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overcoat. “Actually,” he went on as he began strolling away in the direction of Whitehall, with Hale following, “I do hardly know where I am in London these days. The Green Park
I
remember has a barrage balloon moored back there by the Arch, and piles of help-yourself coal lining the walks. You remember.”
    “No beatniks, in those days.” “
    Aren’t
they frightful? Makes you wonder why we still bother.”
    “You—we?—are still bothering, I gather.”
    “Yes,” Jimmie Theodora said flatly. “And yes, you had bloody well better say ‘we.’ ”
    It’s “we” when
you
say it is, Hale thought as he followed the old man across the wet grass, not sure whether his thought was wry or bitter.
    The day of his mother’s funeral in Stow-on-the-Wold had dawned sunny, but like many such Cotswold days it had turned rainy by noon, and the sparse knot of mourners on the grass by the grave hadbeen clustered under gleaming black umbrellas. They were shopkeepers and neighbors from Chipping Campden, mostly friends of Andrew’s grandfather—but the solemn, frightened boy had glimpsed a face at the back of the group that he was sure he recognized from his First Communion day trip to London, six years previous. Andrew had tugged his hand free of his grandfather’s to go reeling away from the grave toward the black-haired man, who at that moment seemed like closer kin than the grandfather; but Andrew had caught a surprised and admonishing scowl on that well-remembered face, and then the black-haired man had simply been gone, not present at all. Later Andrew had concluded that the man must have stepped back out of sight and quickly assumed a disguise—false moustache? cheek inserts, contrary posture, a sexton’s dirty work-shirt under the quickly discarded morning coat and dickey?—but on that morning Andrew had gone blundering through the mourners, tearfully and idiotically calling, “Sir? Sir?” since he hadn’t even known the man’s name. Jimmie Theodora had no doubt been embarrassed for him and made an unobtrusive exit as soon as possible.
    The priests at St. John’s had known the name and address of a solicitor Andrew’s mother had been in touch with, which proved to be a pear-shaped little man by the name of Corliss, and after the funeral ser vice the solicitor had driven Andrew and his grandfather to an office in Cirencester. There Corliss had explained that the uncle—he had paused before the word and then pronounced it so clearly and deliberately that even Andrew’s grandfather had not bothered to object that no such person existed—who had been paying for Andrew’s support and schooling would continue to do so, but that this benefactor would now no longer be persuaded that an expensive and Roman Catholic school like St. John’s was appropriate. Andrew’s grandfather had shifted to a more comfortable position in his chair at that, clearly pleased. Andrew was to be sent to the City of London School for Boys instead, and would incidentally be required to add the study of German to his curriculum.
    During the long drive back south to Windsor, where Andrew could at least finish out the present school term at St. John’s, hisgrandfather had gruffly advised the thirteen-year-old boy to get into the Officers’ Training Corps as soon as he could; war with Germany was inevitable, the old man had said, now that Hitler was Chancellor, and even the blindly optimistic Prime Minister Baldwin had admitted that the German Air Force was better than the British. But Andrew’s grandfather had been an old soldier, having fought with Kitchener in the Sudan and in South Africa during the Boer War, and Andrew had not taken seriously the old man’s apocalyptic predictions of bombs falling on London. Andrew’s only goal at this period, which he had known better than to confide to the elderly Anglican hunched over the steering wheel to his right, had been a vague intention to become a Jesuit priest himself one day.
    Within