Eventually I give in. I flip back to the column on Maclean’s family—a blurred photograph of the Maclean children ducking through the school gates, one of his wife, Melinda (who happens to be American, it seems), gazing haughtily from the doorway of their house in the English suburbs. I learn that Mrs. Maclean, who delivered their third child only three weeks after her husband’s disappearance, gives short shrift to any insinuations that Maclean has defected to the Soviet Union. “I will not admit that my husband, the father of my children, is a traitor to his country,” she insists.

HERBERT WALKS IN AT half past eight. I rise to take his coat and hat and usher him into his office. Bring him his coffee and cigarettes and arrange myself in the chair before his desk for our usual morning chat.

Most people are not aware that Herbert Hudson suffered a stroke in the summer of 1945, in between the capitulation of Hitler and the capitulation of Tito. I’m telling you now so you’ll understand why his attention wanders from time to time, as we review the day ahead, and why he sometimes sticks the wrong word in the middle of a sentence or two. I figure as long as I understand his meaning, who cares about the delivery?

This morning Herbert’s having a little trouble lighting his cigarette—the right side of his body being a touch clumsier than the left, though you’d have to know him extremely well to notice—so I lean forward and help to steady his hand until the end of the cigarette flares comfortably orange. He nods his thanks and asks how Barbara’s getting along.

“The headshots are out of sight.” I rummage through the manila folder in my lap. “Bunny said she was an absolute professional, instincts and everything.”

Herbert removes the cigarette from his mouth and brings the photograph up close. He studies her for some time. Herbert’s got an eye, stroke or not—I mean his aesthetics never missed a beat. And I don’t mean dirty, either; Herbert always could separate his libido from his professional judgment. For example. You can take a girl who absolutely drips sex appeal, or a girl so beautiful she might have been sent on loan from the archangel choir, and stick this girl in front of a camera and get absolutely nothing. I would put my sister in that category, by the way; not that Iris is as beautiful as the angels, maybe, but she has looks—at least she did, before she dropped all those kids—and also this winsome, sugar-cookie appeal that makes you want to tuck her into your arms and (if you’re a man, I guess) sire ten thousand children with her. But in photographs she looks so ordinary she’s almost plain. There’s simply no angle and no light that translates her particular beauty into two flat dimensions.