"Don't know."

"I thought she'd be here. I don't see her all this time I figure she's in her funny apartment shooting God-forbid some kind of terrible drug between her toes, the only skin left."

"I haven't seen her in a while. She may be in Morocco, she may not. Then again she may."

"You plan to go looking?"

"I'm staying right here," I said.

"That's your right and your privilege, Bucky, with or without a studio-equipped house in the mountains. The first death rumor was in the evening paper. I could easily stop it here and now."

"I don't think you could. But either way, don't get into it. I want to see how long it lasts."

"Whatever you say."

"I haven't asked about your wife. How's your wife, what's-her-name, your lovely and charming wife?"

"Wife, companion, lover," Globke said. "She's all that and more. Mother, daughter, teacher, adviser, friend. But I'm keeping you two apart. Otherwise it's instant sex karma. She's got a beautiful soul but I don't trust her body. See, oldness and fatness. They make me a bad person."

"What's she do all day, stranded on top of that cliff?"

"She curls up with the Upanishads. She's been reading the Upanishads in paperback for the last three years. She feels the East is where the truth is, what she calls the petal of all energy. Non-attachment turns her on."

"And the little girl," I said.

"Still at it with the cello. Appreciate your asking. To think my genes could produce this kind of classical talent. She'll be concertized next year. Age of fourteen."

"Will it hurt?"

"You attack even the things I hold dearest, Bucky, but I forgive you because I know you're on the threshold of something extra-extra-ordinary or you wouldn't be here in this cold dark room far from the hue and cry. Or am I wrong?"