There were no phone calls the next day, and the fact that neither Mr Rosenwasser nor the kitchen hand had heard of the department where I was due to start had roused my suspicions.

I had asked the proprietor, in the strictest confidence, whether he might have the contact of someone who could look into the matter. He wrote an address on a sheet of the hotel’s notepaper.

I took a packed bus across the city (past the docks, into an industrial area). There was a small kerfuffle on board—a passenger annoyed by another jostling him. I disembarked at the bus’s final stop.

The investigator’s office was on a mezzanine above a storage warehouse. I recounted the details of the job I had been offered, my stay at L’Hotel Delle Cento Storie, that I had not heard from the secretary since arriving in the city. ‘Will you be able to find the department—the secretary in particular?’ I asked him. It would not be a problem, the investigator assured me—he specialised in company and institutional investigations. He reeled off the details of his recent cases—the latest, he told me, had been into a company director who had fallen down an escalator: the accident wasn’t considered too serious at first, but weeks passed, then months, and though the director recovered from his injuries, something from the trauma had rendered him mute.

‘But, as comes to pass with nearly every case,’ the private investigator opined, ‘a client’s original inquiry is most often a decoy from what they are really pursuing. In this case, the client’s relationship was not with the subject of the case, the director—as she had initially implied—but with the man sent, by secondment, to cover the voiceless director’s work: her interest was in the veracity of her lover’s excuses. Eventually, the director recovered—by that point, though, the client had stopped answering my calls. I did not hear from her—nor her seconded partner—ever again.’

Published in Lunate #2, 2023, and available to read online here