“I didn’t,” I said. I followed the bureau chief’s map to the big beige file cabinet where they kept the dead files. The lock on the cabinet had a tiny six on it, and I flipped through the ring of keys until I found the six. I asked, “Does that make him a prince?”

Two low voices conferred. Then came a voice an octave lower than Sawyer’s. “Sort of,” Big Man said. “If fourteen people die, I will be king.”

I found Sawyer’s file, a fat brown accordion, under S. “How likely is that?” I asked.

There was another pause. “Not very,” Big Man’s voice said.

I could see the room well now, by the exit signs and the streetlights. “I have the file,” I called. “What should I do?”

“We’re in the third cubicle from the door,” Sawyer said. “Near the windows. With the horse calendar.”

Big Man sat cross-legged on the floor, hands tied behind his back with orange baling twine, and Sawyer sat in one of those kneeling chairs that support the lower back, by a computer screen with changing photographs of the sea. He rested a hunting rifle on his knee, and seemed to have hung up the phone on the police. The two men filled the entire space. Big Man had close-cropped hair and a narrow mustache with a goatee.

“We’ve been talking football,” Sawyer said.

Big Man said, “He played both offense and defense in college.” He seemed genuinely impressed.

“It was a junior college,” Sawyer explained. He looked at me in my sweatshirt, bulked by the Kevlar vest underneath. “Sorry to get you out of bed,” he said. “Sit down.”

I sat in the remaining floor space next to Big Man, who nodded. He was carrying himself beautifully, no dishonor to his family or his future subjects.

“Read me the file,” Sawyer said. “Not the stuff I said, just the stuff they said about me. I want to hear all the letters.”

“That’ll take all night,” I said.

“So start.”

I began to read in the dim light. One of the computer’s ocean scenes was darker than the others, and each time the dark one came around the reading was harder. I read the letters from the insurance adjuster to the bureau chief, the memos from the chief’s secretary to her boss, the letters from Sawyer’s employer’s attorney. I read letters by me, dictated too quickly, sounding too lawyerly, typed up by my secretary and flung into the afternoon mail. What wasn’t embarrassing was sad, and what wasn’t sad was stultifying, but Sawyer sat riveted. I looked up from time to time to see if I could stop. He gestured me on with the rifle in his hand. I read through the neurologist’s account of what Sawyer could do, and through the settlement. I read the figure Sawyer was to receive for the loss of his work.