I think so, I said.

I’m sure you know it. I’ll have to see if I can put my hands on a reproduction, there are some very faithful ones available. Of course these widely available reproductions lack texture and ruin the colors, but they will give you the idea, put across the gist.

I’d like that, but …

But why, my dear Henry, am I telling you this?

I nodded.

You should sleep now, he said. You are not well and I’ve troubled you enough.

No trouble at all, I said.

That’s very nice of you to say, but still, I should go.

Before you do, why don’t you tell me what it is you think we have in common?

Mr. Kindt looked at me with his pale blue eyes. He licked his lips and leaned closer.

What we have in common is that we’re both thieves, Henry. Not terribly successful ones.

NINE

New York is swell. It is swell on a cold wet night and it is swell on a cold clear dawn. It is swell with the cars coming fast toward you and it is swell down by the subway tracks, where the people come to gather and watch each other and wait. It is swell with the attractive denizens and with those who are not, including those, like you, who might once have been. It is swell with the shop lights and it is swell with its skyscrapers and acres of rubble and brilliant glass-strewn streets with everyone loving everything and moving through the haze of airborne particles saying fuck you. It is swell with its parks and harsh, windswept open spaces, with its beautiful giant bridges, with its great river and grim estuary, its cardboard villages, its scaffolding, its doves in the morning, its sparrows and pigeons and hawks and wild parrots basking in the sun. Its layers of sonic and visual complexity are swell. Swell too is the little girl screeching with delight on the carousel at Bryant Park, while the cars go by, bits of garbage flick through the air, the wind irritates the trees, chairs are scraped again and again over gravel, the ground rumbles distantly as the trains plow the dark tunnels, grackles fight, small, unseen electric explosions, wrecking balls, gobs of spittle smacking the pavement, someone claps, someone taps the Gertrude Stein statue on the shoulder, someone stumbles on an abandoned bright pink beauty-company supply case. Astoria and Fort Greene and Hell’s Kitchen and Spanish Harlem and Washington Heights and Cobble Hill are swell. Swell, as we have already seen, are the museums, movies, bathhouses, and restaurants frequented by petty hoods. A woman says, where are they all going? Another slaps her Bible shut. A man groans a little as he stoops to pick up a weather-stained pamphlet from the Church of Scientology. Two boys dressed in identical oversized Knicks jerseys take turns kicking a plastic Yoo-hoo bottle and doing beautiful 360-degree jumps over every crack. New York is unbelievably swell with its loud surfaces and sharp, sweeping contours, even more so with its endless peripheral zones. There people are told to hush or leave, to stand with their faces pressed against wet brick, to back away slowly, to curl up in a ball, to pay for that hot dog, to hand over a few bucks for a little New York City porn. You get, say, five minutes, and you open the magazine you’ve chosen and you’ve got this guy and another guy and three gals and some objects or you’ve got this gal and this gal and maybe a table and some green underwear or maybe a couch and a guy and a magazine or a guy with big hair and bad features wearing bell-bottoms, holding a book, listening to a “hi-fi,” and a young gal wearing a cream-colored fur-lined negligee enters stage left looking surprised and even more surprised, in the next panel, when the guy is standing and opening his pants.

New York is swell, you think, as you leave the brightly lit shop, warmed in the body though not in the heart, and get back onto the glittering, grimy street. As you walk toward the neon billboards and giant television screens of Times Square you think about New York’s swellness in almost cosmic terms, wondering where it begins and where it stops, and what is all that why in the middle, and then you leave off thinking and are just walking, past face after face backed by stone, steel, and dark brick, down into the subway and then out again at Fourteenth and First, where your mind flicks back on and you realize you just spent five bucks in a porn shop looking at what now seem like grotesqueries, pure and simple, and that you’re broke and hungry and that, even though things have been much better lately, even though New York is so swell in so many ways, things are still far from perfect, far from soothing, far from, moment to moment, ideal. So you head over to see Mr. Kindt, your dear friend, who often feeds you, who often talks to you at great length about not uninteresting things, who frequently eases the pain of parting, now that you have exhausted your own supply of funds, at the end of the evening. Mr. Kindt, who greets you at the door on this particular night, this night that is now in question, before you’ve even rung the bell and who says to you, come in, come in, Henry, I’m so glad you decided to drop by. It feels like it has been ages. What on earth have you been up to? Was it just the day before yesterday that you accompanied me to Russ and Daughters? There is a little of the pickled whitefish left and some dried pears. You can take it with you later. Where have you been? Never mind. I’m so happy to see you. Your timing couldn’t be more perfect. Mr. Kindt, who says, you see, I would like, this evening, to introduce you to a murderer.

A murderer? you say.

He has ushered you into the front room. There is some unfamiliar outerwear hanging on the eighteenth-century cherrywood coatrack. You hear voices. You go into the living/dining room, Mr. Kindt’s hand on your elbow, his breathing a little louder than usual. A small man with gray hair, deep wrinkles, and large, indistinct features turns toward you.

Here he is, says Mr. Kindt.

Hello, you say.

Hello, says the murderer.

He cordially shakes your hand and asks you how you do and you tell him that the day has been difficult for various reasons, but, as is always the case when you walk through Mr. Kindt’s front door, things have improved.

I know exactly what you mean, says the murderer.

You are both too kind, but there is really no need, says Mr. Kindt.

Then you eat, the four of you, no, the five — you, plus Mr. Kindt, plus Tulip, plus the murderer, plus the murderer’s guest, who is just returning to the room from the toilet with a cell phone pressed against her ear. She is a knockout. She is almost as tall as Tulip, has gorgeous mahogany skin, broad shoulders, and mile-long legs, and is bald. She slips her tiny phone into an orange shoulder bag.

I hope it’s all right, she says, not to you but to Mr. Kindt. I’ve asked a friend to join us.

Mr. Kindt does not mind. He says as much and smiles, and when he smiles his little blue eyes are sucked back into his face and his rather bad but not unsightly teeth are exposed. He waves his hand over the bowls of nuts and olives and cubed Gouda that are spread out over the table. He says, we will just nibble and chat until they get here.

We nibble and chat. The knockout tells a story about a cab that almost ran her over and how she took off her heels, chased it down at the next light, and smashed out one of its rearview mirrors with a rock. You don’t believe a word of the story but admire the way she tells it, punctuating her sentences with the brisk ingestion of carrots and cheese cubes. You know this is not how she is doing it, but each time you look away you have the impression that she is lifting the cheese and carrots with a single finger and popping them into her mouth. There are numerous embellishments to the story. You all listen, although for part of her account, the murderer and Mr. Kindt put their heads together and murmur. While she speaks, you try lifting an olive with your index finger and send it rolling toward Tulip, who doesn’t notice its approach. It leaves a line of oil on the dark wood, a faint trace of its pointless trajectory. The murderer, whom you think you have just heard say “the Benny problem,” although it could just as easily have been “the Lenny or the Kenny problem,” pulls his head away from Mr. Kindt’s, reaches over, winks at you, and plucks it up.