Blunt

Blunt moves through the household as a guest whose ease with the occult unsettles as much as it charms, and his offhand remark that without the jade god he would never have found Jean ties his fate to the carving's. He treats the idol less as a curiosity than as an old acquaintance, smiling where others shudder. That ambiguous intimacy makes him the story's most disquieting presence, a man whose real errand the reader keeps trying to read.