A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

Chapter 13

We sat at a table off to the side. I had a mug of strong black coffee and he had a bottle of the twelve-year-old Irish that is his regular drink. The bottle had a cork stopper, a rarity these days; stripped of its label it would make a pretty decent decanter. Mick was drinking his whiskey out of a small cut-glass tumbler that may have been Waterford. Whatever it was it stood a cut above the regular bar glassware, and like the whiskey it was reserved for his private use.

"I was here the night before last," I said.

"Burke told me you came by."

"I watched an old movie and waited for you. Little Caesar, Edward G. Robinson. 'Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?' "

"You'd have had a long wait," he said. "I worked that night." He picked up his glass and held it to catch the light. "Tell me something, man. Do you always need money?"

"I can't go very far without it. I have to spend it and that means I have to earn it."

"But are you scratching for it all the fucking time?"

I had to think about it. "No," I said at length. "Not really. I don't earn a lot, but I don't seem to need much. My rent's cheap, I don't have a car, I don't carry any insurance, and I've got no one to support except myself. I couldn't last long without working, but some work always seems to come along before the money runs out."

"I always need money," he said. "And I go out and get it, and I turn around and it's gone. I don't know where it goes."

"That's what everyone says."

"I swear it melts away like snow in the sun. Of course you know Andy Buckley."

"The best dart player I ever saw."

"He's a fair hand. A good lad, too."

"I like Andy."

"You'd have to like him. Did you know he still lives at home with his mother? God bless the Irish, what a strange fucking race of men we are." He drank. "Andy doesn't make a living throwing darts in a board, you know."

"I thought he might do more than that."

"Sometimes he'll do something for me. He's a grand driver, Andy is. He can drive anything. A car, a truck, anything you could ask him to drive. He could likely fly a plane if you gave him the keys." The smile was there for an instant. "Or if you didn't. If you misplaced the keys and needed someone to drive without them, Andy's your man."

"I see."

"So he went off to drive a truck for me. The truck was full of men's suits. Botany 500, a good line of clothing. The driver knew what he was supposed to do. Just let himself be tied up and take his time working himself loose and then tell how a couple of niggers jumped him. He was getting well paid for his troubles, you can be sure of that."

"What happened?"

"Ah, 'twas the wrong driver," he said, disgusted. "Your man woke up with a bad head and called in sick, entirely forgetting he was to be hijacked that day, and Andy went to tie up the wrong man and had to knock him on the head to get the job done. And of course the fellow got loose as quick as he could, and of course he called the police at once and they spotted the truck and followed it. By the grace of God Andy saw he was being followed and so he didn't drive to the warehouse, or there would have been more men than himself arrested. He parked the truck on the street and tried to walk away from it, hoping they'd wait for him to come back to it, but they outguessed him and took him right down, and the fucking driver came down and picked him out of a lineup."

"Where's Andy now?"

"Home in bed, I shouldn't doubt. He was in earlier and said he had a touch of the flu."

"I think that's what Elaine's got."

"Has she? It's a nasty thing. I sent him home. Get in bed with a hot whiskey, I told him, and ye'll be a new man in the morning."

"He's out on bail?"

"My bondsman had him out in an hour, but now he's been released altogether. Do you know a lawyer named Mark Rosenstein? A very soft-spoken Jewish lad, I'm forever asking him to speak up. Don't ask how much money I handed him."

"I won't."

"I'll tell you anyway. Fifty thousand dollars. I don't know where it all went, I just put it into his hands and left it to him. Some went to the driver, and your man changed his story and swore it wasn't Andy at all, it was someone else entirely, someone taller and thinner and darker and with a Russian accent, I shouldn't wonder. Oh, he's very good, Rosenstein is. He'd make no impression in court, you could never hear what he was saying, but you do better if you stay out of court entirely, wouldn't you say?" He freshened his drink. "I wonder how much of the money stayed with the little Jew. What would you guess? Half?"

"That sounds about right."

"Ah, well. He earned it, didn't he? You can't let your men rot in prison cells." He sighed. "But when you spend money like that you have to go out and get more."

"You mean they wouldn't let Andy keep the suits?" I went on to tell him Joe Durkin's story of Maurice, the dope dealer who'd demanded the return of his confiscated cocaine. Mick put his head back and laughed.

"Ah, that's grand," he said. "I ought to tell that one to Rosenstein. 'If you were any good at all,' I'll tell him, 'ye'd have arranged it so that we got to keep the suits.' " He shook his head. "The fucking dope dealers," he said. "Did you ever try any of that shit yourself, Matt? Cocaine, I mean."

"Never."

"I tried it once."

"You didn't like it?"

He looked at me. "The hell I didn't," he said. "By God it was lovely! I was with a girl and she wouldn't rest until I tried some. And then she got no rest at all, let me tell you. I never felt so fine in my life. I knew I was the grandest fellow that ever lived and I could take charge of the world and solve all its problems. But before I did that it might be nice to have a little more of the cocaine, don't you know. And the next thing you knew it was the middle of the afternoon, and the cocaine was all gone, and the girl and I had fucked our silly brains out, and she was rubbing up against me like a cat and telling me she knew where to get more.

" 'Get your clothes on,' I told her, 'and buy yourself some more cocaine if you want it, but don't bring it back here because I never want to see it again, or you either.' She didn't know what was wrong but she knew not to stay around to find out. And she took the money. They always take the money."

I thought of Durkin and the hundred dollars I'd given him. "I shouldn't take this from you," he'd said. But he hadn't given it back.

"I never touched cocaine again," Mick said. "And do you know why? Because it was too fucking good. I don't ever want to feel that good again." He brandished the bottle. "This lets me feel as good as I need to feel. Anything more than that is unnatural. It's worse than that, it's fucking dangerous. I hate the stuff. I hate the rich bastards with their jade snuff bottles and gold spoons and silver straws. I hate the ones who smoke it on the streetcorners. My God, what it's doing to the city. There was a cop on television tonight saying you should lock your doors when you're riding in a taxi. Because when your cab stops for a light they'll come in after you and rob you. Can you imagine?"

"It keeps getting worse out there."

"It does," he said. He took a drink and I watched him savor the whiskey in his mouth before he swallowed it. I knew what the JJ amp;S twelve-year-old tasted like. I used to drink it with Billie Keegan years ago when he tended bar for Jimmy. I could taste it now, but somehow the sense-memory didn't make me crave a drink, nor did it make me fear the dormant thirst within me.

A drink was the last thing I wanted on nights like this. I had tried to explain it to Jim Faber, who was understandably uncertain of the wisdom of my spending long nights in a saloon watching another man drink. The best I could do was to suggest that somehow Ballou was drinking for both of us, that the whiskey that went down his throat quenched my thirst as well as his own, and left me sober in the process.

HE said, "I went to Queens again Sunday night."

"Not to Maspeth."

"No, not to Maspeth. Another part entirely. Jamaica Estates. Do you know it?"

"I have a vague idea of where it is."

"You go out Grand Central Parkway and get off at Utopia. The house we were looking for was on a little street off Croydon Road. I couldn't tell you what the neighborhood looked like. It was full dark when we went out there. Three of us, and Andy driving. He's a grand driver, did I tell you?"

"You told me."

"They were expecting us, but they didn't expect we'd have guns in our hands. Spanish they were, from somewhere in South America. A man and his wife and the wife's mother. They were dope dealers, they sold cocaine by the kilo.

"We asked him where his money was. No money, he said. They had cocaine to sell, they didn't have any cash. Now I knew they had money in the house. They'd had a big sale the day before and they still had some of the money around."

"How did you know?"

"From the lad who gave me the address and told me how to get through the door. Well, I took the man in a bedroom and tried to talk sense to him. Talked with my hands, you might say. He stuck fast to his story, the little greaseball.

"And then one of the lads comes in with a baby. 'Get up off the money,' he tells the man, 'or I'll cut the wee bastard's throat.' And the babe's screaming through all this. No one's hurting him, you understand, but he's hungry or he wants his mother. You know how it is with babies."

"What happened?"

"If you can believe this," he said, "the father as much as says we can go to hell. 'I don't think you do thees,' he says, looking me right in the eye.

