Jake Leibowitz stood in front of the bathroom mirror, trimming his tiny mustache and cursing his eyesight. He was all of thirty-seven years old and already his eyes were going bad. Walter Winchell’s column in the Mirror was nothing more than a gray blur. If he wanted to read, to keep up with the fast crowd, he was going to have to get glasses.

“With the Jews, it’s always the eyes,” he said to himself. “If I don’t watch it, I’ll end up with coke-bottle glasses and a gray beard.” He shook his head in disgust. “Now I’m talkin’ to myself, again.”

But he couldn’t be angry with himself. Not on the brink of a New Year’s which had the promise of ushering in a really new year. He’d been waiting a long time to get his big break, long enough to know there might not be another one coming. He intended to make the most of it.

“I got lost for a while,” he muttered, lifting the scissors to the edge of his upper lip. “But I ain’t lost now.”

The jet-black hairs of his mustache were no more than an eighth of an inch long. When he stepped far enough away to bring the mirror into focus, they melted into one another like a dark smudge on a piece of paper.

He tossed the scissors into the bathtub. “I shoulda gone to the barber this afternoon. Gotta look good for the wops.” He picked up a hairbrush and began to tear at the tight curls on his head. Jake kept his hair short, but he couldn’t keep it down. His curls, especially in wet weather, stood out in every direction. Even in a suit, he looked more like a shaggy-headed beatnik than a nice Jewish gangster. That’s why he never left his apartment without wearing a hat.

Jake loved hats the way some men love shoes, kept a dozen in his closet (his mother’s closet, he reminded himself, mustn’t forget that little fact) and usually tried on most of them before leaving the apartment.

“I never met a hat I didn’t like,” he said, chuckling at his own joke.

Soon, very soon, he’d have enough hats to fill a dozen closets. And he’d shop for his suits at Brooks Brothers instead of Robert Hall. Maybe he’d even have a tailor make one up by hand. But not a Jew tailor with glasses so thick they looked more like binoculars. He’d go to Chinatown and find a tailor from Hong Kong. Let the chink make him a gray sharkskin suit, then buy a pair of Italian shoes and a matching tie and, of course, a snap-brim fedora.

“It shoulda happened long ago, Jake,” he told himself. “If life was fair. Which it ain’t.”

The bitch about it was that you could control a lot of things in your life, but you couldn’t control everything. For instance, you couldn’t control wars. He’d been a twenty-year-old kid when the war broke out, and he’d been coming up in the world. The Depression (they called it the Great Depression though he couldn’t see anything great about it) had hit the packed immigrant neighborhoods of the Lower East Side with the wallop of a Colt.45. Even the gangsters had suffered. He should know, his father had been a gangster. At least until they found him floating in the East River.

That was in ’33 and life for the Leibowitz family had been harder than hard after Poppa made the mistake of challenging the wops. The wops had a genius for organization. They based it on their families and the villages they’d come from in Sicily. Jews didn’t do that. There was no Pinsk gang, no Bialystoker mob. Jewish gangsters wanted their kids to be doctors (or, at least, to marry doctors). And there were a lot more Italians than Jews in the good old U.S.A. All the Jews had come to New York (most of them to the Lower East Side which, in the 20’s and 30’s, seemed more like the Warsaw Ghetto than Manhattan) while the Italians had spread out. A wop who wanted to kill a Jew could call in a button man from Boston or Providence or Chicago. A Jew who wanted to kill a wop usually did it himself.

Still, even considering all that, even considering his poppa’s big mistake, Jake Leibowitz had done okay. He’d begun by shoplifting his way through the middle of the Depression, working with several other boys, including an Italian. Then, in the natural course of things as he understood them, he’d graduated to commercial burglary, shimmying through unlocked bathroom windows until he’d outgrown his specialty. Until he was old enough to pick up a rod and take what he wanted.

It was too bad about the war. Too bad, because he’d understood the essential lesson. The wops didn’t really care what you did to put bread in your mouth as long as you took care of them, as long as you gave them a piece of your bread. What was that old saying? The only sure things are death and taxes? For Jake, the wops were the government and the tribute he paid them was the gangster version of the graduated income tax.

Jake took another step backward and the face in the mirror jumped into focus. It wasn’t a bad face, all in all. True, his eyes were set too close and his thin nose had a definite hook. But those eyes were a mild blue and the nose was small. Meanwhile, his cleft chin (as formidable as Robert Mitchum’s) dominated his beak, just as high, prominent cheekbones dominated those narrow eyes.

“A regular Tony Curtis,” he observed. “Only bigger.” He tightened his chest muscles until the individual bands of tissue criss-crossing his ribs stood out like leather straps. He’d always been strong and the war had made him stronger. Not that he’d spent any time fighting the Germans or the Japanese. Jake’s career in the regular army had ended ten minutes after he arrived in Fort Dix to begin his basic training. Sergeant T. Blair Johnson, in the manner of drill sergeants everywhere, had put his face within two inches of Jake’s, and screamed out a series of obscenities, most of which concerned Jake’s mother. Two days later, when Sergeant Johnson finally woke up, he was lying in the base hospital, recovering from a fractured skull.

“It was the war,” Jake muttered. “The war put me in a bad mood. It wasn’t fair.”

Jake had first reported to the induction center on Whitehall Street in the spring of 1939. The army had evaluated him thoroughly, then declared him 4F, which was supposed to mean permanently unfit for duty. So why, in 1942, even though millions of schmucks were volunteering, had they called him back, reexamined him, overlooked his extensive criminal record, and re-classified him 1A? He’d stopped asking himself the question three weeks later when he got a telegram: Greetings, it began.

What had bothered him most, as the packed bus drove through New Jersey on its way to Fort Dix, was how happy the other recruits were. They’d laughed and joked, bragging about what they would do to the Krauts and the Japs, a bunch of schmucks eager to get their brains blown out. And for what? There was nothing in it for them. Nothing but crumby food, aching bones and an early death.

“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” Jake tossed several punches at the face in the mirror. His hands were very fast. Always had been. The redneck sergeant unlucky enough to greet the bus carrying Jake Leibowitz had been out before he knew what was happening. That was part of what Jake called “Plan B.”

Plan A had been just to disappear, stretch it out until he was caught, then do his time. But there was no way for him to operate if he was on the run. He was just getting started with the wops, doing them little favors, hoping for a piece of the gambling east of Canal Street. If he spent the rest of the war (and the damn thing could last for ten years the way it was going) in Toronto with Uncle Bernard, his career would be up shit’s creek. Permanently.

Better to step right up and take your medicine. Better to pound on some officer, do a year in the joint and get back to work. The wops were being drafted, too. If he got out before they did, there’d be plenty of action.

By the time the bus had arrived at Fort Dix, Jake was too crazy to wait for an officer. Which was just as well, because they ended up giving him eighteen months for what he’d done to the sergeant, six months more than he expected. If he’d beaten an officer, they probably would have given him five years.

But even the extra six months would have been okay. As long as he behaved himself, he’d be out in a little over a year. He was going to a joint called Leavenworth, in Kansas. How bad could a joint in Kansas be?

“Leeeeee-bow-witz,” Deputy Warden Blackstone had drawled. “What kind of name is that, boy? Is that a Jewish name? Are you a Jewwwww-boy?”

Standing in front of the Dep, flanked by a pair of massive, blond, crewcut sergeants, Jake finally understood that the earth did not end at the far side of the Hudson River.

“Yessir,” he answered.

“Leeeeee-bow-witz, are you from Newwww Yawk City?”

“Yessir.”

His fellow convicts had been no more accepting than Dep Blackstone. They thought all Jews were soft, flabby tailors. Hiding behind thick glasses, cringing over their prayers. Jake had had to prove himself again and again. Each time he did, a court-martial added a few years to his sentence. The end result was the opposite of what he’d intended. By the time he’d gotten out, WWII and the Korean War were over. The wops didn’t even remember him.

