A minute later, Desiree passed me in Jay’s car, followed by a white Mercedes, which was followed by Angie. I watched all three cars wind up to Staniford Street and go right, heading toward Cambridge Street and an infinite number of possible destinations beyond.

By the way the man ahead of me tucked his briefcase under his arm and dug his hands into his pockets at the next corner, I could tell we were in for a walk. I let fifty yards get between us and followed him up Merrimac Street. Merrimac emptied onto Congress Street at Haymarket Square and another blast of wind found us as we crossed New Sudbury and continued in the direction of the financial district, where more architectural styles mixed together than in just about any city in which I’d ever been. Shimmering glass and slabs of granite towered over sudden four-story bursts of Ruskinian Gothic and Florentine pseudopalaces; modernism met German Renaissance met postmodernism met pop met Ionic columns and French cornices and Corinthian pilasters and good old New England granite and limestone. I’ve spent entire days in the financial district, doing nothing but looking at buildings and feeling, on more optimistic days, that it could stand as metaphor for how to live in the world—all these different perspectives piling in on each other and still managing to make it work.

Though, if I had my druthers, I’d still nuke City Hall.

Just before we would have entered the heart of the financial district, the man turned left, cutting across the nexus of State, Congress, and Court streets, stepping on the stones that commemorate the site of the Boston Massacre, and walked another twenty yards and turned into the Exchange Place Building.

I broke into a trot because Exchange Place is huge with at least sixteen elevator banks. When I walked onto the marble floors under ceilings that stretched four stories above me, I didn’t see him. I took a right into the express elevator corridor and saw two doors sliding to a close.

“Hold, please!” I jogged to the doors and just managed to get my good shoulder in between them. They receded but not before giving my shoulder a hard squeeze. Tough week for shoulders.

The man leaned against the wall, watching me as I came in, an annoyed look on his face, as if I’d interrupted his private time.

“Thanks for holding the door,” I said.

He stared straight ahead. “There are plenty of other elevators at this time of morning.”

“Ah,” I said, “a Christian.”

As the doors closed, I noticed he’d pressed floor 38, and I nodded at the button, and leaned back.

He looked at my bruised and pocked face, the sling around my arm, the clothes I’d wrinkled almost beyond recognition by sitting in a car for eleven hours.

“You have business on thirty-eight?” he said.

“I do.”

I closed my eyes, leaned against the wall.