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The interesting thing about Chester’s file was that the arrest record ended about three weeks before my bust. Since then he’d been a witness in a variety of drug and prostitution cases.

He was a black man, what my daughter’s teachers would call African American, six three, and my age. He’d gone to public school until the age of fifteen and he was considered a predator by most of the detectives who had investigated or worked with him.

There was an open file on him about a woman, Henrietta Miller, who had gone missing nearly twenty years before.

If I wanted his address or number I’d have to come up with higher clearance than Henri had.

That was no problem.

I went upstairs to my apartment and spent another hour or so making notes on pink and blue sheets of paper. These I sorted into a leather folder that I put into a shoulder bag along with a silver flask of sour mash whiskey and a loaded .45 with an extra box of shells.

At 6:45 I boarded the first car of an uptown A train. It was already crowded with people from all classes commuting into Manhattan. Next to me sat a young black woman reading Journey to the East by Hesse. She was rapt in the language of the long-dead Nobel laureate.

In her early twenties, she was dressed for office work but not sleekly like a manager or VP. I figured she was a college student working as a receptionist or data entry clerk. Her profile was what I could only call friendly, so I said, “I tried The Glass Bead Game but couldn’t get through it.”

She looked up at me as if expecting to see someone else.

“What?”

“Magister Ludi,” I said.

“You read Hesse?”

“Journey to the East and an early one called Knulp.” I could see the question in her eyes so I added, “There was an accident this one time and I couldn’t read for months. I never really read very much before that, but once I could do it again it was like I couldn’t stop for the next five years. I still read but just not so much as before.”

“How did you end up reading somebody like Hesse?”

“Worked my way sideways from the existentialists.”

The look on her face was trying to deny my claims but unable to find a reason why.

“What?” I asked. “Don’t I look like I can read?”

“I don’t know,” she said, an authenticity in her tone. “You’re dressed like a janitor except for that leather bag. I guess you could be a professor.”

“Retired cop.”

“I expect cops to read Tom Clancy or something.”

“What got you reading Hesse?”

“I’m majoring in comp lit at Hunter. Our senior year we have to write, like, a thesis.”

I stuck out a hand and said, “Joe Oliver.”

“Kenya. Kenya Norman,” she said, reaching out too. “Are you trying to pick me up, Mr. Oliver?”

“No,” I said. And that was mostly true.

18.

I got a phone number before getting off at Port Authority. Kenya Norman, the young scholar, was headed for Brinkman/Stern, an investment company in the Sixties that specialized in new technologies.

“I figure I won’t be distracted from my work if I’m not interested in what my day job is,” she told me.

“Whoever you are,” I concurred, “you have to love what you do or you end up hating yourself.”

She gave me an odd look and I felt for a moment that I was looking into a mirror.