Everybody Dies

Andy Buckley said, "Jesus Christ,"and braked the Cadillac to a stop. I looked up and there was the deer, perhaps a dozen yards away from us in the middle of our lane of traffic. He was unquestionably a deer caught in the headlights, but he didn't have that stunned look the expression is intended to convey. He was lordly, and very much in command.

"C'mon," Andy said. "Move your ass, Mister Deer."

"Move up on him," Mick said. "But slowly."

"You don't want a freezer full of venison, huh?" Andy eased up on the brake and allowed the car to creep forward. The deer let us get surprisingly close before, with one great bound, he was off the road and out of sight in the darkened fields at the roadside.

We'd come north on thePalisades Parkway, northwest on Route 17, northeast on 209. We were on an unnumbered road when we stopped for the deer, and a few miles farther we turned left onto the winding gravel road that led to Mick Ballou's farm. It was past midnight when we left, and close to two by the time we got there. There was no traffic, so we could have gone faster, but Andy kept us a few miles an hour under the speed limit, braked for yellow lights, and yielded at intersections. Mick and I sat in back, Andy drove, and the miles passed in silence.

"You've been here before," Mick said, as the old two-story farmhouse came into view.

"Twice."

"Once after that business in Maspeth," he remembered. "You drove that night, Andy."

"I remember, Mick."

"And we'd Tom Heaney with us as well. I feared we might lose Tom. He was hurt bad, but scarcely made a sound. Well, he's from the North. They're a closemouthed lot."

He meant the North of Ireland.

"But you were here a second time? When was that?"

"A couple of years ago. We made a night of it, and you drove me up to see the animals, and have a look at the place in daylight. And you sent me home with a dozen eggs."

"Now I remember. And I'll bet you never had a better egg."

"They were good eggs."

"Big yolks the color of a Spanish orange. It's a great economy, keeping chickens and getting your own eggs. My best calculation is that those eggs cost me twenty dollars."

"Twenty dollars a dozen?"

"More like twenty dollars an egg. Though when herself cooks me a dish of them, I'd swear it was worth that and more."

Herself was Mrs. O'Gara, and she and her husband were the farm's official owners. In the same fashion, there was somebody else's name on the Cadillac's title and registration, and on the deed and license for Grogan's Open House, the saloon he owned on the corner of Fiftieth and Tenth. He had some real estate holdings around town, and some business interests, but you wouldn't find his name on any official documents. He owned, he'd told me, the clothes on his back, and if put to it he couldn't even prove those were legally his. What you don't own, he'd said, they can't easily take away from you.

Andy parked alongside the farmhouse. He got out of the car and lit a cigarette, lagging behind to smoke it while Mick and I climbed a few steps to the back porch. There was a light on in the kitchen, and Mr. O'Gara was waiting for us at the round oak table. Mick had phoned earlier to warn O'Gara that we were coming. "You said not to wait up," he said now, "but I wanted to make sure you had everything you'd need. I made a fresh pot of coffee."

"Good man."

"All's well here. Last week's rain did us no harm. The apples should be good this year, and the pears even better."

"The summer's heat was no harm, then."

"None as wasn't mended," O'Gara said. "Thanks be to God. She's sleeping, and I'll turn in now myself, if that's all right. But you've only to shout for me if you need anything."

"We're fine," Mick assured him. "We'll be out back, and we'll try not to disturb you."

"Sure, we're sound sleepers," O'Gara said. "Ye'd wake the dead before ye'd wake us."

O'Gara took his cup of coffee upstairs with him. Mick filled a thermos with coffee, capped it, then found a bottle of Jameson in the cupboard and topped up the silver flask he'd been nipping from all night. He returned it to his hip pocket, got two six-packs of O'Keefe's Extra Old Stock ale from the refrigerator, gave them to Andy, and grabbed up the thermos jar and a coffee mug. We got back into the Cadillac and headed farther up the drive, past the fenced chicken yard, past the hogpen, past the barns, and into the old orchard. Andy parked the car, and Mick told us to wait while he walked back to what looked like an old-fashioned outhouse straight out of Li'l Abner, but was evidently a toolshed. He came back carrying a shovel.

He picked a spot and took the first turn, sinking the shovel into the earth, adding his weight to bury the blade to the hilt. Last week's rain had done no harm. He bent, lifted, tossed a shovelful of earth aside.

I uncapped the thermos and poured myself some coffee. Andy lit a cigarette and cracked a can of ale. Mick went on digging. We took turns, Mick and Andy and I, opening a deep oblong hole in the earth alongside the pear and apple orchard. There were a few cherry trees as well, Mick said, but they were sour cherries, good only for pies, and it was easier to let the birds have them than to go to the trouble of picking them, taking into account that the birds would get most of them whatever you did.

I'd been wearing a light windbreaker, and Andy a leather jacket, but we'd shucked them as we took our turns with the shovel Mick hadn't been wearing anything over his sport shirt. Cold didn't seem to bother him much, or heat either.

During Andy's second turn, Mick followed a sip of whiskey with a long drink of ale and sighed deeply. "I should get out here more," he said. "You'd need more than moonlight to see the full beauty of it, but you can feel the peace of it, can't you?"

"Yes."

He sniffed the wind. "You can smell it, too. Hogs and chickens. A rank stench when you're close to it, but at this distance it's not so bad, is it?"

"It's not bad at all."

"It makes a change from automobile exhaust and cigarette smoke and all the stinks you meet with in a city. Still, I might mind this more if I smelled it every day. But if I smelled it every day I suppose I'd cease to notice it."

"They say that's how it works. Otherwise people couldn't live in towns with paper mills."

"Jesus, that's the worst smell in the world, a paper mill."

"It's pretty bad. They say a tannery's even worse."

"It must be all in the process," he said, "because the end product's spared. Leather has a pleasant smell to it, and paper's got no smell at all. And there's no smell kinder to the senses than bacon frying in a pan, and doesn't it come out of the same hogpen that's even now assaulting our nostrils? That reminds me."

"Of what?"

"My gift to you the Christmas before last. A ham from one of my very own hogs."

"It was very generous."

"And what could be a more suitable gift for a Jewish vegetarian?" He shook his head at the memory. "And what a gracious woman she is. She thanked me so warmly that it was hours before it struck me what an inappropriate gift I'd brought her. Did she cook it for you?"

She would have, if I'd wanted, but why should Elaine cook something she's not going to eat? I eat enough meat when I'm away from the house. Home or away, though, I might have had trouble with that ham. The first time Mick and I met, I was looking for a girl who'd disappeared. It turned out she'd been killed by her lover, a young man who worked for Mick. He'd disposed of her corpse by feeding it to the hogs. Mick, outraged when he found out, had dispensed poetic justice, and the hogs had dined a second time. The ham he'd brought us was from a different generation of swine, and had no doubt been fattened on grain and table scraps, but I was just as happy to give it to Jim Faber, whose enjoyment of it was uncomplicated by a knowledge of its history.

"A friend of mine had it for Christmas," I said. "Said it was the best ham he ever tasted."

"Sweet and tender."

"So he said."

Andy Buckley threw down the shovel, climbed up out of the hole, and drank most of a can of ale in a single long swallow. "Christ," he said, "that's thirsty work."

"Twenty-dollar eggs and thousand-dollar hams," Mick said. "It's a grand career for a man, agriculture. However could a man fail at it?"

I grabbed the shovel and went to work.

I took my turn and Mick took his. Halfway through it he leaned on his shovel and sighed. "I'll feel this tomorrow," he said. "All this work. But it's a good feeling for all that."

"Honest exercise."

"It's little enough of it I get in the ordinary course of things. How about yourself?"

"I do a lot of walking."

"That's the best exercise of all, or so they say."

"That and pushing yourself away from the table."

"Ah, that's the hardest, and gets no easier with age."

"Elaine goes to the gym," I said. "Three times a week. I tried, but it bores me to death."

"But you walk."

"I walk."

He dug out his flask, and moonlight glinted off the silver. He took a drink and put it away, took up the shovel again. He said, "I should come here more. I take long walks when I'm here, you know. And do chores, though I suspect O'Gara has to do them over again once I've left. I've no talent for farming."

"But you enjoy being here."

"I do, and yet I'm never here. And if I enjoy it so, why am I always itching to get back to the city?"

"You miss the action," Andy suggested.

"Do I? I didn't miss it so much when I was with the brothers."

"The monks," I said.

He nodded. "The Thessalonian Brothers. In Staten Island, just a ferryboat ride fromManhattan, but you'd think you were a world away."

"When were you there last? It was just this spring, wasn't it?"

"The last two weeks of May. June, July, August, September. Four months ago, close enough. Next time you'll have to come with me."

"Yeah, right."

"And why not?"

"Mick, I'm not even Catholic."

"Who's to say what you are or aren't? You've come to Mass with me."

"That's for twenty minutes, not two weeks I'd feel out of place."

"You wouldn't. It's a retreat. Have you never done a retreat?"

I shook my head. "A friend of mine goes sometimes," I said.

"To the Thessalonians?"

"To the Zen Buddhists. They're not that far from here, now that I think of it. Is there a town near here called Livingston Manor?"

"Indeed there is, and 'tis not far at all."

"Well, the monastery's near there. He's been three or four times."

"Is he a Buddhist, then?"

"He was brought up Catholic, but he's been away from the church for ages."

"And so he goes to the Buddhists for retreat. Have I met him, this friend of yours?"

"I don't think so. But he and his wife ate that ham you gave me."

"And pronounced it good, I believe you said."

"The best he ever tasted."

"High praise from a Zen Buddhist. Ah, Jesus, it's a strange old world, isn't it?" He clambered out of the hole. "Have one more go at it," he said, handing the shovel to Andy. "I think it's good enough as it is, but no harm if you even it up a bit."

Andy took his turn. I was feeling a chill now. I picked up my windbreaker from where I'd tossed it, put it on. The wind blew a cloud in front of the moon, and we lost a little of our light. The cloud passed and the moonlight came back. It was a waxing moon, and in a couple of days it would be full.

Gibbous- that's the word for the moon when there's more than half of it showing. It's Elaine's word. Well, Webster's, I suppose, but I learned it from her. And she was the one who told me that, if you fill a barrel inIowa with seawater, the moon will cause tides in that water. And that blood's chemical makeup is very close to that of seawater, and the moon's tidal pull works in our veins.

Just some thoughts I had, under a gibbous moon…

"That'll do," Mick said, and Andy tossed the shovel and Mick gave him a hand out of the hole, and Andy got a flashlight from the glove compartment and aimed its beam down into the hole, and we all looked at it and pronounced it acceptable. And then we went to the car and Mick sighed heavily and unlocked the trunk.

For an instant I had the thought that it would be empty. There'd be the spare, of course, and a jack and a lug wrench, and maybe an old blanket and a couple of rags. But other than that it would be empty.

Just a passing thought, blowing across my mind like the cloud across the moon. I didn't really expect the trunk to be empty.

And of course it wasn't.

I don't know that it's my story to tell.

It's Mick's, really, far more than it's mine. He should be the one to tell it. But he won't.

There are others whose story it is as well. Every story belongs to everyone who has any part in it, and there were quite a few people who had a part in this one. It's none of their story as much as it's Mick's, but they could tell it, singly or in chorus, one way or another.

But they won't.

Nor will he, whose story it is more than anyone's. I've never known a better storyteller, and he could make a meal of this one, but it's not going to happen. He'll never tell it.

And I was there, after all. For some of the beginning and much of the middle and most of the end. And it's my story, too. Of course it is. How could it fail to be?

And I'm here to tell it. And, for some reason, I can't not tell it.

So I guess it's up to me.

Earlier that same night, a Wednesday, I'd gone to an AA meeting. Afterward I'd had a cup of coffee with Jim Faber and a couple of others, and when I got home Elaine said that Mick had called. "He said perhaps you could stop in," she said. "He didn't come right out and say it was urgent, but that was the impression I got."

So I got my windbreaker from the closet and put it on, and halfway to Grogan's I zipped it up. It was September, and a very transitional sort of September, with days like August and nights like October. Days to remind you of where you'd been, nights to make sure you knew where you were going.

I lived for something like twenty years in a room at the Hotel Northwestern, on the north side ofFifty-seventh Street a few doors east ofNinth Avenue. When I moved, finally, it was right across the street, to the Parc Vendôme, a large prewar building where Elaine and I have a spacious fourteenth-floor apartment with views south and west.

And I walked south and west, south toFiftieth Street, west toTenth Avenue. Grogan's is on the southeast corner, an old Irish taproom of the sort that is getting harder and harder to find in Hell's Kitchen, and indeed throughoutNew York. A floor of inch-square black and white tiles, a stamped tin ceiling, a long mahogany bar, a matching mirrored backbar. An office in the back, where Mick kept guns and cash and records, and sometimes napped on a long green leather couch. An alcove to the left of the office, with a dartboard at the end of it, under a stuffed sailfish. Doors on the right-hand wall of the alcove, leading to the restrooms.

I walked through the front door and took it all in, the mix of slackers and strivers and old lags at the bar, the handful of occupied tables. Burke behind the bar, giving me an expressionless nod of recognition, and Andy Buckley all by himself in the rear alcove, leaning forward, dart in hand. A man emerged from the restroom and Andy straightened up, either to pass the time of day with the fellow or to avoid hitting him with a dart. It seemed to me that the fellow looked familiar, and I tried to place the face, and then I caught sight of another face that drove the first one entirely out of my mind.

There's no table service at Grogan's, you have to fetch your own drinks from the bar, but there are tables, and about half of them were occupied, one by a trio of men in suits, the rest by couples. Mick Ballou is a notorious criminal and Grogan's is his headquarters and a hangout for much of what's left of the neighborhood tough guys, but the gentrification of Hell's Kitchen into Clinton has made it an atmospheric watering hole for the neighborhood's newer residents, a place to cool off with a beer after work, or to stop for a last drink after a night at the theater. It's also an okay place to have a serious drink-eased conversation with your spouse. Or, in her case, with someone else's.

She was dark and slender, with short hair framing a face that was not pretty, but occasionally beautiful. Her name was Lisa Holtzmann. When I met her she was married, and her husband was a guy I hadn't liked and couldn't say why. Then somebody shot him while he was making a telephone call, and she found a strongbox full of money in the closet and called me. I made sure she could keep the money, and I solved his murder, and somewhere along the way I went to bed with her.

I was still at the Northwestern when it started. Then Elaine and I took the Parc Vendôme apartment together, and after we'd been there for a year or so we got married. Throughout this period I went on spending time with Lisa. It was always I who called, asking her if she wanted company, and she was always agreeable, always happy to see me. Sometimes I'd go weeks and weeks without seeing her, and I'd begin to believe the affair had run its course. Then the day would come when I wanted the escape that her bed afforded, and I would call, and she would make me welcome.

As far as I've ever been able to tell, the whole business didn't affect my relationship with Elaine at all. That's what everybody always wants to think, but in this case I honestly think it's true. It seemed to exist outside of space and time. It was sexual, of course, but it wasn't about sex, any more than drinking was ever about the way the stuff tasted. In fact it was like drinking, or its role for me was like the role drinking had played. It was a place to go when I didn't want to be where I was.

Shortly after we were married- on our honeymoon, as a matter of fact- Elaine gave me to understand that she knew I was seeing somebody and that she didn't care. She didn't say this in so many words. What she said was that marriage didn't have to change anything, that we could go on being the people we were. But the implication was unmistakable. Perhaps all the years she'd spent as a call girl had given her a unique perspective on the ways of men, married or not.

I went on seeing Lisa after we were married, though less frequently. And then it ended, with neither a bang nor a whimper. I was there one afternoon, in her eagle's nest twenty-some stories up in a new building on Fifty-seventh and Tenth. We were drinking coffee, and she told me, hesitantly, that she had started seeing someone, that it wasn't serious yet but might be.

And then we went to bed, and it was as it always was, nothing special, really, but good enough. All the while, though, I kept finding myself wondering what the hell I was doing there. I didn't think it was sinful, I didn't think it was wrong, I didn't think I was hurting anybody, not Elaine, not Lisa, not myself. But it seemed to me that it was somehow inappropriate.

I said, without making too much of it, that I probably wouldn't call for a while, that I'd give her some space. And she said, just as offhandedly, that she thought that was probably a good idea for now.

And I never called her again.

I'd seen her a couple of times. Once on the street, on her way home with a cartful of groceries from D'Agostino's. Hi. How are you? Not so bad. And you? Oh, about the same. Keeping busy. Me too. You're looking well. Thanks. So are you. Well. Well, it's good to see you. Same here. Take care. You too. And once with Elaine, across a crowded room at Armstrong's. Isn't that Lisa Holtzmann? Yes. I think it is. She's with somebody. Did she remarry? I don't know. She had a bad run of luck, didn't she? The miscarriage, and then losing her husband. Do you want to say hello? Oh, I don't know. She looks all wrapped up in the guy she's with, and we knew her when she was married. Another time…

But there hadn't been another time. And here she was, in Grogan's.

I was on my way to the bar, but just then she looked up, and our eyes met. Hers brightened. "Matt," she said, and motioned me over. "This is Florian."

He looked too ordinary for the name. He was around forty, with light brown hair going thin on top, horn-rimmed glasses, a blue blazer over a denim shirt and striped tie. He had a wedding ring, I noted, and she did not.

He said hello and I said hello and she said it was good to see me, and I went over to the bar and let Burke fill a glass with Coke for me. "He should be back in a minute," he said. "He said you'd be coming by."

"He was right," I said, or something like that, not really paying attention to what I was saying, taking a sip of the Coke and not paying attention to that either, and looking over the brim of my glass at the table I'd just left. Neither of them was looking my way. They were holding hands now, I noticed, or rather he was holding her hand. Florian and Lisa, Lisa and Florian.

Ages since I'd been with her. Years, really.

"Andy's in back," Burke said.

I nodded and pushed away from the bar. I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and turned, and my eyes locked with those of the man I'd seen coming out of the bathroom. He had a wide wedge-shaped face, prominent eyebrows, a broad forehead, a long narrow nose, a full-lipped mouth. I knew him, and at the same time I didn't have a clue who the hell he was.

He gave me the least little nod, but I couldn't say whether it was a nod of recognition or a simple acknowledgment of our eyes having met. Then he turned back to the bar and I walked on past him to where Andy Buckley was toeing the line and leaning way over it, aiming a dart at the board.

"The big fellow stepped out," he said. "Care to throw a dart or two while you wait?"

"I don't think so," I said. "It just makes me feel inadequate."

"I didn't do things made me feel inadequate, I'd never get out of bed."

"What about darts? What about driving a car?"

"Jesus, that's the worst of it. Voice in my head goes, 'Look at you, you bum. Thirty-eight years old and all you can do is drive and throw darts. You call that a life, you bum, you?'"

He tossed the dart, and it landed in the bull's-eye. "Well," he said, "if all you can do is throw darts, you might as well be good at it."

He got the darts from the board, and when he came back I said, "There's a guy at the bar, or was, a minute ago. Where the hell did he go?"

"Who are we talking about?"

I moved to where I could see the faces in the back-bar mirror. I couldn't find the one I was looking for. "Guy about your age," I said. "Maybe a little younger. Wide forehead tapering to a pointed chin." And I went on describing the face I'd seen while Andy frowned and shook his head.

"Doesn't ring a bell," he said. "He's not there now?"

"I don't see him."

"You don't mean Mr. Dougherty, do you? Because he's right there and- "

"I know Mr. Dougherty, and he's got to be what, ninety years old? This guy is- "

"My age or younger, right, you told me that and I forgot. I got to tell you, every time I turn around there's more of 'em that are younger."

"Tell me about it."

"Anyway, I don't see the guy, and the description doesn't ring a bell. What about him?"

