She spoke softly, with raised eyebrows and in a breathy voice brimming with care and consideration, like her primary concern was my own post-traumatic stress. Can you tell me? Can you? Like, can you bear to relive it? I smiled, briefly. Midtown South was down to low single-digit homicides per year, and even if she had dealt with all of them by herself since the first day she came on the job, I had still seen more corpses than she had. By a big multiple. The woman on the train hadn’t been the most pleasant of them, but she had been a very long way from the worst.

So I told her exactly what had happened, all the way up from Bleecker Street, all the way through the eleven-point list, my tentative approach, the fractured conversation, the gun, the suicide.

Theresa Lee wanted to talk about the list.

‘We have a copy,’ she said. ‘It’s supposed to be confidential.’

‘It’s been out in the world for twenty years,’ I said. ‘Everyone has a copy. It’s hardly confidential.’

‘Where did you see it?’

‘In Israel,’ I said. ‘Just after it was written.’

‘How?’

So I ran through my résumé for her. The abridged version. The U.S. Army, thirteen years a military policeman, the elite 110th investigative unit, service all over the world, plus detached duty here and there, as and when ordered. Then the Soviet collapse, the peace dividend, the smaller defence budget, suddenly getting cut loose.

‘Officer or enlisted man?’ she asked.

‘Final rank of major,’ I said.

‘And now?’

‘I’m retired.’

‘You’re young to be retired.’

‘I figured I should enjoy it while I can.’

‘And are you?’

‘Never better.’

‘What were you doing tonight? Down there in the Village?’

‘Music,’ I said. ‘Those blues clubs on Bleecker.’

‘And where were you headed on the 6 train?’

‘I was going to get a room somewhere or head over to the Port Authority to get a bus.’