They’d ‘met’, then, in Switzerland: in the Italian part, Ticino, beside Lake Maggiore. To be precise: above it, on a mountain. The International Association for Emergent Legal Theory had convened a three-day conference at which scholars, practitioners and students disported themselves around the suites and grounds of a hotel built in the Bauhaus style – bold, white, orthogonal – shuttling from airy, glass-walled meeting rooms to airier, white railing-ringed terrace and thence onwards over tennis courts, tea gardens and herb gardens, along wooded pathways running past dilapidated timber stages, empty sunken Roman baths and other performance or assembly spaces of increasingly vague designation as they engaged in presentations and panel discussions, powwows, breakouts and less structured modes of congress. Pirotti’s role there wasn’t really clear. He seemed, right from the off, to be in with the hosts: huddling among them, glad-handing speakers of the opening addresses, insouciantly commandeering reserved seats in the front row, laughing an in-crowd quarter-second before jokes cracked on the podium opened themselves up to secondary, public waves of comprehension . . . But he gave no talk himself, nor was his name listed among the organisers, the only (synecdochal) indication of his presence there being the inclusion in the programme, among a small-print appendix of institutes, alliances and federations, of the outfit under whose flag he travelled: Centre for Juridical Collaboration.

Stanton, later, would check out this CJC: it existed, inasmuch as it was entered in the Council of Europe’s official register of NGOs. Its very title, though, was a misnomer: it possessed a centre neither in the architectural sense (a building or HQ) nor in the more structural or discursive meaning of the word (nucleus, steering board, newsletter), instead folding and doubling across other contexts, institutions, academic papers like the maze that meandered across the hotel’s main lawn below the terrace, its kinks and forkings offsetting the building’s right-angled modernist clarity. Like a spirit of the maze, Pirotti would pop out as if from nowhere during the conference: at bar counters, from behind rocks and abstract sculptures, on a boat trip to an island in the middle of the lake, back up the mountain in the park’s Zen Garden or its Elisarion Pavilion, his small frame back-screened by the rotunda’s fin-de-siècle cyclorama of male adolescent nudes and butterflies . . . Monte Verità’s hotchpotch collage of styles, allusions, epochs had been shaped by its episodic history: social reformers, early-uptake vegans and Freikörperkultur naturists, boosters of naked calisthenics, esotericists, theosophists, anarchists, avant-garde dancers, painters, poets and, yes, even legal theorists had wended their way up there over the previous century or so, all fellow travellers on the long, serpentine path to enlightenment they somehow hoped would, if not culminate there, at least provide them with a vantage point from which a part of transcendental wisdom’s larger vista might be visible. Mountain of Truth – or as the townspeople of Ascona and Locarno termed it, piqued by tales told by their neighbours who delivered food to and did laundry for the unpragmatic seekers of higher consciousness on the hilltop, of balabiott , nude cavorting. Collective parading of bare flesh before the sun god may have given over some decades before the IAELT meeting to team-building exercises during corporate retreats, homegrown turnips and beetroots to a Michelin-starred restaurant, but something of the old licentiousness still hovered in the mountain air. No sooner, each day, were the presentations and discussions done than cocktail hour kicked in, which hour segued effortlessly into pre-dinner Proseccos, then a two-wine menu, more drinks served on the terrace while DJs set up their decks on the lawn for dance sessions which ran into the small hours, white lines far straighter than the maze’s disappearing intermittently up altitude-dilated nostrils, room numbers treated more as starting squares on some great snakes-and-ladders board than fixed accommodations. Stanton hooked up with a grad student named Moira, a Slovenian with dark hair and novel takes on both Internal Energy Market rules and plein-air coitus. After a blissed-up dawn tryst on the hillside, she wandered off, her pale form swallowed by magnolias and pine trees, and Stanton, loitering alone, suddenly cold, pulled on his clothes and staggered back in the direction of the hotel, only to run, not twenty feet away, into Pirotti, who immediately removed his coat and handed it to him.

‘Lake breeze,’ the older man said. ‘And the air expands as it rises.’

Had he been watching them? He wore a kind of knowing smile – the same one that he’d worn throughout the conference, the one that primed his face to launch itself into a laugh that fraction of an instant before others’. As they skirted the tennis court’s meshed-wire fence he told Stanton:

‘I was much taken by your presentation.’

‘It was pretty – it was, standard, you know: pretty standard stuff,’ Stanton responded, his habitual stutter expanded, like the air’s particles, by a mid-sentence shiver.

‘Not at all,’ Pirotti countered in a tone now serious. ‘There was a clarity to it – made all the more sharp, I thought, by the counterintuitive direction of your argument.’

‘Counter . . .’ Stanton repeated, but gave up on trying to formulate a phrase. His paper had been on the difference between lex lata and lex ferenda , or the law as it stands now and the law as it will or should be – a pretty classical distinction with which any first-year law student would have been familiar; his twist on it had been to elevate the commonplace derivative de lege ferenda ( ‘ with view to coming law’) into the model for a certain temporality or ‘tense’, a future anterior or not-yet-arrived post hoc , under which legal consciousness (he suggested) was obliged to find its presence, or its present. ‘Would you send it to me?’ Pirotti asked as the hotel loomed into view.