We continue, he said.

What? I said.

Just like before, except that now you get your tips directly from me.

I looked at him.

He smiled.

What do you mean now I get my tips directly from you? Where did they come from before?

Certainly not from Job.

Mr. Kindt smiled. It was a hard smile, hard and cold like a thin piece of frozen fruit pie. Looking at it I shivered involuntarily and thought of its owner crying about herring and standing in the shower talking about screaming. I thought about his obsession with seventeenth-century Dutch exploits, including his own, which were the product, he said, of that “vortex of Dutch-made misery whose razor edges extended to the far corners of the world,” and I thought of his giggle and how he would go outside in freezing weather in his robe. I looked at his hard, cold smile and thought of these things and of other things and I shook my head and started to walk away.

Where are you going, Henry?

I’m sorry but you’re — I mean this literally but in the best possible sense — crazy, Mr. Kindt. Which is fine in general, especially here, but not for business.

We’re both literally crazy, Henry.

I’m not, I said over my shoulder. I got hit by a truck — I’m just traumatized. I have some dreams. Some communication issues. Pretty soon I’m getting out of here.

Hit by a truck, Henry?

Yes. A flower truck. It was my fault.

It was your fault, he said. It certainly was. But that was quite some time ago. It’s true that you went to the hospital, a hospital for the injuries you describe, but that’s not why you’re here now. Oh, my, heavens no — that’s most certainly not why.

I didn’t answer. I started walking faster.

Come back here, Henry, Mr. Kindt shouted.

But I didn’t. I went back to my room and looked out the window through the black netting or whatever it was and wondered if I would see — I did not, I did not see anything — a balloon heliuming its way up into the ether. I wondered, also, if I would ever tell Dr. Tulp the truth about Aunt Lulu, that I had stood by, without lifting a finger, when I could have helped her. But it was all too long ago to matter anyway. Wasn’t it? So much else had happened. Was happening. I wondered about what I had said about being traumatized, about the possibly erroneous nature of the causal relationship of my trauma with the truck, which had been full, I suddenly remembered, though I wasn’t sure why, of the pinkest lilies. I wondered also about Mr. Kindt’s smile and the strange look, not entirely pleasant, that had taken over his eyes. When I thought about it, it was a little like the one that had come into them just before he had bitten my ankle so hard that, later, when he had left, I had had to ask Job for some antiseptic cream.

After a few minutes he came in. He was holding a package under his arm and a piece of paper in his hand.

Look, come on, I’ve had enough, stop already, I said.

Here is a hospital robe, plus fake, and a time frame plus parameters for the next score.

The next score? Listen to how you’re talking. Who are you? I can’t believe this. What next score?

The authorities needed someone, as they always do — they came and got someone. They’ve taken him away. He won’t return. That is the way of things. This does not stop us, in any way, from continuing. Do you want a cigar? I’m dying for one.

We can’t smoke in here.

We can do anything we want in here, Henry, that’s the way it works, said Mr. Kindt, unwrapping one of his Dutch Masters, rolling it between his fingers, sniffing it, then lighting a match.

The way what works?

He winked. I looked at his eyes. Whatever had been in them had gone.

All right, my boy?

I looked out the window. No balloon came. No bird flew by. The sounds of the street seemed very distant. I seemed very distant. Empty circles within circles. Inertia clearly had the upper hand. I shrugged then nodded. Then looked at him. Then at the floor. It needed cleaning.

One blue devil for another, Henry, Mr. Kindt said.

NINETEEN

It was a good job, great even. Despite my skepticism, there were customers aplenty — so many that once or twice I had to turn requests down. The pay, as I’ve noted, was more than fair, and it quickly became clear that I could supplement it by lifting the odd item or two after I had, so to speak, put the subject away. This didn’t always work out, of course. Sometimes they didn’t want to stay dead. One guy, who I’d done in good with an aluminum-handled garrote, woke right up and wanted me to have a beer and maybe watch the game. In spite of myself, I found this a little strange, a touch supernatural, as if, while we were sitting there watching his plasma screen, I could see through him a little, and I didn’t stay long. Another, a chipper woman who told me her friends had gotten her a murder for her thirtieth birthday, started plugging me with questions before I’d even gotten started, like about what I did in real life, what kind of music I listened to, whether I thought the murder thing was stupid, distasteful, “and/or kind of cool” (and/or kind of cool, I said), if, maybe, when we were done I’d like to take some X and “see what happens.” Fortunately, the scenario I’d been given, imparted to Cornelius by her friends, had called for me to drop a good dose of her own Halcion in her drink and, in the meantime, “humor her.” Which I did, and eventually her head started lolling and she shut up just before her friends were due to get there and paint her living room. Not that I minded, incidentally, at least as a concept, the x-and-possibly-getting-friendly part — it’s just that, as with one or two other jobs, I had started to get the feeling I was dressed up in a Santa Claus suit and some wiseass kid was tugging on my beard.

Most of them didn’t get weird or friendly though, and didn’t seem to mind if I prowled around a little. A couple of times I was even supposed to prowl around and steal things. One woman, who told me she worked as a stockbroker in a medium-sized firm downtown as I taped her up, said I should smash what I didn’t want and take the rest: it was all insured. Unfortunately there was nothing there — the requisite knickknacks, etc. — excepted, so I knocked over a lacquer vase and a row of blue coffee mugs and took a pair of toy binoculars that, when I tried them the next day, proved not to be functional, and a book I subsequently read and liked a great deal by an Italian writer, which was about black holes and supernovas and the prospect of getting stuck forever on the moon. The other time I was supposed to steal something the verbal brief was explicit. I was to murder the subject (first by knocking him out with a strong dose of chloroform, then by taking a knife from the chest of drawers in his bedroom and “being especially brutal with it”) the moment he (a practicing accountant by the name of Leonard James Seligman, who worked out of his apartment by the looks of the beat-up diplomas on his wall, the big adding machine on his desk, the half-eaten sandwich, full ashtray, etc.) came home, steal his money, then bag up the entire contents of his desk’s file drawer (the key to which would be on his person) and (“in disgust because there is nothing there worth keeping”) toss the lot into the trash outside the building. I did this, not neglecting to “act disgusted” as I feigned going through the bag before I dropped it into the garbage. It occurred to me to wonder, as I did this, if he himself had requested the murder, or if someone else, perhaps a disgruntled client, had requested it, maybe without his knowledge, for him.

I had been under the impression that the jobs would be collaborative, that the contortionists would be involved, that the knockout would stop by once in a while to add a little spice to the business, that Cornelius would occasionally climb in through a window wearing his hunting cape, but after the test runs I was left to work alone.