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“I’m not hiring any staff right now,” he said.

“I know that. I mean, if you was, there’d probably be a sign in the window or somethin’, right? But I was wonderin’ if maybe you had some kinda work that you always meant to be doin’ but never get around to it. You know, somethin’ heavy or dirty. I don’t mind gettin’ my hands dirty. And I could really use a few dollars.”

The old man gauged me. I was just talking to blend in while watching Chester and his cohorts drink and guffaw. What I expected was that the fish merchant would send me away, but if asked later, he’d remember some poorly educated, nearly homeless man looking for work.

“I have a storeroom in the back,” he said. “Junk’s been piling up in there the past thirty-seven years.”

It was the perfect job for a mendicant like I was pretending to be.

The store wasn’t much larger than Chester’s place, but it was crowded with aisles of shelving that supported at least fifty tanks for fish. There were no saltwater tanks or exotic, big, or expensive fish. His aquariums were filled with schools of tiny catfish, zebras, tetras with bright orange spotting, big-bellied hatchetfish, and enough goldfish to populate a small pond.

Past the store proper was a little office where the old man, Mr. Arthur Bono, had a desk sitting under a corkboard decorated with dozens of pictures of good-looking young men—all dressed quite nicely. I figured that he cut these out of fashion magazines like GQ and Esquire.

From the office there was a door to a storage room that was stacked almost to the ceiling with debris of all kinds. There were broken-down cardboard boxes, broken tanks, empty cylinders of fish food, big plastic garbage bags filled with pizza boxes, dozens of empty wine bottles, and other transitory food containers.

The smell in there was pungent, but I didn’t mind.

“You gotta pair of work gloves?” I asked the elderly shop owner.

He was a little guy, but his hands were larger than mine.

I went to work binding and then carrying the refuse through a back door, down an alley that ran along the side of his store, and out to the curb.

The next four hours were occupied with the removal of at least two tons of rubbish.

At the curb I could easily watch Chester and his men. They mostly smoked and drank. There was a pizza delivery that occurred when I was binding trash in the storage room. And then there was a larger drop.

A fair-size U-Haul truck drove up and two Hispanic-looking young men started unloading smallish boxes with the help of Chester’s minions.

I had done a fairly poor job of stacking the trash and so used that opportunity to straighten out the mess.

There were maybe thirty boxes moved by the men into Chester’s make-believe office. They stacked them quickly and haphazardly; men in a hurry. The truck drove off and Chester and his men went back to sitting and laughing, drinking and making smoke.

I’d been working on the trash pile for forty-five minutes or so when one of the men, the white one, came across the street. He was walking toward me.

I considered shooting him.

It was one thing to have the urge to kill Little Exeter. After all, he might have been part of the scheme to destroy my life. But this guy walking across Flatbush, with his hands hanging empty at his sides, was no threat and I had no reason to harbor him any ill will.

I had been thrown back into the creature formed by my imprisonment. I was a rabid dog with hardly a scrap of civility to hide the shame.

The man passed near me, nodded a friendly greeting, and went on to a black Ford parked a few doors down. He drove the car to the storefront and then, with the help of Chester and the other man, loaded the boxes into the trunk and backseat of the automobile.

Nobody could ever say that criminals were at the top of their class in public school.

“Mr. Boll,” Arthur Bono said to my back.

“Yes, sir.” I turned away from my prey.

“Here you go.” He handed me three crisp new twenties.

“Damn,” I said. “I only figured to get about half this.”

“You made a deep dent in the room,” he told me. “And paying off the books costs a lot less. I’m going home now. You know, I don’t feel right being out at night.”

“Uh-huh.” I wanted to see what Chester et al. were up to behind me, but it made sense to maintain my subterfuge.

“You should buy you some new clothes,” Arthur advised. “You know clothes make the man. If you come back tomorrow morning you could finish the job and maybe make enough to buy a new shirt or even a jacket.”