He went back to contemplating the misted city and was silent for a moment, thinking. “You know,” he said, “he’s such a CIA cliche I wonder if the CIA didn’t invent him. Look at his next marriage, in ’58, to Claire Thorpington Eliot, of the Boston Eliots-that was some step up the social ladder for Billy the Kid from Brewster Street. He had, as you will know, one child only, a daughter, Louise, by the second Mrs. Mulholland. Miz Claire, as this grand lady was called, died in a hunting accident-balking horse, broken neck-in April 1961, on the eve, as bloody-minded Fate would have it, of the invasion of the Playa Giron, otherwise known as the Bay of Pigs, a venture in which Big Bill was sunk up to his neck. The grieving widower returned from the shores of Florida to find the Eliots already moving his things, including his two-year-old daughter, out of the grand old family mansion in Back Bay.”

He turned and walked back and slumped down in the chair and again turned his eyes to the ceiling. “Next thing,” he said, “Big Bill was married a third time, to Nancy Harrison, writer, journalist, and Martha Gellhorn-look-alike, and living with her on a fine estate in County Somewhere on the west coast of Ireland, not an Oscar statuette’s throw from the home of his old friend and drinking buddy John Huston. Grand days, by all accounts, but bound to end, like all such. Blond Nancy couldn’t take the endless rain and the low-browed natives and packed up her Remington and hightailed it for sunnier climes-Ibiza, Clifford Irving, Orson Welles, all that.” He stopped, and lowered his glossy gaze from the ceiling and fixed on Glass. “You want more, I got more. And I haven’t even looked into the crystal ball of my laptop yet.”

“What did you do,” Glass said, “rehearse this stuff before you came up here?”

A sharp something came into the young man’s look, a resentful edge. “I have a photographic memory.”