"He must have slipped out," 1 said. "The little man who wasn't there. Except he was there, and I think you talked to him."

"At the bar? I been back here the past half hour."

"He came out of the john," I said, "just about the time I walked in the door. And he looked familiar to me then, and I thought he said something to you, or maybe you were just waiting for him to get out of the way so you didn't stick a dart in his ear."

"I'm beginning to wish I did. Then at least we'd know who he was. 'Oh, yeah, I know who you mean. He's the asshole wearing a dart for an earring.'"

"You don't remember talking to anybody?"

He shook his head. "Not to say I didn't, Matt. All night long guys are in and out of the men's room, and I'm here tossing darts, and sometimes they'll take a minute to pass the time of day. I'll talk to 'em without paying any attention to 'em, unless I get the sense that they might like to play a game for a dollar or two. And tonight I wouldn't even do that, on account of we're out of here the minute he shows, and what do you know? Here he is now."

He is a big man, is Mick Ballou, and he looks to have been rough-hewn from granite, like Stone Age sculpture. His eyes are a surprisingly vivid green, and there is more than a hint of danger in them. This night he was wearing gray slacks and a blue sport shirt, but he might as well have been wearing his late father's butcher apron, its white surface marked with bloodstains old and new.

"You came," he said. "Good man. Andy'll bring the car round. You wouldn't mind a ride on a fine September night, would you now?"

Mick had a quick drink at the bar, and then we went out and got into the dark blue Cadillac and drove away from what a reporter had called "the headquarters of his criminal empire." The phrase, Elaine once pointed out, was infelicitous, because Mick's whole style wasn't remotely imperial. It was feudal. He was the king of the castle, holding sway by the sheer force of his physical presence, rewarding the faithful and drowning rivals in the moat.

And he was, I've always realized, an unlikely friend for a former policeman turned private investigator. The years have left his hands as bloodstained as his apron. But I seem to be able to recognize this without judging him, or distancing myself from him. I'm not sure whether this represents emotional maturity on my part, or mere willful obtuseness. I'm not sure it matters, either.

I have quite a few friends, but not many close ones. The cops I worked with years ago are retired by now, and I've long since lost touch with them. My saloon friendships wound down when I quit drinking and stopped hanging around bars, and my AA friendships, for all their depth and solidity, center on a shared commitment to sobriety. We support one another, we trust one another, we know astonishingly intimate things about one another- but we're not necessarily close.

Elaine is my closest friend and by far the most important person in my life. But I do have a handful of men with whom I have bonded, each in a different and profound way. Jim Faber, my AA sponsor. TJ, who lives in my old hotel room and serves as my assistant when he's not clerking in Elaine's shop. Ray Gruliow, the radical lawyer. Joe Durkin, a detective at Midtown North, and my last real hook in the Department. Chance Coulter, who once trafficked in women and now deals instead in African art. Danny Boy Bell, whose own stock-in-trade is information.

And Mick Ballou.

They don't run to type, these friends of mine, not as far as I can see. By and large, they wouldn't have much fondness for one another. But they are my friends. I don't judge them, or the friendships I have with them. I can't afford

I thought about this while Andy drove and Mick and I sat side by side in the big back seat. We talked a little about the new Japanese pitcher for the Yankees, and how he'd been disappointing after a promising start. But neither of us had a great deal to say on the subject, and mostly we sat in silence as we rode along.

We took the Lincoln Tunnel toNew Jersey, then Route 3 west. After that I didn't pay much attention to the route. We found our way through a sort of suburban industrial sprawl, winding up in front of a massive one-story concrete-block structure perched behind a twelve-foot woven wire fence topped with concertina wire. rooms 4 rent, a sign announced, which was hard to credit, as I'd never seen a more unlikely rooming house. A second sign explained the first: e-z storage / your extra room at low monthly rates.

Andy drove slowly past the yard, turned at the first driveway, coasted past the place a second time. "All peace and quiet," he said, pulling up in front of the locked gate. Mick got out and opened the big padlock with a key, then swung the gate inward. Andy drove the Cadillac in and Mick secured the gate behind us, then got into the car.

"They lock up at ten," he explained, "but they give you a key to the lock. You've got twenty-four-hour access, with no attendant on hand from ten at night to six in the morning."

"That could be convenient."

"Why I picked it," he said.

We circled the building. There was a roll-up steel door every fifteen feet or so, each of them closed and padlocked. Andy pulled up in front of one and cut the engine. We got out, and Mick fitted another key into this lock and turned it, then gripped the handle and raised the door.

It was dark within, but information was coming my way before the door was all the way up. I sniffed the air like a dog with his head out the car window, sorting the rich mixture of scents that came my way.

There was the smell of death, of course, of lifeless flesh spoiling in a warm unventilated space. With it was the smell of blood, a smell I've often heard described as coppery, but it has always reminded me more of the taste of iron in the mouth. An ironic smell, if you like. There was the burnt smell of cordite, and another burnt smell as well. Singed hair, for a guess. And, as unlikely background music for all these sour notes, I breathed in the rich nostalgic bouquet of whiskey. It smelled like bourbon, and good bourbon at that.

Then the light came on, a single overhead bulb, and showed me what my nose had led me to expect. Two men, both wearing jeans and sneakers, one in a forest green work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the other in a royal blue polo shirt, lay sprawled just a few feet left of the center of a room some eighteen feet square and ten feet high.

I walked over and had a look at them, two men in their late twenties or early thirties. I recognized the one in the polo shirt, although I couldn't remember his name, if in fact I'd ever heard it. I'd seen him at Grogan's. He was a fairly recent arrival fromBelfast, and he had the accent, with his sentences turning up the slightest bit at their ends, almost like questions.

He'd been shot through the hand, and in the torso, just below the breastbone. He'd been shot again, and conclusively, just behind the left ear. That shot had been fired at close range, the blast singeing the hair around the wound. So it had indeed been singed hair that I smelled.

The other man, the one in the dark green work shirt, had bled abundantly from a bullet wound in the throat. He lay on his back, with the blood pooled around him. Again, there'd been a coup de grace, a close-range shot into the middle of the forehead. It was hard to see the need for it. The throat wound would have been enough to kill him, and, judging from the blood loss, he may well have been dead before the second shot was fired.

I said, "Who killed them?"

"Ah," Mick said. "Aren't you the detective?"

Andy waited outside with the car, guarding our privacy, and Mick lowered the steel door to screen us from any chance passerby. "I wanted you to see them exactly as I found them," he said. "I didn't care to walk away and leave them like this. But how could I tell what clues I might be disturbing? What do I know of clues?"

"You didn't move them at all?"

He shook his head. "I didn't have to touch them to know they were beyond help. I've seen enough dead men to know one on sight."

"Or even in the dark."

"The smell was less a few hours ago."

"Is that when you found them?"

"I didn't note the time. It was early evening, with the sky still bright. I'd say it was between seven and eight."

"And this is exactly what you found? You didn't add anything or take anything away?"

"I did not."

"The door was lowered when you got here?"

"Lowered and locked."

"The cardboard carton in the corner- "

"Just some tools in it that it's useful to keep here. A pry bar for opening crates, a hammer and nails. There was an electric drill, but I guess they took that. They took everything else."

"What was there for them to take?"

"Whiskey. Enough to fill a small truck."

I knelt down for a closer look at the man I recognized. I moved his arm, lined up the wound in the hand with the wound in the torso. "One bullet," I said, "or at least it looks that way. I've seen that before. It seems to be instinctive, holding up a hand to ward off a bullet."

"And have you ever known it to work?"

"Only when Superman does it. He was beaten up, did you notice that? Around the face. Pistol-whipped, probably."

"Ah, Jesus," he said. "He was just a lad, you know. You must have met him at the bar."

"I never got his name."

"Barry McCartney. He would be telling you he was no relation to Paul. He'd not have bothered saying that at home inBelfast. There's no lack of McCartneys inCountyAntrim."

I looked at the hands of the other dead man. They were unmarked. Either he hadn't tried catching bullets with them or he'd tried and missed.

He looked to have been beaten around the face and head as well, but it was hard to be sure. The bullet to the forehead had distorted his features, and that was enough to explain the discoloration.

To me, at any rate, if not to someone who knew what he was looking at. I'd been to my share of crime scenes, but I wasn't a medical examiner, I wasn't a forensic pathologist. I didn't really know what to look for or what to make of what I saw. I could pore over the bodies all night and not pick up a fraction of what an expert eye could tell at a glance.

"John Kenny," Mick said, without my having to ask. "Did you ever meet him?"

"I don't think so."

"From Strabane, in theCountyTyrone. He lived in Woodside, in a rooming house full of North-of-Ireland boys. His mother died a year ago. Saves having to tell her." He cleared his throat. "He flew home, buried her, and came back here. And died in a room full of whiskey."

"I don't smell it on them."

"The room was full of whiskey, not the lad himself."

"But I smelled whiskey when I walked in the door," I said, "and I smell it now, but not on them."

"Ah," he said, and I looked where he was pointing. Broken glass covered a few square feet of the concrete floor at the base of the wall. Five or six feet above the heap of shards the wall was stained, with the stain trailing down the wall to the floor.

I went over and had a look at it. "They were stealing your whiskey," I said, "and they broke a bottle."

"They did."

"But it didn't just slip out of their hands and break on impact," I said. "Somebody deliberately smashed the bottle against the wall. A full bottle, too." I poked around in the debris, found the piece of glass with the label on it. "George Dickel," I said. "I thought I smelled bourbon."

"You still have the nose for it."

"McCartney and… Kenny, is it?"

"John Kenny."

"I gather they both worked for you."

"They did."

"And it was your business that brought them here?"

"It was. Last night I told them to drive out here sometime today and pick up half a dozen cases, scotch and bourbon and I don't remember what else. I told them and they wrote it down. John had a station wagon, a big old Ford consumed with rust. Plenty of room in it for a few cases of whiskey. Barry would give him a hand. They'd be coming during the day, so they wouldn't need a key to the padlock. I had extra keys to this unit, and I gave them one."

"They knew how to get here?"

"They'd been here before, when we unloaded the truck the whiskey came in. They weren't part of the taking of the truck, but they helped in the unloading. And they were here another time or two over the months."

"So they came to pick up some whiskey. And they were to deliver it where?"

"To the bar. When they didn't show up I called around looking for them. I couldn't find hide nor hair, so I got in my own car and came out here myself."

"You were worried about them?"

"I'd no cause for worry. The errand I sent them on was of no great urgency. They might have put it off for a time."

"But you were worried all the same, weren't you?"

"I was," he admitted. "I had a feeling."

"I see."

"My mother always said I had the second sight. I don't know if it's so, but sometimes I'll have a feeling. And we needed whiskey at the bar, and I'd nothing else to do, so why not run out and have a look?"

"And this is how you found them?"

"It is. I added nothing and took nothing away."

"What happened to the station wagon?"

"I've no idea, beyond that it was nowhere to be seen. I'd say whoever killed them drove off in it."

"But there was more whiskey than would fit in a station wagon," I said. "That would do for the half dozen cases, but to clear out the whole room- "

"You'd need a panel truck."

"Or a couple of station wagons, each making several trips. But they'd want to get it all in one trip. They wouldn't want to come back to a room with dead men in it. They had a truck, and one of them drove away in it and the other drove off in Kenny's station wagon."

"You couldn't sell the thing," he said. "Not even for parts. Take away the rust and there'd be nothing holding it together."

"Maybe they needed the space. Maybe the truck or van they brought wouldn't take the whole load, and they had to stuff the extra cases into the station wagon."

"And had one bottle left over," he said, "and smashed it against the wall."

"It's hard to make sense out of that, isn't it? It's not as though the bottle just dropped. Somebody heaved it against the wall."

"If there was a scuffle- "

"But there's no sign of one. The killers got the drop on your boys and pistol-whipped them and shot them. That part seems clear, and it's hard to fit a broken bottle into that scenario." I bent down, stood up. "The bottle was opened," I said. "Here's the neck, and the cap's off and the seal's broken." I closed my eyes, trying to reconstruct the scene. "Kenny and McCartney are in here. They've loaded the cases and they're having a drink before they head out. The bad guys come in with guns in their hand. 'Calm down, have a drink,' Kenny says, or McCartney. He hands over the bottle, and the gunman takes it away from him and heaves it against the wall."

"Why?"

"I don't know, unless you got knocked off by Carry Nation and the Anti-Saloon League."

"All this talk of whiskey," he said, and dug out his flask and took a short drink. "They wouldn't have found an opened bottle, man. All the cases were sealed. They'd have had to open a case if they wanted a drink, and they wouldn't have done it."

I returned to the bodies. There was a little flake of glass floating on top of the blood that had gushed from John Kenny's throat. "The bottle was broken after the men were killed," I said. "They killed them, then broke open a case and had a couple of drinks while they loaded the whiskey. And smashed the bottle. Why?"

"Mayhaps they didn't care for the taste of it."

"In some localities it's a violation to drive around with an opened bottle of liquor. But somehow I don't think that would have worried them. It's a gesture of contempt, isn't it? Smashing a bottle against the wall. Or maybe it's like tossing your glass in the fireplace after you drink a toast. Whatever the reason, it was a stupid thing to do."

"Why is that?"

"Because glass takes fingerprints beautifully, and there's a good chance one of those chunks of glass has a usable print on it. And God only knows what else a lab technician might find here." I turned to him. "You were careful not to disturb the integrity of the crime scene, but it's largely wasted if I'm the only one to see it. I haven't got the training or the resources to do a good job. But I don't suppose you want to call this in to the cops."

"I do not."

"No, I didn't think so. What happens next? Are you planning to move the bodies?"

"Well, now," he said. "I can't leave them here, can I?"

We laid the two bodies in the single grave we'd dug. We'd shrouded each in a pair of black plastic Hefty bags before loading them in the trunk, and we left the bags on when we transferred them to the grave.

"There ought to be a prayer over them," Mick said, standing awkwardly at the side of the grave. "Would you ever have a prayer you could say?"

I couldn't think of anything appropriate. I remained silent, as did Andy. Mick said, "John Kenny and Barry McCartney. Ah, you were good boys, and may God grant you glory. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, amen." He made the sign of the cross over the grave, then dropped his hands and shook his head. "You'd think I could think of a fucking prayer. They ought to have a priest, but that's the least of it. They ought to have a proper funeral. Ah, Jesus, they ought to have thirty more years of life, as far as that goes, and it's too fucking bad what they ought to have because this is all they're after getting, a hole in the ground and three men shaking their heads over it. The poor bastards, let's bury 'em and be done with it."

It took a lot less time to fill in the hole than it had taken to dig it. Still, it took awhile. We had only the one shovel and took turns with it, as we'd taken turns before. When we'd finished there was earth left over. Mick shoveled it into a wheelbarrow from the toolshed and dumped it fifty yards away, deep in the orchard. He brought the barrow back, returned it to the toolshed along with the shovel, and came back for another look at the grave.

He said, "Spot it a mile away, wouldn't you? Well, there'll be no one back here but O'Gara, and it won't be the first one he's seen. He's a good man, O'Gara. Knows when to turn a blind eye."

The light was still on in the farmhouse kitchen. I rinsed out the thermos and left it in the strainer, and Mick put back the unopened cans of ale and topped up his flask from the Jameson bottle. Then we all got back in the Cadillac and headed for home.

It was still dark when we left the farm, and there was less traffic than there'd been before, and no bodies in the trunk to hold us to the posted speed limit. Still, Andy didn't exceed it by more than five miles an hour. After a while I closed my eyes. I didn't drift off, but thought my own thoughts in the stillness. When I opened my eyes we were on the George Washington Bridge and the eastern sky was beginning to brighten.

So I'd had a white night, my first in a while. Sometimes Mick and I would sit up all night at Grogan's, with the door locked and all the lights off but the shaded bulb over our table, sharing stories and silence until the sun came up. Now and then we rounded off the night with the eight o'clock Mass at St. Bernard's, the Butchers' Mass, where Mick was just one of a whole crew of men in bloodstained white aprons.

As we came off the bridge and onto the West Side Drive, he said, "We're in good time for it, you know. Mass at St Bernard's."

"You read my mind," I said. "But I'm tired. I think I'll pass."

"I'm tired myself, but I feel the need for it this morning. They should have had a priest."

"Kenny and McCartney."

"The same. The one's family is all in Belfast. All they need to know is there was trouble and he died, the poor lad. John Kenny's mother died, but he had a sister as well, didn't he, Andy?"

"Two sisters," Andy said. "One's married and the other's a nun."

"Married to Our Lord," Mick said. It wasn't always clear to me where reverence left off and irony began. I'm not sure it was clear to him, either.

Andy let us out at Grogan's. Mick told him to drop the Cadillac at the garage. "I'll take a taxi to St. Bernard's," he said. "Or I might walk. I've time enough."

Burke had closed the place hours ago. Mick opened the steel accordion gates and unlocked the door. Inside, the lights were off, the chairs perched on top of the tables, so they'd be out of the way when the floor was mopped.

We went into the back room he uses for an office. He spun the dial of the huge old Mosler safe and drew out a sheaf of bills. "I want to hire you," he announced.

"You want to hire me?"

"As a detective. It's what you do, isn't it? Someone hires you and you undertake an investigation."

"It's what I do," I agreed.

"I want to know who did this."

I'd been thinking about it. "It could have been spur of the moment," I said. "Somebody with an adjoining cubicle sees two guys standing around and all that booze there for the taking. What did you say it ran to?"

"Fifty or sixty cases."

"Well, what's that worth? Twelve bottles to a case, and how much a bottle? Say ten dollars? Is that about right?"

Amusement showed in his eyes. "They've raised the price of the creature since the day you stopped drinking it."

"I'm surprised they're still in business."

"It's hard for them without your custom, but they manage. Say two hundred dollars a case."

I did the math. "Ten thousand dollars," I said, "in round numbers. That's enough to make it worth stealing."

"Indeed it is. Why do you think we stole it in the first place? Though we didn't feel the need to kill anyone."

"If it wasn't somebody who just happened to be there," I went on, "then either somebody followed McCartney and Kenny or else they had the place staked out and waited for somebody to come and open up. But what sense does that make?"

There was an opened bottle of whiskey on his desk. He uncapped it, looked around for a glass, then took a short drink straight from the bottle.

"I need to know," he said.

"And you want me to find out for you."

"I do. It's your line of work, and I'd be entirely useless at it myself."

"So it would be up to me to learn what happened, and who was responsible."

"It would."

"And then I would turn the information over to you."

"What are you getting at, man?"

"Well, I'd be delivering a death sentence, wouldn't I?"

"Ah," he said.

"Unless you're planning on bringing the police into it."

"No," he said. "No, I wouldn't regard it as a police matter."

"I didn't think so."

He put a hand on the bottle but left it where it stood. He said, "You saw what they did to those two lads. Not just the bullets but a beating as well. It's no more than justice for them to pay for it."

"Rough justice, when you mete it out yourself."

"And isn't most justice rough justice?"

I wondered if I believed that. I said, "My problem's not in the action you take. My problem's being a part of it."

"Ah," he said. "I can understand that."

"What you do is up to you," I said, "and I'd be hard put to recommend an alternative. You can't go to the cops, and it's late in life for you to start turning the other cheek."

"It would go against the grain," he allowed.

"And sometimes a person can't turn the other cheek," I said, "or walk away and leave it to the cops. I've been there myself."

"I know you have."

"And I'm not sure I chose the right course, but I seem to have been able to live with it. So I can't tell you not to pick up a gun, not when I might do the same thing myself in your position. But it's your position, not mine, and I don't want to be the one who points the gun for you."

He thought that over, nodded slowly. "I can see the sense in that," he said.

