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the muddy Arno, sick of the smells of garlic and bad plumbing, and of living alone among foreigners, he wrote his friend that Italian painting was garish, saccharine, and boring with its everlasting madonnas, babes, saints, halos, crucifixions, resurrections, green dead Saviors, flying bearded Jehovahs, and the rest; that he much preferred moderns like Miró and Klee; and that anyway, painting was just interior decoration, which didn’t really interest him. He scrawled several pages in this cornered-rat vein, mailed them off, and then went vagabonding around Europe, forsaking his classes and his hope of a graduate degree.
    When he got back to Florence, he found a cheering letter from the professor.
     
    . . . I don’t know what will become of you. Obviously art was a false lead. I think it did you good to get hot on some subject. If you can only shake off your lethargy and find something that truly engages you, you may yet go far. I am an old traffic cop, and standing here on my corner I have seen many Chevrolets and Fords go by. It’s not hard for me to recognize the occasional Cadillac. Only this one seems badly stalled.
    I’ve written about you to Dr. Aaron Jastrow, who lives outside Siena. You know of him. He wrote A Jew’s Jesus , made a pot of money, and got off the miserable academic treadmill. We used to be friends at Yale, and he was very good indeed at bringing out the best in young men. Go and talk to him, and give him my regards.
     
    That was how Byron happened to call on Dr. Jastrow. He took a bus to Siena, a three-hour run up a rutted scary mountain road. Twice before he had visited the bizarre little town, all red towers and battlements and narrow crooked streets, set around a gaudy zebra-striped cathedral, on a hilltop amid rolling green and brown Tuscan vineyards. Its main claim to fame, aside from the quasi-Byzantine church art he had studied there, was a peculiar annual horse race called the Palio, which he had heard about but never seen.
    At first glance, the girl at the wheel of the old blue convertible made no strong impression on him: an oval face, dark enough so that he first took her for an Italian, dark hair, enormous sunglasses, a pink sweater over an open white shirt. Beside her sat a blond man covering a yawn with a long white hand.
    “Hi! Byron Henry?”
    “Yes.”
    “Hop in the back. I’m Natalie Jastrow. This is Leslie Slote. He works in our embassy in Paris, and he’s visiting my uncle.”
    Byron did not much impress the girl either. What Natalie Jastrow saw through the dark glasses was a slender lounger, obviously American, with red glints in his heavy brown hair; he was propped against the wall of the Hotel Continental in the sun, smoking a cigarette, his legs loosely crossed. The light gray jacket, dark slacks, and maroon tie were faintly dandyish. The forehead under the hair was wide, the long slanting jaws narrow, the face pallid. He looked like what he was - a collegiate drone, a rather handsome one. Natalie had brushed these off by the dozen in earlier years.
    As they wound through narrow canyons of crooked ancient red-brown houses and drove out into the countryside, Byron idly asked Slote about his embassy work. The Foreign Service man told him he was posted in the political section and was studying Russian and Polish, hoping for an assignment to Moscow or Warsaw. Sitting in the car, Slote appeared very tall; later Byron saw that he himself was taller than Slote; the Foreign Service officer had a long trunk but medium-size legs. Slote’s thick blond hair grew to a peak over a high forehead and narrow pinkish face; the light blue eyes behind rimless glasses were alert and penetrating, and his thin lips were compressed as though with habitual resolve. All the time they drove, he held a large black pipe in his hand or in his mouth, not smoking it. It occurred to Byron that the Foreign Service might be a pleasant career, offering travel, adventure, and encounters with important