The boys sat together on the love seat, Peter in a tailored Armani suit, Christian in a blue blazer. Christian didn’t come from money, had made it to private school on his wits. Stockton was proud of his son for looking past the other boy’s secondhand wardrobe and for quietly accepting Christian’s broke, shy, strictly religious foster parents. Of course, Christian was probably the only reason Peter had himself graduated from private school—Stockton was sure Christian let him copy on exams, and he’d probably written more than a few of Peter’s papers. That pleased Stockton as well. You looked out for your friends, and they looked out for you. That was the very reason Stockton had insisted on introducing Fallows to Mr. Charn. Fallows had been looking out for Stockton’s boy in Africa, three months ago; Stockton took a certain mellow satisfaction in knowing he could pay the man back with interest. To be honest, a trip through the little door was probably worth any number of overweight, intellectually lazy sons.

A birdcage sat on the coffee table, covered with a sheet of red linen. Or maybe it was white linen and only looked red in the horror-house light, Stockton wasn’t sure. If Stockton were running the presentation, he would’ve started with the birdcage, but he wasn’t, and Charn wouldn’t.

“Thanks for agreeing to meet me, Mr. Charn,” Fallows said. “I’m very interested to hear about the little door. Stockton tells me there’s nothing like it anywhere in the world.”

Charn said, “A-yuh. He’s right enough. Thank you for comin’ all t’way to Boston. I don’t much care to leave Maine. I don’t like to leave the door for long, and ’tisn’t necessary for me to travel widely to drum up business. Word passes around. The truly curious come to me. I only offer the two hunts a year, and next is on the twentieth of March. Small groups only. Price nonnegotiable.”

“I heard about the price. That’s most of the reason I came—the sheer entertainment value of hearing what kind of hunt a person could get for a quarter of a million dollars. I can’t imagine. I spent forty thousand to kill an elephant and felt I overpaid.”

Mr. Charn raised an eyebrow and cast a questioning look at Stockton. “If it’s beyond your means, sir, then—”

“He’s got the money,” Stockton said. “He just needs to see what he’d get for it.” He spoke with a certain smooth, confident humor. He had not forgotten how he himself felt when he was in Fallows’s boots, recalled his own disgust at the price tag and his icy unwillingness to be conned. The pitch had turned him around, and it would turn Fallows around, too.