"Your friendship is important to me," I said, "and I'd bend what principles I have for the sake of it. But I don't think this situation calls for it."

His hand found the bottle again, and this time he drank from it. He said, "Something you said, that it might have been men acting on impulse. Lads with a storage bin of their own, seeing a chance for a fast dollar."

"It's certainly a possibility."

"Suppose you were to look into that side of it," he said evenly. "Suppose you did what you do, asked your questions and made your notes, and learned enough to rule that possibility in or out."

"I don't understand."

He went over to the wall and leaned against it, looking at one of the hand-colored steel engravings mounted there. He has two groups of them, three scenes of County Mayo in Ireland, where his mother was born, and three others showing his father's birthplace in the south of France. I don't know which ancestral home he was looking at now, and I doubt he was seeing it.

Without turning around he said, "I believe I have an enemy."

"An enemy?"

"The same. And I don't know who he is or what he wants."

"And you think this was his doing."

"I do. I believe he followed those boys to the storage shed, or got there first and lay in wait for them. I believe the whiskey he stole was the least of it. I believe he was more intent on shedding blood than in stealing ten thousand dollars' worth of stolen whiskey."

"There have been other incidents," I guessed.

"There have," he said, "unless it's my imagination. It could be I've turned into an old maid, checking the cupboards, looking under the bed. Perhaps that's all it is. That, or else I've an enemy and a spy."

I have a license now, issued by the State of New York. I got it awhile ago when one of my lawyer clients told me, not for the first time, that he'd be able to give me more work if I were licensed. I've worked a lot for lawyers lately, and more than ever since I picked up the license.

But I haven't always had a license, and I haven't worked exclusively for members of the legal profession. I had a pimp for a client once. Another time, I worked for a drug trafficker.

If I could work for them, why couldn't I work for Ballou? If he was good enough to be my friend, if he was good enough to sit up all night with, why couldn't he be my client?

I said, "You'd have to tell me how to find the place."

"And what place would that be?"

"E-Z Storage."

"We were just there."

"I wasn't paying attention once we got out of the tunnel. I'll need directions. And you'd better let me have a key for the padlock."

"When do you want to go? Andy can drive you."

"I'll go by myself," I said. "Just tell me how to get there."

I jotted down the directions in my notebook. He proffered the roll of bills, his eyebrows raised, and I told him to put his money away.

He said this was business, that he was a client like any other, that he expected to pay. I said I'd be spending a couple of hours asking questions that most likely wouldn't lead anywhere. When the job was done, when I'd done as much as I felt comfortable doing, I'd tell him what I'd learned and how much he owed me.

"And don't your clients usually pay you something in advance? Of course they do. Here's a thousand dollars. Take it, man, for Jesus' sake! It won't obligate you to do anything you don't want to do."

I knew that. How could money obligate me more than friendship had? I said, "You don't have to pay in advance. I probably won't earn all this."

"Little enough you'd have to do. My lawyer gets as much every time he picks up the telephone. Take it, put it in your pocket. What you don't earn you can always give back."

I put the bills in my wallet, wondering why I'd even bothered to argue. Years ago an old cop named Vince Mahaffey told me what to do when somebody gave me money. "Take it," he'd said, "and put it away, and say thank you. You could even touch your cap if you're wearing one."

"Thanks," I said.

"It's I should be thanking you. Are you certain you don't want someone to drive you?"

"I'm positive."

"Or I can let you have the use of a car, and you can drive yourself."

"I'll get there."

"Now I've hired you, I'd best leave you alone, eh? Just let me know if you need anything."

"I will."

"Or if you learn anything. Or if you determine there's nothing to be learned."

"Either way," I said, "it shouldn't take more than a day or two."

"Whatever it takes. I'm glad you took the money."

"Well, you pretty much insisted on it."

"Ah, we're a fine pair of old fools," he said. "You should have taken the money without an argument. And for my part, I should have let you refuse it. But how could I do that?" His eyes caught mine, held them. "Suppose some wee fucker kills me before you finish the job. How would I feel then? I'd hate to die owing you money."

I was up a little before noon, and by one o'clock I had picked up an Avis car and found my way to E-Z Storage. I spent the afternoon there. I talked to the man in charge, one Leon Kramer, who started out wary and turned into Chatty Cathy before he was done.

Elaine rents a storage cubicle in a warehouse a few blocks west of our apartment- she stores artwork and antiques there, the overflow from her shop- but the system at the E-Z facility in New Jersey was different, and a good deal more casual. We have to sign in and out whenever we visit our bin, but E-Z, unattended at night and offering twenty-four-hour access, can't attempt anything like that level of security. A sign over Kramer's desk insisted in large print that all storage was entirely at the customer's risk, and he made the point himself three times in the first five minutes I spent with him.

So there were no records kept of comings and goings, and nothing stronger than the tenant's own padlock to keep others out of his storage bin.

"They want to be able to come here any hour of the day or night," Kramer said. "Their brother-in-law needs to store some stuff, they can hand him the key without worrying did they put his name on a list of persons authorized to have access. They don't want to sign in each time, clip on a security badge, fill out a lot of forms. What we got here is more convenience than security. Nobody's renting one of our bins to stash the crown jewels. Anything really important or valuable's gonna go in your safe deposit box at the bank. What we get is your mother's dining room set and the files from Dad's old office, before you went and put him in the home. All the stuff you'd keep in the attic, except you sold the house and moved to a garden apartment."

"Or things you'd just as soon not keep around the house," I suggested.

"Now that I wouldn't know about," he said, "and I wouldn't want to know. All I need to know's your check cleared the first of the month."

"A man's storage space is his castle."

He nodded. "With the exception that you can live in a castle, and you can't live here. There's a lot of other things you can do. We call it storage, but it's not all storage. You see that sign, 'Rooms 4 Rent'? That's what we're offering, the extra room your house or apartment hasn't got. I got tenants'll store a boat here, boat motor and trailer, 'cause they got no room to garage it where they live. Others, the room's their workshop. They set up their tools and do woodworking, work on their car, whatever. Only thing you can't do is move in and live here, and that's not my rule, it's the county's, or the township's, whatever. No living. Not that people don't try."

I'd shown him my business card and explained that I was working for a tenant of his who'd had some goods disappear. He didn't want to make it a police matter until he'd ruled out the possibility of employee pilferage. That was probably what it was, Kramer said. Somebody who already had a key, went and made himself the boss's silent partner.

By the time I left him I had a list of the tenants on the side of the building where John Kenny and Barry McCartney had been shot to death. I'd fumbled my way to a pretext- maybe another customer had seen or heard something- and Kramer went along, either to get rid of me or because we were old friends by then. Ballou's cubicle, I noted, was officially leased to someone named J. D. Reilly, with an address in Middle Village, in Queens.

I had a sandwich and fries at a diner across the road, asked a few questions there, then returned to E-Z Storage and used Mick's key to have another look at the murder scene. I could still detect all the odors I'd smelled the night before, but they were fainter now.

I'd brought a broom and dustpan, and I swept up the broken glass and dumped the shards into a brown paper bag. There was a reasonably good chance that one of those chunks of glass held an identifiable fingerprint, but so what? Even if it did, and even if I found it, what good would it be to me? A single print will nail a suspect, but it won't produce a suspect out of thin air. For that you need a full set of fingerprints, and you also need official access to federal records. What I had was useless from an investigative standpoint, and would be useful only when a suspect was in custody and a case was being made against him.

But it wasn't even good for that. The crime scene had been compromised beyond recognition, with the murders unreported, the bodies spirited away and tucked in an unmarked grave. What I held in my hand was evidence that a bottle had been broken. I knew people who'd call that a crime, but nobody who'd want to run prints to hunt down the man who'd broken it.

I stood inside the doorway, listening to traffic sounds, then lowered the steel door all the way down. I couldn't hear anything now, but it was hard to say what that proved; the traffic hadn't been all that loud.

What I was wondering about was the noise of the gunshots. I was assuming the killers had lowered the door before opening fire, but that wouldn't necessarily render the cubicle soundproof.

Of course they could have used suppressors. If so, that made it a little less likely the incident had been a spur-of-the-moment response to an unexpected opportunity for gain. A couple of resourceful sociopaths could have been on the scene, could have seen all those cases of booze. And they could have been carrying weapons at the time- some people, more than you'd think, never leave home unarmed.

But who routinely carries a silencer? No one I'd ever known.

I raised the door, stepped outside and looked around. Half a dozen units away, a man was shifting cartons from the back of a Plymouth Voyager, stowing them in his cubicle. A woman in khaki shorts and a green halter top was leaning against the side of the van and watching him work. Their car radio was playing, but so faintly that all I could tell was that it was music. I couldn't make it out.

Aside from my Ford, theirs was the only vehicle on that side of the building.

I decided the killers probably hadn't needed to muffle their gunfire. The odds were there hadn't been anyone around to hear it. And how remarkable would a few loud noises be? With the steel door shut, anyone within earshot would write off four or five shots as hammer blows, somebody assembling or disassembling a packing case, say. This was suburbia, after all, not a housing project in Red Hook. You didn't expect gunfire, didn't throw yourself on the pavement every time a truck backfired.

Still, why shoot them?

"Names and addresses," TJ said, and frowned. "These be the dudes renting alongside where the two dudes got shot."

"According to the storage company's records."

"Somebody's bad enough to shoot two dudes and steal a truckload of liquor, you figure he'd put his real name down when he rents storage space?"

"Probably not," I said, "although stranger things have happened. There was a fellow a couple of months ago who robbed a bank, and his note to the teller was written on one of his own printed deposit slips."

"Stupid goes clear down to the bone, don't it?"

"It seems to," I agreed. "But if the shooters used a false name, that's a help. Because if one of the names on our list turns out to be phony- "

"Yeah, I get it. So we lookin' for one of two things. Somebody's got a record, or somebody that don't exist at all."

"Neither one necessarily proves anything," I said. "But it would give us a place to start."

He nodded and settled in at the keyboard, tapping keys, using the mouse. I'd bought him the computer for Christmas, at the same time installing it- and him- in my old room at the Northwestern. When Elaine and I moved in together I'd kept my hotel room across the street as a combination den and office, a place to go when I wanted to be alone, sitting at the window and thinking long thoughts.

I'd met TJ on Forty-second Street long before they prettied up the Deuce, and early on he appointed himself my assistant. He turned out to be not merely street-smart but resourceful. When Elaine opened her shop on Ninth Avenue, he took to hanging out there, filling in for her on occasion and revealing a talent for retail sales. I don't know where he lived before he took over my old room- the only address we ever had for him was his beeper number- but I guess he always found a place to sleep. You learn a lot of survival skills in the street. You'd better.

He'd since then learned computer skills as well. While I leafed through Macworld magazine, trying to find something written in a language I could understand, he tapped keys and frowned and whistled and jotted down notes on the sheet of paper I'd given him. Within an hour he'd established that all the names Leon Kramer had supplied belonged to living human beings, and he was able to furnish telephone numbers for all but two of them.

"This don't necessarily mean that all the information's straight dope," he pointed out. "Could be somebody rented a bin and put down a real name and address, only it's a name and address belongs to somebody else."

"Unlikely," I said.

"Whole deal's unlikely. I'm at my storage locker, and I happen to see you got all this liquor in your storage locker, and there I am with a gun in my pocket and a truck parked alongside?"

"The first part's plausible enough," I said. "You're there and you spot the whiskey. But why shoot me?"

"On account of you might not care to stand idly by while I load your booze onto my truck and drive off with it."

"Why not wait?"

"Come back later, you mean."

"Why not? I've got a station wagon, I'm not going to haul off more than a few cases. The rest'll be there when you come back with a truck and somebody to help with the heavy lifting. You can even do it at night, when it's less likely anybody'll see what you're doing."

"You go away and come back, you got the padlock to contend with."

"So? You drill it out or hacksaw it. Or spray it with Freon and take a hammer to it. What do you figure is trickier, getting past a padlock or taking out two men?"

He tapped the sheet of paper. "Sounds like we wastin' our time on these here."

"Unless somebody on the list happened to see or hear something."

"Long odds against that."

"Long odds against most things in life."

He looked at the list of names and numbers, shook his head. "Guess I got some calls to make."

"I'll make them."

"No, I'll make them. They mostly in Jersey. You make them, they go on your phone bill. I make them, they be free."

A couple of years ago I'd used the talents of a pair of high school computer hackers, and in gratitude they'd given me an unrequested perk. By doing some backing and filling within the phone company's labyrinthine computer system, they had so arranged things that all my long-distance calls were free. By leaving their handiwork in place, I was technically guilty of theft of services, but somehow I couldn't get too worked up about it. I wasn't even sure which long-distance carrier I was defrauding, and hadn't a clue how to go about straightening it out.

The free calls went with the hotel room, so TJ inherited them when he moved in. He'd installed a second line for the computer modem, so he could talk and tap keys at the same time.

That's the future, and I guess it works. I'm old-fashioned, and take perverse comfort in telling myself I'm too old to change. All I know how to do is knock on doors and ask a lot of questions.

"Use your Brooks Brothers accent," I said.

"Oh, you think, Dink? What I was figuring was I'd try to sound like a dude with a 'tude." He rolled his eyes. In the voice of an NPR announcer he said, "Let me assure you, sir, that neither asphalt nor Africa will register in my speech."

"I love it when you talk like that," I told him. "It's like watching a dog walk on his hind legs."

"That a compliment or an insult?"

"Probably a little of both," I said. "One thing, though. Remember you're talking to people from Jersey. If you speak too clearly, they won't be able to understand you."

Elaine and I went out for dinner and a movie, and I wound up telling her what I'd been doing. "I don't think TJ's going to learn anything," I said. "It's not too likely any of the other tenants were around yesterday when the shit hit the fan. If they were, I'd be surprised if they saw or heard anything."

"Where do you go from here?"

"I probably give him his money back, or as much of it as I can get him to take. The money's the least of it. I think he's afraid."

"Mick? It's hard to imagine him afraid of anything."

"Most tough guys are afraid a lot of the time," I said. "That's why they take the trouble to be tough. At the very least, I'd say he's anxious, and he's got reason to be. Somebody executed two of his men for no good reason. They didn't have to shoot anybody."

"They were sending him a message?"

"It looks that way."

"But not a very clear one, if he doesn't know what to make of it. What happens next?"

"I don't know," I said. "He didn't tell me much and I didn't ask. Maybe he's in a pissing contest with somebody. Maybe there'll be a certain amount of pushing and shoving before things sort themselves out."

"Gangsters fighting over territory? That kind of thing?"

"Something like that."

"It's not really your fight."

"No, it's not."

"You're not going to get involved, are you?"

I shook my head. "He's my friend," I said. "You like to talk about past lives and karmic ties, and I don't know how much of that I believe in, but I don't rule it out. Mick and I are connected on some sort of deep level, that much is clear."

"But your lives are different."

"Utterly. He's a criminal. I mean, that's what he does. I'm hardly a candidate for canonization, but essentially he and I are on opposite sides of the law." I thought about that. "That's if the law is something with only two sides to it, and I'm not sure it is. The job I did for Ray Gruliow last month was designed to help him get a client acquitted, and I know for a fact the son of a bitch was guilty as charged. So my job in that particular case was to see that justice wasn't done. And when I was a cop I gave perjured testimony more times than I can remember. The men I testified against had done what they were accused of doing, or else they'd done something else that we couldn't pin on them. I never framed an innocent man, or one who didn't damn well belong in prison, but what side of the law was I on when I lied to put him there?"

"Deep thoughts," she said.

"Yes, and I'm the Old Philosopher. But no, I'm not going to get involved in Mick's problem. He'll have to get through it on his own. And he probably will, whatever it is."

"I hope so," she said. "But I'm glad you're out of it."

That was on Thursday. There was a message from TJ when we got home, but it was late and I didn't call him until the following morning, when I learned that he'd reached everybody on the list, including the two whose phone numbers he'd been previously unable to obtain.

"Computer gives you the world's longest arms," he said. "You like Plastic Man, you can reach out and touch someone and pick their pockets while you at it. But what good's it do you if their pockets is empty?"

And in fact his report was that he had nothing to report. Only one of the people on our list had paid a visit to E-Z Storage on the day in question, and she hadn't seen or heard anything memorable, let alone suspicious. If there'd been a truck there with men loading boxes onto it, she hadn't noticed. If there'd been gunshots, or loud noises of any kind, she hadn't heard them.

I called Mick at Grogan's and left word for him to call me. I tried the other numbers I had for him and nobody answered. He has a few apartments around the city, places he can go when he wants to sleep, or drink in private. I'd been to one of them once, an anonymous one-bedroom apartment in a postwar building up in Inwood, the furnishings minimal, a change of clothes in the closet, a small TV set with a rabbit ears antenna, a few bottles of Jameson on a shelf in the kitchen. And, almost certainly, someone else's name on the lease.

I'm not sure why I bothered trying those phone numbers, and I hung up not much concerned that I'd been unable to reach him. All I had to report, really, was that I didn't have anything to report. Nothing terribly urgent about that. It would keep.

When I stopped drinking and started going to AA meetings, I heard a lot of people say a lot of different things about how to stay sober. Ultimately I learned that there are no rules- it's a lot like life itself in that respect- and you follow the suggestions to whatever extent you choose.

Early on I stayed out of bars, but when Mick and I became friends I found myself spending occasional long nights with him in his saloon, drinking Coke or coffee and watching him put away the twelve-year-old Irish. That's not generally recommended- I certainly wouldn't recommend it- but so far it hasn't felt dangerous to me, or inappropriate.

I've followed the conventional wisdom in some respects and ignored it in others. I've paid some attention to the program's Twelve Steps, but I can't say they've been in the forefront of my consciousness in recent years, and I've never been much good at prayer or meditation.

There are two areas, however, in which I've never strayed. A day at a time, I don't pick up the first drink. And, after all these years, I still go to meetings.

I don't go as often as I once did. In the beginning I damn near lived in meetings, and there was a time when I wondered if I might be abusing the privilege, attending too frequently, taking up a seat somebody else might need. I asked Jim Faber- this was before I asked him to be my sponsor- and he told me not to worry about it.

These days it's a rare week when I don't get to at least one meeting, and I generally manage to fit in two or three. The one I'm most regular at attending- I'm almost always there unless we go out of town for the weekend- is the Friday night step meeting at my home group. We meet at St. Paul the Apostle, three blocks from home at Ninth and Sixtieth. In the old drinking days I lit candles in that church, and stuffed spiritual hush money into the poor box. Now I sit in the basement on a folding chair, drinking sacramental coffee out of a Styrofoam chalice and dropping a dollar in the basket.

In the early days I could scarcely believe the things I heard at meetings. The stories themselves were extraordinary enough, but more remarkable to me was the willingness people demonstrated day after day to tell their most intimate secrets to a roomful of strangers. I was even more surprised a few months later to find myself equally candid. I've since learned to take that stunning candor for granted, but it still impresses me when I stop to think about it, and I've always enjoyed listening to the stories.

After the meeting I joined Jim Faber for coffee at the Flame. He's been my sponsor for all these years, and we still have a standing dinner date on Sunday nights. One or the other of us has to cancel occasionally, but we get together more often than not, meeting at one of the neighborhood's Chinese restaurants and talking from the hot and sour soup straight through to the fortune cookies. Nowadays we're as apt to discuss his problems as mine- his marriage has had its ups and downs, and his printing business almost went belly-up a few years ago. And we always have the problems of the world to solve if we're ever fresh out of problems of our own.

We drank our coffee and paid our separate checks. "C'mon," he said. "I'll walk you home."

"I'm not going home," I said, "although I'll pass the place. I've got a call to make and you won't want to go there."

"Some gin joint, would be my guess."

