That was a possibility too. Well, perhaps I would give it a try. So I simply said to Adletsky, ‘I have a connection here.’

‘I see. I see. That’s a direct answer. You couldn’t get a more direct. This rules out Rangoon, Guatemala City, Paris, New York, and lots of other places. Two on this list, besides, are military dictatorships. And you wouldn’t feel easy in a military dictatorship.’

‘I’m not comfortable in the tropics,’ I heard myself saying.

I might have added that I was fond of winter, of snow on the ground and the old-fashioned raccoon coats high-school girls used to wear – coats with big braided leather buttons – and that I valued highly the smell of animal musk released from the fur by the warmth of Amy’s body when she unfastened those buttons. The heavy round raccoon hat slipped even farther back from her forehead when she pulled me close. Yes, she reached out her arms and pulled me close.

And on the day of the blizzard that passed over Chicago and fell on the eastern edge of Lake Michigan, Adletsky telephoned me in my Van Buren Street hideaway. He said, ‘Our friend Mrs Wustrin is going to have a bad day of it at the cemetery. No woman should have to do such a chore alone. Maybe we should lend a hand.’

I made some dry answer or other. There was no reason why I should give myself away to him. Adletsky had guessed something about my feelings. Maybe he had, after all, learned something from his former brain twister. Confidences, however, would have been out of character. You don’t discuss the outlines of your emotional life with one of the richest men in the world – not even if he wants to do you some good. Maybe he saw that my mystery was, at bottom, nothing but misery.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ve got in mind,’ said Adletsky. ‘Dame Siggy and I will lie down for our siesta soon. I’m sending the limo for you – if you’re up to this – with a second driver. Driver number two brings Amy’s car back to the garage. Driver number one goes anywhere you say. Are you available today?’

Civil of the old guy to ask. I was very surprised by this. It was as though the chairman of the Federal Reserve were phoning with a question or request. Would I attend the exhumation and reburial of my old friend Wustrin? Would I support Mrs Wustrin? She was not strictly speaking his widow. This was something like an institutional intervention in the private sphere.

My answer was minimal. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

‘To add to her trouble budget,’ said Adletsky, sounding more foreign when he was racy or ingenious (what was a ‘trouble budget’?), ‘Mrs Bodo Heisinger poured scalding tea in her lap this morning. She’ll surely tell you about it herself.’ She had gone home to put on dry clothing. She had even applied the aloe vera. It helped. ‘The one and only useful and true thing I ever heard from Heisinger, that old airhead,’ Amy said.