Word Made Flesh

12

Who can explain this city? Whose job or duty would this be? Everyone draws his own map. And this is probably as it should be. Think about the physiognomy of the streets. They seem to exist to be pure spectacle. Absolute form and accidental function.

Understand that while a currently fashionable breed of critic defines the standard metropolitan nexus as “faceless,” the city of Quinsigamond is the antithesis of this. It is a burg too intensely there for its own good. Unlike some urban districts that seem to lack a center, Quinsigamond’s center appears, always, to be everywhere at once, radiating a malignant intensity that, for reasons not readily manifest and despite our best intentions, can never be dissipated into something harmless. It’s as if the closed-down factories that built and grew this town were still operating on some hidden and secret level, pumping out a new kind of toxin, an unsensed but fully noxious pollutant determined to change us all in unknown ways.

The stretch of land beyond the Bohemian Wing, however, is another story. This sprawl of half-destroyed warehouses and dilapidated garages, junked cars and unlicensed scrap yards and fire-humiliated tenements, is a semiotic blanket of emptiness, lacking even the smallest trace amount of self-knowledge. And perhaps that’s what makes it the perfect location for August Kroger’s headquarters.

Kroger’s castle, the hub of his burgeoning little dominion, lies at the end of Heronvolk Road, across the intersection of Diskant Way, down where the Wing begins to segue into that noman’s-land of ethnic confusion, that mayorless pocket of disorder, that one of the more cheeky anthropologists at the J Street School for Social Research has dubbed the Vacuum. It’s an odd and mysterious tract that, for reasons no one can firmly defend, has never become a solidly identifiable neighborhood. As if, for a century now, the block has chronically emitted a warning vibration, a strong and clear sense of bad juju, scaring away every newly immigrated tribe that considered colonization.

But August Kroger has never been bothered by superstition any more than by ideas of racial allegiance. He’ll play by the rules of social tradition as long as they are to his benefit. And then he’ll find a way to improvise. He was not always such a bold personality. In his youth, back in Maisel, he was known as a shy boy, of indistinct character, the type of child who, it is always assumed, will naturally blend into the weave of the workaday world, will never cause a problem but will never proffer a solution, a gray entity who should, in all likelihood, slouch through a lifetime, head bowed down and voice unheard.

At some point in his maturation, August Kroger threw off the mantle of pervasive mediocrity and willed himself, unequivocally and without the possibility of regression, into a player, a bold man who could make things happen to others. This is the reason he can never be happy running a handful of lucrative franchises for the Bohemian king, Hermann Kinsky. Kroger cannot view himself as handmaid to another. It’s a state of being that says the world holds no logic or meaning. It’s perverse and totally unacceptable. And so he is perpetually engaged these days in the perilous task of stockpiling enough money, reputation, and connections to topple Kinsky and become mayor to the Bohemians, taking his seat among the businessmen who truly run this city.

The standard method by which a hyperambitious underling advances to the almost mythical realm of the neighborhood mayor would be to feign unilateral allegiance to the king while secretly expanding and fortifying his own troop of do-or-die meatboys until the hour is judged ripe for a victorious coup. Timing is essential and acting ability is enormously helpful. But while every overthrow attempt in Quinsigamond’s history has been inevitably bloody and confusing, such actions have always transpired wholly within the folds of the tribal family.

Leave it to August Kroger to annihilate tradition and barter for outside support, spit on honor and leverage his dreams with some extra-Bohemian backing.

Kroger operates a half-dozen low-rent storefronts in the Vacuum, some legitimate, like the newspaper kiosks in Guttwetter Alley, some not so, like the copy shop on Zuhorn that is actually in the business of counterfeiting inoculation papers. But August’s only showpiece, the first jewel in his imagined post-Kinsky empire and the base from which he will launch himself into mayoral status, is the Bardo Tissuefable Press, his shockingly successful publishing concern. This privately held corporation is housed in the remnants of the old Bardo Knitting Works, a textile mill that went under decades ago, but in its heyday helped make Gianni “The Peach” Bardo neighborhood mayor to the first generation of Italians down on San Remo Ave.

