It was mid-afternoon when I arrived back at L’Hotel Delle Cento Storie, drenched in sweat from the bus journey and the walk. I had decided I would take a drink in the bar: perhaps I might speak to the young bartender; perhaps—this time—she might reciprocate in the conversation.

The interior of the hotel was darkened compared to the glare of the sun outside, but as my eyes adjusted upon entering, I noticed a group of people seated in the lobby. The proprietor, sat behind the reception desk, looked worried. A tall man stood up from the group and walked over. I saw the coarse hair of his moustache, his overcoat: it was Proto.

I asked him what he was doing here in the hotel. ‘Another coincidence of the incalculable pasts and futures we might live,’ he said. He ushered me towards the waiting party. ‘In one, you have arrived in the city for a job you cannot trace, and I am a stranger seeking a light for a cigarette; in another, you are the suspect of the most banal and trivial deceptions, and I am the superintendent assigned to your case.’ He pulled out a chair; I felt I had no choice but to sit down.

I recognised everyone seated at the table that Proto led me to: the private detective I had hired, the woman with scarlet lipstick who had told me of B and X, as well as Carruthers (a man from my past, to whom I will come shortly). The bartender polished glasses, looking over to us repeatedly and nervously from behind her counter.

‘What is all this?’ I protested. ‘I can only trust you have news of my role at the department…’

Proto shook his head. ‘As I am sure you are aware, and as comes to pass with nearly every case, a client’s original inquiry is most often a decoy from what they are really pursuing.’

Proto gestured towards the private investigator. ‘Our fellow associate visited me last week, to ask my opinion on a case he had just taken on—the case, as you well know, of a missing secretary. A simple case of Subjects A, B, C, and D? he had asked me. I had agreed, but secretly, my intuition was that it was permutation, not identification, which was holding up his case.

‘On the face of this drawn-out tale, we have Subject A, our mutual associate, the private investigator engaged by your good self. You had been drawn to the city, you told Subject A, by the offer of a role in a department administered by whom we will call Subject B, a secretary who has suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth.

‘Subject A makes his preliminary inquiries. Quite quickly, he deduces—through a letter found in the trash, written on discarded hotel notepaper, and a mole he has sent to the hotel—that perhaps you have not come to this city solely for the promise of work from Subject B, but you are instead fleeing Subject C—an ex-lover, he assumes, a love that is now unrequited through the passing of time and tense. Yet there is another chance conversation that casts doubt on the whole case—the investigator’s mole has spoken to the proprietor, who has in turn had his suspicions roused by his employee, Subject D—Subject D, our young bartender, who has had a funny feeling all is not quite as it seems to be, that there may be ulterior motives at play.

‘It is here, though, that to make sense of this case, that we must reshuffle our hand. So Subject D—our subject with a funny feeling, a fear of ulterior motives—is not the young bartender, but is now our mutual associate, the investigator, no longer convinced by your story, concerned that your account does not quite tally. He has come to ask for my opinion, yes, but not before he himself (no longer Subject A, as he is Subject D) had engaged his own Subject A—an ex-lover of yours, embittered by how casually you had once dropped her, who has only been to happy to take a trip to this city and hotel courtesy of the expenses you are paying to the investigator—and whose simple disguise of lipstick and sunglasses appears to have deceived you more easily than any of us could have imagined. But is she also Subject C, we have asked, a former flame that you would be running from? This is a remark she found hilarious—you have no regard for the past, she told us, as evidenced from your sudden yet inevitable walking out on our new Subject C,  Signor Carruthers—a partner at the firm which you fled without a word three weeks ago, who have been making their own local inquiries into your whereabouts.’ Carruthers looked at me silently; his expression conveyed a deeply corporate disappointment.

‘And Subject B,’ Proto continued, ‘the reason you have been drawn to this city? At the heart of this farce are a department, a secretary, and a job offer which don’t exist: each a fiction of your own making, a decoy from what you are really pursuing. And this is where we find Subject B: a young woman you had once sat next to on a train, with whom you had struck up the briefest of conversations on what she was reading, a situation where her only option was polite yet distanced engagement, and from there we have the beginnings of a non-existent romance that you have fabricated and exaggerated in your own mind, and your dropping of everything to follow her to the place of work she had mentioned in that briefest of conversations—L’Hotel Delle Cento Storie.’

I looked into the eyes of everyone sat around me: Proto, the investigator, my ex-lover, Carruthers; further back, at each end of the lobby, the proprietor and the bartender. ‘This is obscene!’ I wanted to cry, but my voice would not carry my protests.

The elevator doors shuddered open; the hotel porter emerged, carrying my suitcases.

‘Your reservation ends here,’ stated Proto, ‘the proprietor and the investigator will be in touch for payment of their bills.’

My head was spinning; I demanded another drink—whiskey, white rum, even an aperitif. Proto instead stood me up, and guided me out of the hotel. The hotel porter followed, placing my suitcases on the pavement beside me.

First broadcast in John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme, Series 5, Episode 5, 2016. Available to listen to online here