In the Foxhole the windows and walls are upholstered in red velvet curtains that are pocked with cigarette burns and the ceiling is covered in whipped cream-like foam soundproofing. Grating, undanceable German techno throbs out of speakers bolted above the stage. An off-duty girl in a full-sex Tron outfit lets a guy buy her a twenty-dollar Pepsi in an eight-ounce can. Another one in a defunct schoolmarm-dominatrix outfit and Wendy O. Williams hair is chumming the floor with worn cleavage and cheap, petroleous drugstore perfume. Onstage, surrounded by men on stools with dead faces, a fat stripper jiggles for the crowd. She leans over a guy, giving him a nuzzle, then slips and tumbles off the stage. The guy, recoiling in horror, rolls out of the way. On the floor, her dollars spilling on the wet carpet, the stripper flushes with shame. While she’s down, the men throw things at her. One makes a piglike noise and truffles in her ass. She makes a move to the back room—she wants out of this—but the floor boss orders her back onstage. She climbs back up, her naked body muddy with beer and peanut dust, and finishes her song as the men laugh and toss coins.

That’s the kind of place it is.

That’s where we meet Tony “Kong” Mavrogordo.

Kong considers the Foxhole his place. You can tell by how he sits at his table. His posture has a low-rent, in situ majesty, an outpost-against-time quality. When he is not abasing himself at his Geek Squad gig, apparently he is playing mafia don of table 12 at the shittiest skin club on the shittiest block in Queens, and the shittiest thing of all is that this criminal, this ex-tech mastermind, is the only person who can help us.

In fairness, he isn’t tickled to see me, either.

“Starks?” he says to Jagjeet, nearly spitting out his lost-and-found cigarette. “You bring me Otto Starks? In here?”

Kong’s appearance lives up to his sobriquet in more ways than the speediness of his anger. Sprouting from his shirt cuffs, his tightly cinched collar, the gaps between buttons are dense patches of coarse, black, gorilla-like hair. His body is carpeted in it; his beard begins under his eyes and only barely spares his nose; there are tufts of dark hair protruding from his aural canal and attached to his pinna, making his ear look like a bristling Venus flytrap. He is not the Wolfman, exactly, but he could cover for him on a sick day.