“I can’t help being born into a rich family, but that doesn’t mean I think I have a right to special treatment,” she burst out, her eyes bright. “I know if you have a special position you have special obligations.”

I nodded. “You don’t look much like your grandfather, but you sure sound like him. Your yearbook statement said you hoped to go into the publishing company. Do you do much around there now?”

“I was an intern last summer. I got to work with Haile Talbot, I mean I just brought him coffee-” She broke off, remembering we were enemies, and refused to speak again until we turned the corner onto Banks Street.

I was glad I hadn’t tried to talk my way in: her family’s town home was in a five-story building, hidden from the street by a high stone wall and a wrought-iron door with opaque safety glass filling the curlicues. A microphone was set into a recess beside the door, where I could have bent over and tried to persuade someone inside to buzz me in.

Catherine unlocked the door and led me across a flagged courtyard. A little garden with a couple of fruit trees and an old stone bench lay on the east side of the building, continuing, as far as I could tell, around to the back. We walked up gray flagstones to the front entrance, also locked, and took an elevator to the fourth floor. No doorman. Catherine could come and go with no one seeing her.

The elevator opened onto what was essentially the apartment’s entryway, an area so big I could have set up my office there and no one would have tripped over me for at least a month. We went on through an arched doorway into the body of the apartment.

A middle-aged woman in a maid’s uniform came out from some back room. “Oh, it is you, Miss Katerina. And your friend?”

“A business acquaintance, Elsbetta. We’ll be in my room.”

“You want me to bring tea? Coffee? Juice?” Her English was precise, but her voice was soft and heavily accented, the “esses” slurred the way my father’s mother’s used to.

“We’re fine without anything,” Catherine said firmly: I was not a guest, I didn’t get refreshments.

“Were you here last night?” I asked Elsbetta. “Here? Yes, I sleep here.”

Catherine looked daggers at me, but she said, “This woman wants to know if I was here also.”

“What do you mean, was you-were you-here? Yes, of course you were here. You ate with friends, you came home, at ten-thirty you went to bed, so I also, I then went to bed.” Elsbetta turned to me. “When Mrs. Renee is not here, I stay awake until Miss Katerina is in bed.”

Catherine gave a tight, triumphant smile and led me to her room. It was decorated in bold colors, and furnished in a way that would remind you every time you came in that you had been born to special obligations-the Bang & Olufsen TV-stereo for starters, and then the antique armoire and desk, Navajo rugs worn enough to show they dated to the pre-Machine Epoch of Indian work. These lay on a hardwood floor so polished it reflected our legs as we walked across it. Another few were draped across a pair of ottomans in front of the working fireplace.