I myself, I must confess, was never much of a Valentino. Even then I must have had my nasty intellectual face. Oh, how I loathed it!

All said and done, though, I must say that time has been a great equalizer. You, if you’ll pardon my saying so, have lived to become a fat, bald old buzzard, and so have I. What a pair of respectable old fogies we two are, both of us with glasses! We may still be a bit suntanned, but from the inside out our bodies are cankered by disease. There’s hardly a sound bone left in them. We’re on our last legs and the Scyths are already lining up to pounce. By the way, “a nasty intellectual face” is my friend Hava’s phrase. A difficult, very peppery lady, although idealistic beyond all words. Once, in her salad days—I can’t recall if we ever discussed this—she conceived a passion for a criminally insane lad but had enough presence of mind to extricate herself from his clutches and enough ambition to attach herself to me. I, as is my custom, forgot and forgave long ago. The problem is that to this day she can’t forgive me for having forgiven her.

I won’t deny that I’m a wicked man, as wicked as they come, yes, wicked to the very marrow of my old bones. In fact, I may even be one of the thirty-six perfectly wicked men on whom our world depends. I mean one of those wicked enough to have sold their own souls on behalf of the cause we held sacred from the time we were young, one of those whose wickedness alone enabled them to preach and practice the faith and all its many commandments. Nevertheless, my dear Eshkol, wicked as we were, we did do a bit of good along the way that the Devil himself cannot deny us. It’s just that we were wicked even then, and cunning too, even if it’s only lately that the fools and our enemies have begun to realize what deceitful old men we really are. All our plotting, all our conspiracies—why, it was never for our own pleasure or profit, but only to do good. Not, if truth be told, that we shunned the public limelight then any more than we do now.