Let me tell the story of that episode now. At a safe distance I had tracked him as he 
walked briskly in the late evening, masking my thoughts as skillfully as he always masked 
his own. What a striking figure he made under the elm trees along the Singel gracht, as 
he stopped again and again to admire the narrow old three- and four-storey Dutch houses, 
with their high step gables, and bright windows left undraped, it seemed, for the 
pleasure of the passersby.
  
  I sensed a change in him almost at once. He carried his cane as always, though it was 
plain he still had no need of it, and he flipped it upon his shoulder as he'd done 
before. But there was a brooding to him as he walked; a pronounced dissatisfaction; and 
hour after hour passed during which he wandered as if time were of no importance at all.
  
  It was very clear to me soon that David was reminiscing, and now and then I did manage 
to catch some pungent image of his youth in the tropics, even flashes of a verdant jungle 
so very different from this wintry northern city, which was surely never warm. I had not 
had my dream of the tiger yet. I did not know what this meant.
  
  It was tantalizingly fragmentary. David's skills at keeping his thoughts inside were 
simply too good.
  
  On and on he walked, however, sometimes as if he were being driven, and on and on I 
followed, feeling strangely comforted by the mere sight of him several blocks ahead.
  
  Had it not been for the bicycles forever whizzing past him, he would have looked like a 
young man. But the bicycles startled him. He had an old man's inordinate fear of being 
struck down and hurt. He'd look resentfully after the young riders. Then he'd fall back 
into his thoughts.
  
  It was almost dawn when he inevitably returned to the Motherhouse. And surely he must 
have slept the greater part of each day.
  
  He was already walking again when I caught up with him one evening, and once again 
there seemed no destination in particular. Rather he meandered through Amsterdam's many 
small cobblestoned streets. He seemed to like it as much as I knew he liked Venice, and 
with reason, for the cities, both dense and darkly colored, have, in spite of all their 
marked differences, a similar charm. That one is a Catholic city, rank and full of lovely 
decay, and the other is Protestant and therefore very clean and efficient, made me, now 
and then, smile.
  
  The following night, he was again on his own, whistling to himself as he covered the 
miles briskly, and it soon came clear to me that he was avoiding the Motherhouse. Indeed, 
he seemed to be avoiding everything, and when one of his old friends-another Englishman 
and a member of the order- chanced to meet him unexpectedly near a bookseller's in the 
Leidsestraat, it was plain from the conversation that David had not been himself for some 
time.
  
  The British are so very polite in discussing and diagnosing such matters. But this is 
what I separated out from all the marvelous diplomacy. David was neglecting his duties as 
Superior General. David spent all his time away from the Mother-house. When in England, 
David went to his ancestral home in the Cotswolds more and more often. What was wrong?
  
  David merely shrugged off all these various suggestions as if he could not retain 
interest in the exchange. He made some vague remark to the effect that the Talamasca 
could run itself without a Superior General for a century, it was so well disciplined and 
tradition bound, and filled with dedicated members. Then off he went to browse in the 
bookseller's, where he bought a paperback translation in English of Goethe's Faust. Then 
he dined alone in a small Indonesian restaurant, with Faust propped before him, eyes 
racing over the pages, as he consumed his spicy feast.
  
  As he was busy with his knife and fork, I went back to the bookstore and bought a copy 
of the very same book. What a bizarre piece of work!
  
  I can't claim to have understood it, or why David was reading it. Indeed it frightened 
me that the reason might be obvious and perhaps I rejected the idea at once.
  
  Nevertheless I rather loved it, especially the ending, where Faust went to heaven, of 
course. I don't think that happened in the older legends. Faust always went to hell. I 
wrote it off to Goethe's Romantic optimism, and the fact that he had been so old by the 
time he wrote the end. The work of the very old is always extremely powerful and 
intriguing, and infinitely worth pondering, and all the more perhaps because creative 
stamina deserts so many artists before they are truly old.
  
  In the very small hours, after David had vanished into the Motherhouse, I roamed the 
city alone. I wanted to know it because he knew it, because Amsterdam was part of his 
life.
  
  I wandered through the enormous Rijksmuseum, perusing the paintings of Rembrandt, whom 
I had always loved. I crept like a thief through the house of Rembrandt in the 
Jodenbree-straat, now made into a little shrine for the public during daylight hours, and 
I walked the many narrow lanes of the city, feeling the shimmer of olden times. Amsterdam 
is an exciting place, swarming with young people from all over the new homogenized 
Europe, a city that never sleeps.
  
  I probably would never have come here had it not been for David. This city had never 
caught my fancy. And now I found it most agreeable, a vampire's city for its vast 
late-night crowds, but it was David of course that I wanted to see. I realized I could 
not leave without at least exchanging a few words.
  
  Finally, a week after my arrival, I found David in the empty Rijksmuseum, just after 
sunset, sitting on the bench before the great Rembrandt portrait of the Members of the 
Drapers' Guild.
  
  Did David know, somehow, that I'd been there? Impossible, yet there he was.
  
  And it was obvious from his conversation with the guard- who was just taking his leave 
of David-that his venerable order of mossback snoops contributed mightily to the arts of 
the various cities in which they were domiciled. So it was an easy thing for the members 
to gain access to museums to see their treasures when the public was barred.
  
  And to think, I have to break into these places like a cheap crook!