Nobody much cares about your deepest secrets. They can matter in politics. John Kennedy’s part in the murder of Diem is worth knowing. His having women rushed into the Oval Office and out again makes him no different from other chief executive officers, situated in Caracas or Macao. I stress this because with me it has been a lifelong principle not to disclose anything to those ‘close’ to me. Moreover, at any deeper level, what is known is just as inexact and fuzzy as the new information you will presently add to the old.

When questioned, I clammed up. Nobody knew what I did in Indochina or Burma. Whether there were women in my life. Or children. Or military dictators. Or Mafia dealings. Or covert intelligence assignments. Or Swiss bank accounts. It may be that I did drown my doings, my nature, in my face. And I never made much of an effort to communicate with Amy. Warmth? Yes. Affection? That too. But after the three of us left the shower stall at the Palmer House and Jay suddenly remembered his court appointment and ran off and I kissed Amy under the breast and inside the thigh, not a word was said about my feelings. Amy’s only mention of the threesome in the shower was that Jay had touched me more than he had her.

I said that didn’t signify much.

‘I was there because of you,’ I said to her.

‘If you cared for me, you could have sent a clearer signal,’ she said. With her eyes, she led my glance downward to what she had become. She then added, ‘Nobody seemed able to get through to you. Why were you always so secretive?’

‘Well, I was a dishonest kid, and I lied to everybody. I held out on my friends. I cheated, I stole, and I welshed.’

‘Maybe that was why you had such a non-boyish distinguished look from the first.’

‘Did I look so special? I had no problem with being dishonest. If I was going to survive, it seemed to me, I had to con everybody.’

‘Was it because you were a little crook that I fell in love with you?’ said Amy. ‘But then, at the Palmer House, when you had the opportunity, you didn’t take it.’

I was ready with my answer, having thought and rethought the scene hundreds if not thousands of times. ‘Just because you were available to me. As you had been available to Jay …’

She said, ‘It would have been the generic product, as druggists say, not the name brand. Not you and me, but any male with any female. Looking back, I might have felt like a sex tramp.’

‘Something like …’

‘But still it would have been a specific. It would have tied us together.’

‘I already was tied to you,’ I said.

This was an uncomfortable exchange, frank on both sides and therefore necessary. From my side, however, it was extremely painful. The reason for this was that I had fallen in love with her when I was an adolescent schoolboy. This tremendous feeling came, as they say, ‘we know not whence.’ Everything – but everything! – was as before. There were still kitchens with onions and potato peels in the sink, and streetcars grinding on the rails. So this love, straight and simple, an involuntary music, was an embarrassment to a little crook like me. To the devious secrets (which later made me a ‘mystery man’), this love, direct, from nature, came over me. I couldn’t help being ashamed of the ordinary middle-class character of this connection with Amy. She was a middle-class girl. I was some sort of revolutionist. ‘You little gonif,’ my impatient mother used to call me. This didn’t signify that I was literally a crook; it meant that I had a masked character. I wasn’t about to join the middle class for Amy’s sake and be a petty bourgeois. I didn’t want to play the hypocrite. It was enough at the time to thicken my mask.