I answered all of them and I had the note on my phone and I read from it, and I want to say that the fact that I had a note was the most fortunate thing that has ever happened to me and also that it made me look, for about four days, considerably stranger than an innocent person is supposed to look.

A woman asked me, at one point, in a perfectly pleasant voice: “You made notes in the car park?”

And I said, “I’m a court reporter.”

And she said, “Okay,” and wrote it down.

I have since been told by my own attorney — I will get to why I had one — that the note is the single reason the first seventy-two hours went the way they did rather than a considerably worse way.

A contemporaneous record made before anybody knew there was anything to record is, in her words, “the closest thing to a time machine that exists in this business.”