The Quantum Thief

9. THE DETECTIVE AND THE LETTER

Later that evening, Isidore lets the co-memory take him to the Tortoise Park. It leads him down a narrow sandy path, through a grove of pine and elm. Beyond the trees, he finds the chateau.

It is the largest restored Kingdom building Isidore has ever seen apart from the Olympus Palace; it is astonishing that it is hidden from public view by gevulot. The last sunbeams of the day glance off two towers that weave left and right as they rise towards the sky, like Oriental daggers. The chateau casts long blue shadows on a field of flowers, laid out with geometrical precision. The flowers form triangles and polygons of many colours, as if the gardener was proving Euclidean theorems. It takes Isidore a moment to realise that they are laid out in the shape of a Darian solar clock, with the shadow of the taller tower as the dial.

There is a tall iron fence with a gate. A Quiet is standing behind it, waiting. It is an unusual creature: a sculpted humanoid, no larger than a man, a golden mask and gloves hiding the angles and edges beneath, wearing blue silver-embroidered livery. It reminds him of the jewelled mannikins in the Kingdom simulation. Naturally, it gives him no greeting, but he feels it is polite to say something.

‘I’m Isidore Beautrelet,’ he says. ‘I’m expected.’

Silently, it opens the gate for him and leads him towards the chateau. They walk through fields of roses, lilies and more exotic flowers he needs to ’blink to recognise. The smell is intoxicating.

The evening sun casts a golden pool in a clearing where a small pagoda-like pavilion stands. A pale-haired young man – barely more than a boy, perhaps six or eight Martian years old – sits inside, reading a book, an empty teacup next to him. He is wearing a plain Revolution uniform that hangs loose on his frame. His thin eyebrows are squeezed together in concentration in a delicate face, rounded by baby fat. The Quiet servant stops and rings a small silver bell. The man looks up slowly and gets up with exaggerated care.

‘Dear boy,’ he says, offering a hand. His fingerbones feel like porcelain in Isidore’s grip. He is taller than Isidore, but almost painfully thin, the elongated Martian bodymorph taken to the extreme. ‘How delightful that you could come. Would you like some refreshments?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Sit, sit. What do you think of my garden?’

‘Impressive.’

‘Yes, my gardener is a genius. A very modest man, but a genius. And that, of course, often applies to other individuals possessing rare talent, such as yourself.’

Isidore watches him quietly for a moment and tries to shake away the disturbance in gevulot. It is not absence of privacy like in the Dust District, but uncertain, as if it could tear any moment.

The young man smiles. ‘And are you genius enough to know who I am?’

‘You are Christian Unruh,’ Isidore says. ‘The millenniaire.’

Finding that out was not difficult, but it occupied him for the other half of the afternoon, going through public exomemories and comparing them to the co-memory the woman in white gave him. Unruh – if that is his name – is a private person even by Oubliette standards: apart from his youth, it is difficult to find out anything about his background. His name comes up mainly in the context of society events and business deals in newspapers. It is obvious that he has more Time than God.

‘You have a personal Time fortune based on gevulot brokering, something the Voice only made possible a few years ago. And clearly, you are worried about something. Gogol piracy?’

‘Oh no. I have been careful to be perfectly ordinary in everything else except making Time. A defence mechanism, you might say. No, what concerns me is this.’

Unruh hands Isidore a note, fine, linen, unmarked paper, with a few words written on it in an elegant, flowing hand.

Dear M. Unruh, it says,

In response to your unsent invitation – I will be delighted to attend your carpe diem party on the 28th sol of Vrishika, 24**. I will bring one guest.

Your obedient servant, Jean le Flambeur.

Isidore has been thinking about le Flambeur all afternoon. The Oubliette exomemory does not have much on him. In the end, he spent Time on an expensive data agent that ventured into the Realm outside the Oubliette noosphere. What it brought back was a mixture of fact and legend. No actual memories or lifecasts, not even video or audio. Fragments from before the Collapse, online speculation about a criminal mastermind operating in Fast London and Paris. Fanciful tales of a sunlifting factory stolen from the Sobornost, a guberniya brain that was broken into; dirty dealings in Realm unreal estate.

It can’t all possibly refer to the same individual, a copy-family perhaps. Or maybe it is a meme, an idea for criminals – whatever that word may mean in different parts of the System – to sign their felonies with. So whatever this is, it must be a prank of some sort. Isidore hands the note back.

