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anything, Isaac?”
    “They’re worth something, yes. Let’s say that with these stones you could buy a small country,” he murmured.
    “Are you kidding?”
    “These are the largest and the most perfect diamonds I have ever seen. Where were they? It isn’t possible that a treasure like this could have gone unnoticed. I know all the important stones in existence, but I have never heard of these, Kate.”
    “Ask them to bring us some coffee and a shot of vodka, Isaac. And get comfortable, because I’m going to tell you an interesting story,” Kate Cold replied.
    And so she informed her good friend about a teenage Brazilian girl who had climbed a mysterious mountain in the Upper Orinoco, led by a dream and by a naked witch man to the place where she found the eggs in an eagle’s nest. Kate told him how the girl had entrusted that fortune to Alexander, her grandson, charging him with the mission of using it to help a certain tribe of Indians, the People of the Mist, who were still living in the Stone Age. Isaac Rosenblat listened courteously, not believing a word of the preposterous story. Not even a blithering idiot would swallow a pack of fantasies like that, he thought. He felt sure that his old sweetheart had gotten mixed up in some shady business, or that she had discovered a fabulous mine. He knew that Kate would never tell him the straight story. And, well, that was her right. He sighed again.
    “I see you don’t believe me, Isaac,” the eccentric writer muttered, tossing back anothershot of vodka to calm a fit of coughing.
    “I suppose you will admit that this is a rather unusual story, Kate?”
    “And I still haven’t told you about the Beasts, the giant, hairy, stinking . . .”
    “That’s all right, Kate, I don’t think I need further details,” the jeweler interrupted, defeated.
    “I need to turn these boulders into capital to set up a foundation. I promised my grandson that the money would be used to protect the People of the Mist, which is what those invisible Indians are called, and . . .”
    “Invisible?”
    “Well, they’re not exactly invisible, Isaac, but they seem to be. It’s like a magic trick. Nadia Santos says that . . .”
    “And who is Nadia Santos?”
    “The girl who found the diamonds. I already told you that. Will you help me, Isaac?”
    “I’ll help you, Kate, as long as it’s legal.”
    And that was how the respectable Isaac Rosenblat became guardian of the three awesome stones; how he was put in charge of turning them into hard cash; how he invested the capital wisely; and how he helped Kate Cold create the Diamond Foundation. He advised her to appoint the anthropologist Ludovic Leblanc president but to keep control of the money in her own hands. Which is how Isaac Rosenblat and Kate Cold renewed a friendship that lay dormant for forty years.
    “Did you know that I’m widowed too, Kate?” he confessed that same night as they went out to have dinner together.
    “I hope you’re not planning to propose, Isaac. I haven’t washed a husband’s socks for a long time, and I’m not going to start now.” Kate laughed.
    They toasted the diamonds.
    A few months later Kate sat at her computer, wearing nothing over her lean body but a ragged T-shirt that stopped at mid-thigh, revealing her bony knees, her vein- and scar-traced legs, and her strong walker’s feet. Above her head the blades of a ceiling fan buzzed like a swarm of flies, doing little to relieve the suffocating heat of New York in the summer. For some time—at least sixteen or seventeen years—the writer had contemplated the possibility of installing air conditioning in her apartment but hadn’t yet found the time to do it. Sweat soaked her hair and trickled down her back as her fingers furiously attacked the keyboard. She knew she had only to brush the computer keys, but she was a creature of habit and so she pounded them, as she had once pounded her now-antiquated typewriter.
    On one side of her