“Sir.”

“Tomorrow morning I am going away again. I wish never to revisit this place where—I shall get in touch. You are not to follow or the deal’s off. At some point or other you can introduce me to Halliday.”

“That’s real difficult.”

“But you, wonderful you, can do it. You have the entrée.”

“No, sir, Mr Halliday doesn’t give that to anyone without she’s real pretty.”

“No boyfriends? No bestiality? No real kinky stuff, torture, murder? What’s his billions for, just ewige Weib or whatever they call it? Well, Rick. You know how we really knowledgeable people are returning to the primitives to regain our health. One of the— My dear, Rick, I feel a lecture coming over me!”

“If you’ll only hold on a moment while I get my recorder out—”

He slid the camera from his sleeve.

“That?”

“Sure. It takes pics too. But, Wilf, I have never been near you without this up my sleeve only there sometimes it misses things so it’ll be better standing on the table.”

“You’ve never recorded me!”

“Yes, sir, always, even at dinner way back in your house. My one regret is I never got that time in the night when we met.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“And I got you even earlier than that, sir. Not on this machine of course but way back when I was a student. Why I swear in between even your accent’s changed!”

“Don’t be wetter than you need be. My accent is satellite and always has been.”

“No, sir.”

“Earlier? Back before you were with me and Liz?”

“When you were in the States. I’ll play it back to you one day.”

“No you won’t. On footsteps of our dead selves or something. You’ll wipe the lot or the deal’s off again.”

“They aren’t mine sir.”

There was a long pause after that as I digested it. Of course. Halliday had them in the Barclay foundation. They as well as Mary Lou were part of the deal. The lord giveth and the lord taketh away, cursed be the name of him whatever one he chooses. Who knows his place? Who can affront, outface, attack, overthrow him? We can do nothing but strike his ministers in the forehead with a stone and hope it sinks in.

“Wilf, you were going to say a piece.”

“Ah yes. This lecture. It’s about rites of passage. You know about them, Rick, I’m talking to myself. For example a rite of passage is when you find that instead of fishing round for tintacks—thumb tacks you’d call them—in some saucer of mum’s, ashtray, paten, rich trifle on the mantelpiece or overmantel as toffs say you can walk into a shop and buy a whole packet. Then you know what you’ve done. You’ve become a householder. Another one comes when you kill something deliberately, a dog perhaps. Reminds me, what do you drink?”

“Anything, I guess.”

“Bourbon? They tell me bourbon’s come back in. Vodka? Whisky? I stick to wine myself.”