Adletsky hadn’t been surprised. ‘In his time, he did everything. Just think what it must have meant for him when there was nothing to do and he had no power left. One day it’s Hitler, Roosevelt, The Hinge of Fate, then there’s nothing at all. Just a lot of worn-out upholstery.’

As he spoke, his narrow, beaked face and his thin old venous temples invited me to make what I liked of his words.

He said to me on one of my visits, ‘I never worry about your writing down or reporting our conversations. You’re too reserved and proud of your reserve even to consider it. That is built into you, Harry.’

You never dropped in on Mr Adletsky. You met him only by appointment. But his reason for inviting you was often obscure. He wondered, he recently said, whether I would have a look at Bodo Heisinger’s Chinese sideboards and cabinets.

For that, you’d want somebody from Gump’s in San Francisco.’

‘Well, if the pieces are phonies, I’m sure you could spot them. Couldn’t you?’

‘Maybe I could.’

He filled my brandy glass with his own billionaire’s hand. It was like being waited on by Napoleon Bonaparte – Napoleon the prisoner at Saint Helena. There wasn’t much for the prisoner to do in exile. Now old age was Adletsky’s exile. To fill up his time, the banished Napoleon read hundreds of memoirs, played chess badly, was a poor horseman. He had never liked to ride. There was an abstract grandeur about him, one of his companions in exile said. About Adletsky there was nothing abstract. Now and then something like dreaminess descended on him, but nothing like grandeur. When he asked me to be one of his brain trusters, he had been kidding, of course. For one thing, he would never have claimed the slightest resemblance to Franklin D. Roosevelt. As for Napoleon, Napoleon wouldn’t have figured in his thoughts.

On this occasion I felt that there was something heavy or clumsy in my posture. Sitting on a brocaded love seat, I felt lumpish, physically ill-assorted. These interviews often made me uneasy about my supposed powers.

‘I think you would be able to spot Bodo’s fakes. Though probably Madge bought them,’ Adletsky continued. Then he veered off into a different subject. ‘I wonder about you. You set yourself up in Burma and then in Guatemala. You’ve got it made. Then why do you come back to this city? It’s a great base for entrepreneurs. But you’re not an entrepreneur. So what’s here for you? The opera? The Art Institute? Your family? You could be living in New York. Or in Paris.’

‘Paris is just New York in French.’

For a man with so much money, Adletsky had very few gestures. He now turned his hand palm upward, perhaps to say that it never had occurred to him to give ratings to the cities of the world. But in opening his old hand, he might have been inviting me to speak. He was saying, Why not come clean?