His apartment was on the fifth floor. There was no elevator. Each flight of stairs was a grim adventure. I heard the scurrying of giant rats, I choked and retched at foul unfamiliar odors, I imagined seven-year-old murderers lurking in every pool of shadow. Without incident I reached his door. He opened before I could find the bell. Even in this heat he wore a white shirt with buttoned collar, a gray tweed jacket, a brown necktie. He looked like a schoolmaster waiting to hear me recite my Latin conjugations and declensions. “You see?” he said. “Safe and sound. I knew. No harm.”

Carvajal lived in three rooms: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen. The ceilings were low, the plaster was cracking, the faded green walls looked as if they had last been painted in the days of Tricky Dick Nixon. The furniture was even older, with a Truman-era look to it, floppy and overstuffed, floral slipcovers and sturdy rhinocerous legs. The air was unconditioned and stifling; the illumination was incandescent and dim; the TV was an archaic table model; the kitchen sink had running water, not ultrasonics. When I was growing up in the mid-1970s, one of my closest friends was a boy whose father had died in Vietnam. He lived with his grandparents, and their place looked exactly like this one. Carvajal’s apartment eerily recaptured the texture of mid-century America; it was like a movie set, or a period room at the Smithsonian.

With remote, absentminded hospitality he settled me on the battered living-room sofa and apologized for having neither drink nor drug to offer me. He was not an indulger, he explained, and very little was sold in this neighborhood. “It doesn’t matter,” I said grandly. “A glass of water will be fine.”

The water was tepid and faintly rusty. That’s fine, too, I told myself. I sat unnaturally upright, spine rigid, legs tense. Carvajal, perching on the cushion of the armchair to my right, observed, “You look uncomfortable, Mr. Nichols.”

“I’ll unwind in a minute or two. The trip out here—”

“Of course.”

“But no one bothered me in the street. I have to confess I was expecting trouble, but—”

“I told you no harm would come.”

“Still—”

“But I told you,” he said mildly. “Didn’t you believe me? You should have believed me, Mr. Nichols. You know that.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said, thinking, Gilmartin, gellation, Leydecker. Carvajal offered me more water. I smiled mechanically and shook my head. There was a sticky silence. After a moment I said, “This is a strange part of town for a person like you to choose.”

“Strange? Why?”

“A man of your means could live anywhere in the city.”

“I know.”

“Why here, then?”

“I’ve always lived here,” he said softly. “This is the only home I’ve ever known. These furnishings belonged to my mother, and some to her mother. I hear the echoes of familiar voices in these rooms, Mr. Nichols. I feel the living presence of the past. Is that so odd, to go on living where one has always lived?”

“But the neighborhood—”

“Has deteriorated, yes. Sixty years bring great changes. But the changes haven’t been perceptible to me in any important way. A gentle decline, year by year, then perhaps a steeper decline, but I make allowances, I make adjustments, I grow accustomed to what is new and make it part of what has always been. And everything is so familiar to me, Mr. Nichols — the names written in the wet cement when the pavement was new long ago, the great ailanthus tree in the schoolyard, the weatherbeaten gargoyles over the doorway of the building across the street. Do you understand what I’m saying? Why should I leave these things for a sleek Staten Island condo?”

“The danger, for one.”

“There’s no danger. Not for me. These people regard me as the little man who’s always been here, the symbol of stability, the one constant in a universe of entropic flow. I have a ritualistic value for them. I’m some sort of good-luck token, perhaps. At any rate no one who lives here has ever molested me. No one ever will.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

“Yes,” he said, with monolithic assurance, looking straight into my eyes, and I felt that chill again, that sense of standing on the rim of an abyss beyond my fathoming. There was another long silence. There was force flowing from him — a power altogether at odds with his drab appearance, his mild manner, his numb, burned-out expression — and that force immobilized me. I might have been sitting frozen for an hour. At length he said, “You wanted to ask me some questions, Mr. Nichols.”

I nodded. Taking a deep breath, I plunged in. “You knew Leydecker was going to die this spring, didn’t you? I mean, you didn’t just guess he’d die. You knew.”

“Yes.” That same final, uncontestable yes.

“You knew that Gilmartin would get into trouble. You knew that oil tankers would spill ungelled oil.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“You know what the stock market is going to do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and you’ve made millions of dollars by using that knowledge.”

“That’s also true.”

“Therefore it’s fair to say that you see future events with extraordinary clarity, with supernatural clarity, Mr. Carvajal.”

“As do you.”

“Wrong,” I said. “I don’t see future events at all. I’ve got no vision whatsoever of things to come. I’m merely very very good at guessing, at weighing probabilities and coming up with the most likely pattern, but I don’t really see, I can’t ever be certain that I’m right, just reasonably confident. Because all I’m doing is guessing. You see. You told me almost as much when we met in Bob Lombroso’s office: I guess; you see. The future is like a movie playing inside your mind. Am I right?”

“You know you are, Mr. Nichols.”

“Yes. I know I am. There can’t be any doubt of it. I’m aware of what can be accomplished by stochastic methods, and the things you do go beyond the possibilities of guesswork. Maybe I could have predicted the likelihood of a couple of oil-tanker breakups, but not that Leydecker would drop dead or that Gilmartin would be exposed as a crook. I might have guessed that some key political figure would die this spring, but never which one. I might have guessed that some state politician would get busted, but not by name. Your predictions were exact and specific. That’s not probabilistic forecasting. That’s more like sorcery, Mr. Carvajal. By definition, the future is unknowable. But you seem to know a great deal about the future.”

“About the immediate future, yes. Yes, I do, Mr. Nichols.”

“Only the immediate future?”

He laughed. “Do you think my mind penetrates all of space and time?”

“At this point I have no idea what your mind penetrates. I wish I knew. I wish I had some notion of how it works and what its limits are.”

“It works as you described it,” Carvajal replied. “When I want to, I see. A vision of things to come plays within me like a film.” His voice was utterly matter-of-fact. He sounded almost bored. “Is that the only thing you came here to find out?”

“Don’t you know? Surely you’ve seen the film of this conversation already.”

“Of course I have.”

“But you’ve forgotten some of the details?”

“I rarely forget anything,” Carvajal said, sighing.

“Then you must know what else I’m going to ask.”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Even so, you won’t answer it unless I ask it.”

“Yes.”

“Suppose I don’t,” I said. “Suppose I just leave right now, without doing what I’m supposed to have done.”

“That won’t be possible,” said Carvajal evenly. “I remember the course this conversation must take, and you don’t leave before asking your next question. There’s only one way for things to happen. You have no choice but to say and do the things I saw you say and do.”

“Are you a god, decreeing the events of my life?”