I agreed, with a significant shrug, and he took this thought no further.

‘But about the Heisingers … I was away during the trial,’ said Adletsky.

‘Five or six years ago, she put out a contract on her husband, the hit man was somebody she knew from way back – a man she used to go with long before,’ I explained to him.

‘Did he hurt him at all?’

‘I think not. Bodo knocked the gun out of his hand. The guy ran. There were prints on the pistol. The police identified this person, and he incriminated Madge Heisinger.’

‘So she was convicted?’

‘Both were, and did three years …’

‘They were paroled?’

‘Yes. Heisinger withdrew his complaint. He wanted Madge back …’

‘He’s got to be one of those men who dote on problem women,’ said Adletsky.

‘He married her a second time. One of the conditions she made was that the hit man go free too. She couldn’t be happy while he was doing time. She promised not to resume relations with him.’

‘So they married a second time and started all over, as good as new.’

‘To Heisinger it must seem daring – like an innovation,’ I said. ‘Like the distinguished twist in a relationship. A man free from general opinions.’

‘About what?’

‘Oh, about gullibility, age, or potency. He opens his arms again to the woman who put out a contract on him. He presents himself publicly to declare that he’s not afraid to marry her again, and he sets aside the old morality and the old expectations and old rules.’

Amy thought that Bodo somewhat resembled Jay, her ex, her late husband. Both felt that nihilism was sexy and seemed to believe that there was no real eroticism that didn’t defy the taboos. Neither Jay nor old Heisinger was sharply intelligent. Very sexy men frequently were stupid, and shared stupidity is an important force when it is presented in the language of independence or emancipation. The appeal of such men is aimed straight at those strata in women’s feelings that lie beneath cleverness. The strength of a Heisinger was his blunt masculinity. He was straightforward and stout, elderly but in the running still – not afraid of being tested. He showed, or tried to show, that he was not worried about the jailbird boyfriend. The boyfriend had been punished, Madge had been punished. Everybody had been tortured. Amy, trying to get into Bodo’s mind, felt that he was thinking of the time remaining, a decade or so: ‘the final years,’ as biographers refer to them – a period of ‘mature’ acceptance, reconciliation, openhandedness, general amnesty. She suspected that Heisinger was too limited a man to understand how wrong he might be. Jay, too, had worked out glamorous projects that nobody else was able to accept – scenarios too histrionic to be translated into real terms.

As well as I could, I spelled this out to Adletsky. He had no difficulty with it. It was exactly this that he wanted to hear from Trellman, his brain truster. He was an intent critical listener.