“What did Karla look like?” Guillam asked, treating the question as rhetorical. “Avuncular. Modest, and avuncular. He would have looked very well as a priest: the shabby, gnomic variety one sees in small Italian towns. Little wiry chap, with silvery hair and bright brown eyes and plenty of wrinkles. Or a schoolmaster, he could have been a schoolmaster: tough—whatever that means—and sagacious within the limits of his experience; but the small canvas, all the same. He made no other initial impression, except that his gaze was straight and it fixed on me from early in our talk. If you can call it
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