He said, this Shakespeare business, dummy. It has all the earmarks of a big con: the secret document, never authenticated and now lost, the priceless treasure, the dupe Bulstrode, the false heiress. It stank of fraud, and since it was a bunch of extremely dangerous gangsters who had been defrauded, it would be a wise move not to get involved any more and to get the word out that I was no longer a player. Something like that. Did I beg him to intercede with Amalie not to leave the country? I may have. As I said, it’s vague.

Hideously clear, in contrast, is what happened during the remainder of my evening. My stomach was acting up, as it always does when I drink to excess during the day, so I made myself some poached eggs, toast, and tea, and around six or so had Omar drive me out to godforsaken Queens, to Ozone Park. It was dark when we arrived at a street of depressing little bungalows, all with vest pocket front yards protected by chain-link fencing and decorated with Madonnas and mirror balls on pedestals. It reminded me forcefully of my Brooklyn roots and my unhappy childhood. I was prepared not to like the inhabitants.

My ring was answered by a thin woman with an Irish kisser and a head full of russet ringlets, wearing a black cotton crewneck and worn blue jeans. A nice freckled face but supplied with the kind of sharp blue eyes it would be hard to lie to. I introduced, we shook. This was Mary Crosetti, mother of. Into the living room: furnishings old, worn, reasonably well cleaned, a middle-class home such as I had been reared in, cared for, but not kept like my own mother kept house, no odor of furniture polish or bleach. A powerful odor of wine, though. Albert Crosetti was a well-fed medium-size fellow with a frank, open face and large dark eyes that seemed to want to be wary if only they knew how. The lawyer-sister, in contrast, was one of us-bright, cool, something of a killer. Pretty and slim, though, another redhead, brighter hair, worn in a schoolgirlish ponytail, fewer freckles than Mom: the sort of woman upon whom my charm does not work. The father of the family had been a cop, apparently, and he stared down at us from one of those awful portraits made from photographs, in which everyone looks stuffed and sprayed with vinyl.

After the preliminaries I told my story, made my confession. Learned they had the ciphers but had made no progress in interpreting them. We then talked about Carolyn Rolly, the woman with whom Crosetti had gone to sell the manuscript to Bulstrode. Rolly seemed like an interesting woman and perhaps a key figure in the affair, and I was about to ask whether anyone had made a serious effort to locate her, when the gangsters came in.

I believe I have already stated that I am not a violent man and that my military experience consists largely in caring for the stricken; my deeds in the events that followed should therefore not suggest that I am anything other than a quite ordinary coward. There was a shot from the street, which I did not identify as such, and then many more ditto. I thought firecrackers, but the Crosettis all rose to their feet and young Crosetti looked out the window. Mrs. Crosetti picked up a cordless phone and dialed 911. I said, inanely, “What’s happening?” No one answered and then some glass broke and three men came running into the living room; to comprehend what happened next you have to understand that we were all in a space about ten feet across.

I recognized them as the men from the street outside my loft, the very big guy, the human-club guy, and the third man. They all had pistols. There were shouts, although neither of the women screamed. I think the thugs were trying to get us to lie down or something, but none of the Crosettis were moving. What I do recall is that the human-club guy came toward me and raised his pistol, as if to hit me on the head, in revenge, I suppose, for my prior ill treatment, and I recall feeling something like relief, because this meant that they were amateurs.

I caught the descending gun in my hand, grabbed his wrist, and wrenched it away from him. He had a surprised expression on his face as I did this, because the movies he had seen, in which pistol-whipping was a common feature, had not prepared him for this obvious maneuver. As my brother has pointed out to me, if you wish to hurt someone and you have a handgun, the thing to do is to shoot them. This is why there are bullets in it, he says, and besides, a semiauto handgun is a fairly delicate piece of gear and not designed for hard contact with a human skull.

Meanwhile, the very large one had rushed over and knocked the phone out of Mrs. Crosetti’s hand. He grabbed her around the neck, with his pistol pointed at her temple. He was shouting something, but his accent was so thick and he was so agitated that I, at least, could make nothing of it. The third man was just inside the living room door pointing his gun around and also shouting. When he saw that I had his pal’s gun he fired a shot at me, but his angle was blocked by the body of that same fellow. I now shifted this weapon into firing position, took a backward step, and turned to face the man who held Mrs. Crosetti.

He was making a good deal of noise, desiring me to drop my gun or he would shoot her, and to make this threat more obvious, he pressed the barrel of his pistol hard against her head. This was another movie watcher repeating what he had learned on the screen, thus ignoring the obvious advantage of any firearm, which is that one can stand off from one’s victim and do damage while the unarmed victim cannot get at you. Mrs. Crosetti knew reality from fiction, however, and so shoved the man’s gun away from her head. It fired harmlessly into the ceiling, whereupon I shot him through the bridge of his nose at a range that could not have exceeded four feet.

Then I was seized from behind by the human-club guy, but at that moment another shot sounded and the man let out a cry and slumped against me, for the third man had inadvertently shot his comrade, who had heroically attempted to grab me from behind and had thus moved into the line of fire. The wounded man screamed in a foreign language (probably Russian) and sat down on the coffee table, collapsing it, and as he opened the target I shot the third man twice in the chest. He dropped to the floor and poured blood.

I would say that about forty-five seconds had elapsed since we heard that first shot. I have an image of myself standing there with the pistol in my hand while the thug from whom I had taken it slowly rose from the splinters of the coffee table. He was holding himself crooked, as if he had aged forty years in that short time. He looked me in the eye and backed away from me, shuffling. My ears were ringing from the shots, but it seemed that there was still gunfire coming from the street, and I wondered, rather abstractly, what was going on. I made no move to stop the man and when he saw my indifference he turned and dragged himself slowly from the room. No one attempted to stop him.

All of that is remarkably clear and burned into my memory, and has formed the theme of many nightmares since: I awake sweating, imagining that I have killed two men, and then it hits me that it is not a dream, that I really have killed them. A uniquely unpleasant experience. It is actually quite difficult to kill someone with a handgun unless the bullet strikes and destroys the heart or the brain, or creates internal bleeding, for pistol bullets are not terribly powerful. A standard 9 mm round generates about 350 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle, which is no fun if it hits you, but not absolutely devastating, which is why you get those situations where the cops shoot someone forty times. Cops are trained to keep shooting until the target is down, and occasionally it takes that much lead to do it. Rifle bullets are vastly more powerful, and this is why soldiers carry rifles. A 30.06 round hits with nearly three thousand foot-pounds, and yes I am avoiding the next part with this bumf, which I got from my brother during his glorious military career, because the memory is both horrible and vague in that bad-dream way where you imagine that it might even have been worse than you recall, a supposition supported in the aftermath when, from time to time, a mercifully forgotten detail will bob up out of the dark to appall you anew.