A few seconds elapsed before it clicked. Buckwheat groats—also known as kasha. Janson felt a stirring of excitement as thousands of column inches from newspaper and magazine profiles whirred through his head in a ribbon of light. Every day starts with a spartan breakfast of kasha … . A homely detail found in dozens of them, along with the near obligatory references to his “bespoke wardrobe,” “aristocratic bearing,” “commanding gaze” … Such were the stock phrases and “colorful” details of feature writing. Every day starts with a spartan breakfast of kasha … .

It was true, then. Somewhere on Smith Mountain lived a man the world knew as Peter Novak.

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-three

In the heart of midtown Manhattan, the bag lady stooped over the Bryant Park steel-mesh trash can with the diligent look of a postal worker at a mailbox. Her clothes, as was usual with derelicts, were torn and filthy and unseasonably heavy—the clothing had to be thick enough to ward off the cold of a night spent in an alleyway, and the warming rays of the sun would not impel her to strip off a single layer, for her clothes and her sack filled with bottles and tin cans were all she had to her name. At her wrists and ankles, grime-gray thermal underwear showed beneath fraying, soiled denim. Her shoes were oversize sneakers, the rubber soles beginning to split, the laces broken and tied together again, in floppy schoolgirl knots. Pulled down low on her forehead was a nylon-mesh baseball cap, promoting not a sports team but a once-high-flying Silicon Alley “incubator” fund that went under the year before. She clutched the grungy satchel as if it contained treasure. Her grip expressed the primal urgency of possession: This is what I have in this world. It is mine. It is me. Time for such as her was meted out by nights she escaped unmolested, by the cans and bottles she collected and traded in for nickels, by the small serendipities she encountered—the intact sandwich, still soft and protected by plastic wrap, untouched by rodents. On her hands were cotton gloves, now gray and sooty, which might once have been a debutante’s, and as she rummaged through the plastic bottles and skeins of cellophane and apple cores and banana peels and crumpled advertising flyers, the gloves grew even dirtier.

Yet Jessica Kincaid’s eyes were not, in fact, on the refuse; they returned regularly to the small mirror that she had propped against the trash can and that allowed her to monitor those arriving at and departing from the Liberty Foundation offices across the street. After days of a fruitless watch, Janson’s confederate, Cornelius Eaves, had called last night excitedly: Márta Lang seemed finally to have made an appearance.