Brandenburg Gate [antikvár]

1 Edge of the Void The man in the straw hat dogged his footsteps from the first, keeping his distance, yet never bothering to hide himself. Rosenharte saw him loitering outside the hotel when he checked in, then at the conference centre and later sitting at a cafe in Piazza deU'Unita, a mournful fellow with a washed-out face, who wore the hat unconvincingly on the back of his head as though he'd just won it in a shooting gallery. At times he got so close that Rosenharte could see the ventilation holes in the side of the hat and a mark on the narrow brim. He wanted to be seen - that much was clear - and once or twice Rosenharte thought he was going to approach, but then he seemed to decide against it and darted away into a side street. He wondered if the man was the visible part of the Stasi's surveillance operation in Trieste, put on his tail to remind him of their presence. Though he didn't need it; they had made it clear to him that the city would be saturated with officers. Everything he did would be watched. Perhaps the man was being fielded by a Western agency as some kind of ploy to draw out the Stasi surveillance. But that didn't make sense either. If the Americans or British were watching - which surely they were - they would know about the Stasi and include them in their calculations. Eventually he concluded that the straw hat was a detail, a side issue to something far more menacing. He ignored the man and threw himself into the conference on the rise of artistic conscience in the late Renaissance, a theme that had