“No doorbell, either. There’s a thing you ring by the door outside, but it’s not connected to anything. That door’s never been opened since I moved in, and you can’t see in the windows, and there’s burglar alarms on everything. Not that you get much burglary in Greenpoint, a nice settled Polish neighborhood like this, but old Dr. Levandowski, he likes his security and he likes his privacy.”

“I guess he does.”

“I’m not here much, Matthew, but when that garage door closes behind me it keeps the whole world out. Nothing touches me here. Nothing.”

“I’m surprised you brought me here.”

“So am I.”

We saved the money for last. He asked how much I wanted. I told him I wanted twenty-five hundred dollars.

He asked what that bought.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t charge by the hour and I don’t keep track of my expenses. If I wind up laying out a lot of money or if the thing goes on too long, I might wind up asking you for more money. But I’m not going to send you a bill and I’m not going to sue you if you don’t pay.”

“You keep it all very informal.”

“That’s right.”

“I like that. Cash on the line and no receipts. I don’t mind paying a price. The women bring in a lot of money, but there’s a lot that has to go out, too. Rent. Operating costs. Payoffs. You got a whore installed in a building, you pay off the building. You can’t give the doorman twenty dollars for Christmas and let it go at that, same as any other tenant. It’s more like twenty a month and a hundred for Christmas, and it’s the same for all the building employees. It adds up.”

“It must.”

“But there’s a lot left. And I don’t blow it on coke or waste it gambling. You said what? Twenty-five hundred? I paid more than twice that for the Dogon mask I gave you to hold. I paid $6,200, plus the auction galleries charge buyers a 10 percent commission these days. Comes to what? $6,820. And then there’s sales tax.”

I didn’t say anything. He said, “Shit, I don’t know what I’m proving. That I’m nigger-rich, I guess. Wait here a minute.” He came back with a sheaf of hundreds and counted out twenty-five of them. Used bills, out of sequence. I wondered how much cash he kept around the house, how much he habitually carried on his person. Years ago I’d known a loan shark who made it a rule never to walk out his door with less than ten thousand dollars in his pocket. He didn’t keep it a secret, and everybody who knew him knew about the roll he carried.

Nobody ever tried to take it off him, either.