“But sometimes, I say, you have to have a drink.”

“You’re right too.”

“No, I don’t think so. Mr. Van Alen knows best. He is a very great man. He, well, he has been good to me.”

“Have you seen Mrs. Copeland since?”

“Ah, no. But then, I have not gone back to Merrill’s. It is too tense now. More guards on the Borderline. Blood in the air. I know how it smells, before a bomb goes off. That is how the Westside smells today.”

My god, he was ugly, with that long scar, those chipped teeth, that zigzag nose. And yet, hard to look away from. His fingers strummed on the railing like it was an upright bass. What song was it, I wondered, that was stuck in his head?

“Does Mrs. Greene work closely with Van Alen?” I asked.

“The bazaar is his great love, and Mrs. Greene is the bazaar.”

“Will she see him today?”

“They don’t tell me these things. They only say, ‘Ugly. Meet me at the Thirty-First Street exit at eleven forty-five, sharp.’ So at eleven forty-five sharp, that is where I go.”

He ground his cigarette inside the nearest trash can until the flame was long past extinguished, and dropped it onto the trash, and left. Something in the way he walked away gave me a grotesque urge to curtsy.

11:45. That gave me an hour. However would I pass the time?

Across the waiting room, by the iron steps to track three, five old men with accordions and brass instruments wheezed out a jolly tune. I listened for a while, and tipped them well, and finally raised the nerve to subject them to my imitation of Aiken’s strange, awful song.

“That’s a dreadful number,” said the man with the trombone, whose head was two sizes too small for his body. “Proud to say I never heard it before.”

“I think I have,” said the accordionist, who played with hands twisted by arthritis. “You got the opening right, but the next part’s all wrong. And there was a bridge. A very strange bridge. It went, hell . . . how did it go?”

He tried it out a few different ways on his instrument, which fought him at every turn, and finally arrived at something that satisfied. One of the trumpet players recognized it, and they played it together, and for the first time, it sounded familiar. It tugged at the edge of my mind, some faint memory. For just a moment, I could almost remember the words.

“What’s it called?” I asked. “What’s the song called?”

“That I couldn’t tell you,” said the accordionist.

“You have to remember.”

“It could have been one of those songs that didn’t have a name at all.”