‘Your carpe diem party?’ he asks. ‘That’s in a week.’

Unruh smiles. ‘Yes. A millennium of Time goes quickly, these days. I’m giving most of it away, and some of it will be managed by my associate – Odette, whom you already met.’

‘I understand it is rare among our generation – not to rail against the injustice of it all – but I’m something of an idealist. I believe in the Oubliette. I have had a rich eight years in this body; I’m ready to do my part as a Quiet. But of course, I want to conclude things with style, before the next time. To seize the day, for one night.’ There is an odd bitterness in his voice.

The Quiet servant hands them both fine porcelain cups of tea: Unruh tastes his with relish. ‘Also, finiteness gives everything such an edge, don’t you think? I think that’s what our founding fathers and mothers had in mind. Experiencing that is all I wanted. Until the note came along.’

‘How did it arrive?’

‘I found it in my library,’ Unruh says. ‘In my library!’ Hard anger lines look strange on his childlike face. His cup rattles when he sets it down. ‘I don’t let anyone in my library, M. Beautrelet. It is my inner sanctum. And no one outside my immediate circle of friends even has the gevulot to come to this castle. As I’m sure you can understand given your recent experiences with the press, I feel… violated.’

Isidore shudders. The thought of someone coming to his personal space, unannounced, without access to his gevulot makes his skin crawl. ‘You don’t think it is possible that this is a prank of some kind?’

Unruh presses his palms together. ‘I have considered the possibility, of course,’ he says. ‘As you can imagine, I went through the castle exomemory thoroughly. I found nothing. Sometime last night, between seven and eight thirty, the letter simply appeared. I don’t recognise the handwriting. The paper is from a stationery shop on the Avenue. There are no obvious DNA traces, apart from mine. That is as far as Odette got. I am convinced that offworld technology is involved. The modus operandi would certainly fit with what we know about this character – announcing a date and time for his crime.

‘In some way, I’m not surprised. The offworlders think that we are a backwater, a playground. And for some reason, this… thief has chosen me as his plaything. But if I went to the Voice or the tzaddikim, they would tell me the same thing: it is a prank. And that’s why you are here, M. Beautrelet.’ Unruh smiles. ‘I want you to help me. I want you to find out how the letter got into my library. I want you to figure out what he is going to do, and stop it. Or if he succeeds, recover what is mine.’

Isidore takes a deep breath. ‘I think you may have a somewhat exaggerated view of my abilities,’ he says. ‘I’m not convinced that this is the real le Flambeur by any means. But if it is, why do you think I will be a match for such a creature?’

‘As I said, I’m an idealist,’ Unruh says. ‘I am familiar with your work. Indeed, I consider myself to be something of a fan. And, while I am deeply insulted by the thief’s actions, I do find the thought of having my demise accompanied by a battle of wits amusing. Naturally, we can find a suitable compensation for your efforts, if that is an issue. What do you say?’

To catch a thief, Isidore thinks. Something pure. Something simple. Something clean. Even if it turns out to be a joke.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘I accept.’

Unruh slaps his hands together. ‘Excellent! You know, M. Beautrelet, you are not going to regret your decision.’ He gets up. ‘Now, let’s find Odette and visit the scene of the crime.’

The chateau is built with the same grandeur as the Kingdom simulation at the zoku colony: high ceilings, marble floors, matte black suits of robotic armour lining the corridors along with large landscape paintings of old Mars: red cliffs, Valles Marineris, the grinning visage of the King in white and gold.

Odette – the woman in white – is waiting for them in the library, and gives Isidore a curt nod when they enter.

‘Well done,’ Unruh tells her. ‘It appears that your charms persuaded young M. Beautrelet to assist us with our little dilemma.’

‘I thought he might,’ she says. ‘I think you will find this interesting, M. Beautrelet.’

The library is a high room, well-lit by a skylight, with large windows to the garden. There are comfortable-looking leather couches. And books, both analog and spime, thousands of them in neat rows in dark oak shelves, attended to by a treelike synthbio drone. A large brass orrery – metal casing containing a real-time image of Mars and the surrounding space – sits in the centre of the room on a dark wine-coloured rug.

