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by the two men hauling his bags. The upper two floors of the house were joined by a spiral staircase; Barron’s bedroom was directly above the drawing-room. He directed the suitcases to be unpacked as soon as he entered the drawing-room. The central-heating system was blowing forced air throughout the apartment. He removed his coat and scarf, and walked to the unlit marble fireplace and stood with his back to the hearth, as if this was the source of heat. Alberto had silently withdrawn, and Schialli, having unpacked the luggage in the bedroom and hung the clothing away, brought Barron a negroni and soda.
    â€˜Wait fifteen minutes, then send the woman to me,’ Barron said.
    â€˜Of course.’ Schialli went out.
    Barron sipped the drink and moved around the room, which was furnished in an eclectic way with pieces purchased here in Venice. There might have been an uneasy juxtaposition of periods in the eye of an antique dealer, but Barron bought whatever appealed to him. A room was your own because you made it so. It was the same with the world, he thought. It was whatever you wanted it to be – if you had the power and the urge to shape it.
    He wandered for a time, rippling the keys of a seventeenth-century spinet that occupied the window space where amber and claret brocade curtains hung. Possessions and belongings: one might enjoy them, but never to the point where they owned you. Everything was dispensable in the end. Everything could be returned to the auction room. He went back to the fireplace, the mantelpiece of which was littered with framed photographs.
    There was a picture of Barron arm-wrestling with the late Ferdinand Marcos in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. In the shot Marcos is smiling, but behind the smile is the stress of a man whose machismo is on trial. There was another of him dancing with Imelda at her private disco in the Malacanang Palace during the dizzily surreal days of her reign when, taking time out from grandiose schemes of building monuments to herself, all she did was dance and sing ‘The Impossible Dream’. He still sent her Christmas cards, hand-printed for him by a small company in Macon, Georgia. A third photograph was of Barron with Fidel Castro in the courtyard of a whitewashed house in the Granma Province of Cuba. Fidel, unsmiling, has one hand laid on Barron’s arm in a gesture that appears to suggest restraint. The last picture was of Barron in the company of William J. Caan, the United States Ambassador to Britain. Good old Bill has his arm linked with Barron’s in the shot, the big breezy ambassadorial smile in place.
    Somebody had once half-jestingly said of Barron that he knew everybody in the world. He was on first-name terms with a variety of pols and show-business sorts. He’d known Visconti and Truffaut. He’d spent time in the company of Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Jerry Brown. Barron seemed to exist in that shadowland of fame where politics and show business become one and the same, that place of dreams and power. He’d fallen under the spell of this hinterland; its landscape enchanted him. Men of power had about them a special presence. They moved through the world with a disregard for the banal demands of life. They rose above the commonplace; they ascended into their own heavens.
    Barron saw his reflection in a mirror over the mantelpiece. No matter the season, he always had a suntan. He habitually wore white or beige suits to underline his bronzed features. He seemed never to age. Rumours of surgical adjustment were always smilingly denied. Despite his public image, he remained a private man. He was congenial, wealthy, handsome, he had a marvellously photogenic face – but what did anybody really know about him? Where did his bucks come from? How did he get to be such a high-roller?
    On the dinner circuit that rolled from Gstaad to Aspen and then to Monte Carlo, there were those who said he’d inherited wealth, while