I held the secret letter deep in my raincoat pocket as I approached the hostel warden. “Excuse me,” I said, obviously American but at least polite. “Are you busy?”
He gave an impression of youthful surliness: intimidating glasses covering small eyes, bangs falling across his face. “Not terribly, at the moment.”
“I was wondering if you could help me find someplace — a village called Shanaheever . . . or something like that.” Aware that I was scrambling the pronunciation, I produced a note — not the letter — from my other pocket and pointed to the name of the village. The note was an e-mail, pulled from my computer’s printer just as I’d left for my flight to Dublin. It read:
