A week after my visit to Carvajal he phoned to ask if I cared to have lunch with him the next day. So I met him, at his suggestion, at the Merchants and Shippers Club down in the financial district.

The venue surprised me. Merchants and Shippers is one of those venerable Wall Street watering holes populated exclusively by high-echelon brokers and bankers on a members-only basis, and when I say exclusively I mean that even Bob Lombroso, who is a tenth-generation American and very much a power on the Street, is tacitly barred from membership by his Judaism and chooses not to make a fuss about it. As in all such places, wealth alone isn’t enough to get you in: you must be clubbable, a congenial and decorous man of the right ancestry who went to the right schools and belongs to the right firm. So far as I could see, Carvajal had nothing going for him along those lines. His richesse was nouveau and he was by nature an outsider, with none of the required prep-school background and high corporate affiliations. How had he managed to wangle a membership?

“I inherited it,” he told me smugly as we settled into cozy, resilient well-upholstered chairs beside a window sixty floors above the turbulent street. “One of my forefathers was a founding member, in 1823. The charter provides that the eleven founding memberships descend automatically to the eldest sons of eldest sons, world without end. Some very disreputable sorts have marred the sanctity of the organization because of that clause.” He flashed a sudden and surprisingly wicked grin. “I come here about once every five years. You’ll notice I’ve worn my best suit.”

Indeed he had — a pleated gold and green herringbone doublet that was perhaps a decade past its prime but still had far more glitter and dash than the rest of his dim and fusty wardrobe. Carvajal, in fact, seemed considerably transformed today, more animated, more vigorous, even playful, distinctly younger than the bleak and ashen man I had come to know.

I said, “I didn’t realize you had ancestors.”

“There were Carvajals in the New World long before the Mayflower set out for Plymouth. We were very important in Florida in the early eighteenth century. When the English annexed Florida in 1763, one branch of the family moved to New York, and I think there was a time when we owned half the waterfront and most of the Upper West Side. But we were wiped out in the Panic of 1837 and I’m the first member of the family in a century and a half who’s risen above genteel poverty. But even in the worst times we kept up our hereditary membership in the club.” He gestured at the splendid redwood-paneled walls, the gleaming chrome-trimmed windows, the discreet recessed lighting. All about us sat titans of industry and finance, making and unmaking empires between drinks. Carvajal said, “I’ll never forget the first time my father brought me here for cocktails. I was about eighteen, so that would be, say, 1957. The club hadn’t moved into this building yet — it was still over on Broad Street in a cobwebbed nineteenth-century place — and we came in, my father and I, in our twenty-dollar suits and our wool neckties, and everyone looked like a senator to me, even the waiters, but no one sneered at us, no one patronized us. I had my first martini and my first filet mignon, and it was like an excursion to Vahalla, you know, or to Versailles, to Xanadu. A visit to a strange dazzling world where everyone was rich and powerful and magnificent. And as I sat at the huge old oak table across from my father a vision came to me, I began to see, I saw myself as an old man, the man I am today, dried out, with a fringe of gray hair here and there, the elderly self that I had already come to know and recognize, and that older me was sitting in a room that was truly opulent, a room of sleek lines and brilliantly imaginative furnishings, in fact this very room where we are now, and I was sharing a table with a much younger man, a tall, strongly built, dark-haired man, who leaned forward, staring at me in a tense and uncertain way, listening to my every word as if he were trying to memorize it. Then the vision passed and I was with my father again, and he was asking me if I was all right, and I tried to pretend it was the martini hitting me all at once that had made my eyes glaze over and my face go slack, for I wasn’t much of a drinker even then. And I wondered if what I had seen was a kind of resonant counterimage of my father and me at the club, that is, I had seen my older self bringing my own son to the Merchants and Shippers Club of the distant future. For several years I speculated about who my wife would be and what my son would be like, and then I came to know that there would be no wife and no son. And the years went by and here we are, and there you sit opposite me, leaning forward, staring at me in a tense and uncertain way—”

A shiver rippled along my backbone. “You saw me here with you, more than forty years ago?”

He nodded nonchalantly and in the same gesture swung around to summon a waiter, stabbing the air with his forefinger as imperiously as though he were J. P. Morgan. The waiter hurried to Carvajal’s side and greeted him obsequiously by name. Carvajal ordered a martini for me — because he had seen it long ago? — and dry sherry for himself.

“They treat you courteously here,” I remarked.

“It’s a point of honor for them to treat every member as if he’s the Czar’s cousin,” Carvajal said. “What they say about me in private is probably less flattering. My membership is going to die with me, and I imagine the club will be relieved that no more shabby little Carvajals will deface the premises.”

The drinks arrived almost at once. Solemnly we dipped glasses at each other in a perfunctory vestigial toast.

“To the future,” Carvajal said, “the radiant, beckoning future,” and broke into hoarse laughter.

“You’re in lively spirits today.”

“Yes, I feel bouncier than I have in years. A second springtime for the old man, eh? Waiter! Waiter! ”

Again the waiter hustled over. To my astonishment Carvajal now ordered cigars, selecting two of the most costly from the tray the cigar girl brought. Once more the wicked grin. To me he said, “Are you supposed to save these things for after the meal? I think I want mine right away.”

“Go ahead. Who’ll stop you?”

He lit up, and I joined him. His ebullience was disconcerting and almost frightening. At our other two meetings Carvajal had appeared to be drawing on reservoirs of strength long since overdrawn, but today he seemed speedy, frantic, full of a wild energy obtained from some hideous source: I speculated about mysterious drugs, transfusions of bull’s blood, illicit transplants of organs ripped from unwilling young victims.

He said suddenly, “Tell me, Lew, have you ever had moments of second sight?”

“I think so. Nothing as vivid as what you must experience, of course. But I think many of my hunches are based on flickers of real vision — subliminal flickers that come and go so fast I don’t acknowledge them.”

“Very likely.”

“And dreams,” I said. “Often in dreams I have premonitions and presentiments that turn out to be correct. As though the future is floating toward me, knocking at the gates of my slumbering consciousness.”

“The sleeping mind is much more receptive to things of that sort, yes.”

“But what I perceive in dreams comes to me in symbolic form, a metaphor rather than a movie. Just before Gilmartin was caught I dreamed he was being hauled before a firing squad, for example. As though the right information was reaching me, but not in literal one-to-one terms.”

“No,” Carvajal said. “The message came accurately and literally, but your mind scrambled and coded it, because you were asleep and unable to operate your receptors properly. Only the waking rational mind can process and integrate such messages reliably. But most people who are awake reject the messages altogether, and when they are asleep their minds do mischief to what comes in.”