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whipping a great man would be terrible.”
    “Or an innocent one,” Julian said.
    We continued on, now down the hill and toward the bridge below the town. I kept quiet for a time, but finally made an attempt to lighten the mood that had descended upon us.
    “So, when are you coming back to the States?” I asked.
    “Never,” Julian answered so abruptly that I wondered if he had only just made that stark decision. “At least not to live.”
    And so there would be no brilliant career? No rising through the ranks of government? He would never be secretary of state? Wild and unreal as those dreams had been, were they truly to be abandoned now?
    All of this I voiced in a simple question.
    “Are you sure, Julian?”
    He stopped and looked at me. “Yes.”
    His gaze had something in it that chilled me, something I expected him to voice, so that it surprised me when he said nothing more as we descended the slope that led to the river and the bridge.
    I was still reliving that long-ago moment when the phone rang.
    It was Loretta.
    “Harry called,” she said.
    She meant Harry Gibbons, Julian’s editor.
    “We’ve agreed that you should deliver the eulogy at Julian’s memorial service,” Loretta said.
    She repeated what she’d told me earlier: that it was to be a quiet affair, just a few friends and associates.
    “Anyway, Harry has a few things you might want to include,” she added. “He thought the two of you should discuss it at his office tomorrow afternoon.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    A pause, then, “Are you all right, Philip?”
    It was the same question my father had asked only an hour or so before, and I gave the same answer. “I’m fine.”
    “You seem so . . . quiet.”
    “It’s how I grieve, I suppose.”
    “Yes, I can see that in you,” Loretta told me. A brief silence, then, “Well, good night, Philip.”
    “Good night.”
    I hung up the phone, glanced down at the book in my lap. The Tortures of Cuenca with its stark cover, a drawing of the two hapless victims of that crime huddled in the dusty corner of a Spanish prison, shackled hand and foot, waiting, as they eternally would be in this rendering, for the torturer’s approach. I’d found the cover quite disturbing and said so to Julian. He’d replied with the tale of Ned Kelly’s execution, how the murderous rogue had stood on his Australian gallows, peered down at the reveling crowd, then turned to the hangman and, with a shrug, uttered his last words. “Such is life.”
    I peered into the frightened eyes of these baffled and despairing men a moment longer. Had this, in the end, been Julian’s only view of life?
    I drew my gaze back to the window. The park beyond it was well lighted, as it had always been, a fact that made me wonder why its reaches seemed so much darker to me now.
    Darker to me now?
    Heavy-handed, I decided, now in critical judgment of my own last thought. Too much foreshadowing. In a novel, as the last line of a chapter, it would make a wary reader groan.

4
    “When Bernal Díaz first came with Cortés to the central market in Mexico City, he found little bowls of human feces for sale,” Harry said. “They were used in tanning leather, and Díaz said that the tanners were going around sniffing at these bowls to find the very best of the lot.”
    We were sitting in Harry’s office on Sixth Avenue. It was spacious with a large window overlooking the street. From such a vantage point, I thought, you could actually think of yourself as a prince of the city, something Harry clearly did.
    “That has always been my view of Julian,” Harry continued. “That he was a very fine craftsman who worked with disgusting materials.”
    “Did you ever tell him that?” I asked.
    “Of course not,” Harry answered. “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. After that book about Cuenca, Julian never considered writing anything but that grim stuff.” He shook his head as if in the face of such repellent work. “Like that African