" 'You're right,' I told him. 'I don't kill babies.' And I told my man to take the babe to its mother and have her change his diaper or give him a bottle, whatever would stop his crying." He straightened up in his chair. "And then I took the father," he said, "and I put him in a chair, and I left the room and came back wearing my father's apron. One of the lads- Tom it was, you know Tom, behind the bar most afternoons."

"Yes."

"Tom had a gun to his head, and I had the big cleaver that was my father's also. I went over and tried it out on the bedside table, just took a good whack at it and it collapsed into a pile of kindling. Then I took hold of his arm just above the wrist, pinning it to the arm of the chair, and with my other hand I raised up the cleaver.

" 'Now, you spic bastard,' I said, 'where's your money, or don't you theenk I'll take your fucking hand off?' " He smiled with satisfaction at the memory. "The money was in the laundry room, in the vent pipe for the dryer. You could have turned the house upside down and never found it. We were out of there in no time, and Andy had us safely home. I'd have been lost out there, but he knew all the turns."

I got up and went behind the bar to pour myself another cup of coffee. When I got back to the table Mick was gazing off to one side. I sat down and waited for the coffee to cool and we both let the silence stretch for a while.

Then he said, "We left them alive, the whole household. I don't know, that could have been a bad idea."

"They wouldn't call the police."

"They couldn't do that, and they weren't well connected, so I didn't think they'd come back at us. And we left the cocaine. There was ten kilos of it that we found, shaped like little footballs. 'I'm leaving you your coca,' I told him, 'and I'm leaving you alive. But if you ever come back at me,' I said, 'then I'll come back here. And I'll wear this'- pointing to the apron- 'and I'll carry this'- the cleaver- 'and I'll lop off your hands and feet and whatever else I can think of.' I'd do no such thing, of course. I'd just kill him and be done with it. But you can't scare a drug dealer by telling him you'll kill him. They all know somebody will kill them sooner or later. Tell them you'll leave them with some pieces missing, though, and the picture sticks in their mind."

He filled his glass and took a drink. "I didn't want to kill him," he said, "because I'd have had to kill the wife too, and the old woman. I'd leave the baby because a baby can't pick you out of a lineup, but what kind of a life would I be leaving it? It's got a bad enough life already, with that for a father.

"Because look how he called my bluff. 'I don't think you do thees.' The bastard didn't care if I did it. Go ahead, kill the baby, he can always start another one. But when it was a question of his hand winding up on the floor, why, he wasn't so fucking tough then, was he?"

A little later he said, "Sometimes you have to kill them. One runs for the door and you drop him, and then you have to take out all the rest of them. Or you know they're not people who will let it go, and it's kill them or watch your back for the rest of your life. What you do then is scatter the drugs all over the place. Grind the bricks to powder, pour it on the bodies, tread it into the rug. Let it look like dealers killing each other. The cops don't break their necks to solve that kind of killing."

"Don't you ever take the drugs along?"

"I don't," he said, "and I'm giving up a fortune, and I just don't care. There's so much money in it. You wouldn't have to deal in it, you could sell the lot to someone. It wouldn't be hard to find someone who wanted to buy it."

"No, I don't suppose it would."

"But I'll have no part of it, and I won't work with anyone who'll use it or traffic in it. The cocaine I left behind the other night, I could have got more for it than I took in cash from the dryer vent. There was only eighty thousand there." He lifted his glass, set it down again. "There should have been more. I know he had another stash somewhere in the fucking house, but I'd have had to chop off his hand to get it. And that would have meant killing him after, and killing the lot of them. And calling the police later, telling them there was a baby crying in a house on such-and-such a street."

"Better to take the eighty thousand."

"That's what I thought," he said. "But there's four thousand right off the top for the lad who told us where to go and how to get in. A finder's fee, you call it. Five percent, and I shouldn't wonder he thought we got more and were cheating him. Four thousand for him, and a good night's pay for Tom and Andy and the fourth fellow, whom you don't know. And what's left for myself is a little less than what I paid to get Andy off the hook for the hijacking." He shook his head. "I always need money," he said. "I don't understand it."

I talked some about Richard Thurman and his dead wife, and about the man we'd seen at the fights in Maspeth. I took out the sketch and he looked at it. "It's very like him," he said. "And the man who drew it never saw the man he was drawing? You wouldn't think it could be done."