Unruh holds out a hand, and the drone hands him a tome, black branch limb snaking up to one of the higher shelves. ‘This is the lifecast of the Count of Isidis. He belonged to a little cabal that tried to oust the King a few years before the Revolution. Naturally, they failed. But it is a fascinating period, the pre-Revolution years; when things could have gone very differently indeed. Full of gaps left by the Spike, of course. As I’m sure you can tell, I had something of a Kingdom enthusiasm phase a while back.’ There is a hollow note in his voice.

‘In any case, this is the volume I was studying when I noticed the letter. It was over here.’ The millenniaire points to a small reading desk. ‘Carefully placed so that I would see it when sitting in my favourite chair.’ He leaves the book on the table, walks over to one of the chairs and sits down. ‘Only I, my three Quiet servants and Odette – and now you – have gevulot to this place.’

‘Any other security measures?’

‘Not yet; but I am happy to give you free rein to put anything you like in place, up to and including black market tech. Odette will see to the details, just let her know.’ Unruh looks at Isidore and grins. ‘And I’d also visit Persistent Avenue with her. You will need something to wear for the party.’

Isidore coughs, suddenly self-conscious in his rumpled old Revolution uniform replica. ‘Do you mind if I take a look around?’

‘Of course not. I would imagine that you will be spending a considerable amount of time here over the next few days. I have given you access to the exomemory – apart from certain private portions – so you should feel free to explore.’

Isidore picks up the volume that Unruh set down and opens it. A dazzling display of images, video and text spills out, floating around him. Point-of-view video, sound and noise, glimpses of elegant faces and great halls-

Unruh yanks the book from his hands with a sudden violence. His eyes are bulging, and there are little patches of red on his pale cheeks. ‘I would prefer it,’ he hisses, ‘if you stayed away from the contents of the library. Many of these were… difficult to acquire, and I am somewhat jealous of them.’ He hands the book back to the library drone, who returns it to the shelves.

Isidore’s expression must betray his shock and rapid pulse: Unruh shakes his head and then gives him a shy smile. ‘I apologise. You have to understand a collector’s passion. And as I said, this is a very private place for me. I would be much obliged if you could carry out your investigations without… academic pursuits.’

Isidore blinks the images away and nods, heart pounding. There is a sudden hard look on Odette’s face. ‘I was never that interested in history,’ he says quietly.

Unruh laughs, an odd, coughing sound. ‘And perhaps it would be best for all of us if we spent more time in the present, hmm? In fact, that is very much what I intend to do for the next few days. I have some last-minute… human things to attend to.’ He takes Isidore’s hand again. ‘I have faith in you, M. Beautrelet. I hope I am not disappointed.’

‘I hope so too,’ Isidore says.

After Unruh is gone, Isidore takes out his magnifying glass and starts studying the room. It overlays the room with information: DNA traces, patterns of wear in the carpet, fingerprints and grease stains, molecules and trace elements. At the same time, he reaches for the room’s exomemory. An infinite tower of past instants opens in his head. A brief ’blink tells him that the letter is there at 8.35pm the previous night, but not a few seconds before. And there is no one in the room, either before or after. He expands the memory through the castle: a servant standing in eternal silence here, another there – and a block, hiding Unruh’s private quarters from view.

He looks at the letter again. There is no sign of self-assembly: it is actual handmade paper, or a perfect nanotech replica. Even with advanced offworld tech, it is hard to imagine a cloud of nanites constructing it out of nowhere in a matter of seconds; the energy required for such an operation would have left many other traces in the castle’s exomemory.

‘We tried all the obvious things,’ Odette says, perched on one of the armrests of Unruh’s chair, looking at Isidore, smiling her little girl’s smile. ‘I doubt your zoku toy will discover anything I didn’t.’

Isidore barely hears her: he is too focused on examining the floor and the walls of the library. As might be expected, they are solid, quickstone-laced basalt. He sits down and closes his eyes for a moment. There are fleeting images from the book that obscure the shape of the mystery, although a part of him wants to fit them in too. He brushes them aside and focuses on the letter itself. A locked room, a mysterious object; there is something almost too clean about it.

‘When was the last time you acquired something for M. Unruh?’ he asks Odette.

She touches her lips with a fingertip. ‘Perhaps three weeks ago. Why?’

‘I was wondering about Trojan horses,’ Isidore says. ‘Is it possible that he could have bought a disguised device, something containing a microdrone or something that could have placed the letter where M. Unruh found it? For that matter, the device could have been purchased a long time ago, sitting here until it was activated.’