On the other hand, twelve years in the slammer had given him a confidence and maturity he might otherwise have never achieved. After a time, somewhere in the spring of ’45, the names had stopped. No more “kike” or “sheeny.” But that didn’t mean his fellow cons had seen him as one of the boys. They’d held their tongues because they were afraid of him, not because they’d liked him.

Jake had begun to talk to himself on the day he’d realized that he couldn’t fight his way to acceptance. He would never be one of them. It was like the Italians, in a way. A Jew could work with the Italians, but he would never be equal to the lowest Sicilian. Meyer Lansky, whose name was in the papers almost every day, was a good example. He’d created his own gang because he could never get in with the wops, could never become an ordinary soldier, much less a Don.

“Them old Jews was tough,” Jake said. “Hymie Weiss? Bugsy Siegel? Louis Lepke? Hell, Arnold Rothstein was king of New York when Al Capone was still suckin’ on his mother’s tit.” Stepping into his bedroom, Jake began to dress. “But they musta not had kids or somethin’. The kids I come up with’re movin’ outta the neighborhood. Goin’ ta bullshit Queens or Brooklyn. Can’t wait to get away.”

He pulled a silk undershirt over his head, then stepped into silk boxer shorts. It was kind of depressing-the only luxury he could afford went on the inside where no one could see it. But that was all going to change. He’d put a lot of effort into attracting the wops’ attention. Doing a warehouse here, hijacking a truck there-fencing the loot to a Jew with a loose mouth. He and the only two pals he could dredge up-Izzy Stein and Abe Weinberg.

One day, two gorillas had arrived on his doorstep. He’d known them right away. They worked for Antonio “Steppy” Accacio. Steppy Accacio, if he wasn’t exactly Sam Trafficante, was an up-and-comer, a connected man with a finger in half a dozen Lower East Side pies.

“We only just heard about ya,” one of the gorillas, Joe Faci, had said politely.

“I understand,” Jake had responded, just as politely. “Whatta ya gotta get?”

“Ten percent. And it would be good if you would fence ya merchandise with our guy on West Street.”

“I got the money upstairs.”

“We’ll go with ya.”

“Nah, it’s my mother’s apartment. She’s home.”

Faci had thought about it for a minute, searching Jake’s face. “That would be all right,” he’d responded. “Ya won’t be long, I hope?”

“Two minutes.”

Jake had made it in one and a half, emerging with a stuffed envelope he’d been saving for months.

“How come we didn’t know about ya before this?” Faci had asked, accepting the envelope. “You ain’t such a young guy.”

Jake had explained about the army and Leavenworth and Faci had listened with respect. He would go back to his boss and pass the information over with the envelope. Jake Leibowitz had done twelve years of very hard time. He was a man you could work with. A man you could trust. He wouldn’t open up the first time the cops slapped him around.

Fifteen minutes later, his mustache as good as he was going to get it, Jake Leibowitz sat in the front seat of his mother’s 1951 Packard Clipper and studied his two companions intently. The both of them, Izzy Stein and Abe Weinberg, were top-notch in his book. Loyal and bright, they were everything good Jewish boys were supposed to be. Except, he had to admit, for the “good” part. And they weren’t boys, either, but hardened ex-cons who’d somehow failed to take advantage of the G.I. Bill.

“Ya know what to do, right?” Jake looked hard at Izzy who looked away. “Ya know who I’m talkin’ to, right?”

Izzy shrugged. “Whatta ya worried about, Jake? Ain’t I been doin’ it all along?”

What bothered Jake was that Izzy, though he’d done two short bits up in Elmira, had never worked with a gun before Jake recruited him. Not that Izzy was soft. Izzy’s prior criminal career had been characterized by a very practical truth: you could get yourself pinned for a hundred burglaries and not do as much time as an eighteen-year-old kid who ripped off the local gas station with his father’s.38.

“It’s one thing to hold a piece on some truck driver who’s crappin’ his pants,” Jake said calmly. “What we’re gonna do here is entirely different.”

The set-up was pretty simple, really. The whorehouse was run by a married couple, Al and Betty O’Neill, who’d fallen behind on their payments to Steppy Accacio. Al and Betty were making noises like they didn’t see any reason why they should pay the cops and the mob. Accacio wanted to teach the loving couple a lesson they should have learned before they went into the whore business. Namely, he wanted Jake and his boys to pistol-whip the crap out of the pair of them. Jake could keep whatever he found on the premises for his trouble.

“What it is, Jake,” Faci had explained, “is Steppy wants that you should put ya hearts inta ya work.”

“I get too enthusiastic,” Jake had replied, “it might be they won’t wake up. I ain’t a doctor, Mr. Faci. I can’t tell the difference between almost and dead.”

“Findin’ that line,” Faci had flatly declared, “is the difference between being an artist and a mug.”

Izzy finally raised his head. He met Jake’s eyes and held them. “You got nothin’ to worry about, Jake. I already decided to do it. I ain’t some fairy who’s gonna chicken out at the last minute.”

“How ’bout you, Abe? You hot to trot?” Jake turned his attention to a grinning Abe Weinberg.

“Ready, ready, Teddy, to rock and roll.” Abe held up a six-inch sap. “I brought my pal, Elvis, along for the ride.” He dumped the sap in his coat pocket and dragged out his.45, the one he’d taken off an MP in 1944. “I don’t wanna mess up Little Richard doin’ balop-bam-boom on some pimp’s head.”

Jake, unable to keep a straight face, broke into a smile. He wanted to ruffle Abe’s hair the way you’d rub the head of a smartass kid, but he was afraid that he’d never get his hand back out. Abe was crazy into rock music-Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ricky Nelson and, of course, the King, Elvis Presley. To Jake, they looked like a bunch of greasy-haired punks, the kind that hung out on the corner and never went anywhere, but Abe worshiped them, even the niggers. He sang all day (except when Jake told him to shut up) and combed his long straight hair into a greasy four-inch pompadour. His favorite outfit was a black leather jacket, black denim trousers and black motorcycle boots. He would have been wearing them right now, if Jake hadn’t ordered him to put on an overcoat.

Izzy was Abe’s exact opposite in every respect but the most important one, his relationship with the law. Izzy was small and wiry, whereas Abe was tall and broad. Izzy’s beak was so big it almost covered his thin mouth and receding chin, while Abe looked like a damned Irishman. Tall and raw-boned, Abe’s tiny, upturned nose and the spray of freckles across his cheekbones were almost ridiculous on a man named Abe Weinberg.

“Look here, Abe, I want ya should calm yourself down a little bit,” Jake said.

“Ya know somethin, Daddy-O, you got a way of takin’ all the fun outta life. Like, don’t be cruel, okay?”

“Cut the crap, Abe. I don’t want them people unconscious before they tell us where the money’s hid. You don’t hit nobody. Ya wave that friggin’ forty-five and keep ya distance. Understand?”

Jake’s temper was legendary. Abe understood that. When Jake lost his temper, it stayed lost.

“Don’t be so nervous, Jake.” Abe’s voice was soft and soothing. “It’s gonna go all right.”

“It better.” He took a second to look into the eyes of both men. “C’mon, let’s get it over with.”

They made no effort to hide themselves as they crossed the street and approached the red door marking 800 Pitt Street. This was a lesson for the whole neighborhood, a lesson from the wops to any fool who believed he could operate independently. Not that there was anyone out on the street. The light rain was mixed with ice, now. It was more than enough to discourage the locals.

Jake knocked twice, paused, then knocked twice again. The door opened immediately and the trio stepped inside. The fat man standing in the hallway, Al O’Neill, began to back up as soon as he saw them.

