After two rings the phone went silent. Soon after that the intercom sounded.

"Yes, Mardi?"

"It's a Mr. Breland Lewis on the phone for you."

"Tell him to hold on. I'll be on the line in a minute."

I don't like getting calls from lawyers. Just hearing Lewis's name, I shuddered and shrank.

And this is in response to my own attorney. If somebody asked me for a list of a dozen friends, Breland would have been on it. But still, he was representative of the law, and law, regardless of its mandate to protect the people, is no friend to man.

"Breland," I said into the mouthpiece.

"How are you, Leonid?"

"You tell me."

"It's Ron Sharkey again."

Ron Sharkey was the metaphor for well over twenty years of criminal activity on my part. I had torn down the lives of well over a hundred men and women in the years I was a fixer for the mob. Most of those that I destroyed were criminals themselves and so I could console myself saying that I was just another means of retribution for what was right and good in the world.

But I had taken down innocents along the way, too. Ron Sharkey was one of these. He lost everything because of my machinations, and he never heard my name or saw my face.

After Sharkey was released from prison I had Breland keep tabs on him. Years in stir had bent the once honest businessman. On the outside again, he had become a drug addict and petty thief. The police arrested him on a dozen different occasions, and every time Breland was there with bail money and representation before the court.

"What's he into now?" I asked.

"It's kind of complex. Maybe we better sit down and talk."

"Yeah," I said, "okay. Listen, I got a lot on my plate right now. Can you give me a day or so?"

"Sure. It'll hold for a day or two. But it can't wait a week."

BRELAND LEWIS'S PHONE CALL was the beginning of one long headache. It blossomed behind my left eye, a bright-red rose of pain. It wasn't Sharkey in particular, or even my oblivious client, Angie. It was more like everything, all at once.

"When you hit your fifties life starts comin' up on ya fast," Gordo Tallman said to me on the occasion of my forty-ninth birthday. "Before that time life is pretty much a straight climb. Wife looks up to you and the young kids are small enough, and the older kids smart enough, not to weigh you down. But then, just when you start puttin' on the pounds an' losin' your wind, the kids're expectin' you to fulfill your promises and the wife all of a sudden sees every single one of your flaws. Your parents, if you still got any, are gettin' old and turnin' back into kids themselves. For the first time you realize that the sky does have a limit. You comin' to a rise, but when you hit the top there's another life up ahead of you and here you are-just about spent."

The time for sitting on my butt on the seventy-second floor, playing like I could avoid my responsibilities, was over.

I hit the street at a good pace, moving north toward my home. On the way I thought about my duties to an unknowing world.

MY INTUITION WAS THAT the thing with Angie and Alphonse was not about sex. The details and photographs had intimacy but no heat to them. It seemed to me that Angie was like a family member, maybe even a daughter, who had somehow become estranged from the Big Man-after which she got into trouble. Or maybe the rift between them caused the trouble in some way.

I wasn't flat-out rejecting the notion that they were lovers. And even if they were related, he might still have had bad intentions toward her.

The problem was that I knew so little about Rinaldo. He was an honest-to-goodness twenty- first-century enigma. No one knew what he did or where his entry was on the chain of command. I'd only met a few people who'd ever heard of him.

"Rinaldo?" Hush, the retired assassin, had said when I'd asked him. "Yeah. I did work for him a couple'a times."

From the age of fifteen until his retirement, the only work Hush had ever done involved homicide.

"Funny thing, though," the serial-killer-for-hire opined. "I never met him in person. He was one of the few clients I ever had who I didn't look in the eye."

"Why's that?" I asked. We were in my office late one Tuesday evening. I was guzzling Wild Turkey while Hush sipped on a glass of room-temperature tap water.

"You can piss on a cardinal in his Easter suit but if the bush starts burning you have to lower your head and pray."

Remembering those words, rendered in Hush's deep voice, I stopped there in the middle of Broadway foot traffic. I was fool enough to be a friend to the killer-for-hire-but now to even consider investigating a man that Hush feared… that just had to make me stop and laugh.

"What the fuck's wrong with you, man?" someone said.

He was standing behind me, a young black man whose attire I could only call modern-day Isaac Hayes: light-brown leather from head to toe, his hat and shoes, pants and vest, and of course the open jacket. The only thing on that young man that wasn't bovine in origin was the golden medallion that spelled out something. The lettering was so ornate that I couldn't make out the word.

"Say what, brah?" I asked him in the accepted dialect of the street.

He was taller than me, of course, and skin-not so dark. The brown in his eyes was light, unnaturally so. I guessed that they might have been covered by cowhide-colored contacts to make his image complete.

The synthetic eyes looked me over, saw my big scarred hands and slumped, strong shoulders. He beheld in me the immovable object-though he might not have known the physics term. I saw in his fake eyes that he had been stopped before.

"I almost run you down, man," he said, allowing a constrained belligerence to express his ire.

I just looked at him. Any word I said would have led to a fight, so I left it up to him. I was ready to go to war-I almost always am. Combat was how I made it through childhood; it was what kept me alive.

The young man in leather gauged me.

Finally he said, "Fuck you," and walked around. After a few moments I went on my way, thinking that he was smarter than me.

He knew when to avoid an obstruction in the road.

It was three o'clock when I reached the front door of my apartment building-3:01, to be exact.

The hyena yipped in my yellow pocket. That was Detective Kitteridge, of course. I was supposed to be at his office. I guess he expected me to answer his call. But I didn't have the sense of the city fop who knew to skirt around a threat when he saw one.

I ignored the call-creating at least a temporary antagonist by my inaction.

MY LIFE IS A series of trials testing whether or not I am capable of maintaining my perceived place in the world. One of these perennial auditions is the staircase of my apartment building. I live on the eleventh floor. There are fourteen steps between each stage-one hundred forty little ascendancies. Unless it's late at night I almost always walk up.

I take the stairs at a fair clip.

The first four floors are no problem. I'm breathing at a good pace between five and eight. It's only the last two flights that are a real strain. The only reason I walk up is for those final twenty-eight steps. If I'm not breathing hard by then I go faster the next time. When I'm no longer able to make that run I'll know it's time to quit the game.

The stairs are not my only test. There's the heavy bag at Gordo's Gym, and how frightened I get, or not, when a man pulls a gun on me. There's sitting in the same room with Hush, who, if he were to have put a notch in his gun for every man he'd killed, would have whittled off the entire handle in the first half of his career.