I put the sketch away and he said, "Do you believe in hell?"

"I don't think so."

"Ah, you're fortunate. I believe in it. I believe there's a place reserved for me there, a chair by the fire."

"Do you really believe that, Mick?"

"I don't know about the fire, or little devils with fucking pitchforks. I believe there's something for you after you die, and if you lead a bad life you've got a bad lot ahead of you. And I don't lead the life of a saint."

"No."

"I kill people. I only do it out of need, but I lead a life that makes killing a requirement." He looked hard at me. "And I don't mind the killing," he said. "There are times I have a taste for it. Can you understand that?"

"Yes."

"But to kill a wife for the insurance money, or to kill a child for pleasure." He frowned. "Or taking a woman against her will. There's more men than you'd think who'll do that last. You'd think it was just the twisted ones but sometimes I think it's half the human race. Half the male sex, anyway."

"I know," I said. "When I was at the Academy they taught us that rape was a crime of anger toward women, that it wasn't sexual at all. But over the years I stopped believing that. Half the time nowadays it seems to be a crime of opportunity, a way to have sex without taking her to dinner first. You're committing a robbery or a burglary, there's a woman there, she looks good to you, so why not?"

He nodded. "Another time," he said. "Like last night, but over the river in Jersey. Dope dealers in a fine house out in the country, and we were going to have to kill everybody in the house. We knew that before we went in." He drank whiskey and sighed. "I'll go to hell for sure. Oh, they were killers themselves, but that's no excuse, is it?"

"Maybe it is," I said. "I don't know."

"It's not." He put the glass down and wrapped his hand around the bottle but didn't lift it from the table. "I'd just shot the man," he said, "and one of the lads was searching for more cash, and I heard cries coming from another room. So I went in there, and there's one of the boys on top of the woman, with her skirt up and her clothes ripped, and she's fighting him and crying out."

" 'Get off her,' I told him, and he looked at me like I was mad. She was choice, he said, and we were going to kill her anyway, so why shouldn't he have her before she was no use to anybody?"

"What did you do?"

"I kicked him," he said. "I kicked him hard enough to break three ribs, and then before I did anything else I shot her between the eyes, because she shouldn't have to put up with more of it. And then I picked him up and threw him against the wall, and when he came stumbling off it I hit him in the face. I wanted to kill him, but there were people who knew he'd worked for me and it would be like leaving a calling card behind. I took him away from there and paid him his share and got a closemouthed doctor to bandage his ribs, and then I packed him off. He was from Philadelphia, and I told him to go back there, that he was finished in New York. I'm sure he doesn't know to this day what he did that was wrong. She was going to die anyway, so why not have the use of her first? And why not roast her liver and eat it, why let the flesh go to waste?"

"There's a pretty thought."

"In the name of Jesus," he said, "we're all going to die, aren't we? So why not do any bloody thing we please with each other? Is that it? Is that how the world works?"

"I don't know how the world works."

"No, and neither do I. And I don't know how you get through it on fucking coffee, I swear I don't. If I didn't have this-"

He filled his glass.

LATER we were talking about black men. He had little use for them and I let him tell me why. "Now there's some who are all right," he said. "I'll grant you that. What was the name of that fellow we met at the fights?"

"Chance."

"I liked him," he said, "but you'd have to say he's another type entirely from the usual run. He's educated, he's a gentleman, he's a professional man."

"Do you know how I got to know him?"

"At his place of business, I would suppose. Or didn't you say you met him at the fights?"

"That's where we met, but there was a business reason for the meeting. That was before Chance was an art dealer. He was a pimp then. One of his whores got killed by a lunatic with a machete, and he hired me to look into it."

"He's a pimp, then."

"Not anymore. Now he's an art dealer."

"And a friend of yours."

"And a friend of mine."

"You have an odd taste in friends. What's so funny?"

" 'An odd taste in friends.' A cop I know said that to me."

"So?"

"He was talking about you."

"Was he now?" He laughed. "Ah, well. Hard to argue with that, isn't it?"

ON a night like that the stories come easy, and the silences between the stories are easy, too. He talked about his father and mother, both long gone, and about his brother Dennis who had died in Vietnam. There were two other brothers, one a lawyer and real estate broker in White Plains, the other selling cars in Medford, Oregon.