"Grogan's. I did a day's work for Ballou, and I've got to drop by and tell him what I found out."

"That what you were talking about earlier?"

During the meeting I'd shared about my occasional difficulties in setting boundaries. I'd been referring to the business at hand, although I'd avoided saying anything at all specific.

"It's hard to do the right thing," I told Jim, "when you're not sure what it is."

"That's the great advantage the religious fanatics have," he said. "They always know."

"Puts them way ahead of me."

"Me too," he said, "and the gap is ever widening. Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man."

"Then I must be growing up," I said, "and it's about time. Are we on for Sunday night?"

He said we were. At the corner of Fifty-seventh we shook hands and said goodnight, and he turned right while I crossed the street. I started to turn automatically toward the Parc Vendôme's entrance, caught myself, then came close to going on in anyway. I was tired, and could call Ballou and tell him what I had to tell him over the phone.

But instead I stayed with the original plan and skirted the building, heading downtown on Ninth Avenue. I walked three blocks, passing Elaine's shop, then crossed to the west side of Ninth when the light turned and walked another block. I was just stepping off the curb at Fifty-third Street when a stocky guy with dark hair plastered down across his scalp popped up smack in front of me and stuck a gun in my face.

My first reaction was chagrin. Where had he come from, and how had I managed to be wholly unaware of his approach? The crime rate's down these days and the streets feel a lot safer, but you still have to pay attention. I'd been paying attention all my life, and what was the matter with me now?

"Scudder," he said.

I heard my name and felt better. At least I wasn't a random patsy, sufficiently oblivious to blunder into the role of mugging victim. That was reassuring, but it didn't do anything to improve the short-term outlook.

"This way," he said, and pointed with the gun. We moved onto the sidewalk and into the shadows on the side street. He stayed in front of me and kept the gun in my face, while a second man, behind me throughout, was behind me still. I hadn't had a look at him yet, but I could sense his presence and smell his beer-and-tobacco breath.

"You ought to quit sticking your nose into storage sheds in Jersey," the one with the gun said.

"All right."

"Huh?"

"I said all right. You want me out of it and I want out myself. No problem."

"You trying to be smart?"

"I'm trying to stay alive," I said, "and to save us all a headache. Especially me. I took a job that's not going anywhere and I was just on my way to tell the man to find himself another boy. I'm a married man and I'm not a kid anymore and I don't need the aggravation."

His nostrils flared and his eyebrows went up a notch. "They said you were a tough customer," he said.

"Years ago. See how tough you are when you get to be my age."

"And you're ready to forget the whole thing? Jersey, the cases of hooch, the two Irish guys?"

"What Irish guys?"

He looked at me.

I said, "See? It's forgotten."

He gave me a long look, and I read disappointment in his features. "Well," he said. "Turns out you're easier than you figured to be, but I still got to do what I got to do." I had an idea what that meant, and I knew I was right when the man behind me took hold of my upper arms and held on tight. The one in front tucked his gun under his belt and made his right hand into a fist.

"You don't have to do this," I told him.

"Call it a convincer."

He hit me right at the belt line, putting some muscle behind the blow. I had time to tense my stomach muscles, and that helped some, but he threw a good punch, getting his shoulder into it.

"Sorry," he said. "Just a couple more, huh?"

The hell with that. I didn't want to take a couple more. I set myself, visualizing my move before I made it, and he drew back his fist, and I shifted a foot and bore down full force on the instep of the son of a bitch who had my arms pinned. I felt bones snap. He cried and let go, and I stepped forward and threw a quick right, hitting the other son of a bitch a glancing blow on the side of the face.

I guess he didn't care for boxing when his opponent could hit back. He stepped back himself and tugged at the gun wedged under his belt, and I moved in on him, feinted with my right, and put everything I had into a left hook aimed at his right side just under his rib cage.

I hit what I aimed at, and it worked the way it was supposed to. I've seen boxers go down and stay down from a single blow to the liver. I don't hit as hard as they do, but I wasn't wearing gloves to cushion the blow, either. He dropped as if he'd been cut off at the knees and rolled on the sidewalk, clutching his middle and moaning.

The gun hit the sidewalk. I snatched it up and whirled around in time to catch the second man, the one whose foot I'd stomped, bearing down on me. He pulled up short when he saw the gun.

"Beat it," I said. "Come on, move! Get the hell out!"

His face was in the shadows and I couldn't read it. He looked at me, weighing the odds, and my finger tightened on the trigger. Maybe he noticed, maybe that made his decision for him. He drew back, deeper into the shadows, and scuttled around the corner and out of sight. He was limping a little, favoring the foot I'd damaged but moving quickly all the same. He had sneakers on, I noticed, while I was wearing a pair of regular leather shoes. If it had been the other way around, I might not have been able to break his hold on my arms.

The other guy, the one with the plastered-down hair, was still on the ground, still moaning. I pointed the gun at him. It had looked much larger when it had been aimed at me than it felt now in my hand. I stuffed his into my own waistband, wincing at the soreness where his opening shot had landed. My middle was tender already, and it would be ten times worse in the morning.

He didn't have to hit me, the son of a bitch.

My anger flared, and I looked down at him and caught him looking back up at me. I drew back a foot to kick him in the head. Kick his fucking head in, the son of a bitch.

But I overruled myself and held back. I didn't kick him.

My mistake.

"When I told him I was out of it," I said, "I was telling the simple truth. I'd have said the same thing anyway, because I've never seen the point of talking back to a gun, but this time I wasn't just shining him on. I'd already decided I was done with the case, and I was on my way here to tell you as much when they braced me."

He'd been spelling Burke behind the stick when I came in, and I guess something must have shown in my face, because he was out from behind the bar before I could say a word, shepherding me to his office in the rear. He pointed to the green leather sofa but I stayed on my feet, and so did he, and I talked and he listened.

I said, "I'd already decided I was wasting my time and your money. I couldn't absolutely rule out the possibility that whoever killed your men and stole your whiskey was there by chance and acted on impulse. But I couldn't turn up anything at all to support that premise. And I wasn't comfortable trying to investigate from the other end. That would mean poking around in your business affairs, and I didn't want to do that."

"You did what you said you'd do."

"I guess so, even if all I learned was that there was nothing to learn. Then two clowns turned up with a gun, and in an eye blink they confirmed the conclusion I'd already drawn. If they were part of the package, then you couldn't possibly write off what happened across the river to coincidence and bad luck. You've got an enemy, and that's why Kenny and McCartney wound up dead."

"Ah, I think I knew as much all along," he said. "But I wanted to be certain."

"Well, it got certain for me the minute they showed up to warn me off. I was already off. That's what I said to them, and the hell of it is I think they believed me."

"But the fucker hit you all the same."

"He was apologetic about it," I said, "but that didn't make him pull the punch. So it didn't feel much like an apology."

"And you stood and took it."

"I didn't have a lot of choice. But one punch was as much as I wanted to take."

"And so you showed them what you could do. Jesus, I wish I'd been there to see it."

"I wish you'd been there to give me a hand," I said. "I'm too old for this shit."

"How's your stomach, man?"

"Not as bad as it'd be if I'd let him hit me again. You know, I was damn lucky. If I don't come down just right on his foot, he doesn't let go. And then all I've done is irritate them, and then where am I?" I shrugged. "On balance it was probably a mistake to fight back. He had a gun, for Christ's sake. And I knew they were killers, or at least working for killers. Hell, I saw what happened to Kenny and McCartney."

"You helped to bury them."

"So if I make these two angry I'm only going to get more of a beating, and they might use a gun instead of a fist, and they might even get carried away and shoot me. But I didn't have time to think it through. All I could do was react. And, as I said, I got lucky."

"I'd have paid to see it."

"You wouldn't want to pay too much. It was over in less time than it took me to tell about it. The adrenaline gives you a rush, I'll say that. When I was standing there watching one of them hurrying away on his bad foot while the other rolled around hugging his liver, I felt like Superman's big brother."

"You had the right."

"And I thought, well, the hell with you assholes. I was off the case, I was done with it, but fuck the two of you, and I'm back on it." I took a breath. "But I realized that wasn't so about the time the adrenaline wore off. What happened didn't change anything."

"No."

"I walked half a block and had to hang on to a lamppost while I threw up. I haven't puked on the street since I stopped drinking, and that's a few years now."

"Beyond the sore stomach," he said, "how do you feel now?"

"I'm all right."

"I'd say you could do with a drink, but you wouldn't take one, would you?"

"Not tonight."

"And doesn't your crowd ever recognize special circumstances? What manner of man would begrudge you a drink on a night like this?"

"It doesn't matter what anybody else would do," I said. "I'm the only man who can give me permission."

"And you won't."

"Suppose I decided it was all right to drink when I got punched in the stomach. What do you think would happen?"

He grinned. "You'd soon have a sore midsection."

"I would, because I'd make sure I got hit a lot. Mick, a drink wouldn't help me any. All it would do me is harm."

"Ah, I know that."

"And I don't really want one, anyway. All I want is to give you some of your money back, and then to go home and get in a hot tub."

"The last's a good idea. The heat will draw the pain and make the morning easier. But I'll not take money from you."

"I had to rent a car," I said, "and I put in an afternoon's work, and TJ spent a few hours riding the phone and the computer. I figure I earned about half of the thousand you gave me."

"You took a beating," he said, "and risked a bullet. For the love of God, man, keep the fucking money."

"I'd have argued with him," I told Elaine, "but I'd fought enough for one night. So I kept the money and treated myself to a cab home. I felt silly, riding that short a distance on a nice night like this, but I didn't really figure I needed the exercise."

"And you didn't want to run into them again."

"I never even thought about it," I said, "but maybe that was in the back of my mind. Not the idea of meeting up with them specifically, but the sense that the streets weren't a safe place all of a sudden."

I hadn't planned on saying anything to her, not right away. But when I walked into the apartment she took one look at me and knew something was wrong.

"So you're done working for Mick," she said now.

"I was done anyway. In the movies the best way to keep a detective on the job is to try scaring him off, but that's not how it works in the real world. Not this time, anyway. Mick wouldn't let me give the money back, but he didn't try to talk me out of resigning, either. He knew I'd done what I set out to do."

"Do they know that, honey?"

"The two heavies? I told them so, and I think they believed me. Punching me out was part of their deal, so the guy took his best shot, but that didn't mean he didn't believe me."

"And now?"

"You think he changed his mind?"

"In his mind," she said, "you were quitting the job because he'd managed to intimidate you."

"And that was partly the case. Although it would be more accurate to say he'd reinforced a decision I'd already made."

"But then you fought back," she said. "And won."

"It was a lucky punch."

"Whatever it was, it worked. You sent one scampering and left the other writhing in agony. What's so funny?"

"'Writhing in agony.'"

"Rolling around and trying to put his liver back together? That sounds to me like writhing in agony."

"I suppose."

"What I'm getting at is you weren't acting intimidated. Though I suppose you must have been afraid."

"Not while it was going on. You're too much in the moment to have any room left for fear. Afterward, walking across Fifty-third Street, I started sweating like the guy in Broadcast News."

"The guy in… oh, Albert Brooks. That was a funny movie."

"And then of course I had to stop and vomit. In the gutter, of course, because I'm a gentleman. So I guess we can say I was scared, once it was over and there was nothing to be scared of. But for a few critical seconds there I was Mister Cool."

"My hero," she said. "Baby, they didn't see you afterward, did they? They missed the shakes and the flop sweat. All they ever saw was Mister Cool."

"You're concerned they're going to turn up again."

"Well, aren't you?"

"I can't rule out the possibility. But why should they? They'll see for themselves I'm not chasing out to Jersey or hanging out at Grogan's. I went there tonight, but I won't be going there again until all of this blows over."

"And you don't think they'll want to get even?"

"Again, it's possible. They're pros, but even a pro can let his ego get caught up in his work. I'll keep my eyes open the next couple of weeks, and I'll stay out of dark alleys."

"That's never a bad idea."

"And you know what else I think I'll do? I'll carry a gun."

"That one?"

I'd put it on the coffee table. I picked it up now and felt the weight of it on my palm. It was a revolver, a.38-caliber Smith, with hollow-point shells in five of the cylinder's six chambers.

"I carried one a lot like this," I said, "when I was on the job. They always weigh more than you think they're going to, even a stubby one like this. It's got a one-inch barrel. The piece I mostly carried had a two-inch."

"When you came up to my apartment," she said, "the first thing you would do was take off your gun and set it aside."

"As I remember it, the first thing I would do was kiss you."

"The second thing, then. You made a ritual of it."

"Did I?"

"Uh-huh. Maybe it was a way of showing you felt safe with me."

"Maybe."

When we met, I was a married cop and she was a sweet and innocent young call girl. Ages ago, that was. Another lifetime, two other lifetimes.

I said, "A few years ago they realized the cops were outgunned by the bad guys, especially the drug dealers. So they called in the revolvers and gave everybody nines. Nine-millimeter automatics. More rounds in the clip than you can load into one of these, and more stopping power. But I think this is as much gun as I'll need."

"I hope you won't need any gun at all, but I agree it's not a bad idea for you to carry it. But is it legal?"

"I have a carry permit. This gun's not registered, or if it is it's not registered to me. So in that sense it's a violation for me to carry it, but I'm not going to worry about it."

"Then I won't worry, either."

"If I have to use it, the fact that it's unregistered is the least of my problems. And if there's an incident that I'd just as soon not report, the lack of paper could be a plus."

"You mean if you shoot someone and walk away from it."

"Something like that." I put the gun on the table and yawned. "What I'd like to do is go straight to bed," I said, "but I'm going to soak in a hot tub first. Come morning I'll be glad I did."

I didn't doze off in the tub, but I came close. I stayed in it until the water wasn't hot anymore. I toweled dry and headed for the bedroom, and when I got there the lights were dim and there was soft music playing, a John Pizzarelli album we both liked. She was standing beside the bed, wearing perfume and a smile, and she came over to me and unfastened the towel from around my waist.

"You've got something in mind," I said.

"See what happens when a girl marries a detective? He doesn't miss a thing. Now why don't you get in the middle of the bed and lie on your back with your eyes closed?"

"I'll fall asleep."

"We'll see about that," she said.

Afterward she said, "Maybe it's an affirmation of the life force. Or maybe I just got horny at the thought of you stretching those two goons. But that was nice, wasn't it? And it didn't hurt your sore tummy or anything else because you didn't have to move a muscle. Well, maybe one muscle.

"And I love you so much, you old bear. It makes me crazy to think of anybody trying to hurt you, and all I want to do is hunt them down and kill them. But I'm a girl and that means I'm stuck with the traditional female role of providing aid and succor. Especially succor.

"And all you want to do is sleep, you poor bear, and this crazy broad won't leave you alone. You had your succor- don't you love that word?- and now you're drifting off. Oh, sleep tight, my darling. Sweet dreams. I love you."

I awoke knowing I'd had some unusually vivid dreams but unable to recall them. I showered and shaved and went into the kitchen. Elaine had gone off to a yoga class and left a note telling me as much, and that coffee was made. I poured myself a cup and drank it at the living room window.

My stomach was predictably sore from the blow I'd taken, and there was some equally predictable discoloration. It would be worse tomorrow, in all likelihood, and then it would start getting better.

Both my hands were a little stiff and sore, too, from the right that had glanced off the side of his head and the left that had gone where it was supposed to. I had other muscular aches here and there, in the arms and shoulders, in the calf of one leg, and in my upper back. I'd used various muscles in ways I didn't often use them, and there was a price to pay. There always is.

I took a couple of aspirin and dialed a phone number I didn't have to look up. "I almost called you last night," I told Jim Faber, after I'd filled him in on what he'd missed after we'd parted company.

"You could have."

"I thought about it. But 'it was pretty late. If Elaine hadn't been here I wouldn't have hesitated, it was no time for me to be alone, but she was here and I was all right."

"And you don't keep booze around the house."

"No, and I didn't want a drink."

"Still, going straight to a ginmill right after a street fight…"

"I paused at the threshold," I said, "and decided I was all right. I had a message to deliver, and I delivered it, and then I got the hell out of there and came home."

"How do you feel now?"

"Old."

"Really? I'd think you'd be feeling like a young lion. How old were the guys you beat up?"

"I wouldn't say I beat them up. I surprised them and I lucked out. How old? I don't know. Say thirty-five."

"Kids."

"Not exactly."

"Still, that's got to feel good, Matt. Two young fellows and you knock them on their asses? Even if luck had a little to do with it- "

"More than a little."

"- it still goes in the books as a win."

We talked some more, and he steered the conversation to our Sunday dinner date, suggesting we meet at the Chinese vegetarian place across from the Coliseum. "Months since we ate there," he said, "and I'm in the mood for some of that famous ersatz eel of theirs."

"Out of business," I said.

"You're kidding. Since when?"

"I don't know, but I saw the sign in their window sometime early last week. 'Restaurant Close. Go Somewhere Else. Thanks You.' Not quite the way they'd put it in the English as a Second Language class, but the message was crystal clear."

"Elaine must be distraught."

"Try inconsolable. We found a vegetarian place in Chinatown, there are a few of them down there now, but the one on Fifty-eighth was a favorite of hers and it was right around the corner. It's going to leave a hole in her life."

"It'll leave a small one in mine. Where else am I gonna find eel made from soybeans? I don't care for real eel, only the phony kind."

"You want to try the place in Chinatown?"

"Well, I'd like to have that eel dish one more time before I die, but that's a long way to go for it."

"I'm not even sure they've got eel on the menu. The joint on Fifty-eighth's the only place I've ever seen it."

"In other words we could drag our asses all the way downtown and I'd wind up having abalone made out of gluten?"

"It's a risk you'd be running."

"Or lamb chops made out of library paste. Eel aside, I'd just as soon stick to real food, so let's forget about Chinatown. God knows there are enough Chinese places in the neighborhood."

"Pick one."

"Hmmm," he said. "Where haven't we been in a while? How about the little place on Eighth and Fifty-third? You know the one I'm thinking of? The northeast corner, except it's not right at the corner, it's one or two doors up the avenue."

"I know the one you mean. The Something Panda. I want to say Golden, but that's not right."

"Pandas are generally black and white."

"Thanks. You're right, though, we haven't been there in ages. And as I recall it was pretty good."

"They're all pretty good. Six-thirty?"

"Perfect."

"And can I trust you to stay out of fistfights between now and then? And ginmills?"

"It's a deal," I said.

There's a gun shop on Centre Market Place, around the block from the old Centre Street police headquarters. They've been there forever, and they carry a wide range of weapons, along with a full stock of police gear and training manuals. I went there to buy a shoulder holster, and as an afterthought I picked up a box of shells, the same hollow-point ammunition as the five in the Smith. Anybody can buy a holster, but I had to show a permit to buy the shells. I'd brought mine, and showed it, and signed the register.

They had Kevlar vests, too, but I already owned one. In fact I was wearing it, I'd put it on before I left the house.

It was a warm day to be wearing a bulletproof vest, with the humidity a few percentage points beyond the comfort range. I didn't need a jacket on a day like that, but I was wearing my navy blazer. I had the little Smith jammed under my belt, and I needed the jacket to keep it from showing, even as I'd need it to conceal the shoulder holster.

They gave me the shells and the holster in a paper bag, and I walked around carrying it, looking for a place to have lunch. I passed up a slew of Asian restaurants and wound up on Mulberry Street, on the two-block stretch that's about all that's left of Little Italy. I sat in the rear garden at Luna and ordered a plate of linguini with red clam sauce. While they were fixing it I locked myself in the men's room. I shucked my jacket and put on the holster, adjusted the straps, then drew the gun from my waistband and tucked it in place. I checked the mirror, and it seemed to me that the bulge of the holster would be visible clear across the room. It was more comfortable, though, than walking around with the gun in my belt, especially with my middle as sore as it was.

