The Pledge

This case gave me a bad feeling; everything had somehow gone wrong; I didn’t know exactly how, but I felt it. I withdrew to my ‘boutique,’ as I called it, a smoke-filled little room next to my office. I ordered a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape from a restaurant near the Sihl bridge, drank a few glasses. There was always an awful mess in that room, I won’t deny it, a jumble of books and files. I did that on principle, because in my opinion it’s everyone’s duty in this well-ordered land to maintain little islands of chaos, even if only in secret.

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