Two days and a half after Martinaise, once they eventually run out of excuses to stick around and Kim is left to rest alone in his flat, he gasps for breath like a diver who, his tanks kaput, swam up some forty metres on the miracle of decompressing oxygen alone and has now broken the ocean’s surface, and struggles to believe what fresh air tastes like. Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Harry Du Bois is all-enveloping and ever in motion, unsounded, unfathomable, hungry, sacred – having reached at last the safety of the shore, salt still on his skin, Kim Kitsuragi is shaken by a shiver.
The blue depths are ever so tempting.