The morning after my arrival I was the first at that septic breakfast board and the last to leave, for it was there in the company of my colleagues that I sought (beneath a mien of indifference) information regarding Valerie’s whereabouts.

Shortly after the grandfather clock in the downstairs hall groaned, wheezed, and, with extraordinary mechanical effort, struck eight, Chatterton’s brave band of brothers struggled through the French doors of the dining room. They were a loutish crew, with dull eyes, sloped shoulders, and heads hanging like heretics about to be burned at the stake.

All of them were old and most of them were irascible. No one took the customary initiative of introducing himself. They might have been members of some seedy club in which they took no pride; each, however, seemed to view his colleagues as so lacking in respectability or accomplishment as to merit expulsion.

No salutations passed among them as they jockeyed, with the glazed, greedy self-absorption of children, for position around the stove, then lunged across the uneven floor to gain a coveted spot by the clanking radiator.

Once they had eaten and thawed out, they grew expansive, garrulous. I listened closely, eager for some clue as to their calling.

“…the angle fish. Fastest gun in the sea. Strikes in four one-thousandths of a second.”

It was (I learned later) Gorelik speaking. He was short, with pale, hooded eyes which gave him a look of sham inscrutability. A Russian rubashka, the kind Tolstoy wore, but dirtier, encased his slab-chested torso and the hump on his back; altogether he was built like a doorknob. But what had angle fish to do with his assault on the fipple flute?

The man he addressed smiled knowingly. “The sargassum fish will eat its own kind,” Norman Baker said. “That, too, takes a sort of gruesome energy.”

Gorelik drew on a brown cigarette. “And what about the saber-toothed blenny?” he asked, exhaling. He held the butt between the tips of finger and thumb, palm upraised as if to catch raindrops from a leaky roof.

Norman Baker, the authority on sargassa, smiled again, a corpse-smile this time. “And the hummingbird,” he said, “beating its wings seventy times a second?”

So their discourse leaped and glanced from fish to birds and then to deceptively fragile butterflies, particularly the monarchs, whose energetic excesses were exemplified by their migrations between Canada and Mexico, laying their eggs under milkweed along the way.