‘It didn’t do much for me.’

‘When you get into it, when you have a secret method that cannot fail, each turn of a card or a wheel dictates your fate: right or wrong, live or die. The blood pumps faster through your veins, your aorta is bursting its walls, and your face is totally calm and smiling. It’s a grand illusion. Win or lose, you must give nothing away. It’s a triumph of the will, in the Schopenhauer sense of the term: man over situation, individual over massed humanity––’

‘That’s pretentious nonsense,’ I interjected.

‘Well, I enjoy taking their money as well.’ He grinned.

Amid the overblown philosophising, I sensed, there was a grain of desperate truth. To escape nightmares of loss and guilt, he needed to chase nightly extremes of danger and deception, with a smear of degradation: high risk and old whores. The sensation he sought was the antipode of where he, by rights, ought to be. ‘I shall not die, for I shall live,’ said the Psalmist. The only way Dovidl could detach his living self from the reproachful dead was by constant reminders that he was verifiably on the right side of the grave. If he felt a pounding in his chest when a card flipped, it was a sign that he was still alive, still defying his intended fate.

‘And then there’s the money,’ he repeated. ‘I need money to make a fresh start when I pack in the fiddle. I am planning a new future for us. You and me, the perfect team.’

One taboo after another, I thought. He had removed himself so far from the loving dead that he was now ready to reject their dreams for his destiny. I was not altogether surprised. When my father returned from Poland, something had drained out of Dovidl’s playing. It sounded desultory to my ears, rhythmically predictable. The vital edge of innovation had been rubbed to routine. He played well but without panache, as if he no longer believed himself predestined for world glory. Practice times grew shorter, repertorial expansions narrower. I betrayed a pledge to my father, failing to apprise him of the cooling of his hot prospect.

Mortimer Simmonds would be mortified when he found out. I could anticipate the clichés of cultural lamentation bubbling to his lips. A great loss for music, he would groan. The brightest since Heifetz. A blow to tradition, a link lost in the chain of interpretation. Such a waste of golden talent and opportunity.

I, however, was content. The silencing of a soloist seemed a small price to pay for the resumption of my union with Dovidl, my restitution to his right hand. The night’s excursion had restored my faith in him; that was all that mattered. Dovidl belonged to me again, soul-damaged and risk-addicted, but needing me to achieve the next stage in his development, as I needed him in mine.

‘What’s the plan?’ I demanded.