Stavro was waiting for Majid at the Grand Hotel Dolder in Zurich. Majid took a morning train from Geneva and then a taxi to Römerhof through the center of the city. Zurich, like Geneva, had a river and a lake, but it was darker, sterner, more German. At Römerhof he boarded a bright red car of the Dolderbahn, the old cog-wheel railway that carried him up through the forest on Adlisberg Hill to the grounds of the hotel. It would have been faster to drive straight there from Geneva, but Majid was in no hurry to see Stavro, and he’d thought he could use the time on the train to think about what to say to his client. In the event, though, he had mostly just stared out the window. Riding the Dolderbahn, he watched the teeth of the turning pinion mesh with the teeth of the rack as the car hauled itself up the steep slope. Technology from a simpler era. Simpler but no less violent, he knew. Majid had once stayed at an inn near Ypres in Belgium. The innkeeper, while serving him steak frites on dishes decorated with cheerful yellow daisies, had pointed to the gently sloping hill behind his establishment. It was covered with grass, freshly mowed, and occupied by the children of another guest playing tag, and, one afternoon in 1914, the innkeeper said, twelve thousand soldiers had been killed there.

They had been killed, however, without the involvement of an investment advisor in another country.

Stavro was waiting at a table between tall white columns on the hotel terrace, smoking a cigar and drinking coffee, with a copy of the Financial Times in front of him. He looked so calm, so smug, that Majid decided to be direct. Could this guy be unsettled? “Somebody came by the office looking for you,” he said.

“Is that so?” Stavro took a puff of his cigar and laid it in an ashtray, careful not to disturb the ash, which was too short to brush off. “Was it the person working with American authorities who inquired about my trades? The one you told me about when I last met with you and your partner?” Which seemed to jog a memory in Stavro. “Oh, I heard about his passing. My condolences.”

His passing? What does one say upon receiving condolences from one who might have murdered the party in question? Not now, Majid thought, not now.

“Thank you,” he said. “It was somebody else. An African. A policeman from Nigeria.”

“What did he say?” Stavro seemed mildly interested. He had picked up his cigar but was just holding it.

“He said he represented someone in Nigeria who was entitled to a share of your profits in the Sahel Hydrocarbon investment.”

Majid watched for Stavro’s reaction. A waiter appeared. Would the new arrival care for a beverage? “Pellegrino,” Majid said. The waiter bowed away.

“What did you tell him?” Stavro said.