On the way back to my table I had the feeling that everybody in the restaurant, if not everyone in the neighborhood, knew I was armed.

I ate my lunch and went home.

When TJ called I was watching Notre Dame beat up on Miami. I'd slung my blazer over the back of a chair and I was sitting around in my shirtsleeves, with the holster in place and the gun in it. I put on the blazer and went across the street to the Morning Star.

We usually sat at one of the window tables, and he was there when I arrived, sipping orange juice through a straw. I moved us to a table near the kitchen, far away from the windows, and sat where I could keep an eye on the entrance.

TJ noted all this without comment. After I'd ordered coffee he said, "Heard all about you. How you the baddest dude in the 'hood, kickin' ass and takin' names."

"At my age," I said, "it's more a matter of kicking ass and forgetting names. What did you hear and where did you hear it?"

"Already said what I heard, and where you think I heard it? I was over at Elaine's shop. Oh, did I hear it on the street? No, but if you tryin' to build yourself a rep, I be happy to spread the word."

"Don't do me any favors."

"You all dressed for success. Where we goin', Owen?"

"Nowhere that I know of."

"Elaine says you be all done investigatin' what went down in Jersey, but I was thinkin' maybe you just told her that to put her at ease."

"I wouldn't do that. I was done anyway, before the incident last night, and all it did was confirm what you and I already determined."

"We ain't workin', must be you dressed up just to come here for coffee." He cocked his head, eyed the bulge on the left side of my chest. "That what I think it is?"

"How would I know?"

"Cause how you know what I thinkin'? 'Cept you do know, an' I know, too, 'cause she already said how you takin' precautions. That the piece you took off of the dude?"

"The very same. It's not hard to spot, is it?"

"Not when you lookin' for it, but it ain't like you wearin' a sign. You was to go around like that all the time, you'd want to get your jacket tailored so it don't bulge."

"I used to carry night and day," I said. "On duty or off. There was a departmental regulation that said you had to. I wonder if it's still on the books. With all the drunken off-duty cops who've shot themselves and each other over the years, the brass might have decided to rethink that particular rule."

"Cops'd carry anyway, wouldn't they? Reg or no reg?"

"Probably. I lived out on Long Island for years, and the regulation was only in force within the five boroughs, but I carried all the time. Of course there was another regulation requiring a New York City police officer to reside within the five boroughs, but it was never hard to find a way around that one."

He sucked up the last of the orange juice and the straw made a gurgling noise. He said, "Don't know who thought up orange juice, but the man was a genius. Tastes so good it's near impossible to believe it's good for you. But it is. Unless they lyin', Brian?"

"As far as I know, they're telling the truth."

"Restores my faith," he said. "'Member the time I bought a gun on the street for you? Gave it to you in a Kangaroo, same as the seller gave it to me."

"So you did. It was a blue one."

"Blue, right. Sort of a lame color, if I remember right."

"If you say so."

"You still got it?"

I'd obtained the gun for a friend who was dying of pancreatic cancer. She wanted a quick way out if it got too bad to be borne. It got very bad indeed before it finally killed her, but she'd somehow been able to live with it until she died of it, and she'd never had to use the gun.

I didn't know what became of the gun. I suppose it sat on a shelf in her closet, snug in the blue Kangaroo fanny pack in which I'd delivered it. I suppose somebody found it when they went through her effects, and I had not the slightest idea what might have become of it since.

"They ain't hard to find," he went on. "All those Korean dudes, got them little stores, tables out front full of sunglasses and baseball caps? They all got Kangaroos. Set you back ten, fifteen dollars, few dollars more if you go for all leather. How much you have to pay for that shoulder rig?"

"More than ten or fifteen dollars."

"Kangaroo wouldn't spoil the line of your jacket. Wouldn't need to be wearin' a jacket, far as that goes."

"I probably won't need the gun at all," I said. "But if I do I won't want to screw around with a zipper."

"You sayin' that's not how Quick Draw McGraw does it."

"Right."

"What a lot of the dudes do is leave the zipper open. That looks sort of cool anyway."

"Like wearing sneakers with the laces untied."

"Sort of like that, 'cept you ain't likely to trip over your Kangaroos. Things turn tense, you just reach in your hand and there you are." He rolled his eyes. "But I be wastin' my breath, Beth, on account of you ain't about to get no Kangaroo, are you?"

"I guess not," I said. "I guess I'm just not a Kangaroo kind of guy."

I went back and watched some more football, changing channels whenever they went to a commercial and not really keeping track of any of the games. A little before six I turned off the TV and walked down to Elaine's shop. elaine mardell, the sign above the window says, and the shop within is a good reflection of the proprietor- folk art and antiques, paintings she's salvaged from thrift shops and rummage sales, and the oils and drawings of a few contemporary artists she's discovered. She has an artist's eye, and spotted the gun instantly.

"Oho," she said. "Is that what I think it is? Or are you just glad to see me?"

"Both."

She reached to unbutton the jacket. "It's less obvious that way," she said.

"Until it opens up and becomes a lot more obvious."

"Oh, right. I didn't think of that."

"TJ was pushing hard for a Kangaroo."

"Just your style."

"That's what I told him."

"This is a nice surprise," she said. "I was just getting ready to close up."

"And I was, hoping to take you out to dinner."

"Hmmm. I want to go home and wash up first."

"I figured you might."

"And change clothes."

"That too."

Heading up Ninth, she said, "Since we're going home anyway, why don't I cook something?"

"In this heat?"

"It's not that hot, and it'll be a cool evening. In fact it might rain."

"It doesn't feel like rain."

"The radio said it might. Anyway, it's not hot in our apartment. I kind of feel like pasta and a salad."

"You'd be surprised how many restaurants can fix that for you."

"No better than I can fix it myself."

"Well, if you insist," I said. "But I was leaning toward Armstrong's or Paris Green, and afterward we could go down to the Village and hear some music."

"Oh."

"Now there's enthusiasm."

"Well, what I was thinking," she said, "was pasta and a salad at home, to be followed by a double feature on the VCR." She patted her handbag. "Michael Collins and The English Patient. Romance and violence, in whichever order we decide."

"A quiet evening at home," I said.

"He said, barely able to contain his excitement. What's wrong with a quiet evening at home?"

"Nothing."

"And we missed both of these movies, and we've been promising ourselves we'd see them."

"True enough," I said.

We left it at that until we hit the lobby of our building. Then I said, "We're both overreacting, aren't we? You don't want me to leave the house."

"And you want to prove the bastards can't keep you from doing anything you want to do."

"Whether or not I really want to do it. One thing you forgot to mention is it's Saturday night, and anyplace we go is likely to be crowded and noisy. If I weren't such a stubborn son of a bitch, a quiet evening at home would probably strike me as a terrific idea."

"You don't sound like such a stubborn son of a bitch."

"I did a few minutes ago."

"But you're starting to come around," she said. "Will this tip the balance? I stocked up on Scotch bonnet peppers the other day. The sauce for the pasta will loosen your scalp, and that's a promise."

"Dinner first," I said, "and then Michael Collins. That way if I fall asleep in front of the set all I'll miss is The English Patient."

"You drive a hard bargain, mister."

"Well, I married a Jewish girl," I said. "She taught me well."

Sunday morning I looked at my middle and half the colors in the rainbow looked back at me. It felt a little better even though it looked a good deal worse, and it seemed to me my other aches and pains had receded some.

I got dressed and went into the kitchen for a bagel and a cup of coffee. Elaine asked how I felt and I told her. "A few years ago," I said, "I'd have come back a lot faster from a punch like that. I wouldn't have had to check every morning to see how I felt."

"And maintenance keeps taking more time and effort," she said. "Who the hell had to bother with exercise? Speaking of which, I think I'll get over to the gym for an hour."

"I'm almost desperate enough to join you."

"Why don't you? There's every machine you could possibly want, and plenty of free weights if you want to be a Luddite about it. And tons of women in Spandex to look at, and the whirlpool afterward for your aching muscles. And the look on your face tells me you're not coming."

"Not today," I said. "I used up too much energy just hearing about the machines. You know what I really feel like? Nothing so energetic as a gym workout, but a nice long walk. Down to the Village and back, or up to Ninety-sixth Street and back."

"Well, you could do that if you want to."

"But you don't think I should."

"Just dress warm, huh? Wear your vest and your shoulder holster."

"Maybe I'll hang around the house today."

"Why don't you, sweetie? You can do some very gentle partial sit-ups if you want to mend quicker. But why not give those jerks another day to lose interest in you?"

"It makes sense."

"Plus you've got the Sunday Times to read, and just lifting it is more exercise than people in the rest of the country get in a month. And there must be plenty of sports on television."

"I think I'll have another bagel," I said. "It sounds as though I'm going to need the energy."

I read the paper and watched the Giants game. When it ended I switched back and forth between the Jets and Bills on NBC and a seniors golf tournament. I didn't much care who won the football game- they didn't either, from the way they were playing- and the golf wasn't even interesting, although there was something curiously hypnotic about it.

It had the same effect on Elaine, who brought me a cup of coffee and wound up staring transfixed at the set until they broke the spell with a Midas Muffler commercial. "Why was I watching that?" she demanded. "What do I care about golf?"

"I know."

"And what do I care about Midas Mufflers? When I buy a muffler it'll be the brand George Foreman advertises."

"Meineke."

"Whatever."

"Since we don't have a car…"

"You're right. When I buy a muffler it'll be cashmere."

She left the room and I went back to watching the golf, and, while some fellow in too-bright clothing lined up his birdie putt, I found myself thinking of Lisa Holtzmann. What I was thinking was that it was just the right sort of lazy afternoon to spend at her apartment.

Just a passing thought, even as I'll still have the thought of a drink, even in the absence of any real desire for one. I'd smelled all that bourbon the other night, and the bouquet had gone straight to the memory banks, but it hadn't made me want a drink. I'd smelled it again the next day, along with smells of blood and death and gunfire, fainter a day later but still very much there to be noted. I hadn't wanted a drink then, either.

And I didn't want Lisa now, but evidently I wanted to be out of the space I was in, not the physical space of our apartment but the mental space, the chamber of self I occupied. That's what she'd always been, more than a source of pleasure, more than a conquest, more than good company. She was a way to get out, and I was a person who would always want to get out. No matter how comfortable my life was, no matter how well suited I was to it and it to me, I would always want to slip away and hide for a while.

Part of who I am.

Just seeing her there, just catching her eye, just watching her holding hands with Florian, had served to put her in mind. I wasn't going to see her. I wasn't even going to call her. But it was something I could talk about later with Jim, and something I wasn't going to bother thinking about anymore for now.

Meanwhile, I'd watch the fellows play golf.

"You look nice," Elaine said. She reached to touch the front of my windbreaker and felt the gun through it. "Very nice. The way it billows out, the holster's completely hidden. And if you keep it zipped halfway like that, you can get it in a hurry, can't you?"

I demonstrated, drawing the gun, putting it back.

"And your red polo shirt," she said, and reached to undo a button. "Oh, I see, you had it buttoned so the vest wouldn't show. But it looks better open, and so what if the vest shows? You can't tell what it is. It could be an undershirt."

"Under a polo shirt?"

"Or a tattoo," she said. "You look good. There's just enough contrast between the windbreaker and your khakis so it doesn't look like a uniform."

"I'm glad," I said, "because I was really concerned about that."

"Well, you should be. Suppose some dame pulls up and asks you to check her oil? How would you feel?"

"I don't think I'm going to answer that."

"You're a wise man," she said. "Gimme a kiss. Mmmm. Have fun. Be careful. Give my love to Jim."

I went outside. It felt like rain, and we could use it. The air was thick and heavy, and needed the rinsing a good downpour would provide. But my guess was it was going to hold off awhile longer, as it had been holding off for several days now.

I walked the long crosstown block to Eighth Avenue and a few blocks downtown to the restaurant, which turned out to be the Lucky Panda. There was a panda depicted on the sign, conventionally black and white, and smiling as if he'd just won the lottery.

Jim Faber was already there, and he was easy to spot in a restaurant that was mostly empty. The table he'd chosen was one I'd have picked myself, against a side wall in the rear. He was reading the magazine section of the Times, and he put it aside at my approach and got to his feet.

"Ike and Mike," he said.

We shook hands, and I said, "Come again?"

He pointed at me, then at himself. "'Ike and Mike, they look alike.' You never heard that expression?"

"Not recently."

"I had twin cousins three years older than myself. I ever mention them?"

"I don't think so. Their names were Ike and Mike?"

"No, of course not. Their names were Paul and Philip, but everybody called Philip Buzzy. God knows why. But I had this uncle, not the twins' father but another uncle, and every time he saw them he said the same thing."

"'Hello, boys.'"

"'Ike and Mike, they look alike.' Every goddamn time, which meant every family event, and there were plenty of those. For a family full of people who didn't much like one another, we got together a lot. 'Ike and Mike, they look alike.' Must have driven them up the fucking wall, but they never complained. But then you didn't complain in my family. You learned not to."

"'Quit your crying or I'll give you something to cry about.'"

"Jesus, yes. Your father used to say that?"

"No, never. But I had an uncle who was always saying that to his kids. And I gather it wasn't just talk."

"I heard it a lot myself growing up, and it wasn't just talk in our house, either. Anyway, that's the sorrowful saga of Ike and Mike."

We were both wearing tan windbreakers over red polo shirts and khaki slacks. "We're not quite twins," I said. "I'm wearing a bulletproof vest."

"Thanks for telling me. Now I'll know to duck behind you when the lead starts flying."

"When you do," I said, "I'll be blazing away at the bastards."

"Oh? You're packing heat?"

"In a shoulder rig," I said, and slid the zipper down far enough to show it, then zipped it up again.

"I'll sleep better," he said, "knowing my dinner companion is armed and dangerous. Change seats with me."

"Huh?"

"C'mon," he said. "Change seats with me. That way you can have a view of the entrance."

"If anybody tries anything," I said, "it'll be on the street. The only thing I have to worry about in here is the mu shu pork."

He laughed at that, but all the same he came around the table, and I shrugged and took the seat he'd vacated. "There," he said. "I've done my part. I suppose you have to keep your jacket on, unless you want the whole world to see that you're strapped. What's the matter?"

"'Packing heat,'" I said. "'Strapped.'"

"Hey, I stay current on the lingo. I watch TV." He grinned. "I'm keeping my jacket on, too, but not out of solidarity. I swear the last time I was in here it was in the middle of a heat wave and it was hotter in here than it was outside. Today's a nice autumn day and they've got the air conditioner going full blast. Did you have air conditioning at home when you were a kid?"

"Are you kidding? We were lucky we had air."

"Same here," he said. "We had a fan, and everybody would huddle together in front of it, and it would blow hot air on us."

"But you didn't complain."

"No, heat was different," he said. "Heat you could complain about. Here's our guy. You want to order?"

"I haven't even looked at the menu," I said. "And I want to wash up first. If you want you can go ahead and order for both of us."

He shook his head. "No hurry," he said, and told the waiter we'd need a few minutes.

I found the men's room and used it. The usual sign advised me that employees were required to wash their hands, and I washed mine, even though I was unemployed at the moment. They had one of those hot-air dryers instead of paper towels, and if I'd noticed it ahead of time I might not have been so quick to wash my hands. I hate the damned things, they take forever and my hands never feel dry when I'm done. But I'd washed them, and now I stood there and dried them, and while it took its time I thought how I'd report all this to Jim in a few minutes.

I looked at myself in the mirror and fussed with my shirt collar, trying to hide the vest without buttoning the top button. Not that anyone could really see it, or know what they were seeing. Not that it mattered. Still, if I took hold of it and tugged it down a little in front-

That's what I was doing when I heard the shots.

I could have failed to notice them. They weren't that loud. Or I could have taken them for something else. A truck backfiring, a waiter dropping a tray. Anything at all.

But for some reason I knew instantly what I was hearing and realized just what it meant. I burst out of the men's room and raced the length of the hallway and into the dining room. I took in the scene there at a glance- Jim, an openmouthed waiter, a pair of customers trying to shrink into the woodwork, a thin blond woman on the verge of hysteria, another woman trying to calm her. I ran past all of them and out the door, but the shooter was nowhere to be seen. He'd vanished around a corner or jumped into a waiting car. Or disappeared in a puff of smoke, but whatever he'd done he was gone.

I went back inside. Nothing had changed. No one had moved. Jim was at our table, his back to the entrance. He had resumed reading while I was in the men's room, and the magazine section was on the table, open to an article about parents who kept their children out of school and educated them at home. I'd known a few people over the years who'd talked about wanting to do that, but nobody who'd actually done it.

He must have been reading when the killer approached, and he probably never saw it coming. He'd been shot twice in the side of the head with a small-caliber pistol, a.22, as it turned out. There was a time when such weapons were ridiculed as toys or ladies' guns, but they'd since become the ordnance of choice for professional killers. I'm not entirely sure why. I'm told that a lighter bullet tends to carom around inside the skull, greatly increasing the likelihood that a head shot will prove fatal. Maybe it's that, or maybe it's an ego thing. If you're really good at your trade you don't need a cannon, you can do fine with a scalpel.

He'd been shot twice, as I said, once in the temple, once in the ear. Not much more than an inch separated the two bullet holes. The killer got in close- I could see the powder burns, I could smell scorched hair and flesh- and he'd dropped the gun when he was done using it, leaving it behind along with the ejected casings.

I didn't touch the gun or move to examine it. I didn't know then that it was in fact a.22, I didn't recognize the maker or model, but that's what it looked like, and that's what the wounds looked like.

He'd slumped forward, the unwounded side of his face pressed against the magazine open on the table in front of him. Blood had trickled down his cheek and some of it had pooled on the magazine. Not a lot of blood, though. You pretty much stop bleeding once you're dead, and he must have been dead before the killer cleared the threshold, perhaps even before the gun hit the floor.

How old was he? Sixty-one, sixty-two? Something like that. A middle-aged man in a red polo shirt and khakis, wearing an unzipped tan windbreaker He still had most of his hair, though it had crept back some from his forehead and was thinning at the crown. He'd shaved that morning, nicking himself lightly on the chin. I couldn't see the place now but I'd noticed it earlier, before I went to the men's room. He did that a lot, cut himself shaving Used to do that a lot.

Ike, of Ike and Mike.

I stood there. People were saying things and they may have been saying some of them to me, but nothing was registering. My eyes were focused on a sentence from the article on home schooling, but that wasn't registering either. I just stood there, and eventually I heard a siren, and eventually the cops showed up.

If only.

If only I'd canceled dinner. We'd seen a lot of each other in the past several weeks. Let's skip a week, I could have suggested. He wouldn't have objected. Odds are he'd have been secretly relieved.

If only we'd gone down to Chinatown. The vegetarian place down there was on Pell Street, up a long flight of narrow stairs. A pro would never hit anybody in a place like that, leaving himself with a tricky escape route.

If only I'd put on different clothes. I've never paid much attention to what I'm wearing, I generally grab the top shirt off the stack. This time the shirt happened to be red, and so did his.

Whoever tagged me from the Parc Vendôme to the Lucky Panda was following a man in a red polo shirt and khaki slacks and a tan windbreaker. And when he (or whoever he called) entered the restaurant himself, he saw a man in those very clothes sitting alone at a table, the only person around who came close to fitting the description. He didn't need to ask to see some ID. He did what he'd come to do and dropped the gun on the floor and took off.

If only he'd taken a good look at Jim first.

If only I'd worn my blazer. So what if it bulged a little over the shoulder holster? I wasn't posing for a layout in GQ.

