I speeded things up by fabricating most of the footnotes. Karen Dietrich paid me my thousand dollars. I cashed her check while the ink was still drying, put the bills in my money belt and the belt around my waist, threw things into a flight bag, boarded a reluctant Minna at Kitty Bazerian’s in Brooklyn, considered and rejected risking a direct flight to London, and caught – with less than ten minutes to spare – an Aer Lingus jet to Shannon and Dublin.

The British government has my name on several lists, and I had a feeling they might give me a hard time. The Irish also have me listed as a subversive – I’m a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood – but they don’t make a fuss about that sort of thing. Since most people are trying to get out of the country, they’ve never been able to take illegal entry very seriously.

But all I saw of Ireland was the inside of Dublin Airport. I had breakfast there before catching a BEA flight to London. You don’t have to show a passport to get from Ireland to England. The flight was routine, except for the casual regurgitation of several babes in arms, and in due course I was in London and on my way to Nigel Stokes’ flat in Kings Cross.

And I was still there. I had corresponded with Nigel over the years and met him once in New York when a play of his made a brief appearance on Broadway. He was a fellow member of the Flat Earth Society and had been working for years to build an elaborate true-to-scale two-dimensional globe, a project I greatly admired. Julia didn’t. She thought the whole thing was madness. Nigel damn well knew it was madness, and took great delight in it.

And now, pouring us each a second cup of tea, he said, “This is madness, you know.” But he wasn’t talking about the shape of the earth.

“I know.”

“It’s bad enough looking through haystacks for needles, but you don’t really know that it’s a needle you’re hunting, do you? I was thinking about that letter, Evan. Somehow I don’t think a travel agent-”