I had breakfast and read the paper. A few minutes before eleven I called him at the precinct and whoever caught the call told me he hadn’t come in yet. I left my name and said I was returning his call. “He has my number,” I said, “but I’ll be out all day. I’ll try him again later.”

I went and sat at the window and watched the rain.

Around twelve-thirty I called his home. The area code was 914, which would put him north of the city, most likely in Westchester or Orange County. A woman answered and said I’d just missed him. I left my name and said I’d try him at work.

Later on I called TJ to see if he wanted to take a run out to Williamsburg with me. He wasn’t in his room across the street, so I called his beeper number. I hung around for fifteen minutes, then gave up. I put on my windbreaker and remembered to take an umbrella. Elaine caught me at the door and asked if I’d be home for dinner. I said I’d catch something on the run, and if TJ called to tell him it was nothing important, I just wanted company.

I rode the A train to Fourteenth Street and transferred to the L. My father died on the L train. He was riding between two cars, and he fell, and the train ran over him. I suppose he ducked out for a smoke, although it was no more legal to smoke on the platform between the cars than in the cars themselves. For that matter, you weren’t allowed to ride between the cars like that, smoking or not. He was probably liquored up at the time, which may have had something to do with his decision to slip out for a cigarette, and with his falling, too.

I never ride the L train without thinking of that. I’d probably get over it if I rode it on a regular basis, but it’s the line that runs across Fourteenth Street and under the East River, then through north Brooklyn until it ends up in Canarsie. I haven’t been on it often enough over the years for my mind to tire of reminding me each time of how my old man died.

Not as though it were the L train’s fault. I couldn’t blame the train, and I couldn’t really blame him, either. Shit happens.

Forty years ago, that was. More, closer to forty-five.

“A little different from the last time you saw it,” Ray Galindez said. “We pulled off all the asphalt siding. I’ll tell you, there must have been one hell of a siding salesman came through Brooklyn back in the early fifties. When me and Bitsy bought this place, I don’t think there were two houses on the block didn’t have some kind of siding covering up the brick. Now that green monstrosity across the street is the lone holdout. I don’t know why anybody ever thought that crap was a good idea.”

“Isn’t it supposed to cut your heating bills?”

“That’s what we’ve got global warming for. But it was some job, puffing it off and repointing the brick. I had help working on the brick, but me and Bitsy did the rest of the work ourselves.”

“I guess that’s where your summer went.”

“Spring and summer both, but it’s worth it, you know. And real satisfying. Which is more than you can say for the job these days. Come on in, and what can I get you to drink? There’s coffee, but it’s like superstrong. Except you like real strong coffee, don’t you? You sure you’re not Puerto Rican, Matt?”

“Me llamo Matteo,” I said.

We sat in the kitchen. They’d bought a narrow two-story row house on Bedford Avenue, midway between the subway stop and McCarren Park. The neighborhood, Northside, was turning increasingly artsy, as were nearby Greenpoint and much of the rest of Williamsburg. Industrial buildings were being converted to artists’ lofts, far more affordable than those across the river in SoHo and TriBeCa, and little houses like Ray and Bitsy’s were shedding their siding like butterflies emerging from cocoons.

It was an unusual neighborhood for a cop to choose but a natural one for an artist, and Ray was both. A police sketch artist, he had an uncanny ability to render in black and white the images summoned up from a witness’s memory. And there was a further dimension, a genuine artistry that had led Elaine to request a drawing he’d done of a chilling sociopath as my Christmas gift to her. Then she’d engaged him to draw her long-dead father, working not from photos but extracting the man’s features from her memory. She’d since given Ray a show in her shop, and steered some commissions his way. Someday I wanted him to do a real portrait of her, but right now I needed him to do that same thing the city paid him to do.

“Two goons jumped me a few nights ago,” I told him, “and I got a good look at one of them. But I didn’t report it, and it’s almost certainly connected to some other matters where I’m playing a lone hand.”

“So the department’s not supposed to know about this. I’ve got no problem with that, Matt.”

“You’re sure?”

“No problem at all. I’ll tell you something, I’m sitting on the fence. I’d put in my papers tomorrow if money wasn’t an issue.” He waved a hand, brushing the whole subject aside. “Tell me about this mutt that wanted a piece of you,” he said, pencil in hand. “What did you happen to notice about him?”

We had done this before, though not recently, and we worked well together. In this instance our task was an easy one, because I could close my eyes and bring the image into sharp focus. I could picture the face of the man who’d held a gun on me, could see the expression he’d shown when he set himself to take a swing at my middle.

“That’s it,” I said, when the pencil lines on the pad matched the face I remembered. “You know, no matter how many times we do this it never ceases to amaze me. It’s like a Polaroid camera, the film pops out and turns into a picture before your eyes.”

