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jacket. “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

4
    After leaving the Harvard Club, I took the subway to my office on Rector Street.
    “Mr. Douglas will be here at eleven,” Gail said.
    Gail was my only employee, a woman who regularly retreated to the street for a cigarette, always returning with the smell of its smoke on her clothes and in her hair. She was overweight, made no attempt to exercise, and ate anything she wanted without regard to either calories or nutrition. As the welcoming face of a risk management firm she was wildly inappropriate, but there was something in Gail’s willing acceptance of statistically unacceptable risks that appealed to me. Perhaps she reminded me of that long-ago time when I’d taken the ultimate one, bet everything on a single chip and spun the wheel.
    “And you’ve got Mr. Carter at two,” Gail added as I swept past her desk and stepped into my office, where, rather than taking my usual place behind my desk, I turned to the window. From that perch I’d once been able to see the upper stories of the World Trade Center. Their sudden, cataclysmic collapse had added an unexpected urgency to the notion of risk assessment, but the magnitude of their fall had faded with time, and my clients had returned to the more mundane risks inherent in shifting markets and floating currencies.
    People can rarely pinpoint the forces that shape them, but I’d always known that I’d chosen a career in risk assessment in the wake of my Lubandan experience, the dark surprise it had brought to my life. For twenty years I’d lingered in its shadows, but Seso’s murder now made reliving it more urgent, so that I found myself once again drifting back to my time in Lubanda.
    For the most part it had been very pleasant, at least at the beginning. I’d been given a Land Cruiser and directions to Tumasi. As I pulled into it that first afternoon, I saw a group of small concrete buildings not far from the market. They were painted different colors: white, green, bright orange. A few had wooden shutters, but most of the windows were nothing but square openings into the interior, without glass or anything else to hold out rain or noise or whatever insects or animals might find their way in. I’d been told that mine was painted green and had a white door, and sure enough, there it stood, just off what appeared to be the market square. I remembered thinking, home, and feeling a wonderful excitement at the prospect of just how far away I was from anything I’d previously experienced. There was exhilaration in that feeling, a sense of adventure combined with service, a heady mix if ever there was one, since there is no better, nor riskier, amalgam than pleasure mixed with purpose.
    The market wasn’t particularly busy, though a few people strolled about the stalls, tradesmen and customers with whom I would become familiar during the next few months. Quite a few had stopped whatever they were doing and turned to look at me, or perhaps the Land Cruiser, though none of them approached, and most resumed their usual activities almost immediately.
    For my part, I simply stood for a moment and took the place in—the stalls, the chickens roaming free, a couple of camels, an old woman who squatted under a tree. The market was animated, but not what a Westerner would call lively. No one appeared hurried.
    I’d started to turn back to the Land Cruiser and unpack my gear when I gave a final glance into the market and she was suddenly, strikingly there.
    I’d not seen a white woman since getting off the plane in Rupala, and this one—tall, slender, her skin only slightly tanned—seemed more like a vision. She was standing near one of the stalls. There was a basket in front of her, and she was fiddling about with whatever was inside it. I’d no doubt made quite a display upon entering the village, a cloud of red dust behind me, but she had not been one of those who’d turned to see it.
    At that moment, I might have unloaded