I boarded the bus for the water shuttle at 10:40. I was looking twice at everyone now: I felt as if I were surrounded by angels and devils, all invisible, attending my every movement. After a ten-minute ride, the bus stopped at a simple, gray dock. The metal gangway swayed and clanked as I made my way down. Three other passengers were already waiting under a gray awning: a heavyset man reading a thick novel about Nazis; a woman in a neat business suit reading The Wall Street Journal; a man in dark glasses and a double-breasted suit gazing out at the harbor. I reckoned the last of these must be Bézy’s man.

The ferry slowly churned toward us. The sky was overcast, heavy with dark tufts of cloud, and the wind was blowing up whitecaps on the water. I felt as if I were standing at a three-dimensional intersection. Behind were the runways of Logan Airport; overhead was the regular roar of jet airplanes, taking off and landing; a mile ahead, across the harbor channel, was the wharf where I would finally meet Bézy. The ferry neared the dock a few minutes before 11:00. The crew slipped bow and stern lines over the cleats, put down the gangplank and dropped the chain so the passengers could board. As I moved toward the boat, the man in the double-breasted suit came up behind me.

“I am Alessi,” he said. “Let us wait for the next boat.”

I stepped back from the gangplank. It was a reasonable move, right out of Frank’s textbook, and it made no difference to me. My problem wasn’t the water shuttle, but what lay on the other side. The other two passengers had already boarded the boat. One of them—the woman who had been reading The Wall Street Journal—looked back at me anxiously, and then turned away. The crew cast off the lines and the boat slipped off from the dock.

Alessi removed his sunglasses and shook my hand. He had a thin face with hooded eyes that gave little away. He was a functionary, an arranger, a procurer. “We are glad to see you,” he said.

“How’s Mr. Bézy?” I asked.

“Good,” he said. Not a word more. He didn’t want to talk; he was busy scanning the harbor for whatever might go wrong. We waited in silence for the next boat. Soon another bus arrived with more passengers. I figured at least one of them had to be from the FBI.

“How was your flight?” I asked, breaking Alessi’s shroud of silence again. I’d always asked that same question to arriving guests when I worked as a bellhop at a hotel in Palo Alto one summer. The theory was that if you could get someone talking on the elevator up to the room, he would give you a bigger tip.