A tall wood-and-brass clock with a motionless brass pendulum stood in the shadows against the wall. There was a pretty decorative fireplace and a mantel. There was a print in a gold frame. Caravaggio. The Calling of St. Michael. He’d seen it in the Louvre. A glass of wine would be nice now, he thought. He looked around for a bottle on a table surface, but saw none. Jena’s clothes were all put away, as though she’d lived here for months, which was how she liked things: ordered surfaces, an aura of permanence, as if everything, including herself, had a long history. It was her form of kindness: to make things appear solid, reliable.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” she said.

“No,” Wales said. She liked to think of him not as a journalist but as a spy. It was her way to make him opaque, to keep herself off-balance. She had asked very little about what he did. At first, when they’d gone for a drink, she’d been interested. But after that she wasn’t.

“Would you?”

“No,” Wales said. “Do you have someone in mind?” He realized he still had on his coat and tie.

“No,” Jena said and smiled and widened her eyes, as if it was a joke.

He thought for the second time in an hour about the woman’s death he’d witnessed on Ardmore Avenue, about the progress of those events to their end. So much possibility, so much chance for a better outcome had been caught in that slow motion. It should make one able to see the ends of events before they happened, to forestall bad outcomes. It could be applied to love affairs.

“That’s surprising,” Jena said. “But it’s because you’re a journalist. If you were a real writer you’d be different.”

She smiled at him again, and he caught the tiny faraway feeling that he could love her, could enter the mystery that way, though the opportunity would pass soon. But her willingness to say the wrong thing, to boast—he liked it. She wasn’t jaded by experience, but freed by a lack of it.

“What do you do in Europe?” she said.

“I go see things and then write about them. That’s all.”

“Are you famous?”

“Journalists don’t get famous,” he said. “We make other people famous.” She didn’t know anything about journalists. He liked that, too.

“Someday you’ll have to tell me what’s the strangest thing you ever saw and then wrote about. I’d like to know about that.”

“Someday I will,” Wales said. “I promise.”

Making love was eventful. At first she was almost dalliant, though selective, vaguely theatrical, practiced.