“Where ya goin’, pal?” Jake asked, his.45 rising until it pointed directly at Al O’Neill’s mouth. “You got a hot date or somethin’?”

“What, what, what …”

“Where’s the bitch? She in the back?”

“You want a woman?”

“I’m talkin’ about your old lady,” Jake said. He stepped forward and jammed the barrel of his.45 into the fat man’s mouth. “Don’t fuck with me.”

O’Neill brought his hand to his mouth. Blood ran down along his fingers, soaking into the cuff of his shirt. “Don’t kill me,” he whispered. “Please, don’t kill me.”

“I want the bitch,” Jake repeated. “I want the bitch right now.”

“Please, please, please.”

“Shit.” Jake drove his foot into the fat man’s crotch. “I know the bitch is in here somewheres. Take us to her or I’ll blow ya friggin’ head off.”

Jake knew exactly where Betty O’Neill was, but now that he’d demanded obedience, he couldn’t very well back down. He cocked the.45 and the sharp click of the hammer settling into place had a sobering effect on the retching Al O’Neill. The fat man pushed himself to his feet and led Jake down a narrow hallway to a door at the rear of the building.

“It’s me,” he called, pushing his way inside.

The thin, almost haggard woman sitting behind the desk was every bit as shocked by the appearance of Jake, Izzy and Abe as her husband had been. Her reaction, on the other hand, was far different.

“You coward,” she screamed at her husband. “You just let the bastards in.”

“I didn’t,” Al protested. “They used the signal. If you weren’t so goddamned cheap, we woulda had a peephole and I wouldn’t have to let people in without knowin’ who they are.”

Betty O’Neill rose to her feet, her eyes riveted to her husband’s. “Ya coulda asked,” she screamed. “Ya coulda asked who it was.”

“What’re you, a moron?” Al was spitting pieces of white enamel each time he spoke, but he didn’t seem to notice. “You wanna ask guys comin’ to a whorehouse to shout their names out? If ya didn’t squeeze every nickel until it bleeds, you woulda listened to me and paid Accacio his vig.” He suddenly turned to Jake. “Look, I tried to make her pay up. I swear. But ya can’t make this bitch do nothin’.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Jake swung the.45 in a long arc, bringing the barrel down on the pimp’s bald skull. He put so much force into it that he was sure the.45 was bent and he made a mental note to check the automatic before he fired it again. The blow, he noted with satisfaction, had split Al’s forehead, from the hairline to the bridge of his nose. The flow of blood was astonishing.

“Where’s the money?” Jake asked calmly.

“You talkin’ to me?” Betty said. Despite everything, she was still defiant.

Jake nudged her unconscious husband with the toe of his shoe. There was no response. “Where’s the money?”

“What money?”

“Whatever you got. And it better be plenty.”

“It’s only nine o’clock. We’re just gettin’ started. I didn’t take in more than fifty bucks the whole night.”

“Izzy,” Jake said, “would you talk to the woman?”

Izzy nodded solemnly. He handed his.38 to Abe and moved behind the desk. Betty, her anger suddenly transformed, put her hands up defensively.

“Hey, look at this,” Izzy said, grabbing the woman’s left arm. “She’s a dope addict.”

Jake looked at the dark scars running up the woman’s arms and shook his head in disgust. Now it made sense. Betty O’Neill was putting Steppy Accacio’s piece of the pie in her arm. It was pretty amazing. Before the war ended, nobody Jake knew had even heard of heroin. Sure, there were hopheads around, but they were getting opium from the chinks or morphine from the crooked doctors. The heroin had started coming into New York with the returning G.I.’s. Now, it was everywhere and the profits were unbelievable, like Prohibition all over again. Convincing the wops to give him a piece of the dope action had become Jake’s major goal in life.

“See if ya could find her stash,” Jake said.

“Right.”

It didn’t take long. Most junkies couldn’t stand being more than a few feet from their scag and Betty O’Neill was no exception. Izzy pulled twenty bags of heroin out of the center desk drawer and held them up for Jake’s inspection.

“Take ’em in the toilet,” Jake instructed. “And flush ’em down.”

“No,” Betty said. “It’s not mine. I mean it’s not all mine. It’s for the girls, the ones that use.”

Cute, Jake thought. The O’Neills were dealin’ dope on the side. And not givin’ Steppy his piece. Jake took the heroin from Izzy and cradled it in his palm.

“What it is,” he said, “is that you should tell us where the money is if ya wanna keep your dope. And I’m talkin’ about all the money, not just what you got in the drawer. I want what you got under the floorboards. Or behind the wall. Or in the ceiling. Now, what you should consider is that I’m gonna find it anyway. If I can’t beat it outta you, I’ll wake up your old man and get it from him. Ya can’t protect the money, but ya could keep ya dope. I know you Irish got potatoes instead of brains between your ears, but I think even a spud-head, like yourself, could figure this one out.”

Jake was right. Betty O’Neill, after considering his proposition for a moment, crossed the room and pulled up a section of the floorboard to reveal a small pile of banded fives, tens and twenties. Jake estimated the take at close to six hundred dollars. He put the money into his pockets, filling his jacket and his overcoat, then nodded to Izzy.

“Do what ya gotta do,” he said.

Izzy, perhaps to impress his boss, approached the job enthusiastically. He used his fists and the leg of a chair instead of his.38, but the only drawback to this approach was that he had to hit Betty O’Neill thirty times to produce the desired effect. Each time he drove his fist into her ribs, he received two rewards: the sharp crack of splintering cartilage and Betty O’Neill’s equally sharp scream.

“He hits pretty hard for a little guy,” Jake observed.

“Gotta rip it up,” Abe sang, “gotta tear it up.”

Izzy kept at his work until Betty stopped screaming. Then he let her drop and all three men turned to leave. When they saw the small brown man standing in the doorway, they did a double-take worthy of the Three Stooges.

“Que pasa?” Luis Melenguez asked as the three men stared at him, wide-eyed. “Que pasa,” he repeated, as Abe Weinberg pulled Little Richard out of his coat pocket. “Que pasa, que pasa, que pasa,” as the hammer drew back and the automatic exploded and a.45 caliber slug blew the back of his head off.

“What’d ya do that for?” Jake asked, wondering if he should be angry or not. “It was just a friggin’ spic.”

“I hadda make my contribution, didn’t I?”

NYPD patrolman Stanley Moodrow sat before a full length mirror in the boys’ locker room of Robert Lehman High School and watched while his trainer, Sergeant Allen Epstein, wrapped his huge hands with a narrow strip of white gauze.

“Tighter, Sarge,” he hissed. “A little tighter.”

“You sure?” Epstein answered, dropping the gauze bandage to reach for a roll of white surgical tape.

“I gotta go six tonight. I don’t wanna hurt my hands in the first round.”

“You can’t hurt your hands punching air, Stanley. This guy’s fast.”

Moodrow tried to frown, but found himself grinning instead. Punching air? The phrase summed up his whole career. “Punching air” and “too damned big.” It was funny, in a way. The last fight of a boxer’s career wasn’t supposed to be held in a Brooklyn high school. And it wasn’t supposed to be the most important fight of that career. The last fight was supposed to come after a career filled with main events in Madison Square Garden, with championship belts held aloft, with popping flashbulbs and crowds of reporters.

Moodrow turned away from Epstein and curled his hands into fists. Satisfied, he studied himself in the mirror. Or, at least, he studied that portion of himself visible in the narrow glass. If he wanted to see the whole of his six foot six, 245-pound frame, he’d have to stand on the other side of the locker room. But he didn’t want to see his chest or his shoulders. Stanley Moodrow was looking into his own eyes, looking for any sign of indecision.

