“He did?” said Joey.

“Didn’t you know? I heard it from Vasily months ago.”

“But why?” Joey asked.

“Well”-she offered the bag of milk-chocolate-covered biscuits around. Joey was the only taker-“remember when he gave that talk in town and, what was his name, Pete Williams got all over his case?”

“Who’s Pete Williams?” Gideon asked, but they were too absorbed to hear him.

“How could I forget?” Joey asked. “It was awful. Edgar was really, really upset. We all went over to the Bishop and Wolf for a drink afterward, and he was muttering in his beer, remember?”

Liz nodded and put on an overblown version of Villarreal’s mild Spanish accent. “‘I keel ’im, dat bastar’, dat leedle peepsqueak.’ Anyway, apparently it was enough to make him never want to come back. That and a few million other reasons, but that had to be the last straw. Anyway, when he got back to the States he faxed Vasily a letter resigning from the consortium. I don’t think Vasily was too upset to hear it. Frankly, I wasn’t too upset myself.”

“I guess he didn’t need the fifty thousand,” Joey said. “I sure wish I could say that.” He removed a thin, tar-black cellophane-wrapped cigar from a shirt pocket and held it up. “Do you mind?”

“Yes,” said Liz.

“Yes,” said Julie.

“Oh,” Joey said meekly and put it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”

“You can save it for the catwalk,” Liz said, and then explained to Gideon: “There’s a kind of catwalk around the roof of the castle. He prowls it after dark, like the Phantom of the Opera, smoking his foul weed.”

“It’s the only place they let me,” Joey said with a sigh.

“What do you mean, ‘they’? Those are Kozlov’s house rules. Don’t blame us. Not that I’m objecting to them.”

“I didn’t go to that talk of Edgar’s,” Julie said. “It was the final night, and I suppose I’d had more than enough of Edgar Villarreal by then. I heard it didn’t go well, but what exactly happened?”