Architecturally, the Bardo is a product of the short-lived Vagabond School, an amalgam of crackpot theories that resulted in a handful of similar monstrosities speckled across the rust belt. The Bardo, like the others, is an opaque, dull pile of unshapely but imposing bricks, sculpted from the start to look as if they had fallen from the heavens in a random pattern. Kroger held on to the mill’s original name and has been restoring the mammoth factory from the top down so that while his penthouse apartment and library are opulent to a degree that encroaches on the decadent, his street-level sweatshop remains as primitive and filthy as it was at its Depression-era worst. The place would give an OSHA inspector a new lesson in outrage, could make some of the piecemeal slave camps of China or Honduras look like a worker’s Eden.

All of the labor force toiling in the Bardo is imported. The bulk of it is under the age of consent. Kroger traffics mainly in comic books, what his distributors and marketing people vehemently insist on calling graphic narrative. While the stock in trade may seem fully legal if somewhat less than respectable, the fact is that Kroger is a down and dirty pirate. He hires ignorant and poverty-blighted prodigies to draw and ink knockoffs of popular original comic books from the U.S.A. Then he exports the plagiarized fables globally.

His child artists are kept like veal in chicken-wire pens, boxlike cells crammed with stool, drawing table, and first-rate pencils and watercolors. It’s rumored that the more escape-prone talent is ankle-chained to the easels. The kids put in twelve-hour days, as August’s forewoman has discovered that a longer shift makes the work suffer. And Kroger has rules about upholding standards. He’ll chew out your heart before he’ll pay a cartoonist a licensing fee, but his forgeries are the best on the market. And though he has little respect for the medium, wouldn’t, in fact, be caught reading a single page of his own product, the dingy hallways of the Bardo are decorated with both stolen original prints and their BTP imitations, hung side by side, examples of the quality inherent in a Kroger operation, daring the rare visitor to just try and choose the progenitor.

Kroger has men and women in the field around the globe, individuals he calls talent scouts but who are, more truthfully, art pimps and procurers. They wander through the fellahin ghettos of the planet, meandering around cities like São Paulo and Port-au-Prince, Kuala Lumpur and East St. Louis, basically any ravaged environs where one might find hordes of youths abandoned and left to fend for themselves. The procurers then make their presence known, handing out candy and colored pencils, dressed in clothing that gives tantalizing hints about a place where God goes to party and only the willfully doomed starve to death. Kroger’s deputies roam through the rice kitchens and public parks, leach onto the migrant carnivals and underpass campgrounds, cruise the municipal aqueducts where the nomads sometimes bathe. And quickly they insinuate themselves into the life of the disinherited child. The pimps enact a near-perfect routine, inspecting the arts and crafts displays for sale at tourist junctions, browsing the graffitied tunnels of subways, even studying sand etchings in the mud banks of the waste dumps, always keeping the eye peeled for that one child born with the gift of graphical representation. The rest is an easy ride to commission, the promise of life west or north, the transplantation to the heart of a myth named America.

And so they are brought to Quinsigamond and life on Heronvolk Road, life in one of Kroger’s art pens in the dim recess of the Bardo. He houses his urchin workers in a basement dormitory that consists of triple-stacked bunk beds and a single toilet with a penchant for overflowing. He feeds them according to their weekly production: Little Li doesn’t finish inking the latest issue of Ignatius in the Tenderloin, Little Li goes to bed hungry on Friday night.

Kroger does not often visit the drawing pens, probably due to the preponderance of mites, lice, scabies, and other parasitic dermatological afflictions rampant among the newest of the indentured artists. August has an excessive, perhaps pathological fear of such infestations. It might be regarded as his greatest weakness, and, oddly, it is a neurosis that developed fairly late in life. He has his charges sprayed down with a homemade insecticide twice a month and forbids them use of the elevator, keeps them confined exclusively to the dormitory and the drawing pens, but this doesn’t prevent him, at night, from dreaming of blind, hairless, wormlike vermin twisting their way into the pores of his body and creating a teeming community, a culture of instinctual sucking and burrowing, just under the surface of his skin. He inevitably wakes screaming. And sometimes he has scratched at his arms so badly that he’s woken to sheets stained with his own blood.

And now the scratching is advancing into the waking hours, into moments of previously uncharacteristic daydreaming, like this moment, as he peers down into Heronvolk from the perch of his top-floor office, as he watches the taxi-boy being pulled indelicately from the Bamberg by the two foot soldiers. He smiles and slips a finger inside his shirt, the nail scraping rapidly above the navel, and studies Raban’s method of escorting prisoners, the almost constant poking and prodding and nudging and slapping and kicking and shoving. Kroger steps away from the smoked window and wonders if Raban was as surly before the Capital Fires. Did his disfigurement trigger an additional gulf of rage that gets released in the course of his nightly duties? The would-be mayor debates the question as he paces the room and begins a series of finger-limbering exercises that his father taught him long ago.

The one with the burn-deformed face shoves Gilrein through the door as it’s opened by a preadolescent girl dressed in worn shorts and an extra-large T-shirt that reads ST. IGNATIUS INQUISITORS. The girl has a smudge of charcoal on her cheek and deep circles under her eyes. The meatboys ignore her and move inside.

Gilrein blinks to help his eyes adjust to the light change. The room is enormous, a factory loft of oil-stained concrete floors and high brick walls all sporting lengthy cracks. The general lighting is dim and yellow, a line of low-watt bulbs glowing from tin fixtures high on the walls, but this is augmented by a series of white-blue high-intensity lamps glaring from each side of a wide center aisle.

Kroger’s animals pull Gilrein down the aisle toward an open freight elevator shaft at the far end of the loft. He looks from side to side as he walks and is horrified to witness something resembling a dingy human zoo, a shabby industrial terrarium filled with children, row after row of boxes, cells, pens, tiny symmetrical stockades separated one from the next by brittle fencing and an occasional sheet of nicked-up plywood. Each pen is chained closed and inside Gilrein can glimpse youngsters seated behind tables and easels working with pencils and pens and paintbrushes under harsh desk lamps.

As he passes, many of the children rush to their doors and peer out at him but no one says a word. There are no voices. There is no din of heavy labor, just the sound of the visitors’ feet tapping off the concrete.

They stop in front of the lift and Blumfeld, the creature with the elaborate overbite, presses for the platform. There’s an awful metal whine and then a three-quarter cage starts to descend through the ceiling. Gilrein weighs the possibility of a run against both the likelihood of success and the amount of joy his two captors earned from his previous beating. He decides to be conservative, turns his head to the side and locks eyes with a young boy, maybe twelve years old, Asian and suffering from a forehead full of eczema. The kid is kneeling, turned around on top of a bar stool, facing away from his drawing board and hunched forward to peer through the fencing.

“Jiang,” a soft and thickly accented voice says, “geet bahk tu vek.”

Gilrein turns and looks across the aisle to the drawing pen opposite Jiang’s. And is stunned to see Mrs. Bloch, the woman from the Houdini Lounge, Oster’s blind tattoo artist. Her face is pointed in his direction and he can see the sick-making pancake tumors in place of her eyes.

Then a bell sounds and the open cage touches down on the factory floor. The meatboys each take one of Gilrein’s arms and yank him onto the metal apron. One of them grabs a free — hanging electrical cord, presses a button on the end, and the entire elevator jerks in place and starts to rise. It’s a slow ascent and while the goons stare at their feet, Gilrein studies a framed print mounted on the wire mesh of the left side of the cage. It’s a blow-up of the cover from this month’s issue of the Bardo title Alice Through the Attic Glass. Apparently a thriller comic, the painting depicts a dark-eyed girl, partially obscured by shadow, reacting in what appears to be shock or horror to something she’s witnessing from behind the drapes of her window.

The platform reaches its zenith, creaks to a stop in front of a set of glossy walnut doors. There’s a long wait until they slide open, then Blumfeld and Raban hustle Gilrein inside the penthouse, pull him through an enormous and ornate foyer, down a dimly lit corridor covered in flock wallpaper, and into a large den rimmed with walls of wood shelving that hold uniform rows of thousands of leather-bound books. At the far end of the room is a podium desk, a little like a scaled-down judge’s bench. Behind the desk, bent over an open volume, sits August Kroger.

He doesn’t look much like the pictures Gilrein has seen, but then it’s been three years since he was privy to OCU files and most of those prints were surveillance shots taken from a distance. The old man looks leaner than Gilrein would have guessed. He’s got a huge forehead and his hair is razor cut, close to the scalp. His ears are oversized and pink, but his cheeks are gray and droopy and lined. The eyes are close-set and squinty, covered by rimless oval glasses that are attached to a thin silver chain which drapes around his neck. But all the facial features are just gravy to the clipped rectangle of mustache that may, despite its brevity, be sporting a coat of wax.

