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He topped up the brandies for those who wanted it.
    When the Jacksons departed around eleven, Jane asked Roland if he didn’t think it had been a successful evening, because she thought it had been. Jane stood proudly in the living room, and opened her arms, smiling.
    “Yes, my love. It was.” Roland put his arms around her waist, held her close for a moment, without passion, without any sexual pleasure whatsoever, but with the pleasure of companionship. His embrace was like saying, “Thanks for cooking the dinner and making it a nice evening.”
    Bertie was stowed away in his room, in his low bed, Roland was sure, though he hadn’t accompanied Jane when she was trying to settle him for the night. Jane was doing things in the kitchen now. Roland went to a corner of the bedroom where he and Jane stacked old newspapers. Because of Roland’s work, he kept newspapers a long while, in case he had to look for a new tax law, or bond issue, or any of a dozen such bits of news that he or his colleagues might not have cut out. What he was looking for was not old and was rather specific: an item about a man found dead on a sidewalk during the night of April 26–27. In about four minutes, Roland found an item not two inches long in a newspaper one day later than he had thought it might be. man found strangled was the little heading. Francisco Baltar, 46, said the report, had been found strangled on East 47th Street. Robbery had evidently been the motive. Mr. Baltar had been a consulting engineer of Vito, a Spanish agricultural firm, and had been in New York for a short stay on business. Police were questioning suspects, the item concluded.
    Robbery, Roland thought with astonishment. Not the same man, surely, unless someone had robbed the corpse. Roland realized that this was pretty likely, in New York. A robber might suppose the man was drunk or drugged, and seize the opportunity to relieve him of wallet and wristwatch and whatever. The street fitted, Roland thought, and the date. And the man’s age. But Spanish, with that brownish hair? Well, Roland had heard of blond Spaniards.
    But they hadn’t mentioned a missing button.
    On the other hand, why should they mention a missing button in an item as short as this? As clues went, a grayish brown button was infinitesimal. For the police to find the button in Roland’s right-hand pocket (he kept the button in that pocket no matter which trousers he wore) would be like finding a needle in a haystack. And noticing the absence of a button on the man’s jacket, why should the police assume the murderer had taken it?
    Nevertheless, the finding of the corpse—or a corpse—gave the button a greater significance. The button became more dangerous. Roland thought of putting it in Jane’s little tin box which held an assortment of buttons, but when he opened the box and saw the hundred or more innocent buttons of all sizes there, Roland simply could not.
    Throw it away, Roland thought. Down the garbage chute in the hall. Better yet and easier, straight into the big plastic bag in the kitchen. Who’d ever notice or find it? Roland realized that he wanted to keep the button.
    And as the weeks went by, the button took on varying meanings to Roland. Sometimes it seemed a token of guilt, proof of what he had done, and he felt frightened. Or on days when Roland happened to be in a cheery mood, the button became a joke, a prop in a story that he had told to himself: that he had strangled a stranger and snatched a button off the stranger’s jacket to prove it.
    “Absurd,” Roland murmured to himself one sunny day in his office as he stood by his window, turning the button over in his fingers, scrutinizing its grayish brown horn, its four empty holes. “Just a nutty fantasy!” Well, no need ever to tell anyone about it, he thought, and chuckled. He dropped the button into his right-hand pocket and returned to his desk.
    He and Jane were going to a resort hotel in the Adirondacks for the last