He hoists himself through the doorway, nearly sideways, and watches with oily pleasure as Herkimer and various gunmen strip off our gear and install us into bolted-down chairs. They give me the loose one, but I don’t have long to dwell on the insult before Azar raises a device that looks like an electric razor to his throat and communicates to me in an otherworldly, vibrating voice that, as our prospects have been reduced to nil, there is no reason to hold out on the location of the Nakamura sword.

“The what?” I say.

Herkimer cow-punches me in the side of my head and my vision flushes with light. The robot voice coming out of the Azar’s machine reminds me that it’s my role to supply answers, not pose questions. Again he suggests that producing the Nakamura sword might net some small measure of mercy.

“I told you a thousand times,” Charlie says levelly. “I didn’t get it. Janus still has it. He doesn’t know anything. Leave him alone.”

“You might be telling the truth,” Herkimer says. “I don’t know. But now that Otto’s here I’m going to spend a lot of energy finding out.”

Herkimer wheels a table out from behind some crates. Instinctively I know what it’s for, but it’s not what I expected to see. I had expected a shiny array of unignorable implements, sharpened and hooked—the tools of a demented oral surgeon—but instead there is only a set of two matching curling irons, their unplugged pigtail cords intertwined like a double helix next to a glistening rump of ham. I don’t get it, and I don’t want to.

Herkimer picks up one of the curling irons and walks playfully around us, capering and grooving as if enjoying a round of musical chairs. Azar, a satisfied spectator, smiles widely, his trach stretching into a pink rictus. It is then that I detect a weak voice emanating, miraculously, from my pants. It is Kong, I suddenly realize, yelling at me from the earpiece. They removed Jagjeet’s, but I still have mine in my pocket. I can’t quite make out what he is saying, though, mainly because my brain is frantically trying to ascertain what role that curling iron will play in the immediate future of me and my corpus.

Herkimer circles Charlie, stops behind her, lowers his mouth to an intimate, slow-dance distance from her neck, then bunches her hair in his hand and licks her ear. With his pelvis he performs an obscene hula on her, snaking a hand over her bare shoulder and under her bra. He gropes her roughly, leering at me as if we are sharing a locker room confederacy.

“Isn’t this great?” he seems to be saying.