Kroger is dressed in a pricey-looking black suit with a minimal gray pinstripe. The shirt is white, rigidly starched, the kind with those odd, rounded-off collar points. He’s wearing a maroon silk tie splashed with a pattern of what look like tiny white polka dots, but are, in fact, the letters of an obsolete Slavic dialect.

The meatboys deposit Gilrein in front of the desk, then move to the far end of the room and sit simultaneously at opposite ends of a dark paisley couch. There’s a straight-backed wooden chair facing the desk, but Gilrein stays on his feet. A few seconds go by. The sound of a clock ticking can be heard from somewhere in the den.

Kroger holds a flat hand up above his head as if calming a crowd, peers down closer to the book, and breathes deeply through a clogged nose. Finally, he lifts his head, stares across the desk at Gilrein, and slaps the book closed.

“I detest multiple points of view,” Kroger says.

Gilrein nods and says, “Did you bring me here for some book chat?”

“In a manner of speaking,” in a phlegmy voice layered with an accent, something Germanic perhaps. “You, Mister Taxi Driver, are in danger.”

“And you,” Gilrein responds, “are a little sewer rat that should’ve been stepped on a long time ago.”

He hears one of the meatboys rise, probably Raban, and then just as quickly sit back down as Kroger waves away the assistance.

“You know me, Mr. Gilrein?”

“I know all about you, asshole.”

“Such as?”

“Such as you were a low-rent errand boy from Old Bohemia who never had the balls to put together his own crew back in Maisel.”

“Such vicious rumors.”

“When you finally annoyed the local tyrants back home, you were lucky enough to be able to buy deportation. You ended up in Q-town a decade ago and weaseled your way into enough franchises to buy this firetrap.”

“You don’t like my home?”—mock offended. “I thought I’d assimilated so well.”

“Must really burn your ass that you’ll never be neighborhood mayor for the Wing. I just don’t know why Hermann Kinsky didn’t whack you already.”

“Hermann and I,” in a voice that suggests he finds Gilrein’s insults amusing, “have an understanding.”

“Well, Kinsky’s like that. He’ll tolerate anybody as long as they’re a useful tool. But after that he reaches for the piano wire.”

Kroger nods and pushes out his bottom lip. “Hermann is an impetuous man.” A pause, a look down at the table. “Anything else you’d like to add?”

Without hesitation, Gilrein says, “You’re a book freak.”

Kroger leans back in his chair.

“A book freak,” he repeats. “That is wonderful. I love it. Just marvelous. Most people call up that tired old pejorative—bibliomaniac. I find it so cliché, don’t you think?”

Gilrein steps forward, braces his hands against the edge of the desk and leans on his forearms. He waits until the air between them is thick and then, in a low voice that someone else might take for respect, he says, “The one thing every gangboy in this town knows is that you don’t dick around with a cop unless you’re doing business together.”

“But then,” Kroger says, “you are not with the police anymore, isn’t that right?”

“Hey, moron, doesn’t make any difference.”

“I am afraid I will have to disagree with you, my friend.”

He gets up from the desk and moves around it until he’s facing Gilrein. Raban comes off the couch and plays valet, helping the boss shirk out of his suit coat. Kroger starts to unbutton his shirt cuffs.

“I’m not quite the fool you wish to paint me,” he says, beginning to fold the cuffs back on themselves. “I’ve asked around the city. I’ve spoken to people both inside City Hall and above City Hall. I’ve confirmed and reconfirmed your status in this matter.”

“And what,” Gilrein grudgingly has to ask, “is this matter?”

“I believe you may have something that belongs to me.”

Gilrein shakes his head. “Like I tried to tell these shitheads the other night, you’re mistaken. You’ve gotten hold of some bad information.”

Kroger pulls down the corners of his mouth and shakes his head. He looks like someone’s deranged grandfather. He turns to the couch and signals for his vermin to approach, then goes to work on his other shirt cuff as Blumfeld and Raban cross the room, take hold of Gilrein and force him into the visitor’s chair.

He doesn’t resist. He looks up at Kroger and says, “You know, it’s never the big guys who give you the problems. Never the Kinskys. Never Willy Loftus or Reverend James. It’s always some little low-end cheesehead who can’t get a handle on how the city is played.”