If only I'd taken a minute to empty my goddamn bladder before I left the house. I'd never have left the table, I'd have been sitting across from Jim when the shooter walked in. Son of a bitch would have thought he was seeing double. He might well have decided to shoot both of us and let God sort us out, and he might have managed it, too, but he'd have had a moment's confusion, a few seconds while he paused and figured it out, and maybe that would have been time enough for me to spot him and go for my own gun.

If only I'd resisted his suggestion to change seats. Jim might have seen the guy walk in, might have had a chance to react. And the shooter, seeing his face instead of the back of his head, might have realized he had the wrong man.

If only I'd skipped washing my hands. Or wiped them on my pants instead of wasting time at the hot-air dryer. I'd have been emerging from the men's room right around the time the shooter was approaching Jim's table. I could have called out a warning, could have drawn my own gun, could have dropped the bastard before he shot my friend.

If only…

If only I'd stood there and taken my beating like a man the other night. It wouldn't have killed me, and that would have been the end of it. I'd have learned my lesson, or seemed to, and they'd have left me alone. But no, I had to be a hero, I had to show off and fight back.

If only I'd been wearing sneakers that night. I was wearing them now. Why couldn't I have been wearing them then? When I stomped the foot of the guy behind me, he'd have grunted and held on, and I'd have earned an extra wallop for my troubles.

If only I'd followed through. If I insisted on fighting back and if I was lucky enough to come out ahead, why couldn't I have finished the job? If only I'd acted on my impulse and kicked the slugger in the head, and kicked him again, and kept at it until I kicked his fucking head in. And put a bullet in the other one's chest while I was at it, and pressed the gun into his buddy's fist. Let the cops figure that one out. With a couple of lowlife skells like that, they wouldn't kill themselves trying.

Oh, hell. If only I'd passed on the case in the first place. Told Mick I didn't want to get involved. I'd wound up telling him that anyway just a day later.

Story of my life, always a day late and a dollar short.

If only I'd fired him as a sponsor. I'd been sober for years, I'd evidently long since mastered the subtle art of not drinking a day at a time, so what did I need with a sponsor? Why prolong the relationship, and why maintain the silly tradition of Chinese Sunday night dinners?

Elaine could have reminded me that I was a married man, that I ought to be having dinner every Sunday with my wife. She'd never do that, it wasn't like her at all, but if only she had.

If only I'd never picked him as a sponsor in the first place. He'd been the obvious choice, the only person who paid any real attention to me when I started coming to meetings at St. Paul's. I was still drinking on and off at first, not at all sure I wanted to be there and apparently incapable of declaring myself an alcoholic, or indeed of saying anything more than I absolutely had to. When it was my inescapable turn to speak, I'd say, My name is Matt, and I think I'll just listen tonight. I didn't think anyone noticed me, and it was months later before I learned that I'd had an AA sobriquet for a little while there. People referred to me as Matt the Listener.

But he took an interest, always said hello, always passed the time of day. Invited me to join a couple of them for coffee after the meeting. Listened respectfully when I spouted nonsense in the manner of the newly sober. Offered the occasional suggestion, so gently put that I rarely realized I hadn't thought of it myself.

I keep hearing I ought to get a sponsor, I said offhandedly one night. Said it after having rehearsed it for two days. What do you think? I said.

It's probably not a bad idea, he said.

No, I said, about you being my sponsor. What do you think about that?

I think I probably already am, he said. But, he said, if you'd like to make it formal, I'd say it sounds okay to me.

He was just this guy in an old army jacket. For a long time I didn't know what he did for a living, or what life he had outside the AA rooms. Then he led a meeting and I heard his story. And then we got to know each other, and drank gallons of coffee at meetings and after meetings, and sat across the table from each other on hundreds of Sunday nights.

If only I'd picked someone else to be my sponsor, or no one at all. If only I'd looked around that basement room and said thanks but no thanks and gone back out for a drink.

He'd never let me get away with crap like that. You must have one hell of an ego, he told me more than once, to be that hard on yourself. Where do you get off setting yourself such impossibly high standards? Who do you think you are, anyway? The piece of shit the world revolves around?

I said, You mean I'm not?

You're just a man, he said. You're just another alcoholic.

That's all?

That's enough, he said.

If only the past were subject to change.

When TJ has second thoughts at the computer, he can press certain keys and undo the previous action. But, as a pinball addict told me years ago, the trouble with life is there's no reset button.

What's done can never be undone. It's set in concrete, carved in stone.

Omar Khayyam wrote it ages ago, and put it so well that even I can remember the lines:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on, nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

If only that were not so.

If only…

I was questioned at length at the crime scene, first by the uniforms who responded to the 911 call, then by somebody in plainclothes. It's impossible to remember the questions and answers because I was only dimly aware of the procedure while it was going on. A portion of my mind was struggling to pay attention, taking in what was being said by others within earshot, monitoring the questions I was asked and the answers I gave. The rest of me was somewhere else, wandering aimlessly through corridors of the past, sending out forays into an alternate future. An if-only future, a future in which, because I'd done something differently, Jim was still alive.

When I was eleven or twelve I got hit in the forehead with a baseball and walked around all day with a concussion. This was like that. As if I'd been swathed in cotton wool, enveloped in fog. I wasn't really taking anything in, and it would all imprint on my memory like dream time, soft and hazy and out of focus, with pieces missing.

It was a quarter to ten when the fog cleared, or lifted, or whatever it does. I noted the time on the wall clock in the squad room upstairs at Midtown North, where I dimly recall being taken in the back of a blue and white police cruiser. We could have walked; the station house was on Fifty-fourth west of Eighth, literally a stone's throw from the Lucky Panda.

I suppose the whole precinct house knew the restaurant. Cops have a legendary appetite for doughnuts, but they also put away a lot of Chinese food, and some of Midtown North's Finest were likely to be at least occasional patrons of the Lucky Panda. That gave me one more entry in the If-Only sweepstakes. Why couldn't there have been a couple of uniforms at a front table? The shooter would have taken one look and gone home.

A quarter to ten. I hadn't even noticed the time until now. I'd met Jim around six-thirty. We talked for a minute or two. I went to the lavatory, I used the lavatory, I came rushing out of the lavatory…

Three hours gone since then, and gone in no time at all. I must have spent a lot of it sitting or standing around, waiting for something to happen, waiting for somebody to tell me what to do. I must have been in a very tractable state. Unaware as I was of the passage of time, I hadn't grown bored or impatient.

"Matt? Here, whyntcha have a seat? We'll go over this one more time and then you can go home and get some rest."

"Sure," I said.

This detective's name was George Wister. He was lean and angular, with a sharp nose and chin and a carefully trimmed little mustache. His beard was dark and heavy, and I suppose he'd shaved when he got up that morning but he needed to shave again and knew it. He had a habit of touching his cheek or chin, running a finger against the grain of his whiskers, as if to check just how urgent was his need for a shave.

He was around forty, 5'10", dark brown hair, deep-set dark brown eyes. I registered all this and wondered why. Nobody would be asking me to describe the investigating officer. What they'd have liked from me was a description of the killer, and I couldn't help them with that.

"I'm sorry to have kept you so long," Wister was saying. "But you know how these things work. You were on the job yourself."

"Years ago."

"And it seems to me I've seen you around the house. You're tight with Joe Durkin, aren't you?"

"We've known each other awhile."

"And now you're working private." I dug out my wallet and started to show him my license. "No, that's all right," he said. "You showed me before."

"It's hard to keep it straight. What I showed and who I showed it to."

"Yeah, and everybody wants to go over the same ground, and the whole experience takes it out of you to begin with. You must be dead on your feet."

Was I? I didn't even know.

"And anxious to get home." He touched his chin, his cheek. "Deceased is James Martin Faber," he read off a clipboard, and went on to read Jim's address and the name and address of his place of business, looking at me each time for confirmation.

I said, "His wife is- "

"Mrs. Beverly Faber, same address. She's being notified, in fact they've probably been over to see her by now. Get her to make a formal ID."

"I'll have to see her myself."

"You want to get some rest first, Matt. You're in shock yourself right now."

I could have told him it was wearing off. I was myself again, whatever that amounted to. But all I did was nod.

"Faber was a friend of yours."

"My sponsor." The word puzzled him, and I was sorry I'd used it because now I had to explain it. Not that there was any reason not to explain. There's a tradition against breaking the anonymity of another AA member, but it's a courtesy extended only to the living. "My AA sponsor," I said.

"That'd be Alcoholics Anonymous?"

"That's right."

"I thought anybody could join. I didn't know you had to be sponsored."

"You don't," I said. "A sponsor's something you get after you've joined, more a combination friend and adviser. Sort of like a rabbi on the job."

"A more experienced guy? Pulls strings for you, helps you keep your nose clean?"

"It's a little different," I said, "in that there are no promotions in AA, and the only way you can get in trouble is by picking up a drink. A sponsor is someone you can talk to, someone who'll help you stay sober."

"Not a problem I've got," he said, "but a lot of cops do, and no wonder. The stress you got to deal with day in and day out."

Every job's stressful when you need a drink.

"So the two of you met for dinner. You have something special on your mind, something you needed to talk about?"

"No."

"You're married, he's married, but the two of you left your wives home on a Sunday night and went out for Chinese."

"Every Sunday night," I said.

"That so?"

"With rare exceptions, yes."

"So it was a regular thing. Is that standard procedure in AA?"

"Nothing's standard in AA," I said, "except not drinking, and even that's not as standard as you might think. Our Sunday dinners started as part of the sponsorial relationship, a way to get to know each other. Over the years it became just a part of our friendship."

"'Over the years.' He was your sponsor for a long time?"

"Sixteen years."

"You're kidding. Sixteen years? And you haven't had a drink in all that time?"

"Not so far."

"And you still go to the meetings?"

"I do."

"What about him?"

"He did."

"Meaning he stopped?"

I was trying to figure out how I was supposed to answer that when he got the point and his face flushed. "Sorry," he said. "Been a long day." He looked down at the clipboard. "Every Sunday night. Always the same restaurant?"

"Always Chinese," I said. "Different restaurants."

"Why Chinese? Any particular reason?"

"Just a habit we got into."

"Well, you could pick a new Chinese restaurant every week and it'd be awhile before you ran out. What I'm getting at, who knew the two of you were going to be there tonight?"

"Nobody."

"I take it you didn't make a reservation."

"At the Lucky Panda?"

"Yeah, I wonder did anybody ever make a reservation there. At lunch, maybe, because they'll fill up noontime during the week, but on nights and weekends you can shoot deer in there."

"Or people," I said.

He looked at me, unsure how to respond. He drew a breath and asked me who picked the restaurant.

"I'm not sure," I said. "Let me think. He'd suggested a place on Fifty-eighth, but they'd gone out of business. Then I suggested Chinatown and he said that was too much trouble, and I think he was the one who thought of the Lucky Panda."

"And when was this?"

"Yesterday, it must have been. We talked on the phone."

"And picked the time and the place to meet." He wrote something down. "And the last time you actually saw him was…"

"Friday night at the meeting."

"That'd be an AA meeting, right? And you spoke on the phone yesterday and met for dinner tonight as arranged."

"That's right."

"Did you mention to anybody where you'd be having dinner?"

"I may have said something to my wife. I don't even know."

"But nobody else."

"No."

"And he'd have told his wife?"

"Possibly. He'd probably have told her he was having dinner with me, but I don't know that he'd have bothered telling her where."

"You know his wife?"

"To say hello to. I doubt I've seen her twenty times in sixteen years."

"You didn't get along?"

"He and I were friends, that's all. Elaine and I had dinner with Jim and Beverly a couple of times, but that's literally all it was. Two or three times."

"Elaine being your wife."

"Right."

"How were they getting along?"

"Jim and his wife?"

"Uh-huh. He ever talk about that?"

"Not lately."

"So as far as you know…"

"As far as I know, they were getting along fine."

"He'd have said if they weren't?"

"I think so."

"Who can you think of that he wasn't getting along with?"

"Jim got along with everybody," I said. "He was a very easygoing guy."

"Didn't have an enemy in the world."

He sounded skeptical, the way cops do. "If he did," I said, "I didn't know about it."

"How about his business?"

"His business?"

"Uh-huh. He was a printer, right? Had a printshop here in the neighborhood?"

I got out one of my business cards. "He printed these for me," I said.

He ran his thumb across the raised lettering. Maybe he wanted to see if it needed a shave. "Nice work," he said. "Okay if I keep this?"

"Sure."

"Know anything about his business?"

"It didn't come up in conversation a lot. A couple of years ago he was talking about packing it in."

"Getting out of the business?"

"He was tired of it and I guess business was slow enough to be discouraging. For a while he was looking into buying a coffee bar franchise. This was back when there was a new one opening every time you turned around."

"My brother-in-law bought one," Wister said. "It's been a pretty good thing for him, but they're working every minute, him and my sister both."

"Anyway, he decided against it and stayed with the printshop. Sometimes he talked about retiring, but I never got the impression he was ready to do it."

"It says here he was sixty-three."

"That sounds about right."

"He in a position to retire?"

"I have no idea."

"He didn't talk about investments or debts, anything like that?"

"No."

He probed his chin stubble. "Anything about a criminal element?"

"A criminal element?"

"Trying to muscle in on his business, say."

"If anyone tried," I said, "he'd have handed them the keys and wished them the best of luck. He squeezed a living out of the business, but it's not something you get rich at, not something a gangster would want to take over."

"He do any work for them?"

"For gangsters?"

"For organized crime."

"Jesus," I said.

"It's not as farfetched as it sounds, Matt. Criminal enterprises need the same kinds of goods and services as everybody else. They need letterhead and invoice forms and order blanks and, yes, business cards, and God knows what else. They own a lot of restaurants, so they're always getting menus printed. No reason your friend couldn't have done some of their printing. He wouldn't necessarily have known who he was doing it for."

"I suppose it's possible, but- "

"It's also possible they'd have asked him to print up something that wasn't kosher. To duplicate government forms or somebody else's purchase order blanks, something dubious like that. Maybe he went along, maybe he refused to go along, maybe he learned something along the way he was better off not knowing."

"What's your point?"

"What's my point? My point is your friend Faber was the victim of what looks like a very professional hit. Those guys don't shoot you just to keep in practice, if he was mobbed up in any kind of way, innocent or otherwise, you're doing him no favor by keeping it a secret."

"Believe me, I'm not keeping any secrets."

"Can you think of anybody who'd want to see him dead?"

"No."

"Anyone associated with him who might have paid to have him killed? Or anyone in the criminal world who might have had any kind of a grudge against him?"

"Same answer."

"You arrived at the restaurant, you sat down at the table. What was his state of mind?"

"Same as always. Calm, serene."

"Nothing bothering him, far as you could tell?"

"Nothing that showed."

"What did you talk about?"

"Anything and everything. Oh, you mean tonight?"

"You were with him a minute or two before you went to the john. What did the two of you talk about?"

I had to think. Ike and Mike, and then what?

"Air conditioning," I said.

"Air conditioning?"

"Air conditioning. They had theirs turned up so it was like an icebox in there, and we talked about that."

"Small talk, in other words."

"Too small to remember."

He took another tack, asked me if I'd got even the slightest glimpse of the shooter. I said what I'd been saying all along, that he was out the door and gone before I got back from the men's room.

"Now memory's a funny thing," he said. "Different things affect it. Your mind doesn't want to let a piece of information in, it walls off a section of memory and won't give you access to it."

"I could give you examples," I said, "but that's not what happened here. I was in the john when I heard the gunshots. I came running, I saw what had happened, and I chased out into the street hoping to get a look at him."

"And you never saw him."

"Never."

"So you don't know if he was tall or short, fat or thin, black or white…"

"I understand the witnesses said he was black."

"But you didn't see him yourself."

"No."

"Or any black man in the restaurant."

"I didn't pay much attention to the other customers, before or after the shooting. But the place was close to empty, and no, I don't believe any of the other people in it were black."

"How about seeing a car pulling away, which you didn't happen to take note of at the time?"

"I'd have taken notice, because that's what I was looking for, either a man on foot or a car puffing away."

"But you didn't see either one."

"No."

"Or a cab or…"

"No."

"And now you can't come up with anyone with a reason to want James Faber dead."

I shook my head. "Not to say no such person exists," I said, "but I can't think of him, and I've got no reason to believe in his existence."

"Except for what happened tonight."

"Except for that."

"How about yourself, Matt?"

I stared hard at him. "I must be missing something here," I said levelly. "Are you really suggesting I set him up and ducked into the bathroom so some gunman I'd hired could come in and start blasting?"

"Take it easy…"

"Because that's so far off base I didn't even know how to react to it."

"Easy," he said. "Sit down, Matt. That's not at all what I was getting at."

"It's not?"

"Not at all."

"That's what it sounded like."

"Well, then, that's my fault, because it's not what I intended. I said 'How about you?' meaning is there anybody with a reason to have you hit."

"Oh."

"But you thought…"

"I know what I thought. I'm sorry I went off like that."

"Well, you didn't yell and scream, but your face got so dark I was afraid you were going to stroke out on me."

"I guess I'm more exhausted than I realized," I said. "You're saying the shooter could have got the wrong man?"

"It's always possible when the shooter doesn't know the vic personally. Faber was what, a couple of years older?"

"I'm taller by a few inches, and he was heavier, and thicker in the middle. I don't think we looked much alike. Nobody ever called me Jim by mistake, I'll tell you that much."

"You have any old enemies? From when you were on the job, say?"

"That's over twenty years ago, George. I'm off the job longer than I was ever on it."

"Well, what enemies have you made lately? You're a PI. You working on any mob-related cases?"

"No."

"Anything at all where you might have rubbed some hard case the wrong way?"

"Nothing," I said. "These days I work mostly for lawyers, checking out witnesses in personal injury and product liability lawsuits. I got a kid with a computer who does most of the heavy lifting for me."

"So you can't think of a thing."

"No."

"Well, why don't you run on home, then? Sleep on it, see what comes to you overnight. You know how it's probably going to turn out, don't you?"

"How?"

"Mistaken identity. I got a feeling what happened, and God knows it wouldn't be the first time. Somebody saw your friend, mistook him for a mope who burned him in a drug deal, or dicked his wife, some damned fool thing. Or, and I've known of cases, there's a contract out on some guy, some poor bastard looked nothing like your friend, and somebody spots him and drops a dime on him, and the guy who gets the call goes to the wrong fucking Chinese restaurant. He shows up at the Lucky Panda on Eighth instead of the Golden Rabbit on Seventh or the Hoo Flung Poo on Ninth."

"Maybe."

"The moon's full, you know."

"I didn't notice."

"Well, it's overcast. You can't see it, but it's on the calendar. Tomorrow night, actually, but that's close enough. That's when weird shit happens."

I remembered the moon Wednesday night, the gibbous moon. And now it was full.

"So go on home. There's uniforms chasing down witnesses now, taking testimony from people who were on the street when it went down, or maybe looking out their windows, wondering is it ever gonna rain. You know how it works. We'll check everything out, we'll see what our snitches have to tell us, and if we get lucky we'll come up with the shitbag who pulled the trigger." He worried his chin. "It won't bring him back, your friend," he said, "but it's what we do. It's all we can do."

I walked home on Ninth Avenue. I passed a few bars along the way, and each time I felt my heart race just the least little bit at the sight of them. It was an appropriate response. I couldn't stand the movie that was playing in my head, and booze was a sure bet to drown the sound track and fade the image to black.

Here's looking at you, Jim. Down the hatch. Bombs away. Mud in your eye, fella.

Thanks for helping me stay sober for the past sixteen years. Who's to say I could have done it without you? And now I'll honor your memory by forgetting everything you taught me

No, I don't think so.

Jim stopped watching NYPD Blue when Sipowicz drank after his son's death. What a jerk, he said. What a fucking asshole.

He can't help it, I said. He's just a character, all he can do is what it says in the script.

