I raised my good hand and brought it down on my thigh several times, made the exact noise I’d make clapping both hands together.

He held his smile and puffed his cigar.

But I kept clapping. I clapped until my thigh began to sting and the heel of my palm grew numb. I clapped and clapped, filling the big room with the sound of flesh hitting flesh until Trevor’s eyes lost their gaiety and his cigar hung from his hand and he said, “All right. You can stop now.”

But I kept clapping, my dead gaze fastened on his dead face.

“I said enough, young man.”

Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.

“Will you stop that annoying noise?”

Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.

He rose from his chair and I used my foot to push him back into it. I leaned in and increased the tempo and the force of my hand against my flesh. He closed his eyes tight. I clenched my fist and hammered it on the arm of his wheelchair, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, five beats per second, over and over. And Trevor’s eyelids clenched tighter.

“Bravo,” I said eventually. “You’re the Cicero of the robber barons, Trevor. Congratulations.”

He opened his eyes.

I leaned back on the desk. “I don’t care right now about the labor organizer’s daughter you chopped into pieces. I don’t care how many missionaries and nuns lay in shallow graves with bullets in the backs of their heads because of your orders or the politics you entrenched in your banana republics. I don’t even care that you bought your wife and probably made every moment of her life a living hell.”

“Then what do you care about, Mr. Kenzie?”

He raised the cigar to his lips and I slapped it off his face, let it smolder in the rug at my feet.

“I care about Jay Becker and Everett Hamlyn, you useless piece of shit.”

He blinked at the drops of sweat forming on his eyelashes. “Mr. Becker betrayed me.”

“Because to do otherwise would have been a mortal sin.”

“Mr. Hamlyn had decided to call several authorities and report my dealings with Mr. Kohl.”

“Because you destroyed a business it took him his entire life to build.”

He removed a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his dinner jacket and coughed heavily into it for a minute.

“I’m dying,” he said.

“No you’re not,” I said. “If you truly thought you were going to die, you wouldn’t have killed Jay. You wouldn’t have killed Everett. But if either of them hauled you into court, you couldn’t climb into your cryogenic chamber, could you? And by the time you were able, your brain would be gone, your organs completely shot, and freezing you would have been a waste of time.”

“I’m dying,” he repeated.