“Too damned big,” he thought. That’s what his first serious trainer, Sammy Turro, had told him. “You’re too damned big, Stanley. Ya stay in the fight game, ya gonna get your ass kicked.”

Moodrow had begun his fighting career in 1948, when he was fifteen years old. Most kids take up boxing because they’re afraid, but not Stanley Moodrow. He was always the biggest kid in his class, always a head taller than the tallest student. Maybe that was why, despite his good grades, he was cast as a dummy, a dope. The other kids made fun of him and he reacted, as kids will, by beating the crap out of them. That ended the teasing, but it hadn’t made him popular.

No, the end result of his schoolyard victories was that the losers, the hoods and the dummies, came to admire him, while the rest of the school left him entirely alone. Stanley Moodrow knew all about losers-growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was no way to avoid them-and he wanted no part of their lives. Lost in arrogance, they hung out on every street corner, sucking on bottles of beer, dreaming of easy scores and easier sex. Right up until the day a judge sent them up the river.

“These are bums, Stanley,” his father, Max, had explained again and again. “All of them. They don’t want to work, so they take what they need from the people. Better to be a dog than a bum. God willing, I’ll live long enough to spit on their graves.”

God, apparently, hadn’t been willing. Max Moodrow fell off a ladder at a Bronx construction site four days before his son’s fifteenth birthday and died on the way to the hospital.

But that didn’t end the lectures. Moodrow’s Uncle Pavlov took up the theme before his brother was in his grave. “I hear you’re fightin’ in school, Stanley,” he counseled. “It’s okay to be tough. Ya gotta be tough to survive down here. But don’t be stupid, all right? Don’t be a bum. Ya wanna fight, go in the ring where it’ll do ya some good.”

Uncle Pavlov, a ten-year veteran of the NYPD, just happened to be in charge of the P.A.L.’s Lower East Side boxing program. He also just happened to be smart enough to act surprised when his brother’s kid turned up a month later.

“Hey, Stanley, fancy meetin’ you here.”

“I thought I’d give it a shot, Uncle Pavlov. I mean boxing. I wanna try it out.”

Try it out? The truth was that fifteen-year-old Stanley Moodrow wanted to be a champion. Like every other kid who put on the gloves. And his first twenty fights did nothing to discourage him. It wasn’t just the power in his right hand. Stanley Moodrow, like all good fighters in the early stages of a career, simply refused to lose. He found a way to win, even when overmatched, to eat the pain and keep on coming. If his fists weren’t good enough, he beat his opponent into submission with the sheer force of his will. The pain-and there was plenty of pain-was a badge of honor.

“Ya mind’s not where it belongs, Stanley.”

“Huh?” Moodrow turned to his trainer. “What’d you say, Sarge?”

“The fight, schmuck. The one you’re gonna have tonight. Get your mind on the goddamned fight.”

Moodrow stood up and kicked the stool away. He set himself in front of the mirror and began to shadowbox with his reflection. Fights, he knew, don’t begin with the opening bell. They begin the day the match is made and progress through a number of stages. Training, first, then a layoff two days before the bout, then the weigh-in, the taping of the hands, the ritual of working up a sweat, the long walk to the ring, the introductions. You could lose your edge anywhere along the way. The will to win could be sucked out of you like a malted through a straw.

“I’m gonna take this guy tonight,” he said without stopping. “It’s six rounds, not three. I’m gonna catch him and take him out.”

The thing about it was that you could control a lot of things in your life, but you couldn’t control everything. You couldn’t control the fact that you were seventeen years old and six foot five inches tall and maybe you’d kicked the hell out of YMCA competition, but now you were in the Golden Gloves and your opponents were faster and more experienced. Very few kids are full-blown heavyweights at the tender age of seventeen.

Moodrow made it to the semi-finals, despite the fact that his opponents were all in their twenties, but that was the end of it. Bobby Brown was a three-time Golden Gloves national champion. Four inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than Moodrow, he used his speed to every advantage, darting in to throw four-punch combinations, then moving back and away before Moodrow could respond. The blood began to flow halfway through the second round and the referee stopped it fifteen seconds into the third. Moodrow, back in the dressing room, tried to make an excuse.

“It was a butt,” he told the doctor sewing his eyelid back together. “A butt,” he insisted to his trainer.

Sammy Turro was kind enough to wait until the doctor finished, until there were no witnesses, before he enlightened his fighter.

“Ya too big, Stanley. Too fuckin’ big. There ain’t no champions big as you. And don’t give me Jack Johnson, neither. Guys today are scientific. They know how to stay away. You get in against one of the good ones? Eddie Machen? Zora Folley? Cleveland Williams? I don’t care how hard ya work, they’re gonna use ya for a punching bag. Lotta guys big as you, guys with your heart, they go into boxing anyway. Fifteen years later they’re sparrin’ partners for two bucks a round. They hear bells whenever they close their eyes.”

“Sammy,” Moodrow insisted, “he butted me.”

“Yeah, well I didn’t see no butt, Stanley. But if he did put his head in your eye, you oughta send him a thank-you note. Another two minutes and he prob’ly would’a killed ya.”

Moodrow, eyes riveted to his reflection in the mirror, stopped throwing punches and assumed a defensive posture, fists alongside the jaw, elbows tight against the ribs. It was the “peek-a-boo” defense used by the current champion, Floyd Patterson, who should have been quick enough to do without it. For Moodrow, on the other hand, it amounted to an acceptance of punishment. He wasn’t fast enough to slip punches, to move out of harm’s way. He was going to have to take one to give one. Or take two. Or three. Or four.

“All right, Stanley, don’t overdo it. You’re supposed to warm up, not leave your fight in the dressing room.”

Moodrow ignored him. Allen Epstein didn’t know squat about the fine art of bringing a fighter to his peak on the night of a big bout. Epstein was in it for the same reason as Moodrow, though he wasn’t dumb enough actually to be the one in the ring.

Moodrow had never seen his desire to be a world champion as simple ambition until his third week at the Police Academy. He’d looked at the freshly scrubbed faces of the other recruits, then raised a finger to the still-pink scar on his brow. He knew things they didn’t know, things you learn by going into the ring and winning your first twenty fights. He knew, for instance, that he could have turned pro and worked himself into contention for a championship. Maybe he would never be a champion, but white boxing fans were always scouting the horizon for another Rocky Marciano, another Great White Hope. Hadn’t they taken a rank amateur like Pete Rademacher and bet him down to even money against Floyd Patterson? He, Moodrow, big as he was, could have played the part, maybe even gotten a title fight against a champion looking for an easy payday. Maybe, if he’d been real lucky …

The kids sitting alongside him didn’t understand any of it, the victories or the defeats. They couldn’t know what it felt like to give up the dream when you’d already come halfway. There were twenty-four thousand cops in the NYPD and twenty-one thousand were out there pounding a beat. Most of them would spend their entire careers on the street. Checking the backs of closed hardware stores. Directing traffic in the rain. Hoofing it from one call box to another. It would pay the rent, but it was a long way from heavyweight champion of the world.

Thank God for civil service exams. There was a way to move up in the job without the direct approval of the brass. You pass the sergeant’s exam, you’re a sergeant, the lieutenant’s exam, you’re a lieutenant, the captain’s exam, you’re a captain. That wasn’t the way Stanley Moodrow wanted to do it, but if Plan A failed, he’d go that route. Plan A was to be appointed to the detectives, to carry the Gold Shield, to spend his workdays in a suit instead of a uniform.

It was a nice dream, but there was no detective’s exam to take. Detectives were appointed by other detectives and, according to his Uncle Pavlov, there was more politics in that Gold Shield than in the rest of the Department put together. In order even to be considered for the detectives, you had to catch the attention of someone already in the detectives. Which was almost impossible, because beat cops rarely came into contact with the suits. Meanwhile, there were dozens of cops out there whose fathers, brothers and uncles already carried the Gold Shield.