“Have you eaten anything recently?” Kroger asks, doing the friendly country doctor as he puts a rubbery bib-apron on over his head. “Say in the past three to six hours?”

“My people will feed your heart to the dogs, you stupid bastard.”

“I only ask,” Kroger continues as Raban pulls Gilrein’s arms behind the chair and handcuffs the wrists together, “because it can be a problem. Every now and then, you’ll hear of a case of asphyxiation. Choking on the vomit, you understand.”

Now Gilrein starts to struggle and Blumfeld immediately puts a brutal choke hold on him, one fat arm wrapped tight around the throat, the other bound in the opposite direction across the forehead. And when Gilrein hears him suck in a deep breath, he becomes convinced that this animal is about to snap his neck, to just twist and squeeze and shove until all those small, fragile bones at the rear base of the head begin to tear free from one another.

Gilrein tries to throw himself forward to the floor, but he can’t move. Kroger steps in front of him, leans in, squinting, pulls a piece of lint or a thread from the front of Gilrein’s flannel shirt, brings it up close to the eyes and examines it.

“My father,” Kroger says, casual voice, fingering the fabric like a soft jewel, “was a tailor. Back in Maisel. A very skilled craftsman.”

Raban moves across the room, opens a closet, returns a second later carrying a brown leather satchel that in places has been worn toward a milk white. It resembles a doctor’s bag, with a flat bottom and a brass latch. Kroger takes the satchel, places it on the desk, releases the latch and bends open the hinges. He dips a hand inside the bag and begins to fish around.

“I spent a great deal of time in my father’s shop. As any boy would.”

Gilrein can smell a musklike cologne coming off of Blumfeld.

“My father hoped I would follow in his footsteps, of course. And I did learn the trade. I would help him during the busy season. I became very proficient with the needle and the thread.”

And he pulls a fat spool of heavy black fiber from the bag and sets it down. It looks like twine or a ridiculously thick suture.

“It is interesting, yes? You, Mr. Gilrein, have chosen to pursue the family business, am I correct? Your father was also a chauffeur, true?”

Blumfeld lets out a laugh without releasing any pressure from his hold. Kroger loves the response and he jerks back a little, looks around to Raban, lets out his own laugh, too loud and self-conscious. Then he shakes his head, dips back into the bag and pulls out a small, flat case, like an undersized billfold, crafted in what looks like the same soft leather as the satchel. There’s a zipper stitched around the edge of the wallet and Kroger begins to unfasten it as he speaks.

“To this day, Mr. Gilrein, I regret that I had to disappoint my father. I could not fulfill his wishes. It was not meant to be. My interests lay elsewhere, as they say.” He gestures to the room around him. “I loved the books. Maisel was a town quite rich in literature. The libraries and the book dens. The merchant carts filled with the old volumes. Sold by the kilo, if you can believe it”—a pause, as if remembering something, then, just as suddenly, back to business. “When my father passed away, the tailor shop closed its doors. But this bag”—touching the satchel gently, looking down on it and smiling—“is testament to his memory. The tools of his trade.”

Kroger makes a job out of removing a large ruby ring from his left hand and depositing it in his pants pocket.

“When I left my homeland, I had to depart quickly. But I could not leave my father’s bag behind. Whenever I take it out, as I have now, it brings him back to me. Do you know what I’m trying to say, Mr. Gilrein? I take out my papa’s tools and I’m transported back to Maisel. The Maisel of my youth. Which, of course, is long gone. The smell of the tailor shop. The steam from the presses mixing with the cut leather and the cabbage stew mother would send …”

He drifts off for a second, then, “I can almost taste it now, yes, Blumfeld?”

Blumfeld shakes his head enthusiastically and Gilrein’s windpipe blocks off for just a moment.

Kroger opens the wallet and reveals a display of silver sewing needles, a dozen or more, all held in a line of increasing size by securing loops. He pulls a midsize needle free, holds it up slightly above his head and studies it as if inspecting a diamond or a photographic negative.

“Zamarelli needles,” Kroger says, “and quite hard to come by in those difficult years. Nothing but the finest tools for Father. My mother, she would shake her head. We ate radish soup three nights a week, but father had to have the Zamarelli.”

“I think,” he says softly, maybe to himself, “this one will do nicely.”

