Cornelius turned and looked at it again, this time a little more closely.

I would say it’s by Emma Kunz. It’s a reproduction.

Who lives here?

Some people, they cleared out for a couple of hours.

Do they have any more of these?

They have some stuff.

Cornelius said this with just enough edge to indicate that he wasn’t interested in discussing art with me any further. I couldn’t quite tell though if the implied request for me to stop speaking was a general one, and because I hadn’t yet been told what I was supposed to do, I tried changing the subject.

So you’ve known Mr. Kindt for a long time? I said.

Yes, Henry. Like I said, we go way back.

All the way back to Cooperstown.

Cornelius had been examining his fingernails. He looked up at me.

It must have been something, that swim he took.

Cornelius nodded. It was quite a swim. You could say that swim took him all the way to New York. All the way to where he is now.

He told me this afternoon that he’d done it with his arms tied behind his back.

Did he now?

He was kidding.

Cornelius shrugged, then said, Aris Kindt. Nice name, isn’t it? Not the average. Has some splash to it. Kind of name you’d like to try on and take for a spin around the block. Fits him doesn’t it? To a T. You’d look at him and say, now that is a guy who has got the right fucking name. Has a ring.

I said I agreed but that I liked the name Cornelius too, and Cornelius said, I’m happy for you, now, please, Henry, there is work to do, shut the fuck up.

I started to speak, but Cornelius shook his head, put his finger to his lips, pointed to a slip of paper on the coffee table, then pointed to the door leading into the next room.

Can we talk afterward? I said.

Shhh, Cornelius said. I’m not kidding.

I picked up the piece of paper, opened the door, and went into a surprisingly long hallway lit by a series of night-lights plugged into sockets placed at regular intervals near the floor along each wall. When I was about halfway down the hallway, the door I had just come through opened again. Expecting Cornelius, I turned and found myself looking at the contortionists. I began to greet them, but they came up quickly and, smiling, began poking and tickling and prodding me forward. When we got to the end of the hallway one of them slipped past me, pushed open the other door, and swept her hand out as if to say, here it is. The other gave my shoulders a few rubs, shoved me forward through the doorway, then jumped past me and stood next to her colleague. They both put mock serious looks on their faces, did a little shadowboxing, gave me the thumbs-up, then flipped themselves over and scuttled back down the hallway and out the door.

The room I entered was larger and more elaborately furnished than I had expected given the street, the general condition of the building, and the Spartan aesthetic that presided in the front room and hallway. There was plush wall-to-wall, deep-shag burgundy carpeting, a long black couch, a good-looking leather cigar chair, a zinc bar with a couple of mahogany stools, a large retro refrigerator and a backlit row of top-shelf bottles, floor lamps that gave off red and gold highlights, and, though there weren’t any more Emma Kunz — or whoever it was — reproductions, at least not in this room, there were two or three expensively framed posters. One of these was a blown-up extra-handsome comic strip featuring a mustachioed heavyset older man with a camera around his neck. Another was a famous black-and-white aerial shot of the Flatiron building taken in the thirties or forties. It wasn’t difficult, looking at the scene from beyond even the photographer’s elevated vantage point, which had reduced all the human beings present to the size and relative significance of dust motes, to feel myself shrinking too. I liked this feeling. New York is interesting in that even at the bottom of the skyscrapers’ deepest trenches a good portion of its inhabitants tend to feel a little bigger, a little more consequential, than they are. In fact, there are days and nights when it feels like everyone (and maybe this is what I meant before about East Villagers looking fat) is holding out oversize thumbs in hopes that history, like some gargantuan stretch limo, will slam on its brakes for them. Not (my comments about being overweight myself to the contrary) me. I’ve always been plenty happy to believe that history would just blow on past if it saw me standing there with my suitcase. On one of our first outings, Mr. Kindt referred to history as “that vast dark entity ravaged by loss and erasure.” Exactly. Not the kind of thing you want stopping for you. It was while I was standing in front of this poster, thinking it was just fine that buildings and trees and cars are the only things that can be seen with any clarity from a distance, that Tulip walked into the room.

She was wearing a long dark-blue silk robe and sequined house slippers and more makeup than I’d ever seen on her, dark around the mouth and eyes. The script Cornelius had handed me read “Keep your mouth shut, watch and improvise,” so I didn’t say anything, just kind of took her in as she sauntered toward me holding what looked a lot like a hatchet.

Later, she told me it was an eighteenth-century embalming tool she had borrowed from Mr. Kindt. This was after Tulip had woken up and we had all walked out together — Cornelius, the contortionists, the knockout, me, and Tulip; after Cornelius had said, good, but I have nothing to say to you about speaking French or art or our mutual friend, and the knockout had said, who would’ve thought? and the contortionists had said nothing, though they had both given me another thumbs-up and one had kissed and kind of nibbled at the other’s arm. The two of us had repaired to a nearby after-hours establishment at Tulip’s suggestion, an invitation that prompted me to register, with more than moderate trepidation, that I had begun my very long day by being summoned to the Odessa by the knockout, my first victim, and that I was ending it with my second.

You’re not going to give me some advice then ruin my shirt and hurt my eardrums are you? I said after we’d left the others.

No more advice necessary, she said. You heard Cornelius.

Not only had I heard Cornelius, Cornelius had given me two hundred more smackeroos.

I’ll buy, I said.

I was expecting you to.

We took a seat in the back of the comfortably shabby place, with its wooden floors, hammered metal ceiling, and soft Nordic jazz, and Tulip said, that was impressive, very direct, very to the point, how did you come up with it?

I don’t know, I said. I improvised.

Which was true.

I also said, after a minute, and there was this drawing in the lobby. Cornelius and I were checking it out before things got started. All these rings and lines leading into the middle. I guess that made me think I should try something interesting but, as you put it, direct. Plus there were the two, you know, contortionist friends, pushing me forward and rubbing my shoulders and knocking a few shadow punches around, like I was heading into the ring. There was also a poster of the Flatiron building that got me going a little on how history doesn’t so much hate us as blindly devour us, like a growing whale eating plankton, so I must have thought a little, maybe just in the back of my mind, of devouring you.

Which was all also true and, I thought, interesting. But Tulip just said, yeah? The “yeah?” she used when she hadn’t listened to what you had just said.

We drank in silence for a little while, then I tried some flattery.

You looked good in that robe, I said.

She smiled or smirked — it was too dark to tell which — but didn’t say anything.

I thought I’d better try something else.

So you’re involved too, I said.