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The man was both pitiful and forlorn, but that’s not what caught my attention. I knew the guy. He was the one Mel called Porker. One of the men Stuart Braun sent to ambush me at the West Village coffee house.

“Can he see us?” I asked.

“No.”

“You been interrogating him?”

“Softened him a little bit. I was waiting for you to come up with better questions.”

Mel went into a small alcove next to the left side of the window-wall. From there he pulled out a pair of folding chairs. He set these up in front of the interrogation cell window as if it were a really big-screen plasma TV.

The room we were in was dark and dusty, but Porker’s room was all light stone and bright light.

“Yep,” Mel said as we looked at his private production. “This is a station house of the Underground Railroad.”

“Say what?”

“There were people on Staten Island who wanted to free as many slaves as they could. Over in Elliotville and under this building they did just that.”

For maybe ten seconds I was distracted from the prisoner.

“I bought this building for a refuge and maybe some other business,” Mel continued. “But then I discovered what had been going on back before the Civil War. I kinda like it. People should break the law if it doesn’t suit them.”

“Can he hear us?” I asked, motioning at Porker.

“Soundproof.”

“What’s his real name?”

“Simon Creighton. He was born in Jersey City. Breaks legs. Beats his girlfriends, but they love him anyway.”

“What have you gotten out of him?”

“I just been beatin’ him. You know…setting up the lexicon for when you got here.”

“You just beat him?” I said, looking at the leg breaker’s bruised, battered, and bloodied face through the slightly green-tinted glass wall.

“Anything one man does that another man understands can be defined as language,” Melquarth quoted. “I read that once in an article on philology. I was looking up poisons but found that instead.”

Mel went back to the little alcove from which he retrieved the chairs and came out with a very long black trench coat, a pair of thick black gloves, and a pure white mask that was reminiscent of Greek marble statuary of the gods. The white face was beautiful and manly, dispassionate and beyond pedestrian human expression.

“I put on this shit,” he told me, “and it scares poor Simon almost to death.”

“You got one for me?”

“Don’t need it.”

“Why?”

“There’s earphones in the mask and an omnidirectional mike too. You just listen to what Porker got to say and tell me if I should be asking something else.”

Mel first donned the trench coat, which came down over his shoes. After that he put on the mask and then the gloves. He turned that motionless and beautiful white face to me, nodded, and then went to a door on the right side of the window. That door led to another. Mel closed the first and then I saw him enter the white stone cage.

He stood motionless for at least three minutes staring at Simon Creighton.

At first the obese prisoner stared back. He was afraid, definitely, but also trying to put up a brave front. Thirty seconds into the stare down he began to tremble.

“What the fuck do you want, man?!”