“No, no. Calderón’s fluent. Someone else called in for him.” He shook his head again. “He’s a very diffident young man, ‘Tavio is. I suspect he reasoned that if he had a friend make the call, I couldn’t intimidate him over the phone. The implication, of course, is that he’s not hale and hearty enough to get from his bed to the phone. I gather he lives in some sort of rooming house with the telephone in the hallway. Someone with a much heavier Latin accent than ‘Tavio made the call.”

“Did he call yesterday?”

“Someone called for him.”

“The same person who called today?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. One Hispanic voice over the phone is rather like another. It was a male voice both times. I think it was the same voice, but I couldn’t swear to it. What difference does it make?”

None that I could think of. How about Sunday? Had Calderón done his own telephoning then?

“I wasn’t here Sunday.”

“You have a phone number for him?”

“It rings in the hall. I doubt that he’ll come to the phone.”

“I’d like the number anyway.”

He gave it to me, along with an address on Barnett Avenue in Queens. I’d never heard of Barnett Avenue and I asked the assistant manager if he knew what part of Queens Calderón lived in.

“I don’t know anything about Queens,” he said. “You’re not going out there, are you?” He made it sound as though I’d need a passport, and supplies of food and water. “Because I’m sure ‘Tavio will be back on the job in a day or two.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“It’s a good job,” he said. “He’ll lose it if he’s not back soon. And he must know that.”

“How’s his absenteeism record?”

“Excellent. And I’m sure his sickness is legitimate enough. Probably one of those viruses that runs its course in three days. There’s a lot of that going around.”

I called Octavio Calderón’s number from a pay phone right there in the Galaxy lobby. It rang for a long time, nine or ten rings, before a woman answered it in Spanish. I asked for Octavio Calderón.

“No está aquí,” she told me.

I tried to form questions in Spanish. Es enfermo? Is he sick? I couldn’t tell if I was making myself understood. Her replies were delivered in a Spanish that was very different in inflection from the Puerto Rican idiom I was used to hearing around New York, and when she tried to accommodate me in English her accent was heavy and her vocabulary inadequate. No está aquí, she kept saying, and it was the one thing she said that I understood with no difficulty. No está aquí. He is not here.