“If you wanna get the attention of the suits,” Uncle Pavlov explained, “the best way to do it is by making a big collar. The kind that gets your name in the papers. But you have to be careful not to step on any toes. The rule is that detectives detect and patrolmen patrol. If you stumble onto a robbery in progress and blow the scum away, you’re a hero. If you follow a burglar for a month, waiting to catch him inside a warehouse, you’re a hotdog.”

“I understand, Uncle Pavlov,” Moodrow replied. “But what I’m hearing is that I’m never gonna get an appointment unless I get lucky. You should pardon me when I tell you that I don’t see myself as a lucky guy.”

Pavlov Moodrow tapped his nephew on the forehead. “Then why don’t you be a smart guy, Stanley. You got good grades all the way through high school. You didn’t fall down, even when your father passed over. Do yourself a favor, go up to City College and take some classes. Study for the sergeant’s exam in your spare time. If the detectives call you up, that’s great, but if they don’t, you got something to fall back on. And there’s no luck involved in it.”

Moodrow took the advice to heart. Twice a week, in addition to his duties as a beat cop on the Lower East Side, he rode the subway up to City College and sat through a boring lecture. He managed to accumulate eighteen credits in three years, a long way from the hundred and thirty he needed to graduate. But graduation wasn’t the point. The point was to make his ambition known and to memorize the Patrol Guide.

He’d been given his copy of the Patrol Guide on the day he entered the Academy. All six hundred looseleaf pages of it. The Patrol Guide was supposed to provide a step-by-step procedural guide to every situation ever encountered by any cop anywhere. Most patrolmen, on the advice of the older cops who shepherded them through their first months on the job, dumped the Patrol Guide in a closet and learned the shortcuts offered by the veterans. Stanley Moodrow, on the other hand, took sections of the Guide to work with him, studying the mechanics (and the paperwork) of police procedure. The sergeant’s exam was based almost entirely on the Patrol Guide.

Moodrow, his career on course, was just finishing his third year on the job when Sergeant Allen Epstein, newly transferred from Midtown North, found him on the corner of Clinton and Houston Streets.

“Patrolman Moodrow?”

“What’s up, Sarge?”

“Get in for a minute. I wanna talk to you.”

The minute turned into twenty as Epstein explained that he knew all about Moodrow’s amateur boxing career. He pronounced that career glorious, then went on to proclaim the glories of the Manhattan South Police Boxing Club, which, under his expert guidance, would become the finest in the Department.

Moodrow listened politely-Epstein was, after all, a sergeant-but he had less than no interest in the glory derived from beating some cop into submission. Glory was a world title, not a sweaty dance in a high school gym.

“The thing about it,” Moodrow explained, “is that I’m taking classes uptown and I’m studying for the sergeant’s exam. I don’t have the time to train.”

“How much time does it take? We’re not talking about the pros here. These guys are all in the same boat as you.”

Moodrow, hoping to end the discussion, had looked Epstein in the eye. “You go into the ring unprepared, you’re gonna lose. And you’re gonna get hurt. I don’t need that in my life. What’s the point? To prove that I’m tough? I already know I’m tough. Take a look at this.” He’d waved section fifteen of the Patrol Guide in Epstein’s face. “The only thing I’m interested in proving is that I can pass the sergeant’s exam.”

“You won’t be eligible to take the sergeant’s exam for two years. What’s the rush?”

“I wanna be ready when the time comes.”

And that, as far as Stanley Moodrow was concerned, should have been that. But a week later, Epstein was back.

“I see you’re an ambitious cop,” Epstein argued. “You wanna move up in the job. I didn’t know this last week, but I know it now. Ambition is fine with me. I understand it because I also wanna move up in the job. So, lemme ask you one question. You answer it right and I won’t bother you again. The Manhattan South boxing squad competes against other police squads and usually we get a crowd of around three hundred. Who do you think comes to watch?”

“It’s gotta be other cops, right?”

“Yeah, but what kind of cops?”

“Maybe you could just tell me what’s on your mind, Sarge. I’m supposed to report in five minutes.”

“The cops who come to the regular matches aren’t on foot patrol. Foot patrolmen are mostly young. They’ve got families to raise. It’s the older cops who show up. Lieutenants, captains, deputy inspectors. These are cops who can help you, Stanley. Who can put you into squads where you’ll make decent collars. The goddamned chief of detectives is a boxing maniac. The …”

“The chief of detectives?”

“That’s right. Matthew Halloran, himself. He fought in the amateurs twenty-five years ago. Now, he gets his kicks watching cops beat the hell out of each other. You want a gold shield, Stanley? That what you’re lookin’ for?”

“I wouldn’t complain,” Moodrow admitted.

“If you fight and win, especially when we’re up against squads from the firemen or sanitation, the chief of all the detectives in New York City will come to the locker room and shake your hand. My squad’s fighting in Brooklyn next Tuesday. Come and see for yourself.”

Moodrow did go to see for himself and while the chief of detectives was nowhere to be found, Moodrow recognized several dicks from his home precinct, the 7th. The captain of the 7th was there too, screaming for blood or victory, whichever came first.

The essential message was obvious-even if there was no glory, no thrill of victory for Stanley Moodrow, that didn’t mean there was no glory for the spectators. They reacted like they were at Yankee Stadium instead of Saint Regis High School.

Three days later, Moodrow began to train. A month later, he had his first fight and his first victory under his belt. It’d never been easier. His opponents were more concerned with attitude than winning. They stood toe to toe and slugged it out, even when they were conceding fifty pounds and a ten-inch reach advantage. They really didn’t have any choice. The few who tried to keep away from him, to dance and jab their way to victory, were booed and jeered at by their own partisans. And the judges hadn’t looked on their efforts any more kindly than the crowd.

The victories continued to come, one after another, for more than a year. And Moodrow had his sore right hand pumped by dozens of ranking officers, including an Irish inspector named Patrick Cohan with an unmarried daughter named Kathleen. Cohan, without ever saying it, became Stanley Moodrow’s rabbi, bringing him to parties and functions, bragging about his exploits, encouraging his courtship of “my darlin’ Kathleen.”

“I would’ve preferred an Irishman,” Patrick Cohan had explained when Moodrow came to him for permission to ask Kathleen out, “but you’re tough, smart and ambitious. Lord knows, there’s no lack of tough, ambitious cops. It’s the smart ones who’re hard to find. So full speed ahead, boyo. Make her happy, if you can. Make her happy, but keep your hands to yourself. I want my daughter to come to the altar in a white gown, as pure as the day she made her first Holy Communion.”

Moodrow didn’t bother to look around when the door to his dressing room opened and Sergeant Peretti, Allen Epstein’s assistant, announced, “Five minutes, Stanley. The light-heavies are outta the ring,” but he felt his gut begin to knot up. It wasn’t the importance of this particular tournament that bothered him. It was the caliber of his opponent.

Liam O’Grady was quick, smart, Irish and a lieutenant in the New York City Fire Department. He’d mastered a strategy available to few fighters, amateur or professional-the art of hammering his opponent while moving away. On the face of it, O’Grady’s technique defied the laws of physics. A fighter had to be moving forward, to get his whole body into the punch, if he wanted to hit with power. But rules were made to be broken and Liam O’Grady had broken all of them (along with Stanley Moodrow’s nose) a year before. O’Grady had danced around the ring like a giant Sugar Ray Robinson, while Moodrow, a clumsy Jake La Motta, lumbered after him, punching air.