‘I find that unlikely,’ Odette says. ‘Christian reviews every item he buys very carefully with the help of experts. And even if there had been a device of some sort, it would have shown up in the exomemory.’

‘True.’ Isidore looks at her curiously. ‘And do you have a theory of your own?’

‘That’s not what I’m paid for,’ Odette says. ‘But if I had to offer one… well, let us just say that during my employ I have seen dear Christian do more eccentric things than writing letters to himself.’ She smiles, something much older and wicked this time. ‘He gets bored easily. For your sake, M. Beautrelet, I hope you are as good at creating mysteries as you are solving them. And a better detective than you are a dresser. Your wardrobe definitely needs some improvement.’

Isidore is still thinking about the letter when he returns home that evening. He realises how much he has missed it, the slowly unfolding map of a new mystery inside his head.

Lin must still be awake: the lights are on in the kitchen. He realises he has not eaten since lunch, and tells the kitchen fabber to whip up some risotto.

As he watches the fabber arm dance over the plate, painting rice grains into being with its atom beam, he thinks about Unruh. There is something about him that does not quite fit. Odette’s suggestion that he has been invited to play along in some elaborate charade seems to fit all the facts. But its shape is too awkward to be acceptable.

He stares at the steaming plate, decides he wants to hang on to the sharpness of hunger and thought, leaves it on the kitchen table and goes to his room.

‘Long day?’

Pixil is sitting on his bed, legs crossed, playing with the green creature.

‘What are you doing here? How did you get in?’ He has deliberately excluded Pixil from his gevulot for the past few days. It has felt like a local anaesthetic, covering up something raw with numbness.

Pixil holds up the entanglement ring. There is a blurry granularity in her features, and he realises she is a utility fog image. ‘It’s not just a communication device, you know,’ she says. ‘I got tired of playing the guess what your boyfriend is thinking game. I suppose you showed initiative in coming up with that one.’

‘Are you-’

‘Serious? No. Most people in the zoku would be, no question about it. I like this guy. Does he have a name?’

‘No.’

‘Shame. He could use one. Something from Lovecraft perhaps. Although there are bigger slimy and tentacled beings around here.’

Isidore says nothing.

‘I suppose you are too busy to talk?’ Pixil says. ‘Maybe I’m just tired of the let’s talk about our feelings game.’

Pixil looks at him for a while. ‘I see. And here I was coming up with a new scoring system for that. One point every time you say a true thing, with achievements unlocked by actual emotional revelations. But I see I wasted my time.’ She crosses her arms. ‘You know, if I asked Drathdor, he could set up a little emotional response model that would tell me exactly what makes you tick.’

A horrible thought strikes Isidore. ‘You don’t have anything to do with this le Flambeur thing, do you?’ He hits the boundaries of what the gevulot allows him to share about Unruh’s assignment, and his tongue freezes. But it does feel exactly the kind of thing Pixil would do. Setting up an elaborate puzzle to restore his confidence. With some horror, he realises it is not a hypothesis he can discard outright.

‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ she says. ‘Clearly, you are busy focusing on important things. I came to say that no matter what game you want to play with me – and believe me, I play better than you – it’s your move.’

She disappears. The entanglement ring and the green thing fall to the bed with a thump. The creature lands on its back and waves its tentacles in the air helplessly.

‘I know exactly how you feel,’ Isidore says.

He picks the creature up and turns it upright. It gives him a large-eyed thankful look. He lies down next to it and stares at the ceiling. He should be thinking about Pixil, and ways to make it up to her, he knows. But his thoughts keep returning to the letter. The letter is a physical object. It has an origin. Somebody wrote it. It is impossible for exomemory not to have recorded where it came from. Therefore, one must be able to find its origin in the exomemory. Unless-

Unless exomemory itself is flawed.

The thought makes him blink. It is like saying that gravity might not be a constant 0.6g, or that the sun might not come up tomorrow. But the thought, wrong as it is, fits. And not only that, it feels like it is only a part of some larger shape, looming in the darkness, just beyond his grasp. When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Something chilly touches his toes, and he lets out a small yelp. It is the creature, exploring the world under his blanket. He picks it up again and gives it an angry look. It flutters its tentacles innocently.

‘You know,’ Isidore says, ‘I think I’m going to call you Sherlock.’

