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tunnel of cool night air filled with my memory of their singing, there they were.
    With the bottle in my hand, held at the neck the way you'd carry a fishing pole, I stared at them. The glasses on the black lacquered table around which they were sitting were beaded on the outside and sparkling like ice. At the center of the table was a bowl of celery and olives.
    When the singers saw me, they looked at one another, shrugged, and motioned for me to approach. It was not as if circus stars had invited an awed child into their midst—we were roughly the same age, I had a very vivid and emotional sense of Europe, having recently played my small part in the greatest opera in all of history, and, to my profound discomfort, I was dressed like a minister of finance. Still, my heart jumped, and I was anxious not to be lost in their august consideration of music and art.
    But, of course, being artists, they wanted to talk only about money, and they displayed an exaggerated respect for me, as my business was money at its most arcane. People love that. I asked question after question about the structure of an aria and the ineffable beauties of harmony, timing, and tone. They asked question after question about exchange rates, tax treaties, and arbitrage. And then, as the night deepened, we began to talk of our childhoods, and that is how I got to know them, and they to know me.
    They are all dead now. I watched from afar as they dropped, one by one, and though they were very rich, when they passed away they were not remembered for their money.
    I knew then, at the bar in the Hassler, that my questions were better and more important than theirs, because their work was far better and more important than mine. I remembered the line of silver trumpets (in Italy, the brass sections are often silvered) echoing off the garden walls of the Villa Doria, and as we spoke—they of growing up in villages and cities in Spain and northern Italy, and I of the Hudson and the private sanitarium at Château Parfilage (it was a lunatic asylum, actually)—I decided that I would quit the firm.
    When I told them this, with great conviction, they thought I was drunk, but I pointed out that I had been drinking only mineral water. At first, as a gesture of elegance and courtesy, they were opposed, as you must be if someone tells you he is about to throw over his career to join the circus. And, I suppose, being familiar with their own magnetic effect, they were always cautioning romantics who wanted to follow in their perilous and glorious footsteps.
    But, then, inexplicably, they warmed to the idea. The Spaniard asked if I were independently wealthy. I shook my head from side to side like a ventriloquist's dummy.
    "To know," he asked. "How you live?"
    The two Italians chimed in simultaneously (these people could time a note the way Robin Hood could shoot an arrow). "When you leave," they said, in C major, "you should be very meticulous. Make sure to turn off the lights, and take all the money with you."
    "Now, you may have a point there," I said. "You have really hit upon something, you know?" They could sing for a million years and they would not have a hundredth of what passed through Stillman and Chase in a day. And I, I could have a heart attack in Greenwich after several more decades of asphyxiation, and die in a private room in a teaching hospital, or I could spend a few magnificent and tense years planning, coming alive with illicit electricity—and then abscond with enough to buy five hundred houses in Greenwich and die in as many teaching hospitals as I wanted.
    "What a good idea!" I said. "I hadn't thought of it!"
    "Bankers, after all," said the Austrian, who—what else—was more serious than the others, "are the worst kind of dogs." I hadn't really seen myself that way, but I was not offended.
    We made a plan. They were as animated as if they were singing, but I was fooling them, for as we went through the elements I was