Once you’ve got the tape around him you smack him on the side of the head with the big ashtray and then you pull the wire tight around his throat.

Are you ladies going to be there? I asked the contortionists.

Us ladies, they said. Flicking their eyebrows up.

Just you, said Cornelius. You won’t need any help with him.

This proved true. When I pulled him out of bed the night of the murder, he smiled, and said, my dear boy, and let me push him into the front room.

What about for moral support?

At this, the knockout picked up her cigarette and jammed it into her mouth, then two-fingered a shard of lettuce and flicked some of the dill dressing coating it onto the ground.

If you don’t mind my pointing it out, you guys seem a little agitated, I said to Cornelius after we had all watched the knockout slip the lettuce shard past the cigarette into her mouth.

Unrelated, Cornelius said.

Nothing to fucking do with you, said the knockout.

That’s right, Mr. Nervous, said the contortionists.

Fine, I said.

I asked if I could have a copy of the scenario.

Cornelius said I could not.

That’s why I’ve been going over it with you, Henry, he said. Oral instructions only, no record — safe. Just like every other time we’ve done this.

I had written instructions the first couple of times.

Yeah, big deal, what did they say?

Why isn’t Tulip here?

Why would she be here? said the knockout. Why does he think Tulip should be here, Cornelius?

Cornelius said he didn’t know why I thought Tulip should be there.

I said maybe because she (1) apparently had known him for quite some time and was probably either working for or with him and (2) was a key player in the scenario.

He can count, said the knockout.

I’ve known her for a while, said Cornelius. She’s a friend. Then he said Tulip wasn’t there because she already knew what she was supposed to do. Her presence had not been required because her role in the affair was merely ancillary and did not involve the scene of the crime.

She practically lives with him, I said.

Not according to the scenario. According to the scenario she lives on Orchard Street, behind the tattoo parlor.

Yeah, I know about that place, I said. I know about the back room. We’re getting pretty friendly, me and Tulip.

No one said anything.

Very friendly, I said.

Jesus Christ, make this guy stop with the commentary, said the knockout.

That’s your business, Henry, Cornelius said. We don’t care about that. Just stick to the scenario.

She gave me a tattoo, I said.

Tell him to shut up, Cornelius, the knockout said.

I just thought you guys would be interested, that’s all. Aren’t you guys interested? I said to the contortionists.

They didn’t answer.

Yeah, yeah, we’re all real interested, the knockout said. Henry finally got a piece of ass.

O.K., said Cornelius, placing a hand on the table, does anyone have anything germane to say? Otherwise this meeting is adjourned.

I looked at the knockout. She looked at her fingernails, which were tapping away on the table in front of her.

Why? I said.

What do you mean, why? said Cornelius.

I mean why am I murdering Mr. Kindt?

You already asked Tulip that.

Yeah, she told me a ton. Real helpful. I’m going to write a book. Incidentally, she referred, in this illuminating chronicle, to the fact that Mr. Kindt comes from Cooperstown.

So what, he does. We’ve already talked about this.

So what I’m asking you is, does this murder I’m supposed to carry out have anything to do with Cooperstown?

What are you, Sherlock Holmes? You’re getting paid. Mind your fucking business.

How do you say that in French?

Plus you’re a real joker.

O.K., never mind, let me ask you this — does it matter if I know or don’t know about what happened in Cooperstown or what, exactly, you and Mr. Kindt are up to?

Cornelius paused here. He looked at the knockout. She looked at the contortionists. They shrugged.

No, it doesn’t matter, Henry.

But you aren’t going to tell me?

Cornelius shrugged.

All right, forget it, how about the first question?

The first question?

Why?

Because he wants you to.

He wants me to?

Yeah, he fucking wants you to, you fucking sad ass.

This last remark surprised me. Because it wasn’t said by the knockout, it was said by one of the contortionists.

Whoa, I said.

This is getting very, very fucking boring, the other contortionist said.

O.K., I won’t bore you much longer. But I do want to know if this whole thing, this whole thing about me committing murders, was a lead-up to this? To killing Mr. Kindt tomorrow night?

I don’t know, said Cornelius, lying. You’ll have to ask him.

Obviously, when Cornelius told me I would have to ask Mr. Kindt, he meant after the murder, when it wouldn’t matter anymore. But as it turned out, I got to ask him before. That very afternoon, in fact. My brain, having found a rare felicitous moment, was starting to whir away about Tulip and murder and the mattress in the back room and the look on the contortionists’ faces and the supposed importance of this particular job, and the still-unexplained murk about the old business on Lake Otsego, and as I was sitting over a burger at Stingy Lulu’s on St. Mark’s Place, I got the urge to go over and see my friend.

In connection with this impromptu visit, and the little detail that Mr. Kindt was in a bad way during it, I’ll relate that one night over several brandies and a couple of cigars, Mr. Kindt, in vintage Mr. Kindt fashion, told me it had been said that the body, in dying, releases a thick white mist, which until that point has been held by mysterious forces within the skin. He did not say what this mist was for or why dying released it, but did note that it tended to gather in the mind when its host was sleeping, and that, in some instances, especially in the case of those “not long for this terrible earth,” did not leave the mind even after the host was awake. He then said he had more than once, when wide-awake, experienced a curious phenomenon that could be attributed to such a mist. When it happened, people and objects tended to lose their definition and bleed into each other, an erosion of border and contour he found very troubling. On those days, he canceled all his appointments and stayed inside, eyes closed, barely moving, as contexts and circumstances that had long seemed inviolable to him came unhinged. It was, he told me, partly to preempt the noxious effects of these occasional bouts that he had taken to admitting a greater-than-average measure of calculated falsification into his life.

That was all I had gotten out of him on the subject that day, but when I went to visit him when I wasn’t supposed to I got a little more. It was a bright afternoon in Manhattan, and the cool air as I went through the park smelled like it is supposed to, or you think it is supposed to, on a cool bright day in a small city park; by that I mean something like almost fresh, so that, in a way that was totally unrelated to what I was thinking about, I felt pretty good. For a few minutes, my mind ceased its whirring and my unease took a break and I was just some guy with a pretty good job walking across the park on a sunny day. I thought about this afterward, after leaving Mr. Kindt’s, about having felt, for those few minutes crossing the park and walking into his building, almost, as I say, good, or, as I put it, pretty good, and I thought about it while I sat in the bar looking out at the rain over the same park, at the glowing lamps and dark trunks and wet benches, getting ready to murder him. It wasn’t like I left Mr. Kindt’s that afternoon feeling awful — I didn’t. It’s just that after I had left him, especially the first time, I definitely no longer felt “pretty good,” and walking through the park wasn’t going to help.