There were two inspections. The exit inspection on the Austrian side was cursory. My own suitcase was not even opened. Then we crossed the border, and the Austrian trainmen were replaced by Czechs, and Czech customs officials paraded through the cars. This second check was a good deal more detailed. When the customs men left and the train started up again, I noticed that a government railway policeman remained in our car. We had been spared the presence of such an official in Austria.

I glanced over at him and saw that he was looking at me. He was a big man, thick in the shoulders and thicker in the neck, with a flat forehead and close-cropped sand-colored hair. I avoided his eyes for a few moments, then glanced his way again. He was still looking at me.

I wondered why. There had been no trouble with the passport. I was sure they had my name on a list somewhere, but a brief customs check would not turn it up. By the time they had put two and two together, I expected to be hidden in Prague.

Unless, of course, they’d had advance notice that I was coming…

The little Frenchman was talking again, assuring me what a pleasure it was to have me for a companion. The pleasure, I wanted to tell him, was all his. He dropped a cigarette upon the floor, ground it out carefully underfoot, and sighed again.

“I think,” he said, “that perhaps I shall take a brief nap.”

“Go ahead.”

“I have not had a decent night’s sleep in almost two weeks.”

I had not had any sleep, decent or otherwise, for over sixteen years, so his lament made less of an impression upon me than it might have on most people. In Korea, a fragment of shrapnel found its way into my head and destroyed something called the sleep center. No one knows exactly what the sleep center is, or how it works, but mine, ever since then, isn’t and doesn’t.