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the modesty provided by corners, and we took our showers at home.
    Chin Wa didn’t have one ounce of fat on his 157-pound frame. He was lithe and smiling. When we faced each other in the middle of the ring I said, “No headgear?”
    “You won’t hit my head,” he said. “But I sure hit you.”
    And he did, too. I was trying to cover up, throwing uppercuts up top but he knew how to punch and he moved his head like a king cobra on speed. Maybe fifteen seconds into the first round he’d hit me as many times. After a minute or so my uppercut fell a bit and I caught him in the rib cage on the right side. One. I got two more in before Gordo hit the bell.
    When the bell to the second round started I could see Chin Wa was angry that I was able to answer. He threw a flurry at me, landing every punch, and I connected once five inches below his diaphragm. Four. For the next minute or so his volume and velocity of punches slowed though he might not have realized it. I got in two right hooks on his left side before Gordo hit the bell again.
    By this time we had an audience. It was my guess that most sparring partners that got in with Chin were daunted by his speed.
    When the third round started I put my hands down, he smiled, hit me four times and then I let out with a straight right hand to his lower core. He looked at me with real surprise on his face. He tried to raise his arms as if to protect himself from the blows that might be coming but instead the movement twisted his gut muscles and he spun to the canvas like a corkscrew.
    —
    “Inside’a your lip bleedin’,” Gordo said as I put on my clothes in the corner.
    He lifted the left side of my lip with two fingers and rubbed a crystal of pure alum against the cut. It stung for a moment and then came the tangy taste of the chemical. The intimacy of boxers and their trainers is something akin to love.
    “Thanks, LT,” Gordo said. “It would’a taken Chin up to the middle ranks to learn that a heavy hitter can have a brain. You could’a been the best in the world at one time.”
    “The way I take hits I would have most certainly been punch-drunk by now.”
    Gordo looked down then. He knew the ravages of the sweet science like anybody else.
    “Have you seen Twill around?” I asked my oldest friend.
    “Not for ovah a week now. But Dimitri come in every night, him and that Mata Hari girl he been datin’.”
    “Does Tatyana box?”
    “Naw. She just stretches and do that yoga stuff while he in trainin’.”
    “But no Twill?”
    Gordo shook his head and shrugged.

8
    I got up to the seventy-second floor of the Tesla Building at a few minutes before 7:00. Now and then I try to get into the office before Mardi. It’s a kind of competition for us. Though usually quiet, and always reserved, Mardi is likely to give me a certain look when I come in and she’s already there. The look says,
You see? I am the better worker here.
So now and then I like to come in early to stick out my tongue at her.
    But when I turned the corner headed toward my office I forgot about the silly rivalry.
    Standing there beside my office door was a medium-sized white man in an ill-fitting brown suit. He was five-seven or -eight but with bad posture and a sagging belly, though he was not overweight.
    When he saw me approaching, the man forced a hopeful look into his depressed features. As I came up to him he said, “Mr. McGill?”
    “Yes?”
    “My name is Stent,” he said. “Hiram Stent.”
    His features were what I could only call indistinct. There was no ridged border between his lips and the surrounding skin. His eyes were murky, neither brown nor green. And Hiram Stent’s skin was tan but not from day labor or last summer’s visits to the beach. His leathery rind came from long hours of overexposure and a little too much alcohol that worked to cure this finish from the inside out.
    “Oh yeah.” I was working the first of seven keys on the office door. “Mardi gave you an early