Sing, Muse, of Jeffrey Epstein, the man of many twists and turns who wandered full many ways until his odyssey came to an end in a cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, where, despite being the most famous suspect in the land, no one was watching as he did or did not kill himself. Epstein’s life and crimes are an American epic, Homeric in scale, appetite, and immorality. The 3.5 million pages of material in the Justice Department’s information dump of Jan. 30 would, if printed, amount to about 1,000 copies of War and Peace or around 5,000 copies of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in a single edition.

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The release of so much material in a single day was either an act of hope or despair. It trusted that people would exercise their reason and not go off the deep end again into a further fruit-loop of conspiracy theorizing. If they did, then the business was done with either way, whatever it meant, because no one really knows anyway. In a land where everyone is a Jay Gatsby, the author of his, her, or their own lives, everyone has the right to make their own Epstein, just as he made of himself what he could.

In Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment, the cat is in a black box with a Geiger counter and a phial of radioactive poison. The cat is both dead and alive because the radioactive matter is both decayed and not decayed, and we don’t know which until we open the box. Epstein is Schroedinger’s crook. Make of him what you will, or what you can, because the files are only half the story, and not just because of the redactions. The first half of Epstein’s variegated career occurred before the internet took off. His correspondence from before the mid-1990s is as lost to us as the records of the petty kingdoms of the late Bronze Age. There are hints of this earlier half-life here and there, but nothing detailed about the sources of the wealth that launched him in New York in the late 1980s after a sojourn in Europe.

Nor do the files contain a big reveal about espionage. Their release occasioned a death rattle of conspiracies about the Mossad and a rash of pieces in the British press in which unnamed “intelligence sources” claimed that Epstein was a Russian spy, albeit the first to write it all down on Microsoft Outlook. The only intelligence source to actually put his name to this nonsense was the ex-MI6 analyst Christopher Steele, he of the discredited “Steele Dossier.” In 2016, Steele purported to prove that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was an agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The dossier bore the fingerprints of the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and members of the U.S. intelligence community.

If Epstein was an agent of a foreign power, it would have been most remiss of American intelligence agencies not to have noticed. Epstein had a stellar guest list, extensive offshore travels and foreign banking exploits, and an address book of international connections in key areas of national interest. If American intelligence agencies missed him, it should be a scandal. Almost as much of a scandal, perhaps, as the one that would ensue if our intelligence agencies had tapped into Epstein’s information networks and decided that turning a blind eye to his habitual sex abuse and trafficking was a collateral cost worth paying because it was paid by other people’s daughters.

If Epstein was a Russian agent, then a quick search of the files shows that the only American president to slip into his evil net and hot tub was Bill Clinton. Trump figured Epstein for an outer-borough chancer from the start, probably because it takes one to know one. Trump turned down Epstein’s freebies. Clinton took the lot. So did freeloading supermodels (Naomi Campbell), dimwitted second-tier royals (Prince Andrew and sundry Norwegians), and ostentatiously smart Harvard types who weren’t as smart as they thought (Noam Chomsky,........

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