When Jim got back to his seat he was surprised to find an envelope on the table, with his name neatly typed on it. He looked all around him in the dim light of the carriage. All the other crew members were either busy at one thing or another, or snatching a brief sleep before the frenzy of filming was resumed.
The envelope was white, his name typed in black. When he opened it, looking about him all the time, he found nothing inside but a set of instructions concerning the next stage of the journey. He breathed a deep sigh of relief. He had been beginning to believe that there was truth in the hysterical cries of two of his crew members claiming that they had received messages hinting at dreadful things, messages seemingly delivered from thin air.
When he came to think of it, even the materialisation of these instructions was a puzzle. There was something sinister about it. He had been made to understand that information would be given to him before the next stage of the journey. He had expected this to take place at the hotel in Paris. But to find that the next stage was in the middle of the tunnel, with information planted in the confusion following a general darkness, troubled him. All his fellow passengers suddenly appeared sinister.
Jim got up and, weaving with the motion of the train, went to ask the other crew members if they had seen anyone place the envelope on his table, or whether they had anything to do with it themselves. They were as puzzled as he was, and began to believe that Jute had indeed seen Malasso in the darkness. The only problem was that no one knew what he looked like, and no one knew if he even really existed. He was merely a rumour that had become a reality, an elusive reality. And they all sat together, trying to understand the nature of the mystery they were faced with.
The new instructions were simple enough. At the end of this train journey they were to approach the train driver and conduct an interview with him at his house in the suburbs of Paris. Before then they might be joined by someone from the organisation whom they wouldn’t notice, and if they did they were to ignore him. After the interview they were to converge at a certain point outside the Louvre, where they would be provided with a map and directed to the next interview, the process having already been arranged for them.
The crew would get its Arcadian interviews, but Malasso would get what he wanted. For the first time, Jim sensed their journey was an arcane voyage, the interviews and places forming an inner script, a sacred script even. He felt that they were all unwitting parts of a sublime riddle, a mystical conundrum, a travelling cryptograph. Back at his table, he tried to work out, by alphabet, a name or map or hint of what their journey secretly represented. But he couldn’t find any order to it, couldn’t find any visible clues, and he was baffled by the apparent inconsequentiality of it all.