I'm talking about the writer, he said.

So I wasn't going to pick up a drink, but I couldn't pretend the desire wasn't there. My eyes took note of each gin joint, each winking neon beer sign. My mouth may have watered a little. But my feet kept on walking.

I looked for the moon, the full moon, but couldn't see it.

Anxiety grabbed me as I walked into the lobby of our building, and in the elevator I had a sudden vision of what I was going to find on the fourteenth floor. The door kicked in, furniture overturned, pictures slashed.

And worse…

The door was shut and locked. I rang the bell before I used my key, and Elaine was on the other side of the door when I got it open. She started to say something and stopped when she got a look at my face.

"Jim's dead," I said. "I got him killed."

"I suppose I was in shock," I said, "and I suppose I still am, to some extent. But no matter how thick the fog got, I never lost sight of my commitment to the obstruction of justice."

"Because you didn't tell them everything?"

"Because I deliberately misled them and withheld information I knew to be pertinent. I sat there parrying questions about Jim's printing business when it was crystal clear to me why he was killed. The shooter made a mistake, all right, and it had nothing to do with phases of the moon. He was supposed to shoot a middle-aged guy in khakis and a windbreaker and a red polo shirt, and that's what he did."

"Why couldn't you tell them that?"

"Because it would tie me to Mick Ballou and drop both of us in the middle of a full-scale homicide investigation. They'd want to know where all the bodies were buried, and that's not a figure of speech. I'd be on the spot for failing to report the murders of Kenny and McCartney, and for in fact actively covering up their deaths. We broke a lot of laws the night we dug up Mick's back yard."

"You'd lose your license."

"That's the least of it. I could face criminal charges."

"I didn't think of that."

"It seems to me I committed a couple of felonies," I said, "and we crossed a state line with a trunkful of corpses, so there might be a federal charge involved as well. Even so, I might have taken my chances if I'd thought leveling with Wister would do any good."

"It won't bring Jim back."

"No, but neither will anything else. It won't catch his killer, either. Jim was an innocent bystander who walked into the middle of a gang war."

"Is that what it is? Gang warfare?"

"That's what it looks like. That's what it looked like in the storage room in Jersey. If I'd had any sense I'd have bowed out then and there."

"I wish you would stop blaming yourself."

I let that pass. She'd said it more than once, and I still didn't have a response to it. I said, "There are things the cops are good at, but solving gang-related homicides isn't one of them. Even when they get lucky and learn who gave the order and who pulled the trigger, they can't put together a case that'll hold up in court."

"I guess they're helpless against organized crime."

"Not exactly helpless. The RICO laws gave them broad powers, and in the past few years they've made some major cases and put away a lot of mob guys. They'll get somebody to wear a wire, they'll get somebody else to roll over on his boss, and next thing you know there's one more guy in the federal joint at Marion, complaining that nobody there can make a decent marinara sauce. That works, and so do some of the local stings they run, like renting a storefront and receiving stolen goods, then locking up all the people who walked in the door with minks and TV sets."

"They get a lot of press when they do that."

"And I'm sure that's one of the things they like about it. But it's good police work just the same. Some of my contemporaries might disagree, but I think the NYPD's better than when I was a part of it. They're doing a superior job. But that doesn't mean they're going to come up with the guy who shot Jim."

"Still," she said, "it bothers you that you held out on them."

"I think it would bother me more if I hadn't. I'd have had fun explaining a lot of things, including the gun I was carrying."

"I was wondering about that. Nobody spotted it?"

"I wasn't a suspect and nobody had any reason to pat me down. I kept my windbreaker zipped up. It was chilly in the restaurant and on the street, but it was warm and stuffy in the squad room at Midtown North. I kept waiting for Wister to tell me to take off my jacket and get comfortable, but he never did."

"But if you'd told them you were the intended victim…"

"Then they'd have asked me a few hundred questions, and everything would have had to come out, including the gun. 'This? Well, you've already got the murder weapon, and anyway this is a.38, not a.22, and you can see it hasn't been fired recently. I haven't registered it yet because I just acquired it the other day from this guy who was pounding on my stomach.'"

"How is your stomach, by the way?"

"It's fine."

"But it must be empty. You didn't get dinner, you haven't had anything since lunch."

"I don't want anything."

"If you say so."

"Why the look?"

"I was just thinking what Jim would say about letting yourself get too hungry."

"He'd say not to," I said. "But I'm not hungry. Right now the thought of food turns my stomach."

"If you change your mind…"

"I'll let you know. Say, is there any coffee? I could stand a cup of coffee."

"What bothers me," I said, "is that I held out without thinking twice. It was second nature."

We were at the kitchen table, with coffee for me and herbal tea for her. I had taken off the windbreaker, and the gun and holster. I'd taken off the polo shirt, shucked the Kevlar vest, and put the shirt back on again. The vest was draped over the back of a chair now, and the gun and holster were on the kitchen counter.

I said, "I was a cop for a lot of years, and then for a long time I worked private without a license. I finally got one because it was an inconvenience not to have it, and it was costing me work. But there was another reason. I had it in the back of my mind that it would make me respectable."

"You never said that before."

"No."

"When you and I got married," she said, "I told you something. Do you remember what it was?"

"I was just thinking about it the other day. You said it didn't have to change anything."

"Because we were already committed to each other, so how could a piece of paper change things? And you were already respectable."

"Maybe that's the wrong word. Maybe I was looking for the license to make me more legitimate, more a part of the establishment."

"And did it?"

"That's the thing," I said. "It didn't. You know, I lost most of my illusions about the system during my years as a cop. They say working in a meat-packing plant ruins your appetite for sausage, and something similar happens on the job. You're essentially taught to break the rules. I learned to cut corners, learned to stand up in court and lie under oath. I also took bribes and robbed the dead, but that was something else, that was more about the erosion of my own morals. It may have been job-related, but it didn't arise directly out of how I'd learned to regard the system.

"Then I put in my papers and quit," I went on, "and you know about that. It was abrupt, one day I was a cop and one day I wasn't, but in another sense it was a more gradual process. I was still a cop at heart. All I lacked was a badge and a paycheck. I still saw the world the same way. I knew guys working in houses all over the five boroughs, and I pulled strings and called in favors when I was working my own cases. Or I bought favors, paying cops for information as if they were my snitches."

"I remember."

"Well, the years went by," I said, "and everybody I knew died or retired. Joe Durkin's my only real friend on the job, and I never even knew him back then. I'd been working private for years before he and I got acquainted. And now he's always talking about retiring himself, and one of these days he'll do it."

"Suppose it had been him instead of Wister asking you questions tonight."

"Would I have told the same lies? Probably. I don't see what else I could have done. I might have been a little less comfortable lying to Joe, and he might have sensed I was holding out. As far as that goes, Wister may have sensed as much himself."

"It's complicated, isn't it?"

"Very. It's hard to know what I am. 'My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic.' I've said that so many times I'm beginning to believe it, but beyond that point it gets a little fuzzy. For years I've been cutting corners and making my own rules. I learned how on the job and I never learned how not to. I've deliberately subverted the law, and now and then I've taken it into my own hands. I've played judge and jury. Sometimes I guess I've played God."

"You always had a reason."

"Everybody can always find a reason. The point is I've done illegal acts, and I've worked for and with criminals, but I've never thought of myself as a criminal."

"Well, of course not. You're not a criminal."

"I'm not sure what I am. I tell myself I try to do what's right, but I don't know how I make that determination. The phrase that comes to mind is 'moral compass,' but I'm not sure I know exactly what a moral compass is, or if I have one."

"Of course you do, honey. But the needle keeps spinning around, doesn't it?"

"The only rule I've got to live by," I said, "is 'Don't drink and go to meetings.' Jim says if I do that much everything else'll work out the way it's supposed to."

"So you do and it does."

"Oh, it works out. That's another thing he told me, things always work out. And God's will always gets done. That's how you find out God's will. You wait and see what happens."

"You've quoted that line before."

"I've always liked it," I said. "I guess it was God's will for Jim to die tonight, and for me to live. Otherwise it wouldn't have happened, right?"

"Right."

"Sometimes," I said, "it's hard to figure out what God has in mind. Sometimes you have to wonder if He's paying attention."

We talked for a long time. Ages ago, in another lifetime, when she was a hooker and I was a cop married to somebody else, part of what drew me to her was that she was so easy to talk to. In a sense I suppose that was part of the job description in her chosen field. A call girl, after all, ought to put men at ease. But it seemed to go beyond that for us. I sensed that I could be entirely myself in her presence, that it was me she liked, not the man I pretended to be, not the man I thought the world wanted me to be.

Maybe that, too, was part of the job description.

I drank coffee and she sipped her herb tea and I talked about Jim. I told stories from early sobriety, before she and I had found each other again after having been out of touch for years. "At first I figured he was a nice enough fellow," I told her, "but I wished to God he would leave me alone, because I knew I wasn't going to stay sober and he was just one more person to disappoint. Then I started to look forward to seeing him at meetings. As far as I was concerned he was Mister AA himself, the voice of sobriety. As a matter of fact he came into the program less than two years before I did. I was in my first ninety days when I heard him speak on his second anniversary. I look back now, and what's two years? A person with two years is just beginning to clear the cobwebs out of his head. So he was actually pretty new himself, but from my perspective he was dry enough to be a fire hazard."

"What would he tell you now?"

"What would he tell me? He'll never tell me anything again."

"But if he could."

I sighed. "'Don't drink. And go to meetings.'"

"Do you want to go to a meeting now?"

"It's too late for the midnight meeting on Houston Street. They've got another one at two a.m., but that's too late for me. So no, I don't want to go, but I don't want to drink, either, so I guess it evens out."

"What else would he tell you?"

"I can't read his mind."

"No, but you can use your imagination. What would he say?"

Grudgingly I said, "'Get on with your life.'"

"And?"

"And what?"

"And are you going to?"

"Get on with my life? I don't really have a choice, do I? But it's not that easy."

"Why not?"

"I told those two bozos the other night that I was done working for Ballou, and I told Mick the same thing. And that was that."

"But?"

"But I must have known it wasn't going to be that easy," I said, "or I wouldn't have gone straight to Jovine's for a shoulder rig. I told myself if I stayed away from Mick and kept close to home they'd find it easy to forget about me. But obviously they'd already made a decision to kill me, and tonight was the first chance they got, and they took it." I frowned. "It shouldn't change anything. Oh, I'm raging inside over Jim's death. Most of my anger's at myself for getting him killed, but- "

"You didn't get him killed."

"I put him in harm's way. Blame or no blame, that's hard to argue with. He was killed because someone mistook him for me, and that happened because I met him for dinner. And because I'd given someone cause to want me dead."

"I could argue with you, but I won't."

"Good. As I was saying, most of my anger's with myself. But there's some left over for the shooter, and for whoever sicced him on me."

"Two different people?"

"Two minimum. Somebody made the decision, either the slugger with the slicked-down hair or the guy who gave him his orders. Somebody else staked out our building and followed me from here to the Chinese restaurant. He could have been the slugger or his chum- they'd both recognize me without trouble- or there could have been a third person, someone who wouldn't have to worry that I might recognize him."

"If so, maybe he doubled as the shooter."

"Maybe, but I'd bet against it. I think he followed me to the restaurant, then posted himself across the street, making a quick call on his cell phone…"

"I guess they've all got cell phones these days."

"Everybody but you and me, it seems like. Even Mick's got one, if you can believe that. He used it the other night to call ahead to the farm and say we were on our way."

"'Leave a light burning, and a shovel on the back steps.'"

"The tail calls the shooter, who gets in his car and hurries to the scene. They meet on the street and the tail points to the Lucky Panda. 'Red shirt, tan jacket, Gap khakis, sneakers,' he says. 'You can't miss him.'

"Then he gets behind the wheel, unless there's already a driver in addition to the shooter. Whoever's doing the driving puts the car someplace handy and keeps the motor running, and the shooter goes in with a gun and comes out without it, and he jumps in the car and they're gone."

"And a man's dead," she said.

"And a man's dead."

"It could have been you."

"It was supposed to be me."

"But God had other ideas."

That was one way to look at it. I said, "Two men on Ninth Avenue the night before last. A third who ordered the hit. A fourth man to trail me to the Lucky Panda, and a fifth to walk in and pull the trigger. And maybe a sixth man to drive the car." I looked at her. "That's a lot of people to get even with."

"Is that what you want to do?"

"You can't help wanting to," I said. "The urge is pretty basic, and I suppose it's instinctive, even cellular. 'They did it to us, we're gonna do it to them.' Look at human history."

"Look at Bosnia," she said.

"But it's five or six people, as I said, and I don't even know who they are. And I can't make myself believe Jim's spirit is crying out for vengeance. If there's a part of you that survives, I'm inclined to believe it's not the part that takes things personally. Didn't you ask what Jim would tell me now? Well, what he wouldn't tell me is to get out there and kill one for the Gipper."

"No, that doesn't sound like Jim."

"I hate the idea of sitting back and letting them get away with it," I said, "but I'm not sure anybody ever really gets away with anything, and I think I've largely outgrown the notion that the world can't get along without my help."

"It's a pretty common delusion," she said, "and the more religious a person is, the more he'll subscribe to it. If there's one thing the fundamentalists of the world have in common it's the conviction that God's work won't get done unless they pitch in and do it. Their God's all-powerful, but He's screwed unless they help Him out."

I drank some coffee. I said, "It's not my job to punish them. I'm not appointing myself judge and jury, and I'm not volunteering for the firing squad, either. I told them I was off the case, and I told Mick the same thing, and Jim's death doesn't change that. I still want to walk away from it."

"Thank God for that."

"But there's a problem. See, I don't think I can."

"Why not?"

"I walked away from it two nights ago," I said, "and it didn't do me any good. Their response was to send somebody to kill me. As far as they were concerned I was still on the case. Or maybe they didn't care. On or off, I was the son of a. bitch who kicked their asses, and maybe that's all you have to do around here to get Madame Defarge to knit your name in the shawl. Because one way or another I got my name on the Death List, and Jim's dying isn't going to get me off it."

"So even if you don't do a thing…"

"I'm still marked for death. By now they probably know they killed the wrong guy, and if not they'll know by morning. I may be inclined to think of Jim as having died for my sins, but that won't make them accept his death as a substitute for mine."

"Your name's still in the shawl."

"I'm afraid so."

She looked at me. "So? What do we do?"

What we tried to do was make love, but that didn't really work, so we just held each other. I told a few stories about Jim, some she'd heard before, others that were new to her. A couple of them were funny, and we laughed.

She said, "I probably shouldn't say this, but it's rattling around in my head and making me crazy. I'm terribly sorry for what happened to Jim. I'm sorry for him and I'm sorry for Beverly, and of course I'm sorry for you.

"But sorry isn't all I feel. I'm glad it was him and not you."

I didn't say anything.

"It's something I find myself thinking all the time," she said. "It's what the voice in my head says every time I read the obituaries, and sometimes I think that's why I read the obituaries. So I can say 'Better her than me' whenever some dame my age dies of breast cancer. 'Better him than Matt' when some poor guy drops dead on the golf course. 'Better them than us' whenever there's an earthquake or a flood or a plague or a plane crash. Whoever they were, whatever happened to them, better them than us."

"It's a pretty natural response."

"But for a change it really resonates, doesn't it? Because it was pretty much a case of one or the other. If Jim went to the bathroom and you stayed at the table…"

"It might have turned out differently. I'd have been facing the door when he walked in. And I had a gun."

"And would you have gone for it in time?"

If I'd looked up when the door opened, I'd have seen a stranger, a black man who looked not at all like the pair of white guys who jumped me. And that's if I looked up. I might well have been engrossed in the menu, or reading Jim's magazine.

"Maybe," I said. "But probably not."

"So better him than you is what I say. My heart aches for Beverly, it makes me sick to think of what she's going through right now, but better her than me. These aren't noble sentiments, are they?"

"I don't suppose they are."

"But God knows they're heartfelt And you have to feel the same way, baby. Because you can tell yourself it should have been you there slumped in your own blood, but it wasn't you and in your heart you're glad of it. I'm right, aren't I?"

"Yes," I said after a moment. "I guess you are. I almost wish it weren't so, but it is."

"All that means is you're glad to be alive, sweetie."

"I guess so."

"That's not necessarily a bad thing."

"I guess not."

"You know," she said, "it probably wouldn't hurt you to cry."

She may have been right about that, too, but we weren't going to find out. The last time I remember crying was at an early AA meeting, when I spoke up for the first time to identify myself as an alcoholic. The tears that followed took me completely by surprise. My eyes have stayed dry ever since, except for the occasional movie, and I don't think that counts. Those aren't real tears, any more than the fear that grips you at a horror film is genuine fear.

So I couldn't cry and I couldn't make love, and it turned out I couldn't sleep, either. I almost drifted off and then I didn't, and finally I gave up and got out of bed and got dressed. I put the vest on under my shirt, and the holster over it. I zipped the windbreaker just far enough to conceal the gun.

Then I went into the other room and made a phone call.

"A black man," Mick said, looking across the table at me.

"According to the witnesses."

"But you never saw him yourself."

"No, and I didn't get to question the witnesses, either, but I understand they all agreed the shooter was black. Medium height, medium build, twenties or thirties or forties- "

"Narrows it down."

"And he had a beard or a mustache."

"One or the other?"

"Or both," I said. "Or neither, I suppose. He was in and out in less time than it takes to tell about it, and nobody had any reason to look at him before the shooting started, and then all they wanted to do was keep from getting shot themselves."

"But he was black," Mick said. "On that point they're in rare agreement."

"Yes."

"Is it niggers then? And what am I to them, or they to me?" He picked up his glass of whiskey, looked at it, set it down untouched. "The two men who gave you a beating," he said, "or tried to. Were they black?"

"They were both white. The one with the gun sounded like a born New Yorker. I didn't get a good look at the other one, or hear him talk, but he was white."

"And the man who shot your friend…"

"Was black."

"A white man could hire a black assassin," he said thoughtfully. "But would this man bring in someone from outside? Wouldn't he use one of his own?"

"Who is he?"

"I don't know."

"But someone's trying to…"

"Take it all away," he said. "And I don't know who he is, or why it's me he's after."

I didn't really think there'd be anyone staked out at the Parc Vendôme, but I'd just had my horse stolen and I wasn't about to leave the barn door unlocked. I went down to the basement and slipped out of the building by the rear service entrance. On my way to Grogan's I looked over my shoulder a lot. Nobody tailed me, and no one popped up out of the shadows in front of me.

Mick had said he'd make a pot of coffee, and he was at a table when I got there, with a bottle and glass in front of him and a stoneware coffee mug across from him. I scanned the room from the doorway. It was getting on for closing, but there were a fair number of people who didn't want the weekend to end, pairs and singles at the bar, a few couples at the tables. I spotted Andy Buckley and Tom Heaney way in back at the dartboard, Burke behind the bar, and old Eamonn Dougherty on the other side of it. Mick had pointed him out once as a legendary IRA gunman. He was killing men before you were born, he'd said.

There were a couple of other familiar faces, too.

I walked to where Mick was sitting, picked up my coffee mug, and carried it to a table along the wall. His eyes widened at this, but when I motioned for him he joined me, bringing his bottle and glass.

"You didn't care for the other table?"

"Too close to those folks," I said. "I didn't want to listen to their conversation, or for them to be listening to ours."

"I already heard enough of theirs," he said, amusement in his eyes. "It's a serious discussion of their relationship that they're having."

"I thought it might be," I said, and then I told him about my visit to the Lucky Panda, and his eyes hardened and his face turned serious.

And now he said, "I was wrong to get you involved."

"I could have turned you down."