There were differences, of course. Sugar Ray Robinson was a consummate professional. He could stay on his bicycle for fifteen rounds and still be throwing punches at the end. O’Grady, on the other hand, was only a gifted amateur. He could stick and move for three rounds, not fifteen. And this fight wasn’t going three rounds. In deference to its importance, the bout, like every fight in this all-star tournament, had been scheduled for six. And the fighters were to wear eight-ounce gloves instead of the customary ten. Most important of all, the referees had been instructed not to stop a fight unless a fighter was out on his feet.

“You ready, Stanley?”

“Huh?”

Epstein frowned. “You’re not focused, Stanley. You’re not here.”

“Then where am I, Sarge?” Moodrow began to put on his robe. He was smiling.

“You tell me?”

“What are they callin’ this tournament? The First Annual Inter-Service Boxing Championships? The Golden Gloves and the Olympics all wrapped up in one?”

“So what, Stanley? This isn’t the first time you’ve gone up against a fireman. You’ve gotta see it as just another fight. Stop putting pressure on yourself.”

“Who’s here tonight, Sarge? Who’s out there screaming for blood?”

“This ain’t helping you.”

“The commissioner’s sitting ten feet away from the ring. The chief of detectives is right next to him. There are city councilmen out there, the borough president, a deputy mayor. If I win, I’m a hero. If I lose, I’m a bum. My daddy always told me not to be a bum. He told me bums were the lowest form of life on the face of the earth.”

Epstein draped a towel around his fighter’s neck. “I could never tell you anything,” he said. “You think you know it all.”

“You could never tell me anything, because you don’t know anything. Not about fighting. Let’s go.”

As they stepped into the narrow corridor connecting the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms with the gymnasium, the crowd in the tightly packed gym sent up a roar.

“O’Grady’s in the ring,” Epstein observed. “Now, it’s your turn.”

As if on cue, the crowd began a chant that was close to a moan. “Moooooooo-Drow, Moooooooo-Drow, Moooooooo-Drow.”

“Your fans await you.” Epstein’s smile was closer to a grimace.

“You trying to say the vampires are hungry, Sarge? That’s all that’s happening. The vampires need to be fed. My blood or someone else’s. It’s all the same to them.”

Epstein started to answer, but Moodrow turned away and marched into the gym. The room was packed, firemen on one side, cops on the other. Moodrow walked between them without turning his head, stepping up onto the ring apron and ducking between the ropes with practiced grace. Once inside, he raised his arms in premature triumph. The crowd went wild, stomping, whistling, cheering. He wondered if they even knew that Liam O’Grady had kicked his butt a year ago? Or cared, for that matter.

“Siddown, Stanley, lemme get the gloves on.”

Moodrow dropped to the stool and extended his left hand. His head swiveled until he was staring directly across the ring at a smiling Liam O’Grady. Though he would have liked to return the smile, to meet arrogance with arrogance, he dropped his eyes to the canvas. If O’Grady wanted to think it was going to be easy, Moodrow had no objection.

“Whatta ya say, Stanley?” Ed Spinelli was a deputy supervisor in sanitation by day and a referee by night. He’d been chosen for his experience and his neutrality. “Lemme see the gloves.”

Moodrow, without bothering to reply, held both gloves out for Spinelli’s inspection. It was going to be a long night for the little referee, though he didn’t know it. At a hundred and sixty pounds, Spinelli was too small to control a pair of determined heavyweights. He’d need the fighters’ cooperation and he wasn’t going to get it.

His gloves laced and inspected, Moodrow got up and began to move around the ring. O’Grady did the same. Both men were sweating profusely and neither wanted to cool off before the opening bell. Inevitably, they passed each other in the center of the squared circle.

“Do yourself a favor, flatfoot,” O’Grady snarled. “Fall down early.”

Moodrow let his eyes flick up to meet O’Grady’s, then jerked them away. There were no scars over the fireman’s eyes and his nose was as straight as a ruler. That was going to change. Liam O’Grady, the Fighting Fireman, might come out of this fight a winner, but he wasn’t going to come out unmarked.

“Go back to your corners,” Spinelli ordered. “They’re gonna do the intros.”

Deputy Mayor Gold was short and forty pounds overweight. Even with a cop and a fireman to hold the ropes apart, he had trouble getting into the ring. The crowd jeered, then broke into laughter. Moodrow heard none of it. He’d never been more focused in his life, never more determined. The Gold Shield was riding on the end of his right hand. Once he had it, he’d never again fight for someone else’s amusement. He’d never hit or be hit, never taste the blood running from his nose or be sprayed as he drove his fist into a cut on his opponent’s face. The glory he’d once reached for had died a second death at his mother’s graveside, two years before. He’d gotten through his mother’s death by deciding not to break down, by telling himself to “do what you have to do.” He’d been living by that rule ever since.

“In the red corner, at two hundred and eight pounds, the Fightin’ Fireman, ‘Irish’ Liam O’Grady.” Deputy Mayor Gold, drenched with sweat, waited for the roar to die away before he continued. “And in the blue corner, at two hundred and forty-seven pounds, New York’s Fightin’ Finest, Stan ‘The Man’ Moodrow.”

The referee motioned both fighters to the center of the ring and began to recite a set of instructions he’d already given in the dressing rooms. “All right, boys,” he concluded, “touch gloves and let’s have a clean fight.”

It was supposed to be a gesture of sportsmanship, but that first contact, just the touch of leather on leather, coursed through Moodrow’s body like a match tossed into a pool of gasoline. Now it was out in the open. It was war. You had to fight to survive.

When the bell rang, Moodrow moved to the center of the ring as if staking out a claim. O’Grady came out to meet him, then began to circle. Moodrow advanced at an angle, cutting the circle, and O’Grady reversed direction, then suddenly closed, throwing a quick combination before bouncing away. Moodrow took the punches, catching three out of four on his arms. The last one slammed into the narrow space between his left elbow and the top of his trunks.

Moodrow was aware of being hit, but he felt no pain. Tomorrow, he’d have trouble getting out of bed; tonight, he had a job to do. He continued to advance, forcing O’Grady back toward the ropes, throwing an occasional jab at his opponent’s dancing head, punching air.

O’Grady gave ground willingly, just as he had in their first fight. Sooner or later his back would be against the ropes and both fighters knew it. Meanwhile, he continued to inflict damage, snapping jabs between Moodrow’s gloves, following with short, vicious rights to the body, slipping Moodrow’s clumsy attempts to counter.

It took Moodrow more than two minutes to force O’Grady into a corner, to render his opponent momentarily stationary. He absorbed a lot of punishment in the process, but found no reward at the end of the road. Before he could take advantage of his power, before he could throw a single punch, O’Grady ducked between his arms and grabbed Moodrow’s huge chest. Now it was perfect. They’d come full circle, repeating every element of their first fight.

“New game,” Moodrow whispered to O’Grady as Spinelli tried to pull the two fighters apart. He wrapped his left glove around the back of O’Grady’s neck, pulling him forward and down, then jammed the point of his right elbow into the soft spot just behind O’Grady’s collarbone. O’Grady tried to jerk away, but Moodrow, much the stronger, held him close.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Spinelli shouted. “No holding, Moodrow. Don’t grab him.”

Moodrow let the ref tug on his arm for another few seconds before releasing his opponent. Grinning, he waited for O’Grady to move back to the center of the ring, then began to advance. For the first time, he allowed himself to look directly into O’Grady’s eyes. He was hoping to find doubt, but he settled for anger. If O’Grady lost his cool and stood toe-to-toe, it would be a very short fight.

Moodrow moved a little faster this time, ignoring the jabs, not even trying to counter. O’Grady was staying closer, waiting for an opportunity to throw his best punch. He found it with fifteen seconds left in the round, a whistling right that slammed into Moodrow’s forehead. Moodrow ignored the blow, didn’t, in fact, even feel it. He pressed forward until O’Grady’s back was against the ropes, then threw his own right. O’Grady’s head moved slightly, avoiding Moodrow’s fist, but not the forearm that followed. It smashed into the side of his skull, driving him sideways along the ropes.

