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Before going down the street to Laniard’s Wine Bar I went into my office and put away three shots of whiskey. I wanted a cigarette and lamented giving the pack away.

Wearing a dark cranberry jacket and walnut-brown trousers, he was sitting at a high stool at the window, looking out onto Montague. When he saw me he waved and maybe gave a wisp of a smile; mirth on the face of a demon. I was glad I’d had the whiskey.

I passed the maître d’, a tall man in a black suit and tie. He gestured for me to wait, but I pointed at Melquarth, who, in turn, put up a welcoming hand.

I climbed up on the stool next to him.

“You look like you been workin’,” he said.

“Got paid sixty bucks.”

“Every penny counts.”

“Why are we meeting here, Mel?”

“I didn’t think you’d be too happy with me sitting in the office with your daughter.”

He was right about that.

“Can I get you something?” a young woman asked.

My nostrils flared when I saw the young Asian woman clad in a coral-colored minidress. For ten years I’d held down the passion in me. But that was over. The dog was out.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“I’ll have another Barolo,” Mel told her.

“Yes, sir.”

“So?” I asked when the waitress was gone.

“I’ll finish my drink and then we’ll take a ride down to the Verrazano Bridge. We’re going to Staten Island.”

He might as well have added, “Across the river Styx.”

Day turned to night in the time it took us to get Mel’s vintage Ford Galaxie 500 and drive to Pleasant Plains, Staten Island. We didn’t talk much; didn’t turn on the radio or play CDs. Wherever we were going it was serious business.

On the south side of the small town, there stood an abandoned church. I say abandoned, but what I mean is deconsecrated. It was surrounded by an eighteen-foot stone wall. The only entrée was through a remote-control iron gate. The rectangular brick structure loomed at a height of at least two and a half stories. Twelve slender stained-glass windows ran from the ground to the eaves of the steeply slanted, dark-green-tiled roof. On one end was a silo-like cylindrical steeple, also made of brick; it rose ten feet above the rest of the structure. There was a satellite dish at the very center of the extreme-angled lower roof.

Mel drove us to the middle of the circular driveway in front of the once holy refuge.

“This is where you live?” I asked as he unlocked the double-door entrance.

When we crossed the threshold, lights snapped on in quick succession. It wasn’t a huge building as far as churches go, but the high ceiling, empty space where there were once pews, and then the raised altar made me feel rather small.

“I stay here sometimes,” Mel said, answering the question that I had forgotten with the light.

“Where do you sleep?”

“In the station house.”

“The what?”

“This way.”

Behind the altar was a small door that led to a cramped spiral stairway going down.

As in the church, the moment we entered the stairs, a series of lights came on. Thirty-seven steps led to a door barely wider than a coffin’s lid. Through this door we entered a desolate room swathed in dim light abutted by a wall-size window behind which sat a bloodied man wearing only a T-shirt and boxers. His wrists were chained to a stone wall and his ankles to the floor.