"And would have, had you known what you were getting into. I'd no idea myself I'd be putting you in danger. But you're in it now, man."

"I know it."

"They didn't believe you'd heed their warning. Or didn't care. You embarrassed them, made them look bad. That's more than my two did, for Jesus' sake."

"Kenny and McCartney."

"Executed, the poor lads."

Two tables away, the fellow got up and went to the bar for fresh drinks. The woman looked sidelong at me, the trace of a smile on her lips. Then she lowered her eyes.

"And Peter Rooney," Mick said.

"That's a familiar name. Do I know him?"

"You might have met him here. Let me see, how would you know him? Well, now, he had the tattoo of a ship's anchor on the back of his left hand, just below the wrist."

I nodded. "Long, narrow face, balding in front."

"That's the man."

"He had the look of a sailor, too."

"And what sort of look is that? Ah, never mind. The ferry to Staten Island is all the sailing he ever did. Or will do."

"Why's that?"

He regarded his glass of whiskey He said, "You know I always have some money on the street. The Jews taught me that. It's like bread upon the water, isn't it? You put your money on the street and it comes back to you multiplied. Peter worked for me, at the job sites and the union halls. Making loans, you know, and receiving payments. He did none of the heavy work, you understand, as he was not cut out for it. A strong warning was as far as he'd go. After that I'd have to send someone else. Or go myself, as likely as not."

"What happened to him?"

"They found him stuffed head first into a trash bin in an alley off Eleventh Avenue. He'd been beaten so that his own mother wouldn't know him, were she alive to see him, which thanks be to God she's not. Beaten half to death, and then stabbed dead in the bargain."

"When did this happen?"

"I couldn't say when it happened. It was midmorning he was found, and early this evening by the time I learned of it." He picked up his glass and drank it down like water. "Did I know this friend of yours?"

"I don't think so."

"You never brought him here, then?"

"He stopped going to bars awhile ago."

"Ah, one of that lot. Not the one you were talking about the other night, was he? That went on retreat with the Buddhists?"

"That was him, as a matter of fact."

"Ah, Jesus. It's a curious thing. I've had that conversation in mind, do you know, and I was thinking that's a man I'd like to know. And now I'll never have the chance. Tell me his name again."

"Jim Faber."

"Jim Faber. I'd raise a glass to his memory, but perhaps he wouldn't care for that."

"I don't think he'd mind."

He poured a short drink. "Jim Faber," he said, and drank.

I took a sip of coffee and wondered what the two of them would have made of each other. I wouldn't have expected them to hit it off, but who's to say? Maybe they'd have found some common ground, maybe Jim had sought the same thing sitting in the zendo that Mick looked for at the Butchers' Mass.

Well, we'd never know.

He said, "They'll try for you again, you know."

"I know."

"By dawn they'll know their mistake, if they don't know it now. What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. All I've done so far is lie to the cops."

"Do you recall the time I went to Ireland? I was avoiding a subpoena, but 'twould be as good a place to dodge a bullet. You could fly out tomorrow and come back when they sound the all-clear."

"I suppose I could."

"You and herself. I know you've never been there, but has she?"

"No."

"Ah, you'd love it, the two of you."

"You could come along," I said. "Show us around, give us the grand tour."

"Just walk away and let them take what they want," he mused. "Do you know, I've thought of it. It's not my way, but is it my way to fight something I can't see? Let them take it, let them have it all."

"Why not?"

He fell silent, considering the question. Over his big shoulder I saw Andy Buckley lean forward to waft a dart. He lost his balance, and Tom Heaney reached out to set him right. Tom, another Belfast native, worked the bar days, and hardly said a word. He came along when Mick and I had that business in Maspeth. Tom took a bullet that night, and the four of us rode clear out to Mick's farm with Andy at the wheel. Mick got a doctor to patch him up, and Tom hardly said a word throughout the ordeal, and was just as closemouthed afterward.

Someone at the bar was laughing- not, surely, the ever-silent Mr. Dougherty- and at the table near us the man was telling the woman that it was no easier for him than it was for her.

"Maybe it's not supposed to be easy," she said.

I looked across at Mick, wondering if he'd heard what she said. He was forming a response to my question, and then his face changed as he caught sight of something behind me. Before I could turn to see what he was looking at, he was in motion, swatting the little table and sending it flying, cup and saucer and bottle and all, then heaving himself at me across the space where the table had been.

There was a ragged burst of gunfire. Mick hurtled into me and I flew over backward, my chair breaking up into kindling beneath me. I landed on it and he landed on top of me. He had a gun in his fist and he was firing it, snapping off spaced single shots in answer to the bursts of automatic-weapon fire from the doorway.

I caught sight of something sailing overhead. Then there was a loud noise, with shock waves rolling, rolling like the sea. And then there was nothing at all.

I couldn't have been out for very long. I don't remember coming to, but the next thing I knew I was on my feet, with Mick urging me on. He had one big arm around my waist, the hand clutching a battered leather satchel. He'd gone and fetched it from his office, so I must have been unconscious for at least as long as it had taken him to do that. But not much longer than that.

He had a pistol in his other hand, an army-issue.45 with the front sight filed down. I managed a look around but couldn't take in what I was seeing. Chairs and tables were overturned, some of them smashed to splinters. Barstools lay on the tile floor like corpses. The backbar mirror had disappeared, all but a few stray shards still left in the frame. The air was thick with the residue of battle, and my eyes stung from smoke and the fumes of gunpowder and spilled whiskey.

There were bodies scattered around, looking like dolls tossed aside by a thoughtless child. The man and woman who'd been discussing their relationship were together in death, sprawled alongside their overturned table. He was flat on his back with most of his face gone. She lay curled on her side, bent like a fishhook, with the top of her head open and her brains spilling from her shattered skull.

"Come on, man!"

I suppose he was shouting, but his voice didn't sound very loud to me. I guess the bomb blast had left me partially deaf. Everything was slightly muffled, the way it is in an airport when you're fresh off a plane and your ears haven't popped yet.

I heard him and the words registered, but I stayed where I was, rooted to the spot, unable to draw my eyes from them. This is no easier for me than it is for you, he'd told her.

Famous last words…

"They're fucking dead," Mick said, his tone at once brutal and gentle.

"I knew her," I said.

"Ah," he said. "Well, there's fuck-all you can do for her now, and no time to waste trying."

I swallowed, trying to clear my ears. It was like getting off a plane m the middle of a war zone, I thought. Smelling the cordite and the death, and stepping over bodies on the way to the baggage claim.

One such body lay in the doorway, a small man with delicate Asian features. He was wearing black pants and a lime green shirt, and at first I took it for one of those Hawaiian shirts with tropical flowers on it. But it was a solid-color shirt and the flowers were three bullet holes and his blood supplied the petals.

Resting in the crook of his arm was the automatic rifle with which he'd sprayed the room.

Mick stopped long enough to snatch up the gun, then gave the dead man a solid boot in the side of the head. "Go straight to hell, you fucker," he said.

A car stood at the curb, a big old Chevy Caprice, the body badly pitted with rust. Andy Buckley was behind the wheel and Tom Heaney was standing alongside the open door, a gun in his hand, covering our exit.

We dashed across the sidewalk. Mick shoved me into the back seat, piled in after me. Tom got in front next to Andy. The car was moving before the doors were shut.

I could hear sirens. Imperfectly, as I heard everything, but I could hear them. Sirens, coming our way.

"You're all right, Andy?"

"I'm fine, Mick."

"Tom?"

"No harm, sir."

"Good job you were both in the back. What hell they made of Grogan's, eh? The fuckers."

We'd headed north on the West Side Drive, then cut over to the Deegan at some point. Andy offered more than once to drop me and Mick wherever we wanted to go, but that wasn't what Mick wanted. He said he wasn't sure yet where he'd be staying, and wanted a car.

"Well, this here's a step down from the Caddy," Andy said. "But it was just down the block, and a lot quicker than getting yours out of the garage."

"It'll do me fine," Mick said. "And I'll take good care of it."

"This piece of shit? You treat it nice, it'll die of shock." He slapped the steering wheel. "She runs good, though. And the body damage is a plus, far as I'm concerned. You can park it on the street and know it's gonna be there when you come back for it."

We drove through the Bronx, a part of town I know hardly at all. I lived there briefly as a child, upstairs of the little shoe store my father opened- and closed, whereupon we moved to Brooklyn. The building where we lived is gone, the whole block bulldozed for an addition to the Cross-Bronx Expressway, and my recollection of the neighborhood is gone with it.

So I couldn't really keep track of where we were, and I might have been equally lost in more familiar terrain, my hearing still imperfect and my whole inner self numb and befogged. There wasn't much conversation, but I missed a portion of what there was, tuning in and out.

Tom said he'd walk from Andy's house, there was no need to take him to his door, and Andy said it was easy enough to run him home, that it wasn't far at all. Mick said near or far we'd drop Tom at his home, for God's sake.

Andy said, "You're in the same place, Tom? Perry Avenue?" and Tom nodded. We drove there through unfamiliar streets and Tom got out in front of a little box of a house clad in asphalt siding. Mick said he'd be in touch, and Tom nodded and trotted to the door and stuck his key in the lock, and Andy turned the car around.

At a red light he said, "Mick, are you sure I can't run you back to the city? You can keep this car and I'll get a subway home."

"Don't be silly."

"Or you can pick up the Caddy. Or I'll get the Caddy, whatever you say."

"Drive yourself home, Andy."

Andy lived on Bainbridge Avenue, on the other side of the Mosholu Parkway from Tom. He pulled up in front of his house and got out of the car. Mick leaned out the window and motioned him over, and Andy walked around the car and leaned against it with his hand on the roof. "My best to your mother," Mick said.

"She'll be sleeping now, Mick."

"By Jesus, I should hope so."

"But I'll tell her when she wakes up. She asks about you all the time."

"Ah, she's a good woman," Mick said. "You'll be all right now? You'll have no trouble getting your hands on a car?"

"My cousin Denny'll let me take his. Or somebody else will. Or I'll grab one off the street."

"Be careful, Andy."

"Always, Mick."

"They're hunting us down like rats in a sewer, the bastards. And who are they? Niggers and Chinamen."

"Looked more like Vietnamese, Mick. Or Thai, could be."

"They're all one to me," he said, "and what am I to them? What's their quarrel with me? Or poor Burke, for Jesus' sake, or any of the boys?"

"They just wanted to kill everybody."

"Everybody. Even the customers. Old men drinking their pints. Decent people from the neighborhood having a last jar before bed. Ah, 'twas a last jar for some of them, right enough."

Andy stepped back and Mick got out of the car himself and looked around, then shook himself like a dog shaking off water. He walked around the car and got behind the wheel, and I got out myself and got in front next to him. Andy stood on the sidewalk and watched us drive off.

Neither of us said anything on the way back, and I guess I must have faded out. By the time I checked in again we were back in Manhattan, somewhere down in Chelsea. I could tell because I recognized a Cuban-Chinese restaurant and got a sudden sense memory of their coffee, thick and dark and strong, and remembered the waiter who'd brought it to the table, a slow-moving old fellow who walked as though his feet had been bothering him for years.

Funny what you remember, funny what you don't.

On Twenty-fourth Street off Sixth Avenue, at the edge of the Flower District, Mick braked to a stop in front of a narrow brick building eight stories tall. There was a steel roll-up door like the kind at E-Z Storage, but narrower, only a little wider than a car, with a pair of windowless doors on either side of it. The door on the right had a column of buzzers at its side, suggesting that it led to the offices or apartments above. The door on the left showed two rows of stenciled lettering, black edged in silver on the red door. MCGINLEY amp; CALDECOTT, it proclaimed. ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE.

Mick unlocked and rolled up the metal door, revealing a small street-level garage. Once he'd kicked a couple of cartons out of the way there was just enough room to park a full-size car or a small van. He motioned, and I slid behind the wheel and maneuvered the Chevy into the space.

I got out and joined him on the sidewalk, and he lowered the door and locked it, then unlocked the red door with the lettering on it. We stepped inside and he drew the door shut, leaving us in darkness until he found a light switch. We were at the head of a flight of stairs, and he led me down them to the basement.

We wound up in a huge room, with narrow aisles threaded among dense rows packed with bureaus and tables and chests of drawers and boxes stacked to shoulder height. It was, as promised, an architectural salvage firm, and the full basement constituted the showroom and stockroom all in one.

Ever since the Dutch bought the place, Manhattan's been a town where they throw buildings up only to knock them down again. Demolition is an industry in itself, construction's twin, and, if its main goal is an empty lot, I was looking at its by-products. Drawers and boxes spilled over with every sort of hardware you could strip from a structure before you took a wrecking ball to it. There were cartons full of nothing but doorknobs, brass ones and glass ones and nickel-plated ones. There were boxes of escutcheon plates and hinges and locks and things I recognized but didn't know the names of, and there were other things I couldn't identify at all.

Carved wooden columns stood here and there, looking for a ceiling to hold up. One section was crammed with ornamental stone and cement work from the outsides of buildings- gargoyles with their tongues protruding, real and imaginary animals, some sharply detailed, others as hard to make out as the inscriptions on old gravestones, weathered by time and acid rain.

A year or two ago Elaine and I spent a weekend in Washington, and in the course of it we dragged ourselves through the Holocaust Museum. It was wrenching, of course- it's supposed to be- but what hit us the hardest was a room full of shoes. Just shoes, an endless heap of shoes. Neither of us could quite explain the room's ghastly impact, but I gather our response was not atypical.

I can't say the plastic milk crates overflowing with doorknobs elicited a similar emotional reaction. My gut didn't churn at the thought of what had happened to all the doors to which those knobs had once been fitted, or the long-vanished rooms behind those doors. But somehow the endless array of hardware, sifted and sorted with Teutonic thoroughness, did call to mind that room full of shoes.

"Where buildings go to die," Mick said.

"Just what I was thinking."

"It's a good old business. Who could guess what you can strip off an old building before you knock her down? You pull the plumbing, of course, and the boiler, and sell all that for scrap, but there are people who find a use for all the old hardware and ornamentation. If you were restoring an old brownstone, say, you'd want all the details authentic. You'd come here and go home with replacement crystals for the chandelier, or a better chandelier entirely. And door hinges, and a marble mantel for the fireplace. It's all here, whatever you might want and much you wouldn't."

"So I see."

"And did you know there are those that collect bits of ornamentation? Caldecott has one customer with a passion for gargoyles. There was one he bought too heavy to carry, and your man delivered it and saw his collection. Two small rooms in Christopher Street was all he had, and there's shelves all round stuffed with dozens of fucking gargoyles of all sizes, all of them making horrible faces, and one uglier than the next. From the description it must have been as cluttered as this place, but that's how it is when you're a collector. You must be forever getting more of whatever it is you fancy."

"Do you own this place, Mick?"

"I've an interest in it. You might say I'm a silent partner." He picked up a tarnished brass hinge, turned it in his hand, put it back where he'd found it. "'Tis a good business for a man. You sell for cash, and you've no purchase records because you don't purchase your stock, you salvage it. So you've cash coming in and cash going out, and that's a useful sort of business in this day and age."

"I imagine it is."

"And I'm a useful partner for the lads. I've connections in the construction and demolition trade, labor and management both, and that's a help in securing salvage rights to a building. Oh, it works out well for all concerned."

"And I don't suppose your name's on the paperwork."

"You know my thoughts on the subject. What you don't own can't be taken from you. I've a set of keys, and the use of the office when I want it, and a place to park a car where it can't be seen. They keep their van there, they use that bay for loading and unloading, but Brian McGinley takes the van home at the day's end. And that reminds me."

He dug the cell phone out of his pocket, then changed his mind and put it back. We walked the length of one aisle to an office in the back, where he sat at the gray metal desk and looked up a number and made a call. The phone had a rotary dial, and might have been salvage itself.

He said, "Mr. McGinley, please… I know it is, and I'd not call at this hour but out of necessity… I'm afraid you'll have to wake him. Just tell him it's the big fellow."

He covered the mouthpiece and rolled his eyes. "Ah, Brian," he said. "Good man. Do you know, I think you and Caldecott are closed for the week. No one's to come in until you hear from me… That's the idea. And my apologies to your wife from the lateness of the hour. Why don't you make it up to her and take her to Puerto Rico for a few days?… Well, Cancún then, if she likes it better… And you'll phone Caldecott? And anyone else that ought to be told? Good man."

He hung up. "'The big fellow,'" he said. "It's presumption, hanging that tag on myself. That's what they called Collins."

"And De Valera didn't like it."

"A sanctimonious bastard, wasn't he? Tell me something. Where the hell's Cancún?"

"The Yucatán Peninsula."

"That's Mexico, isn't it? Mrs. McGinley like is there, likes it better than phone calls in the middle of the night. 'I can't wake him, he's sleeping.' Well, if he wasn't sleeping, you wouldn't need to wake him, you silly cow." He sighed, leaned back in the oak desk chair. "How the hell do you know Dev didn't like it? You never went to the movie."

"Elaine rented it," I said, "and we watched it on the VCR. Jesus Christ."

"What?"

"That was last night we saw it. It doesn't seem possible. It feels more like a week."

"It's a fully day you had, isn't it?"

"So much death," I said.

"The two we buried at the farm, and that was what, four nights ago? Then Peter Rooney, but you only know of him from my telling you. And then your friend, the Buddhist. I drank to his memory, and the next minute they were making a charnel house of Grogan's, killing people left and right. Burke was killed, you know."

"I didn't know."

"I looked for him and found him on the floorboards behind the bar, covered with glass from the mirror and with a terrible hole in his chest. Dead at his post, like a captain going down with the ship. I'd say that's the end of that bar. Next time you see it some Korean'll have it, selling fruits and vegetables around the clock."

He fell silent, and after a long moment I said, "I knew her, Mick."

"I thought you did."

"You know who I meant?"

"Of course I do. Herself as was sitting nearby, that you didn't want to be hearing their conversation. I had a feeling right then."

"Did you?"

"I did. Do you know, moving to the next table probably saved our lives. It put us off to the side and gave us that extra fraction of time to hit the floor before the bullets reached us." He cocked his head, looked at something on the wall. "Unless it's all worked out in advance," he said, "and you die when your time comes and not before."

"I wonder."

"Ah, that's man's lot, isn't it? To wonder." He opened desk drawers until he found the one with the bottle of Jameson in it. He cracked the seal and drank from the bottle. He said, "Was she the one, then?"

"The one?"

"Your bit on the side."

"I guess that's as good a phrase as any. We stopped seeing each other awhile ago."

"Did you love her?"

"No."

"Ah."

"I cared for her, though."

"That's rare enough," he said, and took another drink. "I never loved anyone. Aside from my mother and my brothers, but that's a different matter, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Of women, I loved none and cared for few."

"I love Elaine," I said. "I don't think I've ever loved anyone else."

"You were married before."

"A long time ago."

"Did you love her?"

"There was a time when I thought I did."

"Ah. What was this one's name?"

"Lisa."

"She was a fine-looking woman."

My mind filled with a picture of her as I saw her last, her skull shattered. I blinked it away and saw her in her apartment, wearing jeans and a sweater, standing in front of a window with a view of the setting sun. That was better.

"Yes," I said. "She was."

"It was sudden, you know. I doubt she ever knew what hit her."

"But she's gone."

"That she is," he said.

He had the old leather satchel on top of the desk and was poking around in it. "Cash from the safe," he said. "Some papers. All the guns I could grab up. The police can get a court order and torch the safe, or they'll do it without a court order. What they can't use as evidence against me they'll shove in their pockets. So I didn't want to leave them too much."

"No."

"And anything they left would be useless to me, as I couldn't go back for it. They'll have it sealed off, once they've finished with their photographs and measurements, all the scientific things they do. You'd know more about that than I."