IT WAS AN OVERCAST MORNING OF DRIZZLING RAIN. COOL, BUT not cold. To me it was a lovely morning, except for the humidity, which I could always feel throughout my system, from my nasal passages to my guts, like a malaise.

The diminutive Ecuadorian drudge who tended to the upkeep of the joint had not yet arrived. The retractable dark green awning above the bench had not been lowered, and the bench was wet and getting wetter in the drizzling rain. I went into the bar, got the long, unwieldy awning crank from the barroom corner where it leaned, extending from the floor almost to the ceiling, brought it outside, raised its hooked end, finally engaged the small hoop of the rig, and cranked down the awning to keep the rain from the bench.

I returned the crank to its corner in the bar and looked about for a newspaper to place on the bench under my ass. I found a copy of the Post, and as I was about to lay it on the wet bench I saw its headline: BADGE BETRAYED. I never read newspapers. They were bad for you. But occasionally I was drawn to one of their tawdry front pages. Both the News and the Post had grown almost unbearable in their use of worse and worse puns. It was the old-fashioned Dick Tracy sort of headlines, the feigned public-spirited cries of outrage and shock, that I liked. So I stood there in the light rain to check out the story.

“A veteran NYPD officer assembled an ‘army’ of his fellow not-so-Finest,” the two-page spread began. The cop had “boasted to an FBI informant” that he could pull together the perfect “crew” for any crime. The army had been branching out from smuggling guns and cigarettes and slot machines to offering violence for a price. “We got cops with vests and guns,” the veteran officer had told the fed. “I’m setting up a good army here. A good f—kin’ army.” There was a bunch of pictures. The guy who shot his mouth off to the informant, several of his “army” members. My eyes passed over the pictures, returned very suddenly to one of them. And I heard his voice:

“I know this guy. He’s all right.”

Those two cops that morning last spring. Numb-nuts and glue factory. It was glue factory. Good old glue factory.

I had wondered a lot about that strange visit from those cops. I had wondered even more about the events of the night before. Had I really slashed those girls’ throats? All I remembered was a dim, indistinct flickering in the blackness of what could have been a dream. But I had seen the blood. On the blade of that knife. On me. Or had I only imagined seeing it?

I had wondered about the old cop in my kitchen with his moronic young acolyte. He seemed so intent, old glue factory did, on simply writing me off as innocent and getting the hell out of there. It left me wondering, and I had been wondering ever since.

He, not I, was the killer, I told myself at times. He was, I told myself at other times, a secret brother, a fellow blood drinker, who somehow recognized me as one, and who understood.

When I wondered, my mind went everywhere. Now, as I put the paper on the bench and sat on it, I told myself that he was likely far more concerned with unloading his latest shipment of assault rifles than with any kind of pain-in-the-ass cop work.

Sitting on that paper, the awning overhead, sipping coffee and smoking a cigarette, looking into the foggy drizzle that seemed to quiet the street, I wondered again if I had really killed those girls that night in that doorway. I recalled my last words with the Japanese guy at the store, just a few blocks from here, where I had bought that knife. My last words to him were about the long knife with the leopard-bone handle that I wanted to have made. He told me that the knife master had spoken with several of the great craftsmen in Japan. Using leopard bone was totally against the law, he reported; it could not even be obtained in Japan. One of the craftsmen could make for me a higonokami—a folding knife—with a handle of ivory, maple, and ebony. I could also have a tanto, a dagger, with a handle of ivory, persimmon, and white sharkskin. I could, if I wanted, have a higonokami made entirely of silver. I asked the guy to thank the knife master for me, but also tell him that he should trouble himself no further. “The special knife,” I told him, “can only be made of leopard bone.”

I still didn’t know why I wanted this thing, this “special knife” with a leopard-bone handle. Why did anyone want anything he didn’t need?

As I sat there, I tried to remember what those two girls looked like. I stared into the diffuse mist of silent rain, trying to bring forth their faces.

In that diffuse mist under a sky that showed nothing but a gathering of heavy gray clouds, there were here and there the odd faint twinklings of the slight refractions of stray half-light passing through the raindrops.

If I had in fact killed them, I should at least have the memory of having done so. This at least should be mine. The feel of their warm flesh in the springtime night, the drawing of the blade across that flesh, the terror in their eyes, their blood in my mouth. These things, the memory of them; they should at least be mine. If one was to be a killer, then the memory of killing should be his. What was it to be a killer who had not even the pleasure of—

It was there and then that I caught myself and turned away from wondering. I gave myself to, became lost in, the semitransparent windblown veil of the muted light-falling rain. I did not feel so good. It was the weather. The humidity.