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shook out his match and exhaled a cloud of rich blue smoke. (Another reason
     why I suspect Lou ate there every day was that Dino’s made up its own rules about who could smoke what and where, and anybody
     who didn’t like the arrangement could stay away.)
    “Well, I suppose,” he said, “there was a thing one time. A few years ago I was doing some business in L.A., and as always
     when I’m out there I called up an old friend of mine, a producer. We met for lunch, and he told me about something that had
     happened about a month earlier. He’d been out at the Film Fair at Santa Monica, and he saw me there talking to some guy. So
     he goes over and says, ‘Lou, how can you be in town and not call me?’ I mean, he was really pissed. We were friends. I always
     called. But this guy just looked at him like he was crazy. It was some other guy, not me. But not some guy who looked a little
     like me. According to this friend of mine, the guy was
me
.”
    Lou held out his hands, palms up, his cigar clamped between two thick but perfectly manicured fingers.
    “What can I tell you?”
    “There you are, you see,” I said triumphantly. “Something
did
happen to you. I don’t believe there’s one person you’ll ever meet who hasn’t had some extraordinary coincidence happen to
     them.”
    “To be exact,” he said, “it didn’t happen to me. It happened to this friend of mine who thought he saw me. In fact, when you
     think about it, it isn’t really a coincidence at all. It was a mistake—this friend of mine mistaking somebody else for me.
     That’s not a coincidence.”
    “Two people looking alike is a coincidence,” I said.
    Lou shrugged. “They say everybody has a double.”
    “Maybe. There certainly seem to be plenty of look-alikes. Think of movie stars and politicians. They all have look-alikes.”
    We sat in reflective silence for a while. Lou finished his brandy and set down the glass with an air of finality. “Well,”
     he said, “if this is the book you want to do, just go ahead and do it. I think we’ll hook Mike on a couple of chapters—and
     probably make a better deal.”
    With that, he signaled for the check, which I tried to pay, but Lou insisted it was his and scribbled his name across it.
     When we parted on the sidewalk, Lou shook my hand, grasping my elbow at the same time, as he always did.
    “Let me know how you’re getting on with the book,” he said. “And give my love to Sara when you talk to her.”
    He walked off toward his office, still puffing great clouds of smoke from what remained of his cigar. I set off in the opposite
     direction.
    The actor Anthony Hopkins, asked to play a role in the film
The Girl from Petrovka,
wanted to read the novel by George Feifer on which it was to be based, but could not find a copy in any London bookshop.
     Waiting for an Underground train at Leicester Square station, he came across a book left on a seat. It was a copy of the novel,
     with some scribbled notes in the margin. Meeting the author later, Hopkins learned that a friend had lost Feifer’s annotated
     copy of the book. It was the copy Hopkins had found.
    I was standing in a secondhand bookshop that I’d strolled up to in the Village. There is something called “the library angel”
     with which all writers and students are familiar. It refers to the way in which, whenever you start researching some particular
     subject, relevant books and pieces of information start falling into your lap as though by magic. It’s a little like those
     times that everyone has experienced, not just writers, when you come across some new and rather obscure word, then for the
     next few days find it being so widely and frequently used that you can’t believe you hadn’t been aware of it before.
    Anyway, there I was trawling the shelves in search of anything on coincidence or synchronicity. This 1990 book by Brian Inglis
     was the first I pulled down, and the page at which I opened it carried the