I also asked him to get someone to translate a few German words for me, putting only what I didn’t know in the telegram, not the whole of Mensinger’s personal notes. At the portales Bunky was nowhere to be seen. I should have gone immediately to find him. But no. He was almost certainly sleeping one off. It was best for him simply to sleep. I could talk to him later about what was going on with him. I had another guy to see. The Hostal Buen Viaje was up Montesinos, just across from a loudly clanking, brake-grinding, engine-huffing switching section of the railroad tracks a quarter mile or so from the main terminal. It was a run-down one-story courtyard building made to work as a cheap by-the-week-or-month hotel. Gerhard’s name and room number were chalked with all the other lodgers’ on a board behind the front desk, where an old man sat deeply asleep in an upright position. I knocked on Gerhard’s door, which faced a courtyard whose cracked and shattered tiles were overgrown with ankle-high grassy weeds.