"At least he was the last I heard of him," he said. "He was going to be a priest, Francis was, but he lasted less than a year at the seminary. 'I learned I liked the girls and the gargle too much.' Hell, there's priests that have their share of both. He tried one thing and another and two years ago he was in Oregon selling Plymouths. 'It's great here, Mickey, come out and see me.' But I never did, and he's likely gone somewhere else by now. I think the poor bastard still wishes he was a priest, even though his faith's long since lost. Can you understand that?"

"I think so."

"Were you raised Catholic? You weren't, were you?"

"No. There were Catholics and Protestants in the family but nobody worked at it very hard. I grew up not going to church and wouldn't have known which one to go to. I even had one grandparent who was half-Jewish."

"Is that so? You could have been a lawyer like Rosenstein."

He told the story he'd started Thursday night, about the man who owned the factory in Maspeth where they assembled staple removers. The man had incurred gambling debts and wanted Mick to burn the place so he could collect the insurance. The arsonist Mick used had made a mistake and torched the place directly across the street instead. When Mick told the arsonist of his error the man insisted it was no problem, he'd go back the next night and do it right. And he'd include an extra for goodwill, he offered. He'd burn the man's house down and not charge him for it.

I told a story I hadn't thought of in years. "I was fresh out of the Academy," I said, "and they teamed me up with an old hairbag named Vince Mahaffey. He must have had thirty years in and he never made plainclothes and never wanted to. He taught me plenty, including things they probably didn't want me to learn, like the difference between clean graft and dirty graft and how to get as much of the first kind as you can. He drank like a fish and ate like a pig and he smoked those little Italian cigars. Guinea stinkers, he called them. I thought you had to be in one of the five families to smoke those things. He was a hell of a role model, Vince was.

"One night we caught one, a domestic disturbance, the neighbors called it in. This was in Brooklyn, in Park Slope. It's all gentrified there now, but this was before any of that got started. It was an ordinary white working-class neighborhood then.

"The apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up, and Mahaffey had to stop a couple of times along the way. Finally we're standing in front of the door and you can't hear a thing. 'Ah, shit,' Vince said. 'What do you bet he killed her? Now he'll be crying and yanking his hair out and we'll have to take him in.'

"But we rang the bell and they both answered it, a man and a woman. He was a big guy around thirty-five, a construction worker, and she looked like a girl who'd been pretty in high school and let herself go. And they were surprised to hear that we'd had a complaint. Oh, had they been making too much noise? Well, maybe they'd been playing the TV a little loud. It wasn't even on now, the whole place was silent as a grave. Mahaffey pushed it the least little bit, said we'd had a report of sounds of a struggle and a loud argument, and they looked at each other and said, well, yeah, they'd had a discussion that turned into a little bit of an argument, maybe they shouted at each other some, and maybe he'd pounded on the kitchen table to make a point, and they'd be careful to keep it down for the rest of the evening, because they certainly didn't want to disturb anybody.

"He'd been drinking but I wouldn't have said he was drunk, and they were both calm and anxious to please, and I was ready to wish 'em goodnight and get on to something else. But Vince had been to hundreds of domestics and this one smelled and he could tell. I might have picked up on it myself if I hadn't been so new. Because they were hiding something. Otherwise they'd have said there was no fight and no problem and told us to go to hell.

"So he stalled, talking about this and that, and I'm wondering what's the matter with him, is he waiting for the husband to break out the bottle and offer us drinks. And then we both heard a noise, like a cat but not like a cat. 'Oh, it's nothing,' they said, but Mahaffey pushed them out of the way and opened a door, and we found a little girl there, seven years old but small for her age, and now you could see why the domestic disturbance hadn't left any marks on the wife. All of the marks were on the girl.

"The father had beaten the shit out of her. Bruises all over her, one eye closed, and marks on one arm where they burned her with cigarettes. 'She fell down,' the mother insisted. 'He never touched her, she fell down.'

"We took them to the station house and parked them in a holding cell. Then we took the kid to a hospital, but first Mahaffey dragged her into an empty office and borrowed somebody's camera. He undressed the kid except for her underpants and took a dozen pictures of her. 'I'm a shit photographer,' he said. 'If I take enough shots maybe something'll come out.'

