Inside the back room, the music did not reach.

There were three men at the two tables pushed together along the wall. Two of them were people Diamond had not been introduced to and didn’t need to be. The third was Cruz.

Cruz was sitting in the chair facing the door — late forties, heavy through the shoulders and soft through the middle, in a black t-shirt under a dark zip-up jacket. There was a small gold chain at his collarbone. His face was a face that had been a face for forty-eight years and was at peace with each of them. The hands on the table were large and had been, in some past Cruz no longer mentioned, hands that broke things for a living. He didn’t stand when Diamond came in. The two men beside him stood. Cruz tipped his chin a quarter inch toward the empty chair across from him.

Diamond sat.

The fluorescent overhead had been flickering since some month last year, and the building’s super had not been asked twice. There was a small refrigerator with a glass front, holding cans of an off-brand seltzer. A corkboard on the wall behind Cruz held three taped photographs of women the men in the room would have described as girlfriends if asked. A low filing cabinet had an old printer on top that hadn’t been turned on in a year. The carpet was the kind of carpet a city had last regulated thirty years ago. Cruz had not changed any of it.

He looked at Diamond for two seconds. The look was the look of a man checking whether a tool he was holding was still the same tool he had been holding last week.

“Costa is at his apartment,” Cruz said. “Above the body shop on Ninth. Seventeen hundred. Two weeks. Two times we asked.”

Diamond waited.

“He wants us to think he’s stupid. I want him to know I think he’s lying.”

Diamond nodded once.

“Tonight,” he said.

“Tonight,” Cruz said back. The word sat in the room a second after he had said it. He tipped the chin again, the same quarter inch, toward the door.

Diamond stood. The two men beside Cruz didn’t stand this time. They had not, the entire meeting, looked at Diamond. The discipline was the discipline of men who had been told.

He went through the door he had come in through. The bass of the bar’s music returned the moment the door opened.

He crossed the bar. He didn’t look at the men at the bar or the men at the pool table. The jukebox was on a different country song. The contact’s corner table was empty; the contact had gone, or had moved to a stool. The bouncer was at the door in the same posture as before. The bouncer didn’t nod this time. Diamond went through the door onto the street.

The cold was the cold of two hours ago, larger now by the small degree it gets larger an hour at a time after midnight. It was one twenty-eight in the morning. He turned east at the curb.

Two blocks. Closed shops. The same sodium-orange of the bodega on Eighth. The idling diesel of a different delivery truck at a different corner. He passed a darkened storefront, a vacant lease, the rental sign in the window curling at the corners — and he didn’t look at the glass. Not yet.

The body shop on Ninth was at the corner. It had been closed since six. The walk-up apartments above it were reached by a narrow door beside the bay-door entrance, set into the brick. The narrow door wasn’t locked. He pushed it open and went up.

---

The stairwell light was out on the second-floor landing. The hallway smelled of someone’s cooking from earlier in the evening — something with cumin. Costa’s door was the third on the right.

The door was unlocked. Diamond heard voices inside — two of them — one he placed as Costa, one a male voice he didn’t recognize. He put his hand on the knob and pushed.

A second man — taller than Costa, in a hoodie, with a small black sports bag at his feet — was standing at the kitchen island when Diamond came in. The man saw Diamond. He looked at Costa. Costa hadn’t turned. The man picked up the bag, said nothing, and walked past Diamond and out the open door. Diamond didn’t stop him. Costa didn’t turn.

Costa was at the kitchen island with his back partly to the door. There was a glass of something in front of him, half-full. He was in his mid-thirties, wiry, in a t-shirt and athletic shorts. He had been waiting for someone, and the someone he had been waiting for was the man who had just left through his front door with the sports bag. He had not yet turned to confirm what had come in instead.

Diamond closed the door behind him.

“Cruz wants seventeen hundred,” he said.

Costa exhaled. He turned. The turn was the turn of a man who had decided, on the way around, what story he was going to tell.

