“Mi casa es su casa, amigo,” Cooper replied. He raised the small marijuana cigarette to his lips; Janson was never sure whether it still really affected Cooper or whether the maintenance dose just returned him to what passed as normal. The smoke made his voice pebbly. “I could use the company, tell you the truth. Doris left me, I ever tell you that?”

“You never told me Doris joined you,” Janson said. “Barry, I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

“Oh,” Cooper said, and his forehead knit in a moment or two of furious concentration. He was visibly searching for consequence: And therefore … and therefore … and therefore. The engine of reason was turning over but not catching. Finally, he raised an index finger. “Then … never mind.” He had obviously worked out that someone he hadn’t seen in eight years might have little interest in the recent end of a six-week relationship. Cooper was so pleased to have come up with an appropriate response that he leaned back and grinned. “Hey, man, it’s really good to see you.” He mock-punched Janson’s arm. “Roomie,” he said. “Be like having a roommate again. Felix and Oscar.”

Janson winced: the side of his arm was still tender from the tussle in Regent’s Park.

“You all right, man?” Cooper’s eyes filled with concern.

“Fine, fine,” Janson said. “But this time, I think we’ll keep this little visit between ourselves. Comprende?”

“Comprendo mio maximo,” Cooper responded, in the made-up lingo he favored—some mishmash of Spanish, Italian, and schoolboy Latin, with moods, aspects, and tenses of Cooper’s inconsistent devising. This was someone who was born to be a minor character in a Hunter S. Thompson escapade, Janson reflected on occasion. He’d come a long way in some respects, and seemed almost the same in others.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Janson said.

“Cool,” Cooper said.

The streetlights glowed brightly, holding at bay the evening sky, as the two men walked along the Golden Bend of Herengracht. Once it was the favored address of the shipbuilders and merchants who prospered three hundred years ago, during Amsterdam’s golden century. Most of the splendid estates now belonged to banks, museums, publishing houses, consulates. The wash of mercury light made the seventeenth-century dwellings shimmer with a peculiar glamour and seemed to pick out the differences among them. One house had an odd French influence, its sandstone facade adorned with acanthus leaves and volutes; another was a somber affair of dark brick, decorated only by the neck gable. Everywhere one found rounded cornices, modillions, finials, decorative consoles, and bull’s-eye windows: there was no end to the nooks and crannies that a hidden observer could exploit. To Janson, even the projecting hoist beams, securely built into the roof timbers, took on a menacing appearance by night.

“So you see these streets every day,” Janson said.