"We had to let the parents go. The doctors at the hospital confirmed what we already knew, that the child's injuries could only have been the result of a beating, but the husband was swearing he didn't do it and the wife was backing him up, and you weren't going to get testimony out of the kid. And they were very reluctant to prosecute child abuse in those days anyway. It's a little better now. At least I think it is. But we had no choice but to cut the parents loose."

"You must have wanted to kill the bastard," Mick said.

"I wanted to put him away. I couldn't believe that he could do something like that and get away with it. Mahaffey told me it happened all the time. You hardly ever got a case like that to court, not unless the child died and sometimes not then. Then why, I asked, had he bothered taking the pictures? He patted me on the shoulder and told me the pictures were worth a thousand words apiece. I didn't know what he was talking about.

"Middle of the next week we're in the car. 'It's a nice day,' he said. 'Let's go for a ride, let's go to Manhattan.' I didn't know where the hell he was taking me. We wound up on Third Avenue in the Eighties. It was a construction site, they'd knocked down a batch of small buildings and were putting up a big one. 'I found out where he drinks,' Mahaffey said, and we went into this neighborhood tavern, Carney's or Carty's or something, it's long gone now. The place was full of guys with work shoes and hard hats, construction workers on their break or at the end of their shift, having a ball and a beer and unwinding.

"Well, we were both in uniform, and the conversation stopped when we walked in. The father was at the bar in the middle of a knot of his buddies. It's funny, I don't remember his name."

"Why should you? As many years ago as it was."

"You would think I would remember. Anyway, Mahaffey walked right through them all and went up to the guy, and he turned to the men standing around and asked them if they knew him. 'You think he's all right? You think he's a decent sort of a guy?' And they all said sure, he's a good man. What else are they going to say?

"So Mahaffey opens his blouse, his blue shirt, and he takes out a brown envelope, and it's got all the pictures he took of the kid. He had them blow them up to eight-by-ten, and they all came out perfect. 'This is what he did to his own fucking child,' Mahaffey says, and he passes the pictures around. 'Take a good look, this is what the bastard does to a defenseless child.' And, when they've all had a good look, he tells them we're cops, we can't put this man in jail, we can't lay a finger on this man. But, he says, they aren't cops, and once we're out the door we can't stop them from doing whatever they think they have to do. 'And I know you're good American working men,' he tells them, 'and I know you'll do the right thing.' "

"What did they do?"

"We didn't hang around to watch. Driving back to Brooklyn Mahaffey said, 'Matt, there's a lesson for you. Never do something when you can get somebody else to do it for you.' Because he knew they'd do it, and we found out later that they damn near killed the sonofabitch in the process. Lundy, that was his name. Jim Lundy, or maybe it was John.

"He wound up in the hospital and he stayed a full week. Wouldn't make a complaint, wouldn't say who did it to him. Swore he fell down and it was his own clumsiness.

"He couldn't go back to that job when he got out of the hospital because there was no way those men would work with him again. But I guess he stayed in construction and was able to get jobs, because a few years later I heard he went in the hole. That's what they call it when you're working high steel and you fall off a building, they call it going in the hole."

"Did someone push him?"

"I don't know. He could have been drunk and lost his balance, or he could have done the same thing cold sober, as far as that goes. Or maybe he gave somebody a reason to throw him off the building. I don't know. I don't know what happened to the kid, or to the mother. Probably nothing good, but that would just give them something in common with most of the rest of the world."

"And Mahaffey? I suppose he's gone by now."

I nodded. "He died in harness. They kept trying to retire him and he kept fighting it, and one day- I wasn't partnered with him by then, I had just made detective on the strength of a terrific collar that was ninety-eight percent luck- anyway, one day he was climbing the stairs of another tenement and his heart cut out on him. He was DOA at Kings County. At his wake everybody said that was the way he would have wanted it, but they got that wrong. I knew what he wanted. What he wanted was to live forever."

NOT long before dawn he said, "Matt, would you say that I'm an alcoholic?"

"Oh, Jesus," I said. "How many years did it take me to say I was one myself? I'm not in a hurry to take anybody else's inventory."

