"Anyway," he said, "a guy, he eats at night in a bright kitchen that's got no window blinds-he's a guy tastin' his last sandwich."

"Even if the guy's a monk in a monastery?"

Brother Knuckles shrugged. "You can never be too careful."

In exercise sweats instead of his habit, at five feet seven and two hundred pounds of bone and muscle, he looked like a die-casting machine that had been covered in a gray-flannel cozy.

The rainwater eyes, the hard angles and blunt edges of brow and jaw, should have given him a cruel or even threatening appearance. In his previous life, people had feared him, and for good reason.

Twelve years in a monastery, years of remorse and contrition, had brought warmth to those once-icy eyes and had inspired in him a kindness that transformed his unfortunate face. Now, at fifty-five, he might be mistaken for a prizefighter who stayed in the sport too long: cauliflower ears, portobello nose, the humility of a basically sweet palooka who has learned the hard way that brute strength does not a champion make.

A small glob of icy slush slid down my forehead and along my right cheek.

"You're wearin' snow like a poofy white hat." Knuckles headed toward the bathroom. "I'll get you a towel."

"There's a bottle of aspirin by the sink. I need aspirin."

He returned with a towel and the aspirin. "You want some water to wash 'em down, maybe a Coke?"

"Give me a hogshead of wine."

"They must've had livers of iron back in Saint Benny's day. A hogshead was like sixty-three gallons."

"Then I'll only need half a hogshead."

By the time I toweled my hair half dry, he had brought me a Coke. "You come up the stairs from John's Mew and stood there lookin' up at the snow the way a turkey stares up at the rain with its mouth open till it drowns."

"Well, sir, I never saw snow before."

"Then, boom, you're off like a shot around the corner of the refectory."

Settling into an armchair and shaking two aspirin out of the bottle, I said, "I heard someone scream."

"I didn't hear no scream."

"You were inside," I reminded him, "and making a lot of chewing noises."

Knuckles sat in the other armchair. "So who screamed?"

I washed down two aspirin with Coke and said, "I found one of the brothers facedown on the ground by the library. Didn't see him at first in his black habit, almost fell over him."

"Who?"

"Don't know. A heavy guy. I rolled him over, couldn't see his face in the dark-then someone tried to brain me from behind."

His brush-cut hair seemed to bristle with indignation. "This don't sound like St. Bart's."

"The club, whatever it was, grazed the back of my head, and my left shoulder took the worst of it."

"We might as well be in Jersey, stuff like this goin' down."

"I've never been to New Jersey."

"You'd like it. Even where it's bad, Jersey is always real."

"They've got one of the world's largest used-tire dumps. You've probably seen it."

"Never did. Ain't that sad? You live in a place most of your life, you take it for granted."

"You didn't even know about the tire dump, sir?"

"People, they live in New York City all their lives, never go to the top of the Empire State Building. You okay, son? Your shoulder?"

"I've been worse."

"Maybe you should go to the infirmary, ring Brother Gregory, have your shoulder examined."

Brother Gregory is the infirmarian. He has a nursing degree.

The size of the monastic community isn't sufficient to justify a full-time infirmarian-especially since the sisters have one of their own for the convent and for the children at the school-so Brother Gregory also does the laundry with Brother Norbert.

"I'll be okay, sir," I assured him.

"So who tried to knock your block off?"

"Never got a look at him."

I explained how I had rolled and run, thinking my assailant was at my heels, and how the monk I'd almost fallen over was gone when I returned.

"So we don't know," said Knuckles, "did he get up on his own and walk away or was he carried."

"We don't know, either, if he was just unconscious or dead."

Frowning, Knuckles said, "I don't like dead. Anyway, it don't make sense. Who would kill a monk?"

"Yes, sir, but who would knock one unconscious?"

Knuckles brooded for a moment. "One time this guy whacked a Lutheran preacher, but he didn't mean to."

"I don't think you should be telling me this, sir."

With a wave of a hand, he dismissed my concern. His strong hands appear to be all knuckles, hence his nickname.

"I don't mean it was me. I told you, I never done the big one. You do believe me on that score, don't you, son?"

"Yes, sir. But you did say this was an accidental whack."

"Never offed no one accidental either."

"All right then."

Brother Knuckles, formerly Salvatore Giancomo, had been well-paid muscle for the mob before God turned his life around.

"Busted faces, broke some legs, but I never chilled no one."

When he was forty, Knuckles had begun to have second thoughts about his career path. He felt "empty, driftin', like a row-boat out on the sea and nobody in it."

During this crisis of confidence, because of death threats to his boss-Tony "the Eggbeater" Martinelli-Knuckles and some other guys like him were sleeping-over at the boss's home. It wasn't a pajamas-and-s'mores kind of sleepover, but the kind of sleepover where everyone brings his two favorite automatic weapons. Anyway, one evening, Knuckles found himself reading a story to the Eggbeater's six-year-old daughter.

The tale was about a toy, a china-rabbit doll, that was proud of his appearance and thoroughly self-satisfied. Then the rabbit endured a series of terrible misfortunes that humbled him, and with humility came empathy for the suffering of others.

The girl fell asleep with half the story still to be read. Knuckles needed in the worst way to know what happened to the rabbit, but he didn't want his fellow face-busters to think that he was really interested in a kid's book.

A few days later, when the threat to the Eggbeater had passed, Knuckles went to a bookstore and bought a copy of the rabbit's tale. He started from the beginning, and by the time he reached the end, when the china rabbit found its way back to the little girl who had loved him, Knuckles broke down and wept.

Never before had he shed tears. That afternoon, in the kitchen of his row house, where he lived alone, he sobbed like a child.

In those days, no one who knew Salvatore "Knuckles" Giancomo, not even his mother, would have said he was an introspective kind of guy, but he nevertheless realized that he was not crying only about the china rabbit's return home. He was crying about the rabbit, all right, but also about something else.

For a while, he could not imagine what that something else might be. He sat at the kitchen table, drinking cup after cup of coffee, eating stacks of his mother's pizzelles, repeatedly recovering his composure, only to break down and weep again.

Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he'd been a boy.

This realization left him conflicted. He still wanted to be tough, took pride in being strong and stoic. Yet it seemed that he had become weak and emotional.

Over the next month, he read and reread the rabbit's story. He began to understand that when Edward, the rabbit, discovered humility and learned to sympathize with other people's losses, he did not grow weak but in fact became stronger.

Knuckles bought another book by the same author. This one concerned an outcast big-eared mouse who saved a princess.

The mouse had less impact on him than the bunny did, but, oh, he loved the mouse, too. He loved the mouse for its courage and for its willingness to sacrifice itself for love.