“I told him Friday.”

“Today is Friday.”

“It’s one in the morning.”

“It’s the day.”

Costa took a breath. The breath was calculation. He was reading Diamond and reading the door and reading the kitchen counter behind him. The knife block was on the counter — three knives in it. Costa had been a man, before this, who had had to make calculations about doors, and he wasn’t a stupid man, and he knew what the calculation was.

He didn’t back down. He turned slightly — opened his torso to the counter — and his right hand went behind him in the motion of a man reaching for a glass and was not.

The third knife slot was the one at the bottom right.

He swung.

The blade was a small chef’s knife, serrated, three-and-a-half-inch blade, black plastic handle. It came low and across the body for Diamond’s left side under the ribs.

It reached his coat.

It reached his shirt.

It reached his skin.

It did not part any of the three.

The wrist behind it followed through the half-arc the wrist had committed to and met a resistance the wrist had not committed to. Costa pulled the knife back. The fabric of the work jacket had not torn. The shirt under it had not torn. The skin under the shirt — when Diamond glanced down, lifted the corner of the shirt at the bottom hem, and looked — had not torn either. The knife was clean.

Costa stared at the knife.

Costa stared at Diamond.

Diamond stepped inside Costa’s reach. He took the wrist of the knife-hand with his left hand. He didn’t take the knife. He took the hand around the knife, and he turned the wrist outward, past the natural rotation of the joint — and the index and middle fingers, the fingers along the spine and edge of the blade, snapped with a sound that was one sound.

Costa screamed. Once.

The knife clattered on the laminate counter. The other two fingers — ring and small — were not broken but would swell within the hour. The wrist was not broken. Diamond had done this before.

He didn’t let go of the wrist for two seconds. Costa was bent forward at the waist. His good hand went to the broken one, hovered, didn’t touch. Diamond let go.

He looked at Costa. The mouth at the corners was doing a thing the mouth did not have permission to do. He didn’t feel it.

Costa, still bent, still cradling, looked up. He saw what was on Diamond’s face. He flinched. Diamond didn’t see him flinch.

“Where,” Diamond said.

A pause. Costa wasn’t capable of producing words for two seconds. Then:

“Bedroom. Mattress.”

Diamond walked past him to the bedroom. The bedroom was at the back of the apartment. The bed was unmade. The mattress was on a frame missing two of its four wheels. He lifted the foot of the mattress with his right hand. There was a manila envelope. He took it. Set the mattress back down.

He opened the envelope. There were bills. He counted. Twenty-two hundred. He took the seventeen hundred — counted it twice to confirm — and slid the envelope, with the remaining five hundred, back under the mattress where he had found it.

He put the seventeen hundred in the inside pocket of his coat.

He walked back through the living room. Costa was at the kitchen island, leaning on the counter with his good hand, the bad hand held against his sternum. Diamond didn’t look at him on the way past. At the door, Diamond stopped.

“He’ll send me again,” he said. “Don’t.”

He went through the door and closed it behind him.

The stairwell light was still out on the second-floor landing. His eyes had adjusted. He went down without holding the rail.

At the bottom of the stairs, on the way past the body shop’s plate-glass window — the shop closed for hours, the lights off, the glass dark with the shop’s interior, the lettering of Ninth Street Auto Body visible in low contrast across the top — Diamond caught his own face moving past it.

He was smiling.

He stopped walking.

He turned, half a step, and looked.

The smile was gone by the time he had turned. What was in the glass was a man in a work jacket with a flat mouth and cold-reddened ears. But he had seen it — a small satisfied curve at the corners of his mouth that had not matched the cold air or the late hour or the fact that he had just broken a man’s hand. He had seen it.

He didn’t name it.

He didn’t stand at the glass.

He started walking again. North to the corner, then west, then south at the next corner toward the train. He didn’t go back to the bar.

---

The train back was emptier than the outbound had been. Diamond sat at the end of the second car. The dark stations passed. He didn’t look at his hands.

