... and I hung up the phone. Immediately I recollected the voice that had spoken in German. It was that of Captain Richard Madden.
Madden, in Viktor Runeberg's office, meant the end of all our work and - though this seemed a secondary matter, or should have seemed
so to me - of our lives also. His being there meant that Runeberg had been arrested or murdered. 1 Before the sun set on this same
day, I ran the same risk. Madden was implacable. Rather, to be more accurate, he was obliged to be implacable. An Irishman in the service
of England, a man suspected of equivocal feelings if not of actual treachery, how could he fail to welcome and seize upon this
extraordinary piece of luck: the discovery, capture and perhaps the deaths of two agents of Imperial Germany?
I went up to my bedroom. Absurd though the gesture was, I closed and locked the door. I threw myself down on my narrow iron bed and waited on my back. The never-changing rooftops filled the window, and the hazy six o'clock sun hung in the sky. It seemed incredible that
this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death. In despite of my dead father, in despite of having
been a child in one of the symmetrical gardens of Hai Feng, was I to die now?