He’d recognized Keith Stolarsky, but not before thinking, How could they let that bum in here? Casual Western dress wasn’t frowned on in Singapore, so long as that meant appalling tourist pastels, striped Lacoste polo shirts, and rack-fresh sports or hip-hop gear, Juicy Couture, and so forth. And that was what you saw. Not this. The American, who had a posture like a question mark, was dressed in layers of baggy, unwashed black polyester, too tight on his paunch, and a Windbreaker over black jeans and running shoes—a costume exhumed from some Dungeons & Dragons basement. His hair, greasy over his ears, had been combed back from an unhealthy scalp; his shave looked five days old. Of course, the fact that Bruno found this arresting was perhaps a sign that he’d been in Singapore too long. The man would have been invisible in America, unless he buttonholed you for a handout.

Then the man’s features and general comportment, his warped grin and pigeon walk, resolved into those of Bruno’s boyhood acquaintance Keith Stolarsky. Bruno marvelled at the treacherous intensity of restored memory. Since he’d left Berkeley at age seventeen, he’d never once stopped to recall the teen-ager named Keith Stolarsky. Indeed, Stolarsky had been purposely forgotten, with so much else. Yet in his presence each lost gesture and intonation of Stolarsky’s lined up on the front shelf of Bruno’s awareness, waiting to be retrieved. By this process, Stolarsky was magically doubled in Bruno’s gaze. He was simultaneously a forty-seven-year-old wreck—Stolarsky had been a year behind Bruno at Berkeley High—and a frisky, provocative fourteen-year-old, late to mature physically but with an insinuating, gremlin wit.

“Someone you know?” Edgar Falk asked, at the instant Bruno suffered this recognition. Nothing escaped Falk.

“Yes,” Bruno said. “From long ago.”

“A gambler?”

“I have no idea.”

Falk’s question, though, was really no different from Bruno’s: What was a man who looked like Keith Stolarsky doing here? The Smoker’s Club wasn’t merely a V.I.P. lounge; it was a secret one, unlisted in the Marina Bay Sands Casino’s own brochures. One didn’t merely wander in. One learned of the place in an aside or a whisper, and was invited. The club eschewed the sterile gloss of the complex’s hotel and casino in favor of a suggestion of Old World glamour: burnished wood panels, brass fixtures, bevelled mirrors. A cloud of cigar fume marked an alcove featuring a never-ending poker game.

In Falk and Bruno’s case, they’d come to the Smoker’s Club to meet Billy Yik Tho Lim, the former director of the I.S.D., Singapore’s secret police. Lim had got involved in a long-term investment of Falk’s, the fixing of a Korean football match—a matter outside Bruno’s scope of expertise. But in the process the former director had told Falk that he hoped to test himself against the backgammon wizard Falk had been bragging about.

Falk had been engineering this assignation for weeks, and had set aside a sizable stake. Bruno had his backgammon set on the chair beside him, though the contest was likely to be moved somewhere else. Bruno was always ready. He preferred to use his own set, with its smoothly inlaid points, its simple wood checkers, stained light and dark. No ivory or mother of pearl, no stitched felt or leather points to cushion the play. The clacking of the checkers on the hardwood points was the music of honest thought, resounding in silence as it navigated the fortunes told by the pips on the dice. Bruno had for his entire life associated backgammon with candor, the dice not determining fate so much as revealing character.

He doubted a man like Lim would play in view of gawkers and bystanders. An apparition like Keith Stolarsky might spook him completely.

Stolarsky hadn’t come in alone. He was accompanied by a woman, dark-haired and robustly handsome, at least forty when you examined the lines around her mouth, but healthier than Stolarsky by a mile. The woman was dressed in black, too, only to a different effect. A tight sweater and pegged jeans gave the appearance of a film actress dressed slightly down for a part as the girlfriend of a jazz musician or Beat poet. The sweater was tucked above a wide, silver-buckled belt; the refusal to conceal her thick waist was itself brazenly attractive.

“Invite them over,” Falk suggested.

“Why should I do that?”

“For amusement.”

“He doesn’t recognize me. He probably won’t remember me.”

“I doubt that.”

“I haven’t seen him since we were children.” Bruno knew it was the wrong word for who he’d been when he last saw Stolarsky, before he’d departed Berkeley for good. As if catching this thought, Falk said, with luxuriant irony, “You were never a child.”

Bruno’s decision was made for him. He and Falk were sitting near enough to the path between the entrance and the bar that Keith Stolarsky and his companion passed their table.

“No fucking way.”

“Hello, Keith,” Bruno said, as airily as he could manage.

“Alexander Bruno,” Stolarsky said. “Figures you’d turn up in a place like this.” Stolarsky addressed the woman. “I once told you about this guy. We were eating at Chez Panisse, remember? That there was a kid in my high school who worked as a waiter there, who all the moms were in love with? Then he just floated away? This is that guy.”

“I’m Edgar Falk,” said Falk, holding out his hand.

Stolarsky gazed at it for a crucial second, as if unsure. His hands had been shoved into his pockets, and he drew out just one.

“Keith,” he said. “This is Tira.”

She stuck out her own hand, and Bruno stood a little to accept it, warm and strong, into his. “Tira Harpaz,” she said. Was adding her last name a rebuke to Stolarsky’s manners?

If so, Stolarsky wasn’t chastened. “What a fucking scenario this is, huh?” he said to Bruno.

“The Smoker’s Club?”

“Sure, and Marina Bay Sands, and Singapore, the whole kit and caboodle.”

“I suppose so.” Bruno released Tira Harpaz’s hand and came up from his chair. “Please sit. What would you like to drink?” He was conscious of wishing to live up to any legend he’d left in his wake at Berkeley High.

“Nah, you sit, let me buy you a round,” Stolarsky said. “I want to take a look at this joint. What are you having?”

“Another of these—a Tiger Beer, it’s called. But I’ll go to the bar with you.”

Falk waved his hand across the top of his glass, which Bruno knew contained only cranberry juice and soda.

“I’ll have a Tiger Beer, too,” Tira Harpaz said, slipping into a seat.

“Are you staying at the Sands?” Bruno asked.

“Not a fucking chance,” Stolarsky said. “I’d feel like a rat in a psych experiment. We’re at Raffles. After some of the joints in Thailand and Sri Lanka, we were ready for a little five-star action. The place is a trip, it’s got that total Kipling vibe.”

“Naturally,” Falk said. “He lodged there.”

Again, Stolarsky paused, to measure Falk. Bruno could sympathize. He recalled his first impression of Falk, at White’s, in London. Bruno had been there at the whim of an English peer from whom he’d removed thirty thousand pounds, and who plainly regarded seeing Bruno do similar damage to a number of his friends as adequate compensation for his losses. To the great amusement of the callow swells in the peer’s circle, Falk had been presented to Bruno as “the other American.” With his dyed, seemingly lacquered hair and rouged cheeks, Falk had struck Bruno as much older than sixty, an aging queen with everything to conceal.