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“That piece’a-shit traitor? I’ll give you his information if you promise to kill him.”

“I can assure you that I’ll do worse than that.”

“You still AOL?”

“I am.”

“A dinosaur. I’ll get somebody to send you what you need.”

I bought three maple-glazed doughnuts and a Styrofoam cup of black coffee from a cart on the first floor. Then I made another call.

“Watching the watchers watch the watched,” he said.

I grinned. “Hey, Mel.”

“You’re up early.”

“I heard a worm turn and went out lookin’. You got anything?”

“Not quite yet, but I will soon enough.”

I hadn’t had a cigarette since solitary. I went to a little kiosk right outside the bus station and bought a pack of filterless Camels. I coughed a little on the first drag but after that it was a fine memory.

I smoked the cigarette halfway down and then crushed it under the toe of my right shoe.

My real phone beeped and I saw the e-mail that Mimi Lord promised.

“Excuse me,” a woman said.

She was probably thirty but looked like she was closing in on sixty. She wasn’t white or black, but that’s the closest I could come to defining her race. Her hands were very dirty and the violet-and-black dress she wore looked like it might unravel at any moment.

“Yes?”

“You got a cigarette?”

I handed her the nearly virgin pack.

I found him at the address Mimi’s e-mail provided, in a storefront on a stretch of Flatbush that had not yet been kissed by the gentrification bug. The entire space was no more than a few hundred square feet and the only furniture was a desk and four chairs.

Chester was sitting behind the desk with a size-fourteen-shod foot resting upon it. Two other men, one white and one not, were seated in chairs that flanked him. They were all smoking and drinking from small paper cups.

There was a good deal of laughter among them.

I’d driven past the big-windowed storefront private club and parked the car in a garage six blocks away. My shoulder bag was in the trunk, under the spare, but the .45 was in my pocket—I was carrying a pretty mean pocketknife too.

“Can I help you?” a man’s voice asked from behind me.

I was standing across the street and four doorways down from Chester’s hole in the wall.

Turning, I saw a small man with grayish skin looking up from about half a foot below my height. His sports jacket was shapeless enough to be a sweater and the waistline of his pants rode a little higher than where his navel should have been. Maybe seventy, he had a full thatch of gray hair and old-fashioned spectacles glazing auburn eyes.

The sign on the display window of the store behind him read, NILES AQUARIUMS AND FISHES. I didn’t know if Niles was a name or some poetic reference to an ancient river filled with fish.

I looked down into the man’s eyes and said, “Tom Boll. I was, uh, well, I was, um, thinking if I should come in and ask for a, you know, a job.”

This declaration surprised the old man.

“I like fish,” I said. “I mean I like to watch ’em. I like to eat ’em too, but I know you people don’t sell that kinda fish.”