As they land at O’Hare, there are still fast-flying flurries of snow over Lake Michigan. The waters of the lake have an icy sheen, a blue-grey that suggests unplumbed glacial depths.

A limousine is waiting and they are taken straight to the hotel through this city of mass – huge blocks of stone, sturdy bridges and great slabs of buildings. Cy’s office has scheduled an hour for freshening up before the meeting. Wrapped in a towel, Julian looks down on North Lakeshore Drive. Chicago thinks of itself as a tough, no-nonsense place and maybe this is another reason Cy has fixed the meeting here in a town where once hundreds of millions of cattle were slaughtered and the stockyards ran for miles. Strange how industries change: not far away in Detroit, Ford’s defunct River Rouge plant was twelve miles long. Tubal’s had helped finance Henry Ford himself. Now River Rouge is largely derelict.

Standing semi-naked, snow driven past his windows horizontally by the high-altitude winds over the Midwestern vastness, he sees an object lesson of how economics works – the cattle and corn hinterland, the huge barges on the lake, the new condos, the ceaseless flow of traffic, the low-rise former immigrant districts, the projects that housed the black arrivals from the Deep South, the solid buildings of downtown, the architectural bravado of the sixties and seventies, the overwhelming sense that, although the buildings are substantial, the beliefs on which they were built are more treacherous than ever. He sees too that London is a little place, a quaint place and a backwater, no match for the elemental vastness of America. And Tubal and Co., Bankers at the sign of the Leathern Bottle since 1671, is no different from one of those old-world statues that William Randolph Hearst crated up and sent to California: trophies, nothing more than tributes to a self-invented man. Tubal and Co., the repository of all that make-believe Englishness, is as good as an honorary knighthood for Cy Mannheim from Coney Island.

Cy’s penthouse is another ten storeys up. There is nothing above.

‘Hi, boys. Welcome to Chicago. What a view. To me it always looks like they never quite finished the place off. Sit down, there’s everything you could want in the kitchen, and I figured it would be better if we were alone. Feeling strong?’

Julian thinks that Cy understands him far too well: he likes him, but knows his weakness.

Cy has no files or papers in front of him, just a small hotel pad and a pencil. A waiter pours the coffee and offers pastries or fruit, but Julian and Nigel are in another time zone altogether. They drink coffee, not the hotel stuff in flasks that Cy favours, but proper espresso made by the waiter in the kitchen.

‘OK, let’s cut to the chase.’

‘Let’s.’