And Gilrein tries once again to break free, fall to the floor, do anything but sit here and allow the realization of what’s about to happen to him. It’s useless. His movements only cause Blumfeld to tighten his grip.

Through clenched jaws, Gilrein manages to say, “You’re making a mistake.”

But Kroger is already threading the suture through the eye of his needle.

“Mr. Gilrein,” he says, “the beauty of dealing with someone as insignificant as yourself is that I can’t make a mistake. There is nothing to be lost. You are no longer a policeman. You have no family. No powerful friends. You live in a barn, for God’s sake. An attic dweller. You don’t exist beyond your pathetic role as a driver. A deliveryman. Even your passengers forget you the moment they step out of the taxi. You are a shadow, Mr. Gilrein. I can do anything I want to you. And no one will care.”

He comes to stand directly in front of Gilrein, the needle and the spool of thread cupped in the palm of his hand, held out before him like an offering.

“I am going to ask you a final time. You have taken something which belongs to me. I intend to locate it. Now, Mr. Gilrein, you can either help me in this matter or you can waste my time. But if you do not answer me right now, right at this moment, I am going to be forced to teach you a very dear lesson.”

He lifts the threaded needle up to his mouth, dips the point just inside his lips and moistens the tip, withdraws the needle and lowers it down toward Gilrein’s face, as if it were a minuscule chalice.

“Do you have anything to tell me, Mr. Gilrein?”

Blumfeld loosens the choke. Gilrein sucks in air and frantically starts to shake his head, yelling, “I don’t know anything.”

Kroger closes his eyes briefly to indicate his disappointment, then looks to Blumfeld and nods. Blumfeld resecures his vise-hold on Gilrein’s head.

Kroger steps forward, runs a thumb over Gilrein’s lips and then his eyelids, saying, “As you see nothing, it appears you have no use for the eyes. And as you have nothing to tell me, it seems to me, you have no use for the mouth.”

Gilrein tries to scream but it’s as if his head is frozen in a block of ice. With one hand Kroger grabs the front of Gilrein’s face between the expanse of his thumb and forefinger, then, with his other hand, he takes the sewing needle and punctures the bottom lip at the right-hand corner and as blood begins to flow down the chin, the needle and its attendant thread are forced through the upper lip, which likewise begins to bleed.

“The eyes will be much worse,” Kroger says, calmly. “There’s no comparison. The lips are supple, plenty of give. But the eyelid, acht, you need to be extremely careful.”

Very likely, the process takes several minutes. But Gilrein’s perception is skewed from the moment the tip of the needle pierces the skin just below the rim of the lip. What he’s aware of through it all is the pain, the blood, the seizing up of the stomach, the tremblings and hidden conniptions exploding in pockets throughout the entire body, their epicenter located, it seems, one moment at the base of the jaw, perhaps half an inch below the earlobe, and the next moment in his temples, where he can feel his pulse revving beyond panic.

And there’s the strain in Blumfeld’s arms and chest as they struggle to prevent even the slightest movement. There’s the smell of Kroger’s breath — something like mustard or a strong, overripe cheese. There’s the sound, somewhere beyond it all, of movement and, at one point, maybe laughter.

The needle slides in and up, through the soft tissue of lip, breaking blood vessels and igniting a warm flow of liquid down the chin, off the chin and down onto the front of the shirt. The needle slides in again, through the upper, matching lip, pulling the suture along behind, binding the folds of pink flesh together, closing the aperture of the mouth, sealing the wound that holds the tongue, the muscle of speech, the organ of taste. The needle changes direction, follows the lead of Kroger’s hand, reverses course and now comes downward toward earth, back through virgin skin, cinching the hole at the base of the face, the repository of noise, the church of oral language.

And as the needle moves through its design, across the track of the mouth, left to right as well as up and down, Gilrein becomes aware that Kroger is making a humming noise, is murmuring the sound of some familiar song, as if he were back in Maisel, back in his father’s tailor shop, working on nothing more than the mundane cut of a new summer suit.

Then, at some point, it is done. Kroger leans his head back slightly without moving the rest of his body, studying the quality of his work. Pleased with the outcome, he brings his face forward, this time all the way to Gilrein’s cheek until Gilrein thinks the old man is going to kiss him. Instead, Kroger takes the finishing end of his thread between his teeth and bites it loose from the spool, which he repockets.

