As it turned out, they skipped the Saturday session—he’d made a promise to Corey, and he and Joanie took him to the movies, as promised. He was tied up all day Monday, as usual, and didn’t have a chance to see Tim and offer up an explanation, which he felt he owed him—especially after their talk the previous week. And while he wasn’t avoiding Tim, or not exactly, it wasn’t till Tuesday evening that he finally ran into him, and not on campus but on the Square. It was half-past five, he was on his way home, juggling his briefcase and an armful of books and trying to remember what Joanie had asked him to pick up at the store, when he spotted Tim, Dick and Hollingshead coming up the sidewalk toward him. They were all three wearing dark glasses, though it was overcast, and from all appearances having an animated discussion. Dick seemed especially wrought up, throwing out his hands and twisting his torso jerkily, first to make a point to Tim, then Hollingshead, then going back to Tim again. The minute Fitz saw them, he felt intimidated, felt guilty, and he almost ducked into the nearest doorway, but then he told himself he was being ridiculous.

In the next moment they were on him and he almost thought they were going to pass him by without even noticing, but Dick snapped his head around and said something to the other two and they all pulled up short. Tim, in overcoat and scarf, slid the glasses down the bridge of his nose and peered at him out of enormous black pupils. “Oh, Fitz,” he said finally to the accompaniment of the blatting exhaust of somebody’s Spitfire careening down the street, “is that you?” To Hollingshead he said, “Look, it’s Fitz,” and then, turning back to him, “what a surprise, I mean, fancy meeting you here. On Harvard Square. Imagine that.”

He was high, or drunk, or both. All three of them were. “I’m sorry about Saturday,” Fitz said, “but it was, you know, a family obligation really, and I—”

Tim waved him off. “The deep blue sea, Fitz, the deep blue sea.”

And then Alpert, all the blood gone to the visible portion of his face beneath the sunglasses, focused on him. Rangy, tall, his crew cut severer than Tim’s, he was two years younger than Fitz and already a professor. Which just made everything all that much harder. “You are aware of the meeting on the fifteenth, aren’t you? Day after tomorrow?”

Hollingshead turned to Tim and intoned, “Beware the ides of March, Caesar.”

The moment hung there, pregnant with the evening and the pigeons and a snatch of the hit of the week—Bop shoo-op, a bop bop shoo-op—drifting to them from the open window of a passing car, before Fitz could bring himself to ask, “What meeting?”