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biological heir. The first leg of their flight is reasonably relaxed; they reach the meticulously maintained Munich airport around 7:00 a.m. and find a café in which to kill an hour before their scheduled flight to Ljubljana. They stow their Vuitton carry-ons under a black Formica table; inside of Alex’s suitcase is an envelope with $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills, the second half of the payment to Dr. Kis, who insists on cash—he is gracious enough to accept American dollars, though he prefers euros. As luck would have it, someone has left behind a copy of the Financial Times; as they drink their kaffeemilch , Alex reads an article about attempts being made to restructure British Petroleum, and Leslie reads about the resurgence of international gangs who target rich families via kidnapping, identity theft, and blackmail.
    “Look at this,” Leslie says, showing Alex the newspaper’s photo of two stubby-looking men with three-day beards, handcuffed, their balding heads down as they are led away by Russian policemen. “They tried to kidnap an American banker’s child.”
    “Idiots,” says Alex.
    “You know…” They both say it at the same time.
    “Go ahead,” Alex says.
    “I was just going to say I sometimes wish we weren’t rich.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes. Really. I wonder what our lives would be like. I mean, money is its own kind of ghetto, isn’t it? Everything we do, everyone we know. And it makes us a target too. It’s scary. So what were you going to say?”
    “Me? I was going to say I wish we hadn’t flown commercial.”
      
    The flight from Munich to Ljubljana is about forty-five minutes. The airport there, in terms of its size and sense of importance, is what you would expect if you flew into Poughkeepsie. Alex and Leslie disembark, along with a couple of elderly nuns, an Austrian businessman, and a stewardess in a peacock-blue blazer. They are brought to the main building in a minivan, the back door of which remains open to the cold, while not far away a jet begins its takeoff. Inside the shabby white building, there seems to be no passport control, no customs; in a few minutes, the Twisdens are out of the airport and in the back of a taxi reeking of air freshener. The driver, a woman in her thirties whose gelled, spiky hair reminds Leslie of those metal guards some people put on their windowsills to keep pigeons away, drives quickly past the frosted hillocks and icy evergreens lining the road into the city.
    A sudden rain; it seems to come out of nowhere and all at once. The driver is reluctant to use the windshield wipers, turning them on for only a moment or two and then turning them off, waiting to turn them on again until the windshield has been pelted so thoroughly with rain that it looks as if it is covered with silver paint.
    Alex feels the tension in Leslie’s body, and he takes her hand, pats it reassuringly. “How you doing, baby?”
    “Don’t even say that word,” Leslie says.
    Soon, they are in the city. The outlying area exudes a kind of postsocialist anonymity, as if every building—every brick—feared being accused of putting on airs. But as they get closer to the city center, the architecture becomes less utilitarian, more decorative, and, after a series of switchbacks caused by various one-way streets and other streets recently closed to automobile traffic, they arrive at their hotel, which, from the outside, presents nothing more inviting than a wooden door such as you would use to enter a small church. Above it is a stone carving of an old man with his forefinger pressed to his lips, presumably asking passersby to keep their voices down.
    Leslie has fallen asleep. Alex pats her knee as he pays the driver, and, commandeering both of their suitcases, he leads her into the hotel. Her eyes are half closed; he suspects that mainly she doesn’t want to see anything . Check-in is at a charming little desk set to one side of a stone internal courtyard, where they are served