They went down the funicular and sat in a café for four hours, which is what you do.
"Sorensen," she said, at about the second minute. "As in — "
"As in H. Sorensen." He turned his cup round. "Halvard Sorensen. My grandfather."
Frankie Osei put her coffee down so hard that some of it went on the table.
"You're joking."
"I am not joking."
"You are — Kit, I have carried that book since I was fifteen years old — "
"I know."
"I have carried it to thirty-one countries — "
"I know," said Kit Sorensen. "Would you like to shout at me? Genuinely. I have been rehearsing being shouted at since about half past seven this morning and I think it would help us both."
"How much of the book is true?" she said.
"All of it. That is the thing nobody believes. He did every single one of those cities and he did the whole method and he was not a fraud."
"And the four pages about unpredictability?"
"Complete rubbish," said Kit Sorensen. "That is the only bit that is rubbish and I am extremely glad you said it first, because I have thought so since I was about twenty-six and I have never had anybody to say it to."
"Right," said Frankie. "Then tell me the rest of it."
"The rest of what?"
"You have gone through four cities in six months on the same method as me, with the same edition, and you have done rule eleven in all of them, and you are his grandson." She had her notebook out and did not notice she had done it. "That is not a hobby. Nobody does rule eleven twenty-six times as a hobby. So: rule ten. I am asking you why you are here and you have to tell me the truth, that's the actual rule, it is on page nine."
Kit Sorensen looked at her for about four seconds.
"He wrote it in 1973 in a room in Copenhagen," he said. "It came out in the spring of 1974.
"And in the September of 1974 he went to the airport and took the cheapest flight leaving in the next four days, and he did not come back."
"For how long?"
"He didn't come back," said Kit Sorensen. "That's the sentence. That is the whole thing and I have never once been able to say it in fewer words.
"He was thirty-nine. He had a wife called Kirsten and two sons, and one of them was eleven and one of them was six.
"And the six-year-old is my father."
Frankie Osei sat entirely still.
"Open the front of yours," he said.
She opened it and turned it round.
Agnes Osei, 1979.
He was very unkind.
"That's my grandmother," said Frankie. "She gave it to me when I was fifteen and she said exactly those four words and then she never said another word about it in her life, and she died in the September and I have been carrying it since 2027."
Kit Sorensen opened his.
There is no name in it. There is one line, in a different hand — cramped, pressed hard enough to go through the page, in pencil:
This is what he chose.
"My father," he said. "1996. He was twenty-eight and he found a copy in a second-hand shop in Aarhus, and he wrote that in it and put it in a drawer and it stayed in that drawer for thirty-one years."
"How did you get it?"
"He died in 2033," said Kit Sorensen, "and I cleared the flat, and it was in the drawer with his passport.
"And I sat on the floor of a flat in Aarhus at about two in the morning and read a hundred and eleven pages by a man I had never met."