The Sequel

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The very first letter Frederick Lowell slit open and read at his desk Monday morning would, he realized, change the course of history.

Literary history at least.

Which was, to him, perhaps the most important history of all.

Sporting a gray, three-piece suit, white shirt, and striped tie, Lowell sat in his anachronistic office on Seventh Avenue, a dim room tinged with a patina of old New York — high ceilings, windows that rose and lowered, stained oak trim, walls distorted by many layers of paint. The surfaces of the furniture and shelves were continually coated with the grit that always found its way inside as persistently as auditors at a hedge fund. And the music of street traffic, shouts, and jackhammers filled the air. The seventy-two-year-old lawyer pushed his metal bifocals higher on his nose, took a deep breath, and read the letter again.

Frederick Lowell was a slim widower with a balding pate and affection for light opera and heavy novels. His life was simple: the law, walks around the city, meals with a close friend or with a book at one of the half-dozen modest restaurants he frequented on the Upper East Side, the enduring pleasure in taking his grandchildren to the zoo and movies (and bribing them with ice cream and s’mores to let Granddad read them the classics). He was staid and the epitome of calm ratiocination. Yet at the moment his heart was pounding, his palms popping with sweat, and he thought he might leap to his feet and dance a jig.

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