With fantastic speed and precision, the little man made two cigarettes. On the stove the water was boiling and he completed the preparation of the coffee. They sipped the coffee and smoked the cigarettes, and for several minutes there was no talk.

Finally Carp said, “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you. That is, I feel it’s your privilege to be informed—”

“Informed about what?”

“Me,” the little man said.

Corey looked at him. There was a wistful expression on Carp’s face, the slightest trace of a plaintive smile.

Carp said, “It’s in regard to our agreement, our pledge of mutual trust and confidence. Which means that nothing should be held back, nothing at all. It also means that what’s spoken in this room will stay in this room. Is that clearly understood?”

Corey nodded.

The little man sipped some coffee, took a slow pull at his cigarette, let the smoke out and said, “My name is not really Carp.”

There was silence for a while. Then the little man said, “It’s essentially a matter of name reduction. That is, shortening my name to comply with certain adjustments that were necessary in order for me to exist outside a padded cell.”

“Excuse me,” Corey said. “You’re talkin’ way over my head.”

“All right, we’ll try it this way—” And then the little man was speaking just like any Swampdweller and Hangout lounger, saying, “The deal on Carp is that it used to be Henry C. Carpenter with a wife and four children and a hefty chunk of real estate out on the Main Line. From blue chips alone the income was somewhere around thirty thousand a year, inherited from the old man. He also left me the paper box factory that goes way back. It’s been run by the family since the Battle of Yorktown, or thereabouts. So of course when I was born it was strictly velvet, right from the jump. All I hadda do was drift along with the tide. That is, you’re a Carpenter. It’s private school in Switzerland, and then it’s Dartmouth, and then the eighteen months of traveling around the world. The boat tickets all first class, and the hotels only the best. And after that, in line with family tradition, they make me a member of that club downtown where in order to get in, you gotta have a pedigree. And of course that was all right with me. In them days everything that happened was all right with me. Especially what came later—the four little Carpenters and their mother.”

For a long moment Carp was quiet. He gazed at the wall, seemed to be seeing something far beyond the wall, beyond the second floor front and the cobble-stoned street below and all the streets and alleys of the Swamp, very far away from all that.