"So anyway you came,” he said to Pierce. “That's something.” He came close to Pierce and put out a large and knob-knuckled hand, unsmiling still. “Pierce."

"Yes.” The grip was iron.

"Good."

"Where is he now, can you tell me?” Pierce asked. “Do you know?"

"I got some ideas. Some of the guys started the celebration early.” Knowing laughter from the boys on the couch. “He's with them. The usual places."

"Celebration."

"Don't worry. It'll cycle back here. Or we can go hunt ‘em up. You won't miss a thing."

For a time the two looked at each other as, with gradual certainty, Pierce came to understand.

"His birthday,” he said.

"Sixty-three,” said the watchcap. And of course it was, noble, benevolent Aquarius. He knew that. And now he knew the man before him too. This was the Chief, of whom Axel had told him: the Navy man (retired) who managed a team of young working men, who earned extra money and got away from their families on weekends by doing reclamation in Brooklyn buildings. Axel was accountant and factotum. Pierce didn't know they had moved in, apparently to stay.

"Europe,” the Chief said, whose unwavering gaze was unsettling, and intended no doubt to be so. Pierce wondered what they had done to Axel. Or taken from him. There were so many disasters Axel could let himself in for, his misapprehensions and his grandeurs. “Whatcha want over there?"

"It's sort of a research trip,” Pierce said. “Historical research.” He turned away then, as though this answer were sufficient, to study the battered apartment, the building materials stacked against the wall, the rolled rug in the corner. A battered birdcage lay in pieces, the bird flown or dead; gone.

"Yeah, we're working on the place,” said the Chief. “The whole building. We got the tenants out and we're upgrading. What we're doing for Axel. I'll show you around."

There was a pounding of feet on the stair, past the door, on upward to the third floor, leaving a mephitic trail of cheerful obscenities as it went up. The three men on Axel's couch arose as one to follow, calling out as they left. A. A.

"You know he really shouldn't drink a lot,” Pierce said.

"So you'll be staying tonight,” the Chief said. “He'll be glad. You know he always expects you. See, your bed's made."

It was. The old chenille bedspread it had always worn, a new slough in its middle, though.

"Sixty-three,” said the Chief, observing the bed with Pierce as though there were someone in it. “So you would have been born 1942 or so?"

"Um yes."

"I was in the Pacific then."

"Aha."

"Axel missed the big one. Never mind.” He scratched his head again, a habit. “You want coffee? A beer?"

"No neither,” Pierce said. “Actually I may not be able to stay. I thought I'd get out toward the airport, you know, get a motel room out there, so I'd be close in the morning. My flight's early.” None of this was true.

"Naw,” said the Chief.

"And in fact,” Pierce said, “I have to go back to Manhattan for a while tonight. This evening. Shortly."

The Chief was still shaking his head. “You'll leave the bags here,” he said, his voice harsh from a lifetime of barking orders. “You'll come back tonight. Axel will be here, you'll have a drink with us, in the morning we'll take you out to Idlewild in the truck."

"JFK,” said Pierce.

"Listen,” said the Chief, advancing. “I'll tell you something. There is nothing you could want that can't be found right here. In Brooklyn. In the five boroughs at the most."

Somewhere in the building something heavy fell or was thrown down the stairs, while men laughed.

"I guess that must be true,” Pierce said.

"You're not shittn me,” said the Chief. Pierce now noticed that the man's right finger and thumb ticked rhythmically together. Effects of drink, or a palsy. “You know he needs somebody. If it's not you it's got to be somebody."

Pierce said nothing.

"The man's a genius,” the Chief said. “What he knows.” He tapped a temple with his forefinger. “Maybe you take after him."

Nothing.

"A good man too. He knows something about loyalty. Actually a lot."

Pierce was uncertain how long he could stand up under these implied reproaches. He managed to nod, slightly and solemnly. On the floor above, the roughhouse (as Axel would surely call it) worsened. A fight, maybe a mock fight, punches thrown, thud of boots. Fawken A. Fawken assho.

"So,” said Pierce. “Okay."

From an ashtray on the mantelpiece the Chief took a business card. “You probably know the number here,” he said, and Pierce did, even the old letter exchange that had once named his neighborhood, its bounds mysterious. Only by means of the dial plates of phones could you discover what places were within it and what places were outside it; the candy store nearby was in, so was the branch library blocks away, but the movie theater on the avenue wasn't. “There's another number too. We got a warehouse space in Greenpoint."

Pierce looked at the card, which bore their numbers, and a cartoon crown, chosen from a printer's catalog.

Park Reclamation and Renovation

Warehousing Fulfillment

He thought: What if it's all all right, and they will be kind to him, and cherish him; keep him from harm, and not fall into fools’ errors, make bad decisions; will think of him and his unworldliness when they dream up their schemes? What is fulfillment, and how do they do it?

"Okay,” he said again, and took the Chief's hand. Outside the naked windows (what had become of their lifelong brown drapes?) a short day was closing, the black skyline and the sky too familiar. “I gotta go."

She lived up on the Upper East Side, almost under the shadow of the Queensborough Bridge, in a five-story building that was once also shadowed by the rattling El. It was ready now for the renovators and reclaimers, to turn its railroad apartments into expensive studios, but that hadn't happened so far.

The front door was open, maybe stood open always—Pierce hadn't ever been here before, had only heard about it from her on the phone, those rare times she called. He went up. They didn't know, his neighbors up in the country, the feel of these banisters thick with a hundred coats of cheap enamel, these worn rubber treads. He had lived for years going up and down stairs like these, streets like these. And then he had left at last, impelled by her to take another way.

He had used to call her Sphinx, softly in her ear in bed, and then later to himself when he thought of her. Not for her silence, she was a Chatty Cathy most of the time, but for her fine-boned cat's body and the gloss of her thick fur and the alien eyes in her human face. And for the riddle she posed maybe, for she was a Gypsy, or her mother was: gitana, race of Egypt once though no more. Her name had been Diamond Solitaire when she toured with a ragtag theater company of trannies and egotists, still her friends, doing improv and performance pieces in shifting venues. But back before that, when she was unfolding in her unmarried mother's womb, she needed a name (her mother thought) that such a girl as she growing up would want and need to have, a name sturdy and lusterless but not plain or gray; and so she got the name that nuns and her stepfather and unemployment offices would all call her, if no one else. Her mother believed she'd made the name up herself, and in a sense she had, though it wasn't her daughter alone who bore it.

This was her door. On it was a big decal, the red oval of the Holmes Security Agency, an armed Athena and a sunset or sunrise. Premises Protected. He doubted that; a piece of city irony. He listened at the door to what he might hear within (nothing) and then he knocked, and found that so far from being locked it wasn't even shut.