Where had his internal inhibition been? Hunter wondered, taking another mouthful of coffee from a broad thin cup and looking out on the dreary winter scene. Lucy was still in bed. There was no doubt that the strange flood of sadness he was feeling came not only from being in his rarely used London flat and experiencing it as a kind of umpire’s chair between his old home and his old school, between his past self and his present self, but also from living with Lucy’s illness, which had made him temper his megalomania and look seriously into the idea of moderation for the first time since his raging adolescence. At first, it had just seemed too tactless to wolf down cocaine in the presence of a woman who was abstaining from carbohydrates. Lucy was already lying upside down on a steep roof of undeserved misfortune and, far from wanting to hand her a joint, he wanted to lift her back to safety. He still wasn’t sure where his old appetite for high risk had come from. For a long time, he had imagined that his misguided audacity on that rooftop was an early sign, not yet fixed on its proper target, of the daring investment policies that had made him a billionaire with the Midas fund. When clients told him that the name of his fund was ‘kind of weird’, or even ‘inappropriate’, because King Midas had not been a happy bunny when he watched his food and his daughter turn to metal, Hunter would restrain himself from pointing out that he had absorbed all the Greek myths by the age of eight, and simply replied that he was the one taking ‘the Midas hit’ for them and that it was only their investments that would turn to gold. And in a sense, he had taken the Midas hit. Love of power and money had acted as a proxy for love itself, until Lucy had suggested a more direct path.

Although his phone was on silent, Hunter saw the screen light up and the word ‘Jade’ appear.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hey, Hunter!’ said Jade, as surprised and delighted as ever to speak to him. ‘I’m sorry to call you so early, but Cardinal Lagerfeld’s office is pushing for him to come to the party tonight. I wrote to you about it last week, but you didn’t get back to me.’

‘Did his parents call him Cardinal, like Ellington’s parents called him Duke, or did he call himself Cardinal, like Prince called himself Prince?’ asked Hunter.

‘No,’ said Jade, laughing a little more than necessary, ‘he’s a real Cardinal. He was involved with the Capo Santo deal.’

‘I thought that was the little Abbot who came to Soleil.’

‘Father Guido. It was, but the Cardinal was the guy with the legal team.’

‘They were a pain in the ass,’ said Hunter. ‘They almost wrecked the deal. Is Guido coming?’