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The men were looking around. Finally they decided on the partially concealed table that Mel coveted.

When they were settled, shy-eyed Juan went over to take their orders.

“So your story is a prison psych putting a textbook diagnosis on your actions?” I asked, telling Mel that we were just going to watch and wait.

“No. I was just giving you the official answer. You know that’s how most people know everybody else. They read it in a newspaper ad or maybe a letter from home.”

“So what’s the real answer?”

“My mother was a Catholic girl. From the age of three she went with her mother to church every Wednesday and Sunday. When she was nine she pledged her life to Jesus Christ and each and every word in a single book.

“Then one night, when she thought she was alone in the cathedral, a man dragged her into the confession box and raped her. She was barely a teenager and right there in the church too. That shit warped her brain.

“Her mother and father ordered her to get an abortion, but she told them that that would be against God. They kicked her out the house and she lived in a Catholic dormitory, where she gave birth, named me after the demon, and never, ever showed me any love.

“I was a duty like Job’s trial for her. She housed me and fed me and told me every day that I was the son of evil.”

I looked into Mel’s dead eyes, thinking that my life might not have been as bad as I thought.

“You know Porker’s real name?” I asked.

“I forget, but I know where to get it.”

After that we dallied over our drinks and food. Mel had a vast range of knowledge that had nothing to do with crime. He knew quite a bit about evolution. He told me that his greatest wish, when he was a child, was to change into something different; like wolves had become dogs or dinosaurs birds.

When my watch said 10:37 the three thugs paid their bill, got up, and left. They hadn’t seen a man with a red flower in his lapel. Stuart Braun wasn’t there either.

“I guess we can go too,” I said maybe half an hour after Porker and his crew were gone.

Outside the restaurant Mel said, “I killed the motherfucker.”

The old me would have been on the alert for a confession, but I had already crossed over that line in the East Village.

“Who?”

“My father. I asked around until I heard about a guy from my mother’s old neighborhood who had gone down for rape a few times. I met him in a bar and, after a whole lotta rye, he told me about a thirteen-year-old girl he raped in a confession box. He said that was the sweetest nut he ever had.

“A little later on I made some excuse to get mad and hit him in the teeth. I wiped some’a the blood up with a handkerchief and left him on the street.

“The DNA lab identified him as my father and I met up with him again. He’d been so drunk that he didn’t remember gettin’ knocked out. I took him to this abandoned house in the Bronx and put all kinds of pain to his ass. When he was dead I poured seventeen gallons of sulfuric acid into a big ole bathtub and that motherfucker was gone from the world. It was like he never even existed.”

“Because he raped your mother?” I had to ask.

“Because he made me and made me what I am and didn’t even know it. And on top of that he wouldn’t have given a damn even if I told him.”

15.

I took a yellow taxi home.

Montague Street was empty. Coleman Tesserat might have been hiding in some doorway with a gun in his hand. Maybe the exposure of his crimes on Wall Street would have salted him away for twenty years—I didn’t know. I did know that I wasn’t afraid to die, that since deciding to go up against the men who took my life away, I had no fear.

“King-baby,” she said.

Turning my head to the left I saw Effy Stoller. Five three with fifteen pounds over what her physician would have called perfect weight, she had big lips and skin darker than mine. Her high, high heels might as well have been bare feet, she was so poised, and her hair had been done into the shape of a seashell that would exist in some far-flung future when humanity had devolved itself into geologic memory.

“I know I’m a little late,” I said as she walked up to me. “I thought you’d be gone.”

She kissed me full on the lips and said, “I knew you’d get here. If you e-mailed me it had to be something hard.”