At his stop he got off and walked the three blocks to his building. The bodega on the corner was open at this hour, but the man on the stoop next door wasn’t there. The brick was still in his front door. He climbed the three flights.

The hallway smelled of someone else’s late dinner. He keyed his apartment, went in, and turned the deadbolt behind him.

He stood with his back to the door.

His right hand set the keys on the small dish on the table by the door. The keys made a small extra sound — a tremor, transmitted to the metal of the dish — that had not come from his hand in some weeks. He looked at the hand. The hand was shaking.

He didn’t name what was shaking it.

He went to the bathroom, turned on the light. The mirror had the smile no longer in it; he looked at himself and saw a man with cold-reddened ears and a tightness in the jaw. He ran the hot tap and splashed water on his face. The face didn’t need washing for any other reason.

He went back into the main room. Took off the work jacket and hung it on the hook by the door. The jacket didn’t have blood on it. He checked. Two careful sweeps along the right side and the left. The fabric was clean.

The seventeen hundred was in the inside pocket. He took it out. Set it on the kitchen counter, under the bourbon bottle, behind the bowl of two limes that had been there since last week and were not, now, what one would call limes.

Desmond went to the kitchen sink. Ran the water hot. Washed his hands. The blood on his right hand was Costa’s blood; it had dried in the lines of his palm and the cuticle of his thumb. He scrubbed. The water ran pink at first and then clear.

He dried his hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven handle. The towel had been unwashed for two weeks. He should wash it. He didn’t.

From the cabinet over the refrigerator came the bottle of Evan Williams, black-label, the one he had bought a year ago when he had taste and had not bought new since. From the drying rack came a glass. He poured a single measure — two fingers, neat — and took the glass to the small table by the window. He sat.

He drank half. Set the glass down.

The work jacket on the hook had an inside pocket. The pocket had, beside the place the seventeen hundred had been, a small unlabeled pill bottle. He got up. Walked to the jacket. Took the bottle out. Looked at it.

Three pills inside.

He had been taking one most nights since the year that ended a few months ago. He had not taken one in eleven nights. Tonight was the twelfth.

He put the bottle back in the pocket. He sat back down at the table and drank the rest of the glass.

He stood up. He took the empty glass with him. Walked to the bedroom door. Stopped in the doorway.

On the foot of the bed: a black cat.

The cat was mid-size. Sitting up. Its tail was curled around its forepaws. The eyes were yellow. The eyes were looking at him.

He set the glass on the dresser, beside the photograph of his family at his parents’ house at Easter five years ago. He didn’t look at the photograph.

The cat spoke.

“How did it go.”

The voice that came from the cat was the voice he used to argue with himself in the shower — the same voice that had read No I won’t off the sticky note three nights ago, externalized at the same volume.

“Fine,” he said.

“Your hands are shaking.”

“I know.”

“Do you want to talk about it.”

“No.”

The cat didn’t press. The cat watched him.

Desmond crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed three feet from the cat. The cat didn’t move. The radiator clicked once, then twice. The light from the alley window was dim and didn’t change.

They sat in the silence.

“The smile is something we should pay attention to,” the cat said.

Desmond looked at it.

“I know.”

The cat didn’t say anything else. Desmond didn’t say anything else.

He stood up. Sat down to take off the boots. The laces were double-knotted; he undid them twice. Stood again. Took off the jeans and the sweater. Hung them on the back of the chair by the door. Pulled a t-shirt on from the drawer beside the bed. The cat watched each gesture without moving.

He got under the covers. The cat had not moved from the foot of the bed. He turned out the bedside lamp. The room went to the alley-window night-glow.

He lay on his back. He looked at the ceiling. The hand had stopped shaking. The smile had not been on his face since the body-shop window.

He thought about the smile a long time.

He didn’t name what he thought.

He closed his eyes.

The cat watched him sleep.