The next item on the news was also from California, and was about a lobby group called Green Shoots, which was attracting a lot of support. Its view, and it was one that spoke to the battered psyches of many Americans, was that the world was much better able to take care of itself than we were, so there was no point in getting all worked up about it or trying to moderate our natural behaviour. “Don’t worry,” said their slogan, quoting the title of a popular song. “Be happy.”

“Great Balls of Fire,” thought Dirk to himself, quoting another.

“Scientists in Australia,” said someone on the radio “are trying to teach kangaroos to speak.” Dirk decided that what he most needed was a good night’s sleep.

In the morning, things suddenly seemed wonderfully clear and simple. He didn’t know the answer to anything, but he knew what to do about it. A few phone calls to the bank had established that tracing the money back to its origins was going to be hideously difficult, partly because it was an inherently complicated business anyway, partly because it quickly became clear that whoever had been paying the money to him had taken some trouble to cover his or her tracks, but mostly because the man on the foreign desk at his bank had a cleft palate.

Life was too short, the weather too fine, and the world too full of interesting and exciting pitfalls. Dirk would go sailing.

Life, he was fond of telling himself, was like an ocean. You can either grind your way across it like a motorboat or you can follow the winds and the currents—in other words, go sailing. He had the wind: he was being paid by someone. Presumably that someone was paying him to do something, but what he had omitted to say. Well, that was a client’s privilege. But Dirk felt that he should respond to this generous urge to pay him, that he should do something. But what? Well, he was a private detective, and what private detectives did when they were being paid was mostly to follow people.

So that was simple. Dirk would follow someone.

Which meant that now he had to find a good current: someone to follow. Well, there was his office window, with a whole world surging by outside it—or a few people at least. He would pick one. He began to tingle with excitement that his investigation was finally under way, or would be as soon as the next person—no, not the next person, the . . . fifth next person walked around the corner that he could see on the other side of the road.