greasy stairs to reach his room. He understood why the neighbors were complaining. The noise reached his even while he was on the landing.

It was the sound of a party. Shouts, laughter, music. Shitty songs from an Italian radio station. The voices in his room rose up and sang with them in chorus. He heard, as he got closer, the general murmur of conversation. High, shrieked laughs broke through. Laughs he thought he recognized. The noise was dense and vibrant directly outside the door.

He tried the handle: locked from the inside. And his key did not seem to work, they must have damaged the mechanism somehow. He knocked and knocked; no one answered. They probably could not hear him. He started to bang with both fists, but that also brought no response. He got down and tried to peer under the door. He saw shoes, men’s and women’s, as well as bare feet, some quite filthy and others clean. He saw the tawny paws of an animal, though they moved past so quickly he could not tell if it was a dog or a large cat.

His father’s body itself was likely gone, but that did not mean the people responsible for its loss lay beyond the reach of punishment.

For a moment, Cyprian felt total despair. He needed to sleep, he was close to passing out. The concierge would obviously not help him. And if he phoned the police, then he would get in trouble because of the corpse in his room. There was his father’s apartment—but then he remembered: the keys for that were on the desk inside his room, where he had left them. He could try waking the old lady who looked after the building, but it was so late . . .

Then he saw, gleaming in the quiet lamplight, one of the old-fashioned ashtrays next to the dead elevator. Cyprian trotted over and lifted it: he thought it was heavy enough. Sand and cigarette butts spilled as he carried it to his own door and got himself set.

The first blow sent the rest of the sand in a cloud everywhere. His face, his eyes, his hair. The sand and butts fell, and the ash with which they had been mingled floated. But the door opened at once, and to Cyprian N’s alarm it revealed a room entirely dark. No lights, no music, no sign of any person. As he walked in, he discovered that the overhead light seemed to have shorted out, as had the lamp on the bedside table. He found no bottles, nothing. No evidence of the old man, either: he used his phone flashlight to scout around in the closet and bathroom. The room was exactly as he had left it. His belongings exactly where he had left them. A half-folded shirt on the dresser top. His glaucoma medicine on the edge of the sink. The keys to his father’s apartment in silver silence on the desk.

Except that the steel table was gone. The brown stain on the carpet too. And so was the smell. The air smelled fresh, cold. Like it was going to rain. Cyprian N dropped onto the bed. He felt sleep rising up over him. As he succumbed, he thought he heard once more the high, shrieked laugh.

He woke up early. To his own surprise, he felt well. No trace of hangover or exhaustion. He packed quickly and then went online—his phone’s data connection was much better now—and changed his airline ticket to one leaving that afternoon. As he came downstairs with his bags, he saw that the boy with lacquered hair was still working the concierge desk and he prepared himself for a fight, for reprimands and threats. But the boy merely smiled as he totaled up the bill.

The concierge said: I hope you had a very pleasant stay.

Cyprian N said: Yes, thank you.

He was almost at the door when the concierge called out.

The concierge said: Ah, yes—Mr. N! One moment. I forgot to mention that you have some early visitors.

The concierge pointed to the lobby niche. Seated there, in the two armchairs, were the duty nurse from the hospital and Italo C. They waved at him and started speaking well before they reached him.

The duty nurse said: Mr. N, we have wonderful news. We located your departed, and no harm has come to him!

Italo C said: All we need, of course, is to retake possession of the other departed in order to effect the transfer.

Cyprian N’s mouth dried out, and his temples began to pound. He ignored the two and pushed past them. Their hands grabbed at his coat. He started to run but they pursued him into the street, crying out after him. Some passersby stopped to listen to the noise the two made. They looked on with stony interest, forming a small crowd that slowed Cyprian N down enough for the duty nurse and Italo C to catch up. Everyone eating breakfast at the outside tables of the hotel restaurant stared too.

Italo C said: Where is the other departed? We left him under your supervision!

The dirty nurse said: Don’t you care about your father? Don’t you care about your father?

Some of the crowded spectators took up her cry. Their mouths open, wet and black. The small crowd they made around Cyprian N, right on the sidewalk, was now so dense it was impossible for him to move. He looked up and down the street, but the people who had not already stopped to stare and surround him just ignored his glances. He felt the duty nurse grab one wrist and Italo C grab the other. Both were strong, their grips sure and hard. The nurse was squeezing so tightly his hand was beginning to throb.

As he started to struggle against the nurse, Italo C and the closing-in crowd, he saw that the old man from the day before was sitting at a cafe table. He had a blue and white napkin tied around his neck. Before him sat the same, huge dish of white ice cream streaked with brownish sauce.

He looked emptily at Cyprian N, plunged the spoon in and then raised it in silent salute.