Talib was the first to pay his respects to Zim, specifically; he spoke directly to Colonel Zimmermann as we were leaving the alley. “I know I speak for all of us—Colonel, sir—when I say how sorry we were to hear about your Matthew.”

“Thank you, Talib,” the colonel said. He would not let anyone carry the soup pot for him; he would not let Elmira persuade him to take the service elevator, either.

“They don’t like us to carry food through the lobby, Colonel—not even you,” Elmira reminded him.

“Then we’ll forgive them for not liking us when we do it,” the colonel told her.

We were a strange assortment of vagabonds—we looked decidedly out of place on Park Avenue. Not a single taxi, whizzing by, slowed down to take an inquiring look at us. Not even Colonel Zimmermann—elegantly dressed in funereal attire, and with half a chest of medals—caught the cabbies’ eyes. To the taxi drivers, the colonel was just a crazy old man carrying a soup pot.

“Colonel Zimmermann, sir,” Mr. Barlow began; he was struggling with the two platters, trying to shield the paper bowls and paper plates and paper napkins from the wind. A telltale trail of fallen plastic spoons marked the snowshoer’s path along the Park Avenue sidewalk. “Sir,” Elliot Barlow said a second time, as a paper plate was blown away in the wind, “your Matthew was a good shepherd.”

“Good soldiers are good shepherds, Mr. Barlow—thank you for noticing!” the colonel warmly said.

“For God’s sake—give me all that, Mr. Barlow,” Elmira said. She took the two platters with the paper and plastic stuff, hugging them to her capacious chest—the soup ladle held fast in her fist, like a mace. “Adam, give those sandwiches to Talib—he’s a good soldier; he can carry them,” the housekeeper told me. Talib took the platter of egg salad sandwiches from me—he was clearly used to taking orders from Elmira—then the good soldier who’d been saved from combat spoke to Colonel Zimmermann.

“I doubt, Colonel, that I am dressed appropriately for the party upstairs,” Talib told the retired commanding officer.

“You are most appropriately dressed, Talib—someone in fatigues should be there,” the colonel said to the dutiful soldier.

Ayla was keeping her distance from the egg salad sandwiches, or she was worried about her close proximity to the eggs in the elevator that would take her to the thirteenth floor. Yet the colonel also considered that the pregnant younger sister may have doubted the appropriateness of how she was dressed for the party upstairs. “And you, Ayla—you and your baby—look wonderful. There is no one at the party upstairs who looks as wonderful as you do,” Colonel Zimmermann told her. The hooded sweatshirt Ayla was wearing was probably Talib’s, I thought, but everyone could still see the sizable bump in the skinny young woman’s belly.