It was as if Bézy had suddenly lost the mandate of heaven. The new French government had been looking for ways to signal that it would not tolerate the same outrageous degree of corruption its predecessors had accepted. Now Bézy had given them an opportunity. My old friend Philippe Aurant at the prime minister’s office paid me an urgent visit in early August and asked for details about Bézy’s activities. I told him the story as it had happened. A month later Aurant called to say that Michel Bézy had been arrested on a charge of tax evasion. That sounded like a joke—cheating the tax man was France’s national sport, after all—but Aurant said the game really was up for Monsieur Bézy. The evidence against him had come chiefly from his old patron Alain Peyron, who was said to be indignant—indignant!—to discover his former attorney’s transgressions. A settlement was worked out quietly with the SEC; Bézy settled in for a long prison sentence in France. That gave me a moment of satisfaction, but it did nothing to address the problem of what I should do with my life.

I decided to go back to northern California, not just because it was home but because I truly loved that part of the country. I returned in September and stayed the first few weeks with my parents in Davis. I felt better the moment I stepped off the plane in San Francisco. It was as if the air had been washed, it was so clean and fluffy. You forget back East how unpleasant the weather is; it begins to seem natural that the climate has a soggy heaviness, like the kitchen in a greasy-spoon diner. You think you’ll always have to live like that. But then you walk out the door and find that on the other side it’s sunny, with the temperature in the seventies and low humidity, thank you very much. I began to play serious tennis again, for the first time in years, with some of the guys on my high school team. I was in better shape than most of them, which made me feel I hadn’t completely wasted the past twenty years.