“Sometimes they’ll catch the guy and you’d swear I drew him from life, it’s that close. And I have to tell you that feels good.”

“I can imagine.”

“And other times they get the guy, and I see his photo, and I look back and forth between the photo and my drawing, and I swear there’s no resemblance whatsoever. Like they could be members of different species.”

“Well, that’s the witness’s fault, Ray.”

“It’s both our fault.”

“He’s the one who remembered the guy wrong.”

“And I’m the one didn’t dig out the right memory, which is part of what I do.”

“Well, yeah, I see what you mean. But you can never expect to be a hundred percent.”

“Oh, I know that. It’s frustrating, that’s all.”

“And you’re not crazy about the job these days.”

“I’m marking time, Matt.”

“How old are you and how close are you to your twenty?”

“I’m thirty-three and I’ve got eleven years in.”

“So you’re more than halfway there.”

“I know, and I hate to give it up. And it’s not just the pension, it’s the benefits. I could quit now and cover the basics, paying the mortgage and putting food on the table, but what about medical insurance?”

I asked why the job was getting to him.

“I’m obsolete,” he said. “When they had the Identi-Kits I thought, well, hell, it’s Mr. Potato Head for cops. Paste on a mustache, paste on a different hairline, you know how it goes.”

“Sure.”

“I could run rings around that thing, and I knew it. Then they developed a computer program that did the same thing but was a lot more sophisticated about it, and now they got it so you can take an image and morph it. You know, stretching a feature, shrinking it, whatever.”

“I can’t believe it’s better than you at getting a likeness.”

“I have to say I agree with you. But the thing is anybody can do it. All they do is train you and you can do it. Maybe you can’t draw a straight line with a ruler, but you can be a police artist all the same. And there’s more. See, they like the way the computer likenesses present.”

“How do you mean, present?”

“To the public. I do a drawing, people look at it, they say to themselves, oh, an artist did this, so it’s just an approximation. But they can make that computer likeness come out looking like a photograph, and you see it and it seems authentic. It’s got credibility. It may not look like the perpetrator, but it sure shows up nice on TV.”

I tapped the sketch he’d done. “This one’s never going to be seen on TV,” I said, “and it looks just like the son of a bitch.”

“Well, thanks, Matt. Now how about the other one?”

“The other goon? I told you, I didn’t get a good enough look at him.”

“Maybe you saw more than you think you did.”

“The light was bad,” I said. “The streetlamp was shining in my eyes and his face was in shadow. And he was only in front of me for a second or two anyway. It’s not a question of memory.”

“I understand,” he said. “All the same, I’ve had some luck in similar situations.”

“Oh?”

“What I think happens,” he said, “is that the memory doesn’t get suppressed, but it barely registers in the first place. You see something, and the image hits the retina, but your mind’s on something else and you never know you see it. But it’s there all the same.” He spread his hands. “I don’t know, but if you’re not in a hurry . . .”

“I’m certainly willing to try.”

“Okay, so just get comfortable and let yourself relax. Start with your feet and just let them go completely limp. This isn’t hypnosis, by the way, which is to my mind a great way to get people to remember things they never saw in the first place. This is just to relax you. Now your lower legs, letting them relax completely. . . .”

I didn’t have a problem with the relaxation technique, having gone through something similar at a workshop Elaine dragged me to once. He led me through it, and he had me envision a canvas hanging on a wall, all in a gilded frame. Then he instructed me to see the face painted on the canvas.

I was all set to tell him it wasn’t working, and then damned if there wasn’t a face looking back at me on the framed canvas I’d constructed in my mind’s eye. It didn’t look as if it had been pieced together with an Identi-Kit, either, or morphed on a computer. It was a real human face with a real expression on it. And I knew it, by God. I’d seen it before.

“Shit,” I said.

“You’re not getting anything? Give it time.”

I sat up, opened my eyes. “I got a face,” I said, “and I was all excited, because it was like magic the way it appeared.”

“I know, that’s what it’s like. Like magic.”

“But it was the wrong face.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the face I just saw belongs to somebody else. A few days prior to the incident I was in a bar, and I caught a glimpse of a guy. You know how you’ll see a person and you know him but you don’t know how you know him?”

“Sure.”

“That’s what happened. Our eyes met, and I knew him and he knew me, or seemed to. But I can’t think how, and the fact of the matter is I probably saw him once on the subway and his face imprinted itself in my memory. New York’s like that. You’ll see more people in a day than the entire population of a small town. Except it’s in passing. You don’t really see them.”

“But you saw this face.”

“Yes, and now I can’t get it out of my mind.”

“What’s it look like?”

“What’s the difference, Ray? It’s just a face.”

