He bent over and raised a pant leg, exposing a marbleized calf, zinc white and varicose veined. He tugged on a sock. He wore, of all things, scarlet elastic garters.

“On a more personal level,” he said, “we’ll donate whatever it takes to his favorite charity, or perhaps he’d find solace in a retainer from the company, or a network of roads to unify his tribally sundered country, or a fleet of Ferraris.

“Sound him out, son,” he rattled on, “confect your own list of initiatives, indulgences, enticements, so long as one of them is irresistible.”

“Why the camouflage?” I asked. “I mean—is all this Byzantine maneuvering necessary? Why not tell him what you want, how he could benefit from it, draw up a contract…”

“Because,” he said, “business has its own realities. Financial acquisitions require safeguards and imperatives which lesser minds might construe as devious. And when trust is lacking…”

“You don’t trust Abdul?”

“No. And I’ve already told you he doesn’t trust me. Moreover, we at UGH have had considerable experience with third-world nations. We’ve invested money, we’ve worked our brains to the bone, and as soon as our investment shows signs of paying off, the sons of bitches expropriate it. If you think my approach is unethical, remember all ethics are situational.”

“Not any ethical system I’m aware of.”

He watched me with studied forbearance. “I gather you don’t approve,” he said.

He gathered right; my disapproval must have been written all over my face. With mockery in his voice he said, “Dear, dear. How mighty is our moral wrath.”

He shrugged and adjusted the lapels of his jacket. “Or is it because you find dealing in evacuative biodegradables,” he smiled impishly, “or, if you prefer, human shit—repellant?” He shook his head, disappointed in me. “I thought you’d be above that sort of daintiness. As for myself,” he went on, “humani nihil a me alienum puto.”

Alien to me was the discomforting awareness that my education was being expanded by a teacher whose twin disciplines were plunder and larceny. And he was asking me to become his coconspirator.

I said nothing, sitting there, blinking stupidly in the half-light, muddled by his martinis, staggered by the breadth of the man’s interests—BRIT in Assama, gong-bashing in Maryland—intrigued by his chameleonlike ability to switch commitments from one all-consuming cause to another, but most of all marveling at the power of coincidence which shapes all our lives, those odd little accidents only fate is shameless enough to concoct. If the snapping whip of chance and an errant father had not driven me to Yale and to Armbruster and to Chatterton and to Grady and to Valerie in that porn shop under the Brooklyn Bridge…