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delicate wife, the ermine stole and suitcases with reinforced corners that the hero of a bad novel stumbles over in the hotel lobby, a detail the Writer would never have introduced, though he does have the passage—everything is there in the Book, everything!—where the narrator thinks he’s detected a thief, a dubious character, out in front of the casino, and it turns out to be the Baron de Charlus.
    He describes him in alarm and in minute detail: a thief! He wants to warn the hotel’s owner. And then, no: it’s the Baron de Charlus.
    But with your papa and your mama I’m certain of it—no unexpected transformations. Your mother had the eyes of a thief, the long arms of a thief, the swaying walk of a thief: the way your papa had heaped the side table with remote controls was precisely the way a mafia kingpin, maybe a hit man, accumulates expensive audio and TV equipment and moves his hand without looking across the pile of remotes, pickingone up at random and pushing a button to see what comes on. And if it’s music, fine, and if the enormous screen lights up, that’s fine, too. Like a mafia honcho on his day off. His wife, his inexplicably slender and lovely wife, stroking his hair against the arm of the sofa, fingers entwined in her husband’s hair.
    Like two big mafia honchos.
6
    I left the house that same night, Petya, and walked all night beneath vast leaden clouds in a sky illuminated by bolts of lightning. Carried along by my feet and my despair at missing out on the vacation I’d anticipated next to your parents’ swimming pool, hating and fearing my employers, your mother and your father, asking myself over and over what I’d gotten myself into and whether I should proceed immediately to the nearest FBI office and turn them in, like the deplorable citizens in certain deplorable Hollywood movies, who think that informing on or betraying someone in any way—that a snitch can help his country, save it from danger. Lamenting having taken the job with them, those Russians.
    Careful! I had to tell myself as I walked toward Marbella, toward the Marbella night. Careful with them! Given all the money they had and how dangerous they were, and of course: the gem! Going toward the night, and in the night, though I didn’t yet know it, a discotheque I hadn’t imagined was so close by, an edifice immense as a castle, huge as the Ishtar Gate.
    Without having planned to go in, Petya. But the spotlight sweeping across the sky, a movie theater, I thought at first, the beam of light announcing a premiere, and I stopped and saw it was a disco, the massive stone blocks of a castle’s walls handsomely inflated, larger than life. Every color applied to it, the whole palette, on the battlements, the buttresses, the fake drawbridge. A structure that would have gladdened the heart of Bergotte (in the Book), his discovery of color fullycomprehended and painted onto the building’s gigantic walls, the discovery that thus, with various layers of color . The dense yellow he finds in Vermeer, to which other more Disneyesque hues had been added: phosphorescent greens and acrylic reds, the magenta doorway at which two Nubian slaves kept watch, ponderous and muscular as a pair of winged bulls. Understood: a rest, a place—when I’d gone inside and looked around—where I could leave the whole question of the stone to settle into the air as I moved, letting it flow freely around me without thinking about any spot or niche in which to place it.
    Swinging across the dance floor with a thousand levels of freedom, spinning at any angle, not merely reaching the four cardinal points, like some medieval machine, but touching any and all points on the sphere. Behind, before, making stops at sonorous stations, my arrival marked by the beat, my hips and shoulders at a precise spot in the air. Smooth as a machine cunningly articulated on tiny ball bearings, endlessly spinning to