A Café with Two Exits
出口が二つある喫茶店
Mercer chose the café precisely because it had two exits, one onto the boulevard and one through the kitchen.
He arrived eleven minutes early, ordered coffee he would not finish, and sat where the mirror showed the door.
The man he was waiting for called himself Brandt, though Mercer doubted that a single syllable of it was true.
Between professionals, a first meeting is less a conversation than a slow and exchange of suspicions.
Brandt arrived without hurry, folded his coat over a chair, and remarked that the weather had turned unkind.
"It usually does," Mercer answered, meaning something other than weather, and both men understood the second meaning perfectly.
Everything either of them said carried a surface for strangers and a lining that only the other could read.
Brandt mentioned a mutual in Vienna, a name that functioned less as gossip than as a .
Mercer let the name pass without visible reaction, which was itself the reaction Brandt had been watching for.
To offer nothing is a message; to offer too much is a confession; the art lies precisely between them.
A waiter drifted near, and both men fell into the easy, hollow talk that waiters are meant to overhear.
When he withdrew, Brandt said quietly that he might soon have something worth a great deal to certain people.
Mercer had heard that sentence a hundred times, and each time it concealed a different price and a different trap.
He asked, mildly, what "worth a great deal" might mean, as though inquiring about the cost of a coat.
Brandt smiled, understanding that the was a test, and answered with a of exactly equal weight.
So the two of them circled the subject, each measuring how much the other was willing to lose.
Mercer noticed that Brandt's left hand never left the table, and he filed the detail away without comment.
A man who keeps one hand hidden is either frightened or armed, and neither possibility could be safely ignored.
Twice Brandt glanced at the boulevard exit, and once, more briefly, at the corridor leading past the kitchen.
He knows the room as I know it, Mercer thought, which meant Brandt had been trained by someone competent.
They spoke for twenty minutes and agreed to nothing, which, in this , could still count as progress.
Before rising, Brandt slid a matchbook across the table, empty except for a number pencilled inside the flap.
Mercer did not look at it; he covered it with his hand and continued speaking about an opera neither had seen.
"Think it over," Brandt said, standing, and the phrase meant decide whether you trust me enough to be used.
Mercer watched which exit the man chose, because the choice of door often revealed more than an hour of talk.
Brandt took the boulevard, , pausing at the window of a bookshop as any citizen might do.
Only then did Mercer open his hand, memorise the number, and press the matchbook flat into his coffee saucer.
Two exits, he reflected, and yet the truly difficult doors in this work were never the ones set into walls.