She raised a perfect eyebrow. Banks wondered if she had had it microbladed since he had last seen her. “So you know my name,” she said.

“Nelia Melnic,” Banks said. “It’s a fine name. Why change it?”

“It was the name they gave me in the orphanage,” Zelda said with a shrug. “A Romanian name. I thought it was time for a new one. Do you think it gives you power over someone if you know their real name, like in magic?”

“No,” said Banks. “It just came up, that’s all.”

“I can’t imagine how. Anyway, I found out my real name, before the orphanage. I told you before that my parents were Russian, or ‘Russian-speaking,’ as they say in the old republics.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Why?”

“I’m just curious, that’s all.”

Zelda seemed a little embarrassed by his request. Her skin flushed, and she seemed to become suddenly shy. “I don’t know.”

“It’s not about power or anything,” said Banks. “I would just like to know.”

There was a long silence, and for a while Banks thought she wasn’t going to tell him, then she said softly, “Ekaterina Mikhailovna Polinskaya.” Then she put her hand over her mouth and gave a soft laugh. “Quite a mouthful, isn’t it?”

“It sounds like someone out of a Russian novel,” Banks said.

“So now you know everything. I am putty in your hands.”

It was Banks’s turn to laugh. “So what do I call you now?”

“I remember that my father used to call me Katja. But I think we would be best to stick with Zelda, don’t you?”

“I like Katja, but Zelda’s OK with me, if you prefer it. After F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife?”

“Tender Is the Night is one of my favorite books,” Zelda said, “but no. It’s The Legend of Zelda. A Nintendo game I used to play in Paris when I was bored, between clients. Not that that happened often enough.”

“I don’t know much about video games.”

“You haven’t missed anything.”

“And I must confess that I haven’t read Tender Is the Night, either. There are so many books I should read. Including those big Russian novels.”

Zelda laughed. “You’d never get past the names.” She leaned forward a little and pushed a long strand of free hair behind her ear. “It is good to be here, Alan. I think I needed cheering up.”

“Glad to be of assistance.” Banks paused. “I understand it’s been a difficult week for you? You haven’t told me everything.”

Zelda seemed immediately wary again. “Oh? What do you mean, ‘everything’?”

“Well, when you told me about London earlier, you didn’t say you’d gone there from Croatia, or that when you arrived, the first thing you heard was that your boss had died in a house fire.”

“Oh.” She seemed relieved. “Yes. It’s true.”