“So what did Madame Valeska say?” I said. “What was your fortune?”

He laughed. “I wasn’t listening too well. Although I do remember, she said some things that were pretty amazing. She knew that I was about to have the biggest test of my life.”

“You were there with a bunch of other young baseball players,” I said. “Of course she’s going to say that.”

“No, there was more than that. She seemed to know stuff about how I was trying to prove to my father that I could be successful doing my own thing instead of going into business with him.”

“A son trying to impress his father. Another amazing revelation.”

“All right, Alex. I hear ya. It’s not like I really believed in that stuff. It’s certainly not why I went back the next day.”

“Let me guess.”

“I left Maria a little note. Just like a high school kid. I was only twenty, remember. She was nineteen.”

“How many times did you see her?”

“Every day for ten days. Until I got shelled and then… um, sort of left the human race for a while.”

“You had your fortune told every day for ten days?”

“No, just a few times,” he said. “Madame Valeska would have killed me if she’d know about Maria. And her father. And God, her older brother. His name was Leopold. He saw us walking together downtown once, and he just about strangled me right there. Maria had to go over and talk to him, calm him down. She must have made him promise not to tell their parents. We always had to sneak around, you know, meet in different places. I saw her every day, even if it was only for a few minutes before a ball game.”

“Did you have sex with her?”

“Alex, come on.”

“Did you?”

“It was 1971. Everybody was having sex back then.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Yes,” he said. “We had sex. Although really it was only the one time. A couple other times, we sort of just-”