One thing I will say on my own behalf: I wasn’t jealous of Jay Wustrin gripping Amy before the wall mirror, or of the New York man whose blow-by-blow sex conversations with her were on the tapes played for the judge in chambers. Causing pain, even committing murder, was justified by the Marquis de Sade as long as it produced intense sexual pleasure. Amy, on tape, wasn’t even close – a mere bleep in the worldwide sexual uproar.

I couldn’t have expected Amy to mark time while I was inching toward her. It was a lengthy intelligence job for me, cracking one cipher after another. Held up here for a week, there for a decade, I always knew where she was located and what she was up to, more or less.

Of course, she was no longer the beauty she had been. Her face had begun some years earlier to lose its fullness. The sense of her chin today could be completed only if you traced it back to its earlier form. I had no one but myself to blame for what I had missed. Besides, I hadn’t absolutely missed it.

It now became clear, like a fuzzy color slide brought suddenly into focus, that I had been in daily contact with Amy, year in, year out, getting support from her in imaginary consultations even about subterranean enterprises or business combinations. Over many years I saw the feelings I had for her as sheer kitsch. And kitsch didn’t sort well with the advanced forms of personal development I was after.

Sometimes it seemed to me that Amy had a better than fair understanding of this. With a little luck, you discover that the people in your life, permanently placed, are able to follow your inmost, deeply concealed motives. Now, my dead friend Jay Wustrin had been open, theatrical. I was secretive, uncharitable, prepared to do my neighbor in the eye. Jay thought he was open; I thought I was closed, and keeping my own counsel.

But Amy was well aware that I turned to her continually and all my efforts to detach myself from her had failed completely. She understood what first love can do. It strikes you at seventeen and, like infantile paralysis, though it works through the heart, not the spinal cord, it, too, can be crippling.

Well, then, was old Adletsky taken in when he recruited me for his brain trust? In his place, would I have recruited him? He had turned from money (the founder of an empire) to personal observation, and he hadn’t done badly with Frances Jellicoe and her rowdy drunken husband.

He always spoke of Frances with respect and said that on that occasion I had brought out the observer in him.

‘It’s not so much a skill, is it, Mr Trellman. It’s a way of life.’

‘If you have it, it’s because you’ve always had it,’ I said.

The personal observations Adletsky had made in the course of building his empire were of a different order, inevitably. In an acquisition or a merger, you were partly guided by your banking or cartel specialists, but nevertheless you were sure to come away with your private impressions, your own take, in the cinematic sense, of the participants or principals. I had only a rough idea of what he might have seen in seven or eight decades of such registering and observing. But the emphasis must often have changed. Necessarily, you ran out of stages on life’s way – after childhood, manhood, late maturity. For a man of Adletsky’s age, then, what could terms like ‘later’ or ‘earlier’ mean? With this in mind, I once told him that Churchill in his final years was maddened by boredom and prayed for death.