The past forty-eight hours had not, John felt, treated him very well. He'd gone from being harassed by his landlord (who needed his gold yesterday) while in the throes of a cracking hangover to being thrust into the middle of an evacuation emergency. Diffusing the situation - quite literally - had required all of his faculties and juggling three or four separate Departments, even Gringotts, and tracking down all of his men and women to make sure no one had got an arm blown off or something. He'd deserved the hours he'd given himself at the pub to unwind, and he'd probably also deserved to find an eviction notice on his door and his things in a box on the curb when he came home, but that didn't make it any more convenient.
Robin had given him the couch, which was good of her; but that was never easy. And then today had seen him criss-crossing London to question witnesses and persons of interest, taking the odd break to reply (or, more often, not-reply) to the responses to his ad in the paper, some of which had been rather alarming. By the time he arrived at the cafe, he was ready to sit and eat about three meals. About the only thing he had going for him was that he'd found a moment to change out of uniform. It had always been one of his least favorite things about working in the field.
He hadn't spared much thought as to how he was going to find his correspondent, when the time came. He'd assumed it would be easy - the man was clearly very German, and a newcomer, and would have to be ostentatiously eccentric in that Continental sort of way. It seemed natural that picking out foreigners should be the easiest thing in the world. A successful author with enough money to offer advance payment would have to be someone relatively distinguished, on the older side, perhaps a bit sloppy as academics and artists usually were. Shouldn't be hard. And yet when he stopped in the cafe's entryway to survey all the guests, he came up short.
If it had been some other, easier day, he might have wandered for a bit among the tables, searching. Today, he went up to the lady at the counter and asked in his Auror Voice whether anyone had come in who was very clearly not from around here. Once pointed in the right direction, he wasted no time in crossing to the proper table and doing his best to look friendly rather than simply harried. He gripped the back of the opposite chair, keeping his distance. "Mr. Scamander, I think?"