He stands, takes a step backward, places a fist on his left hip, brings his right index finger up to his face and scratches at his chin, then extends the arm down and runs the finger along the black tracks of the new stitching, blood swamping his finger, which he wipes on the front of Gilrein’s shirt.

Kroger nods to Blumfeld while still staring at the craftsmanship. Blumfeld releases his choke on Gilrein who sinks down in the chair, tries to swallow and fights a new, rising fear as the reality of his inability to spit out the blood pooling in his mouth dawns on him. He does the only thing he can do. He swallows all the heavy liquid collecting in the gully around his tongue and uses all his concentration to ward away a gag reflex. He starts to try to pull his lips apart and knows immediately he’ll rip them to shreds sooner than he’ll tear the fibers holding them together.

He looks up at Kroger, who has taken his glasses off and is polishing them with his handkerchief. “After all these years,” he says, almost dreamily, to the room in general. “Father would be so proud.”

Blumfeld’s hands come to rest lightly on Gilrein’s shoulders.

“I am going to need your complete attention now, Mr. Gilrein,” Kroger says, wiping the needle clean and securing it back in the case. “Please, try not to fade on me. I know this is difficult, but I’m sure you are up to it.”

He takes a much smaller needle from the case, studies it as he takes a second spool of thread from the satchel. This spool is much smaller and the fiber is shaded a deep red, almost a maroon.

To Blumfeld, in a more casual voice, Kroger says, “Father used to tell me, ‘The smaller the needle, the greater the skill of the craftsman.’ And I remember a saying among his fellow tailors— ‘He could stitch the anus of a church mouse.’ Of course, it was more lyrical in the mother tongue. Still,” now to Gilrein, in a louder voice, “wouldn’t that be an awful proposition, my friend?”

A volley of laughter from Raban at the other end of the room.

Kroger sets to threading the second needle.

“I am going to ask you again. One last attempt. In all fairness,” squatting down until he’s at eye level with Gilrein, “it is known that you were a chauffeur for Leo Tani. And it is known that on the last night of Mr. Tani’s life, you drove him to and from a meeting at Gompers Station. You were very likely the last person in the city to see Mr. Tani alive.”

Kroger brings a thumb up to his mouth and gives it a swipe with his tongue, then extends it to Gilrein’s left eye and brushes at the eyelid as if clearing away a smudge on a canvas.

“Leo Tani,” he continues, “was negotiating the sale of an extremely rare and valuable book. Mr. Tani had received an enormous amount of money from me in exchange for this book.”

A nod to Blumfeld. The vise-choke is reapplied around Gilrein’s head. Gilrein bucks up and Blumfeld applies most of his weight, forcing Gilrein back into the chair. Gilrein tries to speak, manages a series of garbled noises, muffled and blunted by his sealed mouth.

Kroger, smiling, brings the needle up to the left eye, maybe an eighth of an inch from the pupil itself. Gilrein closes his lid, pulling on the muscles as hard as he can.

“Not too much contraction,” Kroger warns. “We don’t want to puncture the eyeball itself.”

Gilrein feels a single, sharp prick around the corner of his eye, just a poke, retracted immediately.

“Now, Mr. Gilrein,” Kroger says, “I’m going to ask you what happened to my book. And if you tell me, we will be done with our work for the day.”

Gilrein keeps his eyes closed, but he can feel and smell the breath again, impacting on the center of his face. Another quick, light jab of the needle, but this one closer to the eyeball and this one drawing a run of blood.

“Where is my book, Mr. Gilrein?”

The words I don’t know explode in a stunted, softened scream inside his mouth, in the newly sealed interior, all nasal, undifferentiated, close to meaningless anywhere but in his brain. But he yells them anyway, over and over, until he becomes aware of the laughter, the sound of all three of them laughing, the noise of their amusement overlapping and blending into a chorus of pathetic and overdone tittering.

He opens his eyes, sees Kroger shaking his head, feels Blumfeld’s arms trembling with something like glee.

Kroger breaks away from the joy of his meatboys, cocks his head to the side, and says, “Ignorance is not always bliss, is it Mr. Gilrein?”

Then he turns to Raban and says, “He knows nothing. Take him away from me.”

And as Blumfeld unlocks the handcuffs and starts to haul Gilrein out of the chair, Kroger adds, “And give him a pair of scissors for his troubles.”