He thought back through the story Lindsay had recounted. He thought of her, and of Gini, then Cassandra, who was dead, and Mina, who was still missing, and finally of a young man with dark hair, a young man in his twenties, a young man of undisclosed nationality, Mitchell’s candy man, Star.

At three he fell into a light sleep; he dreamed of a shadowy Esther, and a shadowy New Orleans. Although he retained a clear sense of direction, he was dazed. They walked together along Decatur, up Dumaine, along Bourbon to Canal. Esther was trying to tell him something, but he could not hear the words.

He awoke with a start and lay there, fighting the restlessness such dreams always caused. Hours inched by; he felt the peculiar turmoil of exhaustion and sleeplessness; he felt under siege from the demands of the present and the past.

At five, abandoning the possibility of sleep, he rose, went downstairs to his cold kitchen, and made coffee. Sitting there at the table, he finally submitted, and let the past back into his mind. It was not such a very long history: he had met Esther, a DEA operative, within a month of his taking that assignment in Washington, D.C. Until then, he had spent most of his free time on the fringes of Georgetown, in the company of fellow English journalists. It was a close-knit, gossipy, expatriate community, inward-looking, dependent on American contacts for work yet treating Americans, Rowland found, with a curious, faintly derisive patronage; this patronage, he noted—and it angered him—modulated in private, and after drinks, into scorn. The clannishness, the clubbiness, was already beginning to pall, and Rowland was already finding that he was gravitating more and more to the company of American journalists, when a friend at the Post introduced him to Esther.

On the occasion he first met her, in a fashionable downtown restaurant, she drew his eye for several reasons: she was unusually tall; she was beautiful; she was formally and exquisitely dressed—and she was the only black woman in the room. Rowland, the outsider, the displaced person, the man who never felt English, or Irish, who had never had the sensation he belonged, shook her hand. She gave him a long, cool, quantifying look: Rowland felt an immediate, and astonishing sense of recognition, the signaling of like to like; it was followed by a rare exhilaration, then some ruthlessness on his part. The friend who had introduced them was ditched, unceremoniously, within the hour. Moving on with her somewhere, anywhere, the place was immaterial, they ended up at three in the morning at a street near his house. Esther was a Smith graduate; she had a law degree from Harvard; her great-great-grandmother had been a slave. These facts mattered very much, and not at all.

“Come home with me,” Rowland said.

She gave him one long, still, grave, considering look.

“I just might do that,” she replied.

A week later they rented an apartment together near Dupont Circle. A month after that, Rowland proposed; Esther, more cautious than he, refused.