As promised, she assists him in choosing an outfit for the carpe diem party. They spend half a day on Persistent Avenue. The celebration is going to be Time-themed, and a deft-fingered outfitter measures him up for a costume based around Sol Lunae, the second day of the Darian week: black and silver.

‘Isn’t the Moon supposed to be feminine?’ he protests when Odette informs him of the theme.

‘Christian has thought about this very carefully,’ Odette says, frowning as the shop projects various designs on Isidore’s lean frame. ‘I wouldn’t argue with him: I’ve never managed to change his mind. I think we are going to try another fabric, possibly velvet.’ She smiles. ‘The Moon also symbolises mystery, and intuition. Perhaps that is what you represent to him. Or perhaps not.’

Isidore stays quiet after that and submits to the gentle torture of the tailor without complaint.

After the shopping trip, he returns to the chateau and starts to eliminate the impossible, coming up with a series of hypotheses to explain the appearance of the letter, each more elaborate than the last. They range from self-assembling paper to an invisibility fog sophisticated enough to fool the ubiquitous exomemory sensors. But everything brings him back to the improbable conclusion: something is wrong with exomemory itself.

One of the Quiet servants brings him a light lunch, which he eats alone. Apparently, the millenniaire is too occupied with his last week in a Noble body to spend much Time on something already set in motion.

In the afternoon, Isidore considers the possibility of exomemory manipulation. He ’blinks until his head pounds with technical information about distributed ubiquitous communication and quantum public key cryptography, Byzantine general problems and shared secret protocols. The exomemory is everywhere. Its tiny distributed sensors – in every piece of smart- and dumbmatter – record everything, from events to temperature fluctuations to object movements to thoughts, with access to it controlled only by gevulot. But it has been designed to be write-only, with massive redundancy. Hacking into it and editing it would mean nanotechnological and computational resources far beyond the reach of any Oubliette citizen.

The realisation sends a chill down Isidore’s spine. Perhaps some otherworldly force has indeed chosen Unruh as its target.

After a walk in the garden – where a white-haired man in blue coveralls is working on Unruh’s flowers with the help of a Quiet servant – he goes through all of the castle exomemory he has access to, looking for other gaps. He sits in one of the library chairs, remembering. Unruh has had a regular life for the past year, almost hermit-like, apart from the occasional small party. There are times when exotic courtesans from Serpent Street pass through the memories, making Isidore wonder what Adrian Wu would make of his new patron. But mostly Unruh spends his time in solitude, receiving antique dealers, eating alone, and spending endless hours immersed in study in the library.

He is almost ready to give up – the amount of detail is too much to absorb on one sitting – when he decides to cross-reference the memory with the book Unruh was reading, the lifecast of Count Isidis. The last time Unruh read it was four weeks ago. And in the memory-

It takes a few moments to take in. Then he leaps to his feet and goes to find Odette. She is overseeing preparations for the party in a small office in the eastern wing of the chateau, surrounded by floating spime invitations, like a flock of birds frozen in time.

‘I want to see M. Unruh.’

‘I’m afraid that is not possible,’ she says. ‘Christian has only a few days left, and unless he tells me otherwise, he is going to spend them how he pleases.’

‘I have some questions for him.’

‘If I were you, M. Beautrelet,’ Odette says, ‘I would be content to play your part in this little drama of his.’ She touches a virtual sheet in the air. It becomes a young woman’s face: she studies it, touching her lips lightly with the tip of her pen. ‘A lifecast artist,’ she says. ‘I don’t think she would fit. Sometimes I think I should have been a musician. Organising a party is much like composition: considering how different instruments complement each other. For me, you are another instrument, M. Beautrelet. Christian trusts me to be the conductor of his final day. So please, save your dramatic revelations for the party. Comedy is all about timing, I’ve always been told.’

Isidore folds his arms. ‘I heard a quote once,’ he says. ‘Tragedy is when I slip on a banana peel. Comedy is when you fall into a hole and die. I do wonder what I would find if I spent more time investigating you.’

She holds Isidore’s gaze for a long time. ‘I have nothing to hide,’ she finally says.

Isidore smiles, saying nothing. She is the first to look away.

‘All right,’ Odette says. ‘I suppose he could use some light entertainment.’

Unruh greets him at one of the galleries of the chateau, wearing a dressing gown and a chilly expression. Isidore sees someone walk past along a corridor, blurred by gevulot, wondering what activity the millenniaire interrupted to see him.