Moodrow grabbed O’Grady behind the neck before he could escape and the fireman instinctively tried to pull away, lifting his body erect, opening his ribs to the right hand. The bell rang an instant before Moodrow could react to the opportunity, but that didn’t stop him. He drove his fist into O’Grady’s chest, then turned and walked back to his corner.

“You’re cut, Stanley,” Epstein said.

“Bad?” Moodrow suddenly became aware of the drops running along the outside of his right eye.

“Not yet.” Epstein took the edges of the cut between his fingers, squeezing them tightly together. He held the cut closed until the bleeding stopped, then filled the gash with a thick coagulant. “You could use a real cut man for this one. If he keeps tagging you with the jab, it’s gonna get messy.”

“Don’t worry about it, Sarge. They’re not gonna stop this one for blood.” He glanced across the ring, but O’Grady’s handlers had him surrounded.

“Look here, Stanley.” The referee’s face swam into view. “I want you to stop the bullshit. Right now. Stop grabbin’ him. Stop the elbows. I’ll disqualify you.”

“The crowd’ll love that,” Moodrow grunted. The truth was they’d probably tear Spinelli to pieces and Spinelli knew it. O’Grady was on his own.

The second round, in direct contrast to the first, was slow and dull. O’Grady got on his bicycle, staying far enough away from Moodrow to spin out before his back was against the ropes. The strategy was effective in that it prevented him from being trapped, but the distance was too great for any meaningful offense. O’Grady looked like a scared fighter and the few jabs he managed to land did nothing to change that impression. By the time the bell rang to end the round, the crowd, including a few of the firemen, was booing.

In the third round, O’Grady again reversed strategy, staying close to Moodrow, as he had in the first. Moodrow wasn’t surprised. Irish fighters were expected to be especially courageous. O’Grady would have to return to the firehouse as soon as his injuries, should he suffer injuries, healed up. He couldn’t very well go back to his buddies if he came out of this fight labeled a coward.

Moodrow led with a hard, straight right. It missed, but not by much. O’Grady didn’t bother to counter. He came inside and banged his forehead into Moodrow’s nose. Moodrow heard the cartilage in his nose snap, but he had no sense that it was his own flesh being torn. It was more like someone in another room had broken a pencil. O’Grady, aided by the referee, tried to pull back, but Moodrow held him long enough to put his glove on the fireman’s cheek and rub the laces across his face.

O’Grady managed to jerk away and the referee, incensed, stepped between the two fighters before Moodrow could take up the pursuit. “I’m takin’ a point,” he shouted. “Y’understand? I’m takin’ a point for that.”

Spinelli signalled his decision by turning to each of the three judges and raising his index finger. The cops in the audience sent up a howl. They’d been fairly quiet before, not sure how to react to Moodrow’s tactics. Now they were screaming for O’Grady’s (and Spinelli’s) blood.

The bell rang a few seconds later and this time O’Grady didn’t wait to be hit. He bounced away like a puppet on the end of a string. Moodrow, standing in the center of the ring, turned to the crowd, spread his arms in a gesture of wonder, then minced back to his corner. The cops roared with laughter.

“How’s the eye?”

“Forget the eye,” Epstein nearly shouted. He pressed a hot-water bottle filled with shaved ice against his fighter’s nose, trying to spread the swelling out over Moodrow’s face. “Your nose is broken. I think it might be split.”

“I know. I can taste the blood. It’s kind of salty. Maybe we oughta save it and pour it over a hard-boiled egg.”

“You’re a funny guy, Stanley. But this ain’t The Milton Berle Show.”

“The fight’s over, Sarge,” Moodrow replied calmly. “He’s mine.”

“This I already know.”

O’Grady began the fourth round with a five-punch combination that stopped Moodrow in his tracks. Instinctively, Moodrow grabbed O’Grady and pulled him close. Spinelli, still furious, yanked at Moodrow’s left arm, tugging it back far enough to allow O’Grady to drive his right fist into Moodrow’s ribs.

Stunned at the turn of events, Spinelli let Moodrow’s arm go and started to say something to O’Grady. He wasn’t fast enough to get his message across. Moodrow grabbed O’Grady’s face with his left hand and stuck the thumb of his glove into O’Grady’s eye. Once again, O’Grady tried to pull away, but this time Moodrow’s follow-up right caught the top of the fireman’s head.

O’Grady responded by coming directly at Moodrow for the first time. And Moodrow, for the first time, began to give ground. He took a step backward, then another, then another, then set himself and put every ounce of his 247 pounds into a short left hook. O’Grady ran directly into the punch. It stopped him in his tracks, paralyzed him just long enough for the following right hand to catch him flush on the jaw. He trembled for a moment, like a sapling hit with a sledgehammer, then his body went limp and he dropped to the canvas. Moodrow, looking for any sign of consciousness, knew the fight was over when he distinctly heard the crunch of his opponent’s skull smashing into the floor of the ring.

“Jesus, Stanley. Jesus Christ.” Epstein ran to the center of the ring and tried to remove his fighter’s mouthpiece.

Moodrow, his arms raised in triumph, ignored his trainer. He walked over to the ropes and saluted the assembled brass. The cheering continued for several minutes, then finally died away. Moodrow dropped his arms, weary for the first time. The pain was coming. He could feel it in his nose and ribs, only a dull ache now, but soon it would overwhelm him. Still, he wanted to drag it out as long as possible, to imprint his victory in the minds of every cop in the crowd.

“Go shake your opponent’s hand, Stanley.”

“What?” Moodrow looked down at his trainer as if surprised to find him there.

“Go shake his fucking hand. Tell him it was a great fight. Tell him anything, but don’t leave him sitting there.”

“You’re right,” Moodrow admitted. “I forgot.”

O’Grady’s handlers had him up and sitting on his stool when Moodrow approached. The fireman stared at the bloody apparition kneeling in front of him for a moment, then nodded his head. “You fought hard, Stanley,” he said. “You deserve it. But I want a rematch. One more fight to settle the issue.”

“Sorry, pal,” Moodrow replied evenly, “but you’re gonna have to learn to live with this one. I’m retired.”

Patrick Francis Matthew Cohan lingered in the bedroom of his ten-room Bayside home, despite the fact that most of his guests had already arrived. He knew his guests were out there, having met each of them at the door. He also knew about the gusty winds blowing through the borough of Queens. Those winds had greeted him each time he opened the door and now he was thoroughly absorbed in the task of patting rebellious strands of feathery white hair back into place.

Pat Cohan was always careful with his hair because he wore it long, despite the current fashion. There was no rebellion involved in the style he preferred. (Patrick Cohan was, after all, a full inspector in the NYPD, not some Greenwich Village beatnik.) It was just that a tall, broadly built, fifty-nine-year-old Irishman with a thick head of silvery hair couldn’t, on pain of being declared a Protestant, wear that hair in a two-inch brush cut.

Pat Cohan thought of his hair as “the mane,” called it that as he worked each strand into place. “Guess it’s time to tame the mane.” His daughter, Kathleen, liked to tease him about the amount of time he spent in front of the mirror. Pat didn’t particularly like to be teased-he only took it from “my darlin’ Kathleen”-but he also knew it was important that his hair always be neatly combed. Short hair, in 1958, was a badge of patriotism, the physical equivalent of a loyalty oath.

Satisfied that every hair was firmly in place, Pat Cohan drew himself up to his full height and measured the result of his efforts. His “mane” floated above a large skull, just as it was supposed to. It framed his broad brow, strong assertive jaw and blue, blue eyes. He liked to describe those eyes (to himself, at least) as the color of an Irish lake under a cloudless sky.

