Naturally, instead of hands he has two curved metallic pincers. He is so distressed to see me that he makes impassioned gestures of outrage with them. The maneuver is disconcerting. In order to open and close the pincers in disgust it’s necessary for him to shrug both shoulders—they operate on a wire connected to that area, it seems—and so the eerie clawlike gestures of scissoring metal are underscored by an incongruous penguin dance.

I’m far from laughing, though. For one thing, this is Kong’s turf, and I know he’d like to kill me. But for another, I see in Kong someone who probably craves sitting alone in dark rooms as much as I do.

I also see a guy whose life has been destroyed by Jimmy the Hat.

“Please just listen,” Jagjeet says.

“I got nothing I want to hear that involves this guy. If he was holding a ten-foot check with Ed McMahon’s signature on it in the blood of Swedish virgins, I wouldn’t want to hear it from this guy.”

I say, “Mr. Mavrogordo—”

“Is this guy talking?” he says to Jagjeet, amazed. “Is he verbalizing at my table? Guy comes over to my fucking table, words coming out of his fucking mouth?”

I say, “I’m sorry, but—”

“Shut this guy up,” Kong says to Jagjeet, not looking at me.

I say, “Charlie is—”

“Shut this guy the fuck up.”

Stupidly, I say, “Jimmy the Hat has—”

“If this guy says one more word I’m going to stab him in the eye with this hook. You got that, Jeet?”

So far this is not going swimmingly. But as Kong raves against me Jagjeet is able to convey to him that Jimmy the Hat has Charlie. That pulls him up short.

“Charlie?” he says.

Jagjeet nods. “If I don’t bring Otto to him then he’s going to torture and kill her.”

“So what’s the problem? Bring him Starks. What’s the fucking holdup?”

“Charlie would never forgive me.”

Kong struggles with this briefly, but not long enough.

“I like that girl, but: not my problem.”

“It’s Charlie,” Jagjeet tells him.

“Not my problem.”

“Remember Istanbul? You owe her.”

“Not. My. Problem. Not like this.” He nods at me. “Not for the guy did this to me.” Kong pulls off one of his pincers and shows Jagjeet his wound. The skin is striated and puckered like the end of a hot dog and its color is a tender, nearly translucent, inhuman pink. A pink like the nose of a newborn mouse.

“Otto didn’t do that to you,” Jagjeet says gently. “Jimmy did.”

“Don’t tell me who fucking did it! I was there, asshole! And I’m not helping.”

Jagjeet flips open his cell and shows him the picture.

“You know what he’ll do to her, Tony. We can’t get in without you.”