“It’s just a face?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Why not describe it a little?”

“You want to sketch the guy? Why?”

“To clear the slate. Right now you try to picture a face and that’s the face that comes up. So if we get that face on paper we’ll be getting it out of your mind.” He shrugged. “Hey, it’s only a theory. I got the time, and I always enjoy working with you, but if you’re in a big hurry . . .”

“There’s no hurry,” I said.

And the face seemed eager to be drawn. I watched it emerge as we worked together, the head very wide at the top and tapering sharply like an upside-down triangle, the exaggerated eyebrows, the long narrow nose, the Cupid’s bow mouth.

“Whoever he is,” I said, “that’s him.”

“Well, it’s an easy face to draw,” Ray said. “A caricaturist would have a ball with him. In fact this here comes out looking like caricature, because the features are so prominent.”

“Maybe that’s why I remembered it.”

“That’s what I was thinking. It stays with you, if it was a meal you’d say it sticks to your ribs. It’d be a hard face to forget.”

Bitsy came home while we were working, but she stayed out of the kitchen until we were done. Then she joined us and I had another cup of coffee and a piece of carrot cake. I left the house with the two sketches, sprayed with fixative and tucked between two sheets of cardboard inside a padded mailer. Elaine would want the originals. She’d frame them and hang them in the shop, and sooner or later somebody would buy them.

I gave Ray $300, and I had trouble getting him to take it. “I feel like a thief,” he said. “You come to my house and I get more enjoyment than I’ve had in the last two months on the job, and on your way out the door I pick your pocket.” I told him I had a client and he could afford it. “Well, I won’t pretend I can’t find a use for it,” he said, “but it still doesn’t seem right to me. And I collect again when Elaine sells the originals. How can that be right?”

“She collects, too. She’s not a charity.”

“Even so,” he said.

I walked through the rain to the subway and got downstairs just as a train was pulling out. I sat there while three outbound trains came and went before I caught one back to the city. I could have transferred at either Sixth or Eighth to a train that would take me to Columbus Circle, but what I did was get off the train at Union Square and walk over to the Kinko’s at Twelfth and University. I made a dozen copies of the sketch of the guy who’d punched me in the stomach. I didn’t have any use for copies of the other sketch, but I made a couple anyway while I was at it.

Some years ago I’d spoken at a group called Village Open Discussion, and I seemed to remember that they met on Tuesday evenings at a Presbyterian church just a block west of the copy shop. It was a big meeting, a young crowd. There was a show of hands after the speaker, and there were always plenty of hands in the air. Matt the Listener sat back and listened.

It was still raining when I left, so I passed up the outdoor pay phones for one in a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue. I dialed my own number, waiting for the machine, and Elaine picked it up on the first ring.

“That’s a surprise,” I said. “I thought we were screening our calls.”

“Oh, hi, Monica,” she said. “I was just thinking about you.”

I felt a chill, and tensed my stomach muscles as if in anticipation of a blow. I said, “Are you all right?”

“Oh, never better,” she said. “I could do without the rain, but other than that I’ve got no complaints.”

I relaxed, but not entirely. “Who’s there with you?”

“I was going to call,” she said apologetically, “but then these two friends of Matt’s dropped by. Did you ever meet Joe Durkin? Well, he’s married, so forget it.”

“You’re good at this,” I said. “But that’s not the Monica I know. She’s only interested if they’re married.”

“Yeah, he’s kind of cute,” she said. “Hang on and I’ll ask him. . . . My friend wants to know your name and if you’re married.”

“Don’t get too cute or he’s gonna want to talk to me.”

“He says his name is George, and the other is classified information. But there’s a ring on his finger, if that means anything.” She laughed. “You’ll love this. He says he’s working undercover and it’s part of a disguise.”

“Yeah, I love it,” I said. “How long are they likely to hang around, do you have any idea?”

“Oh, gee,” she said. “I really couldn’t say.”

“Anybody call?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t want to say the names, so just answer yes or no. Did Mick call?”

“No.”

“TJ?”

“Uh-huh, a little while ago. You know, you really ought to get back to them.”

“I’ll call him.”

“There was something else I had to tell you, but I can’t think what it was.”

“Somebody else called?”

“Yes.”

“Feed me the initials.”

“Absolutely, baby.”

“AB?”

“Uh-huh. That’s right.”

“Andy Buckley?”

“I knew you’d understand.”

“Did he leave a number?”

“Sure, for all the good it does.”

“Because he left it on the machine and you don’t have it handy. Never mind, I can get it. If those two get on your nerves, tell them to get the hell out.”

“My sentiments exactly,” she said. “Look, sweetie, I have to go now. And I’ll tell Matt what you said.”

“You do that,” I said.