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There was something so intimate about the question that for a brief span of seconds I didn’t feel alone. And because of that epiphany I realized that I felt alone almost all the time—when talking to people, walking down crowded avenues, even when I was talking with Aja.

I was alone because no one else seemed to know what was in my heart. Only Mel to a certain degree and now Effy, whom I had had all kinds of kinky sex with. None of that mattered because in order to truly be with somebody you have to be in their mind.

“Did you, Joe?” she asked again.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”

“Did you do anything to him?”

“I knocked him down.”

“Did he deserve that?”

“About a hundred times over.”

“He’s still alive?” Effy asked.

“He is.”

“You a good man, King Joe,” she said. “In any country, language, religion, or wild place—you a good man. You knew me when I didn’t know myself.”

“Thanks,” I said, then I disconnected the call.

I put the pistol in the trunk and drove home at a snail’s pace; that same snail that was bringing humankind to a new understanding of the same old shit.

17.

When Aja was a baby I’d watch her sleep, sometimes for an hour or more. Her face changed expressions with whatever dream she was having or with anything shifting in the room or inside her. She made errant noises and reached out now and again.

Sleeping, it seemed to me, was an act of innocence. That’s why I stayed awake after almost murdering Exeter Barret. I knew that peaceful slumber was for babies, whereas only nightmares awaited a man like me.

Little X had provided corroboration of the intelligence Henri gleaned from his superiors. Not only was there a man in my downfall named Cumberland, but he dealt with heroin and his first name was Hugo.

If the name was an alias it was well chosen. It sounded like a real name, but then again it had a fancy quality that might be a shield.

I used Henri Tourneau’s passwords to get into the police and informant files of the NYPD. There was no Hugo Cumberland anywhere.

Google told me that there was a man of that name who had died more than twenty years before. He was a carpenter who had four children, one wife, and a house in Nyack. At the time of his death he had lived sixty-one years and his youngest child, a son who was twenty-three at the time of Hugo’s death, was named Adam.

Adamo Cortez and Hugo Cumberland. Albeit thin, it was the only shred I had to hold on to at 4:19 in the morning.

There were no CIs or cops with Adam’s name, but there was the record of an incident, fifteen years earlier; a shoot-out in East Harlem, a falling-out among dope dealers, and a man named Adam Cumberland was grazed on his left biceps. The investigating officers believed that Cumberland was an innocent bystander.

He filled out a witness report but disappeared before the inquest. If he was a police plant there was no record of him in the system.

It wouldn’t have been a lot of information even if I was still a police detective. I could go to the hospital or to the false address he put down in his statement. But all of that was over twenty years ago.

I stared at the screen and scrawled down the names. The last initial for both false names was C. Maybe it was the original Hugo Cumberland’s son.

My cell phone sounded after maybe an hour of searching for the scion of the dead carpenter.

“Hello?”

“Joe?”

“Hey, Effy. It’s five thirty. Don’t you sleep?”

“Don’t you?”