I don’t meet the Patriarch of the Order at my own office. I don’t even use my usual staff. They’re not appropriate: too young, too brash, and too typical of my profession. This opportunity has arisen, apparently, because this Patriarch is new and feels the need to clear out some infrastructural chaff before he gets to his future life of deep spiritual contemplation and pastoral care. The old guy was ousted in some sort of priestly coup d’état of the sort churches pretend not to have. I am therefore working to a style I have established with religious institutions, one that seems to make their representatives happy, and as long as they’re happy they continue to invest and I continue to get a commission and that commission is large. For these meetings I use a cave-like basement office belonging to a friend, a man who keeps vineyards as a hobby. The room has wooden panels rippled by age, and stone flagging. The desk is a traditional kidney with an actual blotter: it reeks of perpetuity. My rooms at the bank are for more commonplace clients and the dynamic is wrong for a personage like Nikolaos Megalos, and wrong for me when I need to be his kind of banker. There’s nothing worse than meeting someone who is dressed for the Crucifixion in a room with a six-foot Patrick Nagel girl on the back wall.