He dictated a phone number to me, digit by careful digit, and told me whose it was.

“My personal attorney,” he said.

“He has worked for me, and only for me, for a very long time.

He is not Christopher’s man.

He is one of the very few people left in this world that I still trust completely.” Together we composed a short and careful message, and we sent it, and then, on his instruction, we erased the record of it entirely, wiping the log clean so that no one who searched the phone would ever know a word had gone out.

It became, in the days that followed, a strange sort of partnership, and I would be lying if I said there was no dark humor in it.