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Being right hadn’t helped his cause and the Fox had found himself out on his silver ear—a disaster he had turned to remarkable advantage when the Soviet Union’s collapse opened half the planet to American business.
    To nervous executives, Henry King, Incorporated offered top drawer connections and insights into an often baffling, always frightening world. When GM wanted to tilt again at the Japanese market, they retained Henry King to instruct them in matters Japanese, which he was current on because Toyota had paid him for introductions in Europe where Muslims hired him to deconstruct Christian rhetoric and Christians crossed his palm with gold to steer them toward compliant Muslims, et cetera. The Economist swore the scam was taking down twenty million a year.
    Add weekly speeches at fifty grand a pop to the tax advantages of paying for pleasantries like the helicopter and the Georgetown townhouse through the non-profit “Henry King Institute of Geopolitics,” and the man was accumulating a lot of money. Much of which he appeared to be spending on construction.
    His estate resembled a war zone. The driveway followed the same elegant sweep it had before the place got a name, disappearing up the meadow and into a deep woodlot, but the meadow had been extended by obliterating several acres of trees. Cratered where Chevalleys had dynamited stumps, it looked like B-52s had emphasized NATO’s impatience with a Balkan dictator.
    The alterations were subtler inside the woodlot, where tree surgeons had judiciously thinned and pruned. Weed trees had been culled, and dead limbs removed from the stately red oaks. It was unusual to see a managed forest in Newbury and to my eye it looked a trifle too managed, like a PlayStation version of Robin Hood’s Sherwood. But I had to admire the views designed to highlight handsome specimens. Beech and shagbark hickory and sugar maple reveled in the clean new space.
    Rounding a curve I ran into more security. The real thing, this time. A spike barrier blocked the driveway with foot-high razor-sharp steel prongs that would make hamburger of my tires if I didn’t stop beside a speaker box and stifle the impulse to order a Whopper and fries.
    â€œBen Abbott.”
    â€œYou may continue,” said the box.
    The spikes sank into the macadam.
    I continued.
    Now hemlocks began speckling the forest, denser and denser until they formed an impenetrable wall, which opened suddenly on a long view of the main house that hit the eye like a frozen snowball.
    I stopped the car and stared. The new main house, I realized, a monumental stone and stucco structure built in the neoclassical style the New York Times long ago dubbed “Corinthian avant-garde.”
    Four columns supported a massive pediment over the two-story entrance. Palladian windows arched heroically. Majestic chimneys dominated an elegant mansard roof. It wasn’t ugly. There was too much ordered symmetry for that, too many finely executed details. But it did look like a banker had commanded his architects to build something solid around a pile of money.
    The original dwelling, Mr. Zarega’s 1920s country house—pleasantly shingled, and draped in porches—that had looked so big and sprawling to adolescent eyes, stood dwarfed at some distance. Here, too, construction was in progress and both buildings were surrounded by frozen mud studded with construction trailers. Plank paths criss-crossed the mud, which was thawing stickily in the afternoon sun. I didn’t recognize any of the workmen plodding through it, as King’s contractors were from down on the coast of the Long Island Sound.
    They had finished the motor court. I parked my elderly Oldsmobile in a herd of Range Rovers, hobbled across the cobblestones, and mounted an imposing flight of marble stairs. The doorbell played a ragtime tune that Aunt Connie later identified for me as having been composed by Harry Fox, the bandleader who