...of precaution

The young man (everything about him indicated he was R.'s fiance) looked around with great caution. He clearly thought the police had hidden microphones in my apartment. With silent nods we agreed to go outside. We walked at first in continuing silence, and only when we entered the din of the Narodni Avenue did he tell me that R. wished to see me and that a friend of his whom I didn't know, had offered to lend his apartment in a suburb for this secret meeting.

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]