“Another commission,” he said, as if I had asked for one and he was weighing the prospect. He needed this little dance to keep from himself the knowledge that he needed me. “This’ll be a hard one.”

“The last one wasn’t exactly lying around like gravel.”

He picked up the box that held Singin’ in the Rain, and turned it over and over in his hands. At last, he said, “I want the Horsemen movie.”

I laughed, which I hadn’t meant to do. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve never seen it, that’s why not. If anyone in the City would have seen it, I would, and I haven’t.”

“So you think it doesn’t exist.” There was chilly disbelief in his voice.

“I know the folklore. That some poor bastard made a sci-fi-B-movie in which psychic Special Forces soldiers took over the minds of evil brown dictators and won the war in South America. And that some folks who wore dark glasses in the nighttime arrived at his house, asked him urgent questions, and took him into custody. I’ve never heard if they let him out. I’ve never heard that the thing got video release. I’ve never even heard it proved that it was released, period. File the whole story next to Hitchhikers, Comma, Vanishing.”

There was a silence, in which I decided he was trying to figure out what that meant. If he asked, I was going to tell him to look it up.

“You sound as if you don’t believe in the Horsemen.”

Sometimes I feel a profound, crippling sense of loss for something I never had: the world, as it once was. I felt it then. “Of course I believe in the Horsemen. I just don’t believe that someone had the bad luck to make a movie about them.”

“You’re turning down the job?”

I shook my head. “I’ll look. I’ve been looking for years. But I’m not going to find it. Not now. It if had ever existed, do you really think there’d be a copy left unburnt?”

“Five hundred,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows. “A thousand, hard. Be glad I don’t ask for the hand of your firstborn and half your kingdom.”

“No one’d give you a thousand for a goddamn movie.”

“Then if I find it, no one will get it.”

Long, expensive-sounding silence. “If you find it,” he said finally, rustily, “bring it to me.”

I smiled, and stifled the impulse to bow. We had not agreed on a price; but we’d agreed that his figure and mine marked the borders of a country we were willing to skirmish in later, if the need arose.

He opened one of his desk drawers, dropped Singin’ in the Rain into it, closed and locked it. As sometimes happens when a great deal of money changes owners in an atmosphere of bare tolerance, he suddenly turned hearty. He gestured toward a lower corner of the room and said, “Down there, some people call two hundred in gold a fortune, son. What do you plan to do with it all?”