Isn’t there anything you want sent to the country? she kept asking, not even your correspondence? No, he had replied, what difference does it make what I wrote in ’83 to the Southern Trust Company about fraudulent conveyances? The statute of limitations on my negligence has run out, and if it hasn’t, and the firm is sued, the boys will find what they need in the central files. Mementos of closings followed to the trash the rich blue-and-maroon-bound volumes of transaction documents: tombstone ads laid to rest in Lucite, miniatures of products associated with various borrowers, his name on tarnished Strips of fake brass glued to the base on which they were displayed—among them airplanes, oil tankers, trucks, and earth-moving equipment, and one large black telephone, and framed photographs of him signing opinions or, more often, hovering behind some borrower’s president, ostensibly to make sure that potentate wrote his name in the right place. Unlike many of his partners, he had not used these articles as paperweights or displayed them on his window ledge. On his good days, when he knew that a principal involved in the transaction was due at his office, he would rummage in his closet and, if he could find it, put the appropriate toy in a place of honor on the coffee table or lean the photograph against the bound volumes on his bookshelf. Really, it was like the system Mary and he had for dealing with paintings they bought from artists who were friends or, far more dangerous, paintings that artists had given to them: there was a nail from which they would hang the work in question (usually it was Mary who remembered it had to be done) just before its creator came for a meal or for the weekend. Otherwise, since artists, like pigs in search of truffles, immediately head for the place where they last saw whatever work of theirs one had acquired, it was necessary to invent a theory of migration: the painting or drawing wasn’t there because, depending on the circumstances of the visit, it was in the country, in the city, at the framer’s because it had buckled, or, in extreme circumstances, at Schmidtie’s office. A high-wire act, given the investigative skills of most artists.
Craveri’s article took an unexpected turn; he had been reading about peasant women in England gathering animal turd for use as fuel in the kitchen fireplace—an activity he had never heard of—when the author, without transition, launched into an anecdote about the hour at which the prime minister wanted dinner served. The chef was in the wrong. Disraeli insisted that the sweets had begun to melt before they reached the table. There was more to it, but he couldn’t find it on the page. He rubbed his eyes. Where was his cigar? Not in the ashtray, not at the edge of the end table where he sometimes balanced it. He stood up abruptly, frightened that the thing was burning somewhere. The cigar rolled from his lap to the floor. It had gone out. He brushed off the ashes, relit the cigar, and carried the whiskey glass to the sink. The running water made him realize he badly needed to go to the bathroom. When he came back to the kitchen, he saw it was past one in the morning.
He was tired, and yet once again so wide awake that, if he went on reading downstairs, he knew there would be no going to sleep without a strong pill. It would be better to read in bed. He got a glass of soda water for the night and was beginning to turn out the lights when he heard a series of rapid knocks at the front door and then the doorbell. The man? Burglars of more than usual impudence? In a passage off the kitchen that served as a mud room stood an ax handle he had bought years before intending to use it on the pair of unknown black dogs that had taken to rooting in the flower beds next to the back porch and clawing at the porch itself, presumably to get at a rabbit burrow underneath it. As if forewarned by the purchase, the dogs stopped their visits. He grasped the weapon, strode to the front hall, and turned on the outside light. Peering through one of the narrow windows at the side of