You hit him too hard, one of the faces said.

I did not hit him too hard, said the other.

O.K., fine, but he’s unconscious.

I’m not unconscious, I said. I heard some kind of wet scraping sound. Someone smacked their lips.

You think he knows?

About tonight?

About poor old Lenny.

Nah, Cornelius and Kindt were careful.

Who is poor old Lenny? I said.

He’s the accountant. Leonard Seligman, one of your victims.

My victims?

Let’s just say he didn’t make it.

Give him some smelling salts.

Who has smelling salts?

Shake him around a little.

Just let him lie there. There’s plenty of time. The rain’ll wake him up. He can dream about his great buddy, Mr. Kindt.

Laughter. Gales of it.

I am awake, I said. Their faces had vanished. All I could see was rain and dripping tree branches. After a while, though I wasn’t sure if it could in fact be attributed to the rain, the use of my arms returned to me, as did that of various other tendons and muscles and limbs and nerve clusters, and I sat up.

Good, now I’m soaking fucking wet, I said.

It’s time, Henry, Cornelius said, coming up behind me, putting his arms under my shoulders and helping me up.

As he helped me, I could see the contortionists, farther down the path, grinning unpleasantly. The knockout, too, had appeared, was sitting on a bench wearing a long black vinyl raincoat and holding a small gun.

Is that real? I asked Cornelius.

Of course not, none of this is real, Henry.

None of it?

He handed me a knife, a flat-handled silver buck knife.

What’s this? I thought it was supposed to be a wire. I thought I was supposed to choke him until his throat bled.

Last-minute change.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with a knife?

You will make a line with it across Mr. Kindt’s throat.

A line, I said.

A very straight line. Be sure to break the skin.

Cornelius smiled. I looked over my shoulder. The knockout was also smiling, as were the contortionists.

What was with the punch in the face?

It’s time, Henry, Cornelius said. Mr. Kindt is waiting for you.

He was sitting cross-legged on his bed wearing black silk pajamas and a black silk sheet draped over his head.

What are you doing here so late, Henry? he said.

You know what I’m doing here, I said.

Mr. Kindt raised an eyebrow.

Fuck all this, I said.

What do you mean, dear boy?

I mean I’m tired of all this shit. You with your slop in bowls and heart monitors and beat-up books and being a crybaby because you killed someone a million years ago and took his name.

Mr. Kindt looked at me, a quizzical expression on his face.

I know about Lenny, I said.

Who is Lenny, Henry?

Your accountant.

I was eavesdropping in the rain. I heard about it. I know you took care of him. I know some fucking way or another I’m getting set up here to take a fall, and that the one doing the setting up is you.

He told me again that he didn’t know what I was talking about so I yanked him out of bed and dragged him into the living room, sat him down on the floor beneath the window next to a purple orchid, and hit him with the ashtray. I went to the fridge and retrieved the bag of Mr. Kindt’s blood, cut it open, and leaned over him with it and the serrated silver knife Cornelius had given me. Then I lifted the floorboard, retrieved the portfolio, and left him there. Lying in a heap in his black silk pajamas. Blue eyes open, rolled slightly back.

I very casually left the building and headed down Avenue B. Breathing hard but also whistling a little. Across and along Houston. Past Essex. Car lights shattering the rain. Impressed by the state Cornelius and Co. had managed to put me into. To Orchard. Along Orchard. The authenticity their little late-in-the-game revelation about setups and so forth must have leant my performance. My exquisite performance. The one I didn’t yet know had been videotaped. Mr. Kindt’s killer. Because of course he was killed. The authenticity was magnificent. Cut across the throat with the knife, the one I had brandished then left sitting on the floor by Mr. Kindt’s head. I stopped. The little tattoo parlor was closed. Dark. No Tulip. Padlocked shut. I started thinking, and turned around.

Mr. Kindt lay beneath the window exactly as I had, I swear, left him, except that his throat was open. And there was no empty blood bag in the garbage under the sink. And no cheerful little note written by me as a flourish, saying that I would call tomorrow so that we could have lunch.

I leaned close to the window. I put my bloody hand on the cold, rain-splattered glass, pulled it away, and looked out at the park.

Then Tulip was there.

I didn’t do this, I said. I mean, not this.

Save it, Henry, she said.

He’s my friend, I said. My dear friend. I’m complicit. I know the story. I know Mr. Kindt isn’t Mr. Kindt, or didn’t used to be. I know he was trying to set me up, that he has set me up, hasn’t he? Is that why he told me about Cooperstown — so that I’d have something else to think about? What’s in this portfolio? Should I look?

I held up the small leather case and took a half step forward. I could see Mr. Kindt’s hat and cape hanging by the door, his heart monitor dangling wires off the edges of the coffee table. I could see that Tulip, not smiling, was holding a gun.

I don’t care what you did or didn’t do, or know and don’t know, you shouldn’t have come back here, Henry, she said.

I could see her lift the gun and point it at me. I could see mist rising from Mr. Kindt, my dear dead friend dressed in black silk and lying with his throat open at my feet.

THIRTY

That’s what I’ve most recently thought about it all, but probably now that I’ve discussed events with Mr. Kindt, who even much-diminished as he is likes a good talk, and who has been talking lately about how accuracy too often undoes us and precision too often blurs, I’m not so sure. The trouble is, despite the progress I’m supposed to be making, part of me isn’t sure about anything these days. Things, as I’ve already let on, are a little confused, a little nebulous — to use one of the words that comes up when Mr. Kindt discusses the unavoidable tendency of past and present “to infect each other” here. They are growing more nebulous, not less. This increasing confusion stems in part, I suspect, from the fact that I have had to pay more and more frequent visits to Dr. Tulp’s office. Not a great deal has changed about our meetings, except that the call button on her desk is no longer functioning and when she steps out into the hallway to yell for assistance no one comes.

Further complicating things is that several versions of what transpired during those last few hours were presented (by myself, by others) at my trial, some of which definitely have their appeal for me. In one, Mr. Kindt dies alone in his room. In another, he dies in company in his room. In one version of that version, I am there. It is just the two of us. It is dark. Mr. Kindt has called and I have come. He says there will be no need for any murdering, that it has been taken care of already, he can feel it coming on, so to speak. Mr. Kindt whispers something. One of the words he whispers is “false.” Another is “wrong.” Mr. Kindt dies happy, or at least smiling, unafraid in my arms.

Nevertheless, and Dr. Tulp, despite the adjustment in our relationship, has been quite firm on several occasions in getting me to admit this, it is the version I describe above — or anyway, the prosecutor’s version of that version, which was, as I said, captured at its climactic moment on videotape by a camera hidden in Mr. Kindt’s closet, one that is supposed to have been turned on by Mr. Kindt (he says he can’t remember doing so and that, because he was unconscious, he has no idea, “only a very strong suspicion, Henry, since after all I am here with you,” about who actually finished him off), which is described and discussed and made a mockery of during the trial — that burns the most brightly for me. It is in this version that I am sentenced in a courtroom resembling the murky interior of a water tower by a judge I could never quite see and sent here, or someplace very much like here, it is not heaven and I’m not leaving, so you can perhaps understand why such details now mean considerably less to me than, say, my next little talk with Dr. Tulp or next visit from my dear old aunt or next awful, windswept dream.