It was dark in the street, snowing again, and a man in a long coat stood in the alley between Lafayette and Broadway. I walked around a stack of shipping containers. The industrial loft buildings along Great Jones seemed misproportioned, broad structures half as tall as they should have been, as if deprived of light by the great skyscraper ranges to the north and south. I found a grocery store about three blocks away. One of the customers nudged the woman next to him and nodded in my direction. A familiar dumb hush fell over the store. I picked up the owner's small brown cat and let it curl against my chest. The man who'd spotted me drew gradually closer, pretending to read labels along the way, finally sidling in next to me at the counter, the living effigy of a cost accountant or tax lawyer, radiating his special grotesquerie, that of sane men leading normal lives.

I got back to find Globke with his arm down the toilet bowl.

"I dropped a dime," he said.

"The floor's not very clean. You'll ruin your new pants. What is that – vinyl?"

"Polyvinyl."

"And the shirt," I said. "What about the shirt?"

He struggled up from the floor, then held his stomach in and adjusted his clothes. He followed me into the main room, not exactly a living room since it included a bathtub and refrigerator. Globke himself occupied a duplex apartment in a condominium building situated on the heights just across the Hudson River. His apartment was a model abode of contour furniture and supergraphics, an apparent challenge to the cultured indolence of Riverside Drive. His second wife was young and vaporous, a student of Eastern religions, and his daughter by his first marriage played the cello.

"There's a story behind this shirt," he said. "This shirt is part of an embroidered altar cloth. Fully consecrated. Made by blind nuns in the foothills of the Himalayas."

"What's that color? I've never seen a shirt exactly that color."