People laughed, and soon everyone was coming up with rhymes: sump, slump, hump, pump his stump. There was a festive atmosphere, with a definite blood-sport cruelty about it, complicated by the fact that the quarry seemed only too eager to present himself as an actual monster. I drifted inward again. A phrase of Julia’s came back to me: “He wasn’t thinking of me . . .” I hadn’t attached much importance to it at the time. It had seemed a bit trite, if anything—an easy formula she’d settled on to explain her change of heart up in Marco’s room all those years ago. It wasn’t that it had become any more profound, but it seemed to come at me suddenly from a different angle—one that put my own actions in a new light. He wasn’t thinking of me . . . For a moment I saw myself standing before her with a peculiar ruthlessness as I pursued my inquisitorial mission: facing her like some single-minded speculator surveying a landscape purely for its extractive possibilities . . . Had I, too, not been thinking of her—not thinking of her? Absurd! I thought, immediately. There was no comparison between my conversation with Julia in her flat and her encounter with Marco in that hotel bedroom. Here was a character flaw I most certainly did possess: a tendency toward morbid self-recrimination. I pushed the image out of my mind.

“He’s stalking her! He’s stalking her . . .”

The Republican had appeared in the frame directly behind his opponent as she answered a question, his red tie stretching down the edge of the screen as he loomed into her space in what appeared to be a deliberate, and deliberately flagrant, attempt at intimidation. Again the room filled with cries of jubilant outrage. It really was like a bullfight, only with the Minotaur himself in the ring.

“Beautiful! That’s it. Presidential candidate stalks his opponent on live TV. We’re done. R.I.P. the Republican party.”

“R.I.P. the whole white fucking billionaire patriarchy!”

“It’s already going viral!”

I glanced at Marco. Was he experiencing any symptoms of identification with the beleaguered candidate? He didn’t appear to be. But then, why should he? He was in the clear, I reminded myself. His accuser had been neutralized, silenced, undone. Hanan hung on his shoulder. I wondered if the news about Julia would affect this new-born tenderness of hers when she heard it. Probably not, I thought. She’d apparently made up her mind to believe in Marco’s innocence. The onus of belief . . . I thought again, blackly. It was as if I’d invented some spell of my own, for reducing reality to a question of where one’s best interests lay.

“You okay?”

Marco’s voice sounded in my ear. I must have been grimacing. I nodded.