‘M. Beautrelet. I am told that you have discovered something.’

‘Yes. I am convinced that your concern is real, and there is an offworld force of some sort at work here. I will help you to make appropriate preparations for the party.’

‘I suppose I should thank you for not agreeing with Odette and claiming I wrote the letter myself,’ Unruh says. ‘And?’

‘Nothing. The local exomemory has been manipulated in some fashion, but I cannot determine how or by who. But that is not what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Oh?’ Unruh raises his eyebrows.

‘When going through the exomemory and looking for gaps, I noticed you had frequently studied the Isidis lifecast, and went back to its first appearance. I realise that I was, perhaps, abusing the powers that you had given me, but I felt it was important to study all the elements of the case from all possible angles.’

‘Indeed.’

‘I could not help noticing your… reaction to the text.’ Unruh had screamed, thrown the book across the room, flung other books from their shelves, toppled the orrery with violence that seemed to overflow his thin frame, before collapsing into a heap in his reading chair. ‘If I’m correct, soon after that you made up your mind to enter Quiet early. What was it that you saw?’

Unruh sighs. ‘M. Beautrelet, I should perhaps clarify that it is not a generic investigation you are carrying out here. I did not empower you to pry into my private life, or the reasons to my actions: merely to protect my property and my person from what I felt was a threat.’

‘You hired me because you wanted to solve a mystery,’ Isidore says. ‘And I think it was not just the mystery of the letter. I also ’blinked Count Isidis.’

‘And what did you discover?’

‘Nothing. I can’t find any references to a Count Isidis in the public exomemories. As far as the general public is aware, he never existed.’

Unruh walks to one of the gallery’s large windows and looks out. ‘M. Beautrelet, I admit I have not been entirely honest with you. A part of me was hoping you would spot certain things on your own as you have done.’ He presses a pale hand against the glass. ‘A strange thing happens when you are very rich, even when one’s wealth is as artificial as in our society. You develop a solipsism of sorts. The world yields itself to your will. Everything becomes your reflection, and after a while looking into your own eyes is dull.’

He sighs. ‘So I sought to find more solid ground in the past, in our origins, our history. I doubt there are many of our generation who have put as much effort into the study of the Kingdom and the Revolution as I have.

‘At first it was the perfect escape. So much richer than our bland existence, with real struggle, real evil, ideas triumphing over oppression, despair and hope. Count Isidis, plotting against a tyrant. Drama. Intrigue. And the Revolution! I bought memories from Time beggars. I remember being there, in Harmakis Valley, tearing Noble bodies with diamond claws.

‘But after a while I realised that something was wrong. The deeper I delved, the more inconsistencies there were. People who appeared in lifecasts I bought from black market dealers, memories that contradicted each other. The Isidis lifecast was when I had the first revelation, and you… saw how I reacted.’

Unruh clenches his hands into fists.

‘I lost my faith in the past. Something is wrong with it. Something is wrong with what we know. That is why I didn’t want you to study the texts in the library. I would not wish this feeling on anyone. Perhaps the old philosophers were right, and we are living in a simulation, playthings of some transhuman gods; perhaps the Sobornost has already won, Fedorov’s dreams are true and we are merely memories.

‘And if you can’t trust history, what should you care of the present? I don’t want any of it anymore. Merely Quiet.’

‘Surely, there is a rational explanation,’ Isidore says. ‘Perhaps you have been a victim of forgery; perhaps we should investigate the sources of your library texts-’

Unruh waves a hand in dismissal. ‘It does not matter anymore. You may do what you want with this knowledge, once I am gone. One perfect moment for me, and then I’m done.’ He smiles. ‘I’m glad I was right about le Flambeur, though. That encounter should be entertaining.’ He touches Isidore’s shoulder.

‘I am grateful, M. Beautrelet. I wanted to discuss this with someone. Odette is many things to me, but she would not understand. She is a creature of the moment, as I should try to be.’

‘I appreciate your confidence,’ Isidore says, ‘but I still think-’

‘We will say no more about it,’ Unruh says firmly. ‘The only thing you need to worry about now is the party, and our thief. Speaking of which – any security arrangements I should ask Odette to make?’

‘We could demand full gevulot disclosure at the entrance, or set up a series of agoras in the garden-’

‘How gauche! Absolutely not!’ Unruh frowns. ‘Being robbed is one thing, lack of manners another.’