‘Freeloader. Part of the freight many a company carries.’

‘They got rid of him when the Eskimo girl said she was having his baby,’ I said. ‘The purpose of the dinner party was to rehabilitate Rourke socially.’

‘For the sake of his children?’

‘Up to a point,’ I said. ‘Also to do her will. To have her way.’

‘She’s not long for this world,’ said Adletsky. ‘And she married for love.’

‘There’s the powerful female system we call Frances, and its basic investment is in this lout.’

‘Nothing else can explain what happened the other night. Would you kindly lay the event out as you saw it.’

‘All right,’ I said, more willing than I usually am to speak my mind. As a rule, I am reluctant to put myself on record. I’ve never operated that way – frankly, directly. I felt, however, that old Adletsky had opened a door for me, for reasons I couldn’t readily understand, and that it would be unwise to refuse to come in. Not injurious but, in some way, unsociable. ‘She invited leaders of the business establishment. I was sitting next to old Ike Cressy of the Continental Bank. You were there for the same general purpose.’

‘We’d never touch the likes of that husband of hers.’

‘That’s for you only to say, but you were there to increase the gravity of the occasion.’

‘And you?’

‘I was representing the arts. She owns world-famous paintings. There was one guy from Sears, Roebuck. Also one federal judge and What’s-his-name from the commodities exchange. And the wives, of course.’

And Rourke, drinking and acting up. He was rough and angry – aggressive. He went through a couple of bottles of wine and made a speech denouncing wetbacks and Asian immigrants. He said there were too many unacceptable people already in the country. Then, with a sweep of the arms, he overturned the wineglasses on his side of the table, cracking some of them. I had to remember that Frances’s little white Scottie was only half housebroken. On an earlier visit, I had seen him raise his leg to the skirts of armchairs and sofas.

‘About Cressy: he started a conversation about Shakespeare at his end of the table. He said the secondary schools had gone to hell, and one reason was that poetry was no longer memorized by the kids. He gave an example of the New York businessman who was kidnapped. Two of this man’s employees dug a hole – well, a grave. They snatched and held him in it under a piece of sheet iron. The guy of course thought this was it – he’d never again see the light of day.’

‘A real piece of major viciousness,’ said Adletsky. ‘Do you think the people committing such a crime have any idea what it was – a living grave?’

‘They may not have the capacity. But what Cressy said was that the poetry the elderly businessman had learned at school kept him alive.’

Bankers do like to quote from Hamlet: