Janson’s old academic mentor was half-haloed in the cloud-filtered sunlight. His face was etched with age, his white hair thinner than Janson had remembered; yet he was still lean and rangy, and his pale blue eyes retained the brightness of someone who was in on a joke—some nameless cosmic joke—and might let you in on it, too. Now in his late sixties, Fielding was not a large man, but his intensity gave him the presence of someone who was.

“Come along, dear boy,” Fielding said. He led Janson down a short hallway, past the doughty, middle-aged woman who worked as his secretary, and into his spacious office, where a large picture window gave a view of the Great Courtyard. Plain white shelves on the adjacent walls were filled with books and journals and offprints of his articles, the titles stultifying: “Is the Global Financial System Imperiled?: A Macroeconomic View,” “Central Banks’ Foreign Currency Liquidity Position—The Case for Transparency,” “A New Approach Toward Measurement of Aggregate Market Risk,” “Structural Aspects of Market Liquidity and Their Consequences for Financial Stability.” A sun-yellowed copy of the Far Eastern Economic Review was visible on a corner table; beneath a photograph of Peter Novak was the headline: TURNING DOLLARS INTO CHANGE.

“Forgive all the bumf,” the don said, removing a stack of papers from one of the black Windsor chairs by his desk. “You know, in a way I’m glad you didn’t let me know you were coming, because then I might have tried to put on the dog, as you Americans say, and we’d both have been disappointed. Everyone says I should fire the cook, but the poor dear has been here practically since the Restoration and I haven’t got the heart, or perhaps the stomach. Her entremets are agreed to be especially toxic. She’s an éminence grise, I try to say—éminence greasy, my colleagues riposte. The amenities, such as they are, have a curious combination of opulence and austerity, not to say shabbiness, that takes some getting used to. You’ll remember it from your stay in these halls, I daresay, but the way you remember playing tag when you were a child, one of those things that were so appealing at the time but whose point now seems utterly elusive.” He patted Janson on the arm. “And now, dear boy, you’re It.”