Well, maybe not comforting. Or anyway not always comforting. Recently when Mr. Kindt has lent me his tape deck, there has been precious little comfort in these tapes for me. One Hank Williams song in particular makes for difficult listening. In it, he asks if you think that when your time comes you will be ready to go, and if you think that once you are dead and are under the cold clay you will be satisfied with what you have done and who you have been. And, such unpleasant questions aside, he calls shadows “shadders,” and the “shadders” creep, and if you sit there listening to the song alone, which is what I’ve been doing these last few nights, even right this second, and there are strange lights flashing around you, there are bars on the windows and strangers passing in the corridors, there are wires, a rotting carcass you couldn’t smell before it really started to stink, an oily box filled with mashed fish, you are thinking too much, you always think too much, if all that, well then, basically, shit.

ELEVEN

Let’s take a walk, kid, says the murderer whose name, he tells me as we’re leaving Mr. Kindt’s building, is Cornelius.

Nice to meet you, Cornelius, I say.

Yeah, sure, kid, sure, this way.

“This way” is up Avenue B for a while, past the curving lanes of the park, past the restaurants and shops and brightly lit tenements, past Tenth and Eleventh, with their relatively quaint buildings and spindly trees, then over to Avenue A. Cornelius walks fast. Cornelius is dressed a little shabbily, and he’s a little hunched over and fat. On some nights in the East Village everyone is fat. We passed this fat guy. We passed this fat gal. We passed a pickle shop window and I caught a piece of our reflection and, yes, no question, I’m a little fat too.

I was fatter than the average as a kid. My aunt, who was a very nice woman, my God, she was nice — especially when she would smack me with the spoon — used to refer to me as husky. Boy, you’re husky, she would say. Then she would smack me. I later gathered that she had gotten hold of husky from a commercial for young boys’ jeans. Young boys with slow metabolisms, who had indulged too frequently on Big Macs and double cheeseburgers and Twinkies and Mars Bars and large vanilla Tyrols were husky. To tell the truth, husky’s probably not a bad way to describe me now.

So there we are, husky Henry and fat Cornelius walking up Avenue, past the local denizens, with their somber eye shadow and faux fur and polyester pants and nonprescription nerd glasses and cell phones and gas masks.

Where are we going, Mr. Murderer? I say.

Nowhere, shut up, Henry, we’re here, don’t be a motormouth, he says.

A motormouth? I say.

He turns into a doorway next to an unlit faded dry cleaner’s, buzzes, tells me to wait, and goes in.

A couple of cabs hum by, then a Mustang painted up to look like the Mexican flag and a cyclist wearing a black helmet and goggles and dark-green socks. It takes me a second to realize that this cyclist is my old friend Fish. I don’t call out to him. He probably wouldn’t stop anyway. I owed him money for too long and obliged him to bang on my door until I came out and, in lieu of payment, let him stagger off with my TV. Fish used to work as a copy editor at a short-lived golf magazine based in midtown. We both lost our jobs around the same time, both slid around the same time, the difference being that Fish slid voluntarily and now lives, by choice, in an unusual squat situation and rides around the East Village in his goggles.

I do a little near-silent whistling. I register that I’m whistling ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me” and stop. I don’t really, I think, want anyone to do any such thing. An old man in one of those colorless zip-up jackets and a beat-up porkpie takes a long time to walk by me. I nod at him. He does not look at me, does not, in fact, seem to see me. A dollop of street light falls onto his face. I can smell lentils, saffron, burnt plastic. My mind follows him home, where I imagine him unlocking a door, pulling it open, stepping in, clearing his throat, and calling out an unreciprocated greeting into the darkness. Time is not our friend, I think. I start whistling again. ABBA again. After about five minutes, Cornelius is back.

All right, good to go, he says, handing me a key.

Good to go in what way exactly?

You’ll see, just get up there, it’s on the fourth floor.

I look at him.

He frowns at me.

You’re Mr. Kindt’s buddy, right?

Right.

So why are we still standing here talking?

He wants me to do this? This specifically?

Let’s just say he thought you might enjoy doing, yes, this.

O.K., but enjoy doing what? I’m supposed to go up there and murder someone?

Apartment 4A, lock sticks a little, you got gloves? Put them on and go the fuck up.

It was one of those East Village buildings that hadn’t been fixed up and would likely see a wrecking ball before long. The stairwell was steep and dirty and narrow and badly lit and poorly painted and there were deep cracks at the base of its walls. High-pitched, unhappy sounds came out of a couple of the graffiti-covered doors. As Cornelius had said, the lock did stick but not too badly. I took a deep breath, bit down on my tongue, exhaled, and went in. And while in the wake of my conversation with Anthony I was expecting to come face-to-face with something strange, possibly exciting, more probably unpleasant, it certainly wasn’t that. That was the knockout, who was apparently, literally, knocked out. Lying on the kitchen linoleum wearing nothing but a sign on her stomach that read, when I got close enough to kind-of inspect her and read it, KILL ME.

Yeah right, hah, hah, KILL ME, I thought.

But just then a door opened and the fraternal twins from dinner came out. I can’t even describe what it was they were doing and how it was they were moving. Maybe you’ve seen contortionists in action before. Or at least photos thereof. Basically, something is seriously wrong with their spines. And with other things: their sockets, their primary joints and articulations. They had shucked the loose-fitting gear they had been wearing at Mr. Kindt’s in favor of pale-blue sequined leotards. They made circles around the room — hideous, freaky, fascinating circles — each time stepping over the knockout lying on the linoleum. Once one of them misstepped, or, maybe, didn’t misstep, and joggled one of the knockout’s patently artificial, definitely torpedo-class breasts. Then they rushed me and before I could move I had two grimy feet in my face. Each of the feet was holding a piece of folded paper pinched between the first and second toes. I took one of them, then the other, then the feet went away and the two of them went back to doing their contorted dance around the room. All of this was happening in your basic, crappy, old-school East Village kitchen. There was one long window with the inevitable bars and a couple of bedraggled sun-starved plants. Blech paint job, birdcage with a stuffed parrot in it, some oil-grimed hot-pepper Christmas lights, a sink out of something by Hieronymus Bosch, a view of an air shaft, and all the standard low-budget, largely defective kitchen implements. I unfolded the first piece of paper. It read, “In the drawer next to the stove.” I unfolded the second piece. It read, “Get the knife.”

I should probably clarify, if it means anything, that on this occasion at least, Cornelius, the murderer, wasn’t really all that much like I have most lately described him. He was more like I described him at dinner — sort of distant and mysterious, given to pronouncing what Mr. Kindt later described as the “sonorous conundrums” of seventeenth-century surgeon-philosophers. He certainly wasn’t overweight. Just like I’m not. He was, if not emaciated, then quite slender, and he wore, with his own floppy black hat, an elegant black hunting cape, and we walked a good deal farther before arriving at our destination than I made it sound like above, and we talked.