‘You mean you don’t trust me,’ I accused him angrily.
He looked at me. ‘If you like to take it that way, but—’ He shrugged his shoulders and then added, ‘Would you mind having a look out in the corridor to see if it’s all clear?’
I opened the door and peered out. The corridor was empty. I nodded to him. He went quickly down to the end and turned right. I went back to my room, closed the door and emptied the remains of the bottle into my glass.
By the time I went to bed I was very drunk — drunk and happy. Reece was alive. Shirer was alive. I hadn’t killed them, after all. I managed to unstrap my leg and get most of my clothes off. Then when I’d fallen into bed, I suddenly had a feeling that I had made a mistake in the report I’d been working on earlier in the evening. I rolled out of bed, switched on the light and got the report out of my suitcase. The last thing I remember was trying to decipher the blur of writing through eyelids that kept on shutting out my vision.
I awoke to a blinding light on my eyes. I remembered that I had fallen asleep with the light on and put out my hand to switch it off. It was then that I discovered that the light was off and that it was the sun shining on my face. I sat up, trying to separate the roar of traffic outside the window from the noises in my head and wondering when during the night I had switched off the light. I looked at my watch. It was only seven-thirty and no servant would have been in the room yet. At some time during the night I must have wakened and switched it off. I lay in the bright sunlight thinking about Maxwell. His visit seemed unreal, like a dream.
I was called at eight-thirty. As soon as I was dressed I went down to breakfast. In the entrance hall I stopped to buy a paper. ‘Good morning,pane.’ It was the night porter. He was just putting on his outdoor things and his face had a confidential smirk. I paid for my paper and turned away. But before I was halfway across the room, the man was at my side. He was still struggling into his overcoat. ‘I hope you did not mind my letting a visitor up to your room so late,’ he said.
I stopped and glanced down at him. He was a little, rat-faced man with bulging blue eyes and a thin, greedy mouth. ‘Nobody came to my room last night,’ I said.
He shrugged the padded shoulders of his overcoat. ‘Just as pana says.’ He stood there and it was perfectly clear what he was waiting for. I cursed Maxwell for having been so careless. He must have mistaken my hesitation, for he added, ‘One o’clock is very late for an Englishman to receive visitors in a hotel in Czechoslovakia.’
‘One o’clock!’ I stared at him. Maxwell had left shortly after eleven.
He cocked his head on one side. ‘And pan Tucek is a well-known-figure here in Pilsen.’ He shrugged his shoulders again. ‘But of course if pana says no one visit him, then I believe him and I also say no one visit him.’