I got up and went to the men's room, and when I came back he said, "God knows I like the drink. It'd be a bad bastard of a world without it."

"It's that kind of world either way."

"Ah, but sometimes this stuff lets you lose sight of it for a while. Or at least it softens the focus." He lifted his glass, gazed into it. "They say you can't stare at an eclipse of the sun with your naked eye. You have to look through a piece of smoked glass to save your vision. Isn't it as dangerous to see life straight on? And don't you need this smoky stuff to make it safe to look at?"

"That's a good way to put it."

"Well, bullshit and poetry, that's the Irish stock in trade. But let me tell you something. Do you know what's the best thing about drinking?"

"Nights like this."

"Nights like this, but it's not just the booze makes nights like this. It's one of us drinking and one of us not, and something else I couldn't lay my finger on." He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. "No," he said, "the best thing about drinking is a certain kind of moment that only happens once in a while. I don't know that it happens for everyone, either.

"It happens for me on nights when I'm sitting up alone with a glass and a bottle. I'll be drunk but not too drunk, you know, and I'll be looking off into the distance, thinking but not thinking- do you know what I mean?"

"Yes."

"And there'll be a moment when it all comes clear, a moment when I can just about see the whole of it. My mind reaches out and wraps itself around all of creation, and I'm this close to having hold of it. And then"- he snapped his fingers- "it's gone. Do you know what I mean?"

"Yes."

"When you drank, did you-"

"Yes," I said. "Once in a while. But do you want to know something? I've had the same thing happen sober."

"Have you now!"

"Yes. Not often, and not at all the first two years or so. But every now and then I'll be sitting in my hotel room with a book, reading a few pages and then looking out the window and thinking about what I've just read, or of something else, or of nothing at all."

"Ah."

"And then I'll have that experience just about as you described it. It's a kind of knowing, isn't it?"

"It is."

"But knowing what? I can't explain it. I always took it for granted it was the booze that allowed it to happen, but then it happened sober and I realized it couldn't be that."

"Now you've given me something to think about. I never thought for a moment it could happen sober."

"It can, though. And it's just as you described it. But I'll tell you something, Mick. When it happens to you sober, and you're seeing it without that piece of smoked glass-"

"Ah."

"- and you have it, you just about have it, and then it's gone." I looked into his eyes. "It can break your heart."

"It will do that," he said. "Drunk or sober, it will break your heart."

IT was light out when he looked at his watch and got to his feet. He went into his office and came back wearing his butcher's apron. It was white cotton, frayed here and there from years of laundering, and it covered him from the neck to below the knees. Bloodstains the color of rust patterned it like an abstract canvas. Some had faded almost to invisibility. Others looked fresh.

"Come on," he said. "It's time."

We hadn't discussed it once throughout the long night but I knew where we were going and had no objections. We walked to the garage where he kept his car and rode down Ninth Avenue to Fourteenth Street. We turned left, and partway down the block he left the big car in a no-parking zone in front of a funeral parlor. The proprietor, Twomey, knew him and knew the car. It wouldn't be towed or ticketed.

St. Bernard's stood just east of Twomey's. I followed Mick up the steps and down the left-hand aisle. There is a seven o'clock mass weekdays in the main sanctuary, which he had missed, but there is a smaller mass an hour later in a small chamber to the left of the altar, generally attended by a handful of nuns and various others who stopped in on their way to work. Mick's father had done so virtually every day, and there were always butchers in attendance, though I don't know if anyone else called it the butchers' mass.

Mick attended sporadically, coming every day for a week or two, then staying away for a month. I had joined him a handful of times since I'd come to know him. I wasn't sure why he went, and I certainly didn't know why I sometimes tagged along.

This occasion was like all the others. I followed the service in the book and picked up my cues from the others, standing when they stood, kneeling when they knelt, mouthing the appropriate responses. When the young priest handed out the Communion wafers Mick and I stayed where we were. As far as I could tell, everybody else approached the altar and received the Host.

Outside again Mick said, "Will you look at that?"

It was snowing. Big soft flakes floated slowly down. It must have started just after we entered the old church. There was already a light dusting of snow on the church steps, and on the sidewalk.

"Come on," he said. "I'll run you home."