I returned to Chicago and opened a business on Van Buren Street. I trained my employees to run it for me, and then I was free to fill my life with more interesting activities. Somewhat to my own surprise, I became part of a set of curious people. The main threat in a place like Chicago is emptiness – human gaps and breaks, a sort of spiritual ozone that smells like bleach. In the old days, Chicago streetcars gave off such a smell. Ozone is made by a combination of oxygen and ultraviolet rays in the upper atmosphere.

I found ways to protect myself from this liminal threat (the threat of being sucked into outer space). Oddly enough, I began to be invited out as a man who knew a lot about the Orient. At least, hostesses believed I did – I made no claim. One didn’t have to say much.

I settled into an apartment on the edge of Lincoln Park. And pretty soon I had a significant piece of luck. I met old Sigmund Adletsky and Mrs Adletsky at a dinner party. Adletsky is a name instantly recognized everywhere, like Prince Charles or Donald Trump – or, in earlier times, the Shah of Iran or Basil Zaharoff. Yes, Adletsky, the old Chief himself, the founding colossus, the man under whom the incomparable luxury hotel complex on the Caribbean coast of Mexico was built – one of many pleasure domes on the subtropical beaches of many continents. Old Adletsky had by now turned his empire over to his sons and grandchildren. He would never have bothered with the likes of me if he had still been running the hotels, the airlines, the mines, the electronics laboratories.

The dinner party at which we met was given by Frances Jellicoe. A Jellicoe commanded the British Grand Fleet in the Battle of Jutland (1916). The family had an American branch (so the American Jellicoes said), which was very rich. Frances, who came into a fortune, had also inherited a collection of paintings that included a Bosch, a Botticelli, and several Goya portraits, as well as some Picassos of my favorite kind – multiple noses and eyes. I greatly admired (esteemed) Frances. Fritz Rourke, her husband and the father of her two children, had divorced her, but she continued to love him, and not in the abstract. He was there that night, drunk and noisy, and the most conspicuous thing about the man was the quality or grade of the love to be seen in his ex-wife as she stood up for him. A stout woman, she had never been pretty. That night in her Gold Coast dining room, her face was aflame, and the lower lip was drawn away from the teeth. Rourke soon was drunk; he quickly got out of hand, breaking glasses. She took her stand behind the uncontrollable former husband’s chair, making a silent statement of despair, militancy, loyalty. Well, to me she was a rich human asset. Not the millions in her trust account, but her character – a character of great price.