From the stretch limo I telephoned the cemetery office. Yes, Mrs Wustrin had arrived a while back, bringing all the necessary legal papers. She was outside now. Did I need to speak to her?

‘No,’ I said. ‘My name is Harry Trellman. Just tell her I’m on my way. I’m on a cellular phone.’ As if it were a novelty. There are tens of millions of cellular phones. I didn’t own one, though. I am less communicative than most. It was uncharacteristic of me to boast that I was using an advanced instrument.

Of course, I knew the way to the cemetery – I was all too familiar with it. You went due west on the Congress Street Expressway and got off at Harlem Avenue, Chicago’s city limit. When I was a boy, there were vacant lots out here. Now there are small industries, taverns, pizza joints, commercial greenhouses, and, of course, the bungalow belt-tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of brick bungalows.

I had never made a trip all by myself in this ocean-liner limo. So much soundproofed luxury and kid-leather upholstery, the bar with its cut glass, its brandy decanters.

Composure is one of my special gifts. Not to look impressed. An impervious pre-Columbian look. Maybe it’s in the air of this continent. The Red Indians were famous for it, and now the sons and daughters of immigrants can also assume a look of solitary dignity. And there is something about these great limos that makes you think of concert pianos and, in this case, more appropriately, of funerals. In this rolling instrument I passed through the wrought-iron cemetery gates.

Dame Siggy had been right to predict wet ground. There’s lots of sandy soil in Chicago. The melting ice of the last glaciation left a huge lake here, and much of the city stands on a series of old beaches. Farther out are the prairies – rolling land such as you must find in central Siberia. So the graves go into the ancient lake bottom, twenty or thirty thousand years old. Big trees don’t thrive in this sandy soil. Everything might have been different for us if such trees had grown in the Midwest as they do in the East – smooth-skinned beeches that go back to the eighteenth century. In dense urban cemeteries, however, there isn’t much room for big trees. Here you see cottonwoods or catalpas. Gravediggers have to cut through roots. In the walls of an open grave you always see the white butts of severed roots.

The chauffeur was piloted by a guide waiting for him inside the gate. For the rich, such arrangements are laid on beforehand. This was not a large cemetery. In it, the relatively small Jewish neighborhoods of Chicago were represented, so that even I, whose contact with the Jewish community was minimal, could recognize many of the names.

Amy had followed Mrs Adletsky’s advice and put on boots. I saw her as soon as I lowered the sepia-tinted window. Her back was to the road. The diggers were already at work, and there was a little winch coming up – a rig something like a backhoe, I thought, with the driver on a high seat. A van was waiting to carry Jay’s coffin to its permanent grave. He would be reburied between his parents.