When we reached the street, he continued south, turned the corner at Charleville, and entered the alley behind his building. Six garages, one for each unit, each furnished with a bolt and a combination lock.

The third garage was secured with an additional key lock. Keeping me out of view, Monahan twirled, inserted a key, stood back. “Slide it up, I’m smart enough to know my limitations.”

The door rose on smooth, greased bearings, curved inward and upward, exposing two hundred square feet of pristine white space filled with something massive and blue and stunning.

A gleaming vertically barred grille stared me in the face. The radiator cap was a sharp-edged V aimed for takeoff.

The car was huge, barely fitting into the space. Most of the length was taken up by a hood fashioned to accommodate a gargantuan engine. Headlights the size of dinner plates stared at me like the eyes of a giant squid. Hand-sculpted, wing-like fenders merged with polished running boards topped by gleaming metal tread-plates. A side-mounted spare matched four wide-wall, wire-wheeled tires. The car’s flanks were fluid and arrogant.

“Supercharged,” said Felix Monahan, pointing to a quartet of chrome pipes looping out of a chrome-plated grid. Thick and sinewy and menacing as a swarm of morays. “We’re talking zero to sixty in eight seconds in the thirties.”

I whistled.

He went on: “She cruises at one oh four in second gear and that’s without syncromesh. Max speed is one forty, and back when she was born you were lucky to get fifty horsepower out of a luxury car.”

“Unbelievable,” I said.

“Not really, Doctor. What’s unbelievable is how a country that could create this can’t come up with anything better than plastic phones that die in six months. Put together by peasants living on gruel.”

I’d come to see the car in the hope that I might pry more info from him. But the Duesenberg’s beauty held me captive. The paint, a perfect duet of convivial blues, was a masterpiece of lacquer. The interior was butter-soft, hand-stitched leather whose pale aqua hue matched the spotless top. More artisanal metalwork for the sculpted dashboard. The rosewood-and-silver steering wheel would’ve looked dandy on a museum pedestal.

Even silent and static, the car managed to project an aura of ferocity and mastery. The kind of queenly confidence you see in a certain type of woman, able to work natural beauty to her advantage without flirting or raising her voice.

I said, “Thanks for giving me the opportunity.”

Felix Monahan said, “You can thank me by dropping the whole notion of Jimmy Asherwood being some sort of criminal. A, he isn’t, and B, I don’t like anything that upsets my wife.”

“No one’s out to—”