In late August of ’25, a peculiar man known only as THE COUNT began to appear at various locales throughout the New York metropolitan area, drinking heavily and raving about various offscreen women. He was tall, skinny, but muscular in a way that only comes from manual labor, and he wore J. Crew slacks with a wife-beater. If you were in his presence, even if only for a moment, you could feel the power that hid behind his dark eyes, eyes that would stare out at you like deep oceans of hazel and blue, beckoning. He was intensely aware of the presence of every woman within a 2-square-block radius and made a lasting impression on all of them that they didn’t completely understand. He was like a black hole that curved all of space, where the trajectory of every object that passed near him wavered and became blurry. He was the kind of man, in short, that you could stare at for ages, if only he wouldn’t stare back. But the Count always stared back. There were whispers of associations with various underworld figures, and multiple unsubstantiated accounts of past employment as both a mercenary in North Africa and as a seaplane pilot somewhere near Guadalajara, or maybe Guam. You couldn’t really place his accent, which seemed to somehow waver between thick Alabama drawl and rural Minnesotan twang, but his speech was thick with New York area slang that only a native would ever employ. He almost always smelled of sweat, marijuana smoke, and alcohol. He was meticulously groomed, and his