Of course, there were the negatives. (There were bound to be negatives when you were on the wrong side of fifty and tied to a desk.) His once-flat belly had gone the way of his colleagues’ hair. And Pat Cohan had jowls, too, and the florid complexion and small broken veins of the habitual drinker. Not that he was a drunk, by any means. Alcohol was the curse of the Irish and every Irishman knew it. But the functions he was expected to attend as an NYPD inspector often required him to stand in a little circle of politicians with a drink in his hand. There were only forty-two inspectors in the 24,000-man NYPD and they spent as much time on the politics of the job as they did on policing the City of New York.

But not tonight. Tonight was special. This was a ‘friends only’ occasion and Pat Cohan’s definition of the word ‘friend’ excluded all politicians. As far as Pat Cohan was concerned, politicians, with their addiction to public opinion, were only one step above the journalists who created that opinion.

“Not bad, Pat,” he said to himself, pulling his vest down over his belly. He was wearing a black three-piece suit cut from the finest Irish broadcloth and tailored by a Lithuanian from the Yorkville section of Manhattan. The black suit was his trademark and, offset by a starched white shirt and a blue tie that matched his eyes, it made him instantly recognizable, even from a distance, whenever he was out of uniform.

Pat Cohan was just about to return to his guests when someone knocked softly on the closed bedroom door. The door opened before he had a chance to offer an invitation and Detective Lieutenant Salvatore Patero entered. Patero, Cohan noted, was wearing his customary white, two-button cardigan, a duplicate of the cardigans Bing Crosby wore on the golf course. Pat Cohan, who’d seen many similar sweaters on Salvatore Patero’s back, felt that putting a guinea into the Crooner’s cardigan was like putting the vestments of a Cardinal on a gibbering ape.

“Salvatore, my boy,” Pat Cohan said quietly, “it’s not polite to barge into another man’s bedroom.”

Patero’s thick, dark eyebrows shot up in wonder. The gesture was habitual and every bit as conscious as Pat Cohan’s hearty Irish handshake. “I knocked, didn’t I? I mean, your wife’s in the other room, Pat.”

Cohan sighed and let the matter drop. The guineas were coming into the Department in larger and larger numbers. You had to make a place for them, but that didn’t mean they were civilized. Civility would take another generation to master. At least.

“Let’s hear the news, boyo. And would you try to make it good news. We’re celebratin’ my daughter’s engagement tonight.”

Everything about Salvatore Patero was sharp, from his chin to his chiseled Roman nose to his wiry hair. Even his slim, muscular body was all knees and elbows. Patero didn’t particularly like cops. He didn’t like being a cop, but “like” just wasn’t part of the deal for kids from large families. Not when it came to choosing a profession. Patero had first gone out to work when he was eleven years old, carrying milk, eggs and butter from a horse-drawn cart to the doorsteps of Brooklyn housewives. He certainly liked being a cop better than that.

“I spoke to Accacio. I told him exactly what you said.”

“Which was what, Sal?”

Patero held his temper. Maybe, one glorious day in the future, the pompous Irish assholes who ruled the Department would be driven out, but he’d be long retired before it happened. “I told him how unhappy the Department was about what happened at the whorehouse. I told him I didn’t know if we should protect a guy who can’t take care of his own business, who hires amateurs instead of professionals. I told him it’s not nineteen twenty-five anymore. Civilians ain’t supposed to get hurt, much less dead. You got a problem, put it in a Jersey swamp where it belongs.”

“I’ll bet he loved hearing that.”

“He didn’t react much. I mean he didn’t seem frightened or anything. He told me the thing at the O’Neills’ was an accident. He said if there was any heat coming down, he’d cut off the links between his people and the event.”

“The lad is takin’ steps to protect himself,” Cohan interrupted. “How nice. Does he think we’re worried about him?”

Patero threw his palms up in the air and shrugged his shoulders. “What could I say, Pat? It’s the practical thing to do. I mean, I know you can handle your end, but there’s pressure comin’ down from the precinct.”

“From exactly who in the precinct? I’ve already spoken to the captain and he assured me …”

“We’re talkin’ about a homicide, Pat, not about gambling and whores. It’s not a thing a detective can ignore.”

“Be serious, boyo. Dead Puerto Ricans are as expendable as you guineas were forty years ago. Tell our friend Accacio that he needn’t fear the Seventh Precinct. He should be afraid of me.”

“That’s what I told him.” Patero absorbed the remark about “you guineas.” It was the price he had to pay and he knew it. “Look, Pat, I just wanna go on the record about this. We’re not doing the right thing, here. I’m not saying we should go out and bust Steppy Accacio. But I am saying we should let the investigation take its course. It was a homicide.”

“You finished, Sal?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Now, I want to speak to you about my prospective son-in-law.”

“Stan ‘The Man’ Moodrow? The hero?” Patero laughed softly, covering his mouth with his hand.

“Shut up, Sal.” Pat Cohan’s voice demanded obedience. He waited until he got it, before continuing. “If you think what he did was nothing, boyo, you could always arrange to get in the ring with him. Maybe you could teach him a lesson.”

Patero’s face reddened. Like most cops, he didn’t react well to having his courage challenged, but he couldn’t very well punch the shit out of Pat Cohan, he being a lousy detective and Patrick Cohan a full inspector. Besides, Pat Cohan wasn’t that far off the mark. Salvatore Patero would sooner have been assigned to the Bomb Squad than get in the ring with Stanley Moodrow.

“Don’t take it the wrong way, Pat. I know Stanley’s got the balls of an elephant. Besides, I like the kid.”

“That’s good to hear, boyo, because you’ll be seein’ a lot of him. Stanley’s gettin’ his gold shield tonight, though for the life of me, I can’t see why he wants it.” Pat Cohan had nothing but contempt for the “elite” Detective Division. They strutted through the precincts in their suits and overcoats like roosters in a barnyard, but they rarely had two dimes to rub together. You couldn’t blame young cops for being drawn to the Gold Shield, but the truth was that there was no money to be made from assignments to the Missing Persons Bureau or the Photographic Unit or the Crime Laboratory. The only potential money maker in the Detective Division was the Narcotics Bureau. Fifteen years earlier, when Pat Cohan was a mere precinct captain, heroin had been a minor part of the crime pantheon. Now, it was the scourge of the city.

“What I want you to do, Sal,” he continued, “is show him the ropes. I want you to take him around with you.”

“Look, Pat, I don’t give out assignments …”

“He’ll be assigned to you. It’s already taken care of.”

Patero shook his head. “You’re makin’ a mistake here. You oughta put the kid in a decent squad and let him work his way up. The way you wanna do it, he’s gonna be the most unpopular suit in the precinct.”

“Stanley Moodrow’s going to marry my daughter. I don’t want him takin’ her back to some Lower East Side tenement after the honeymoon.” Pat Cohan’s voice was devoid of any Irish charm. “Darlin’ Kathleen” was his only child. His only surviving child. His son, Peter, had been lost in the waters off Omaha Beach. They hadn’t even found his body.

“All right, Pat, I catch your drift. But I got my doubts that you’ll get what you’re after. The kid wants to be a detective. He wants to solve crimes, make arrests. It’s only natural.”

Pat Cohan thought it over for a minute. There was more than a little truth in Patero’s argument. Stanley Moodrow was naive.

“Boyo,” Cohan said, “you may be right, but the thing of it is that I’ve got a little problem. Stanley’s tough as nails. He’s also smart and ambitious, and I suppose that’s all to the good. But he doesn’t know anything about how the Department operates. I want him to find out before he marries my daughter.”

Stanley Moodrow stood in the center of Pat Cohan’s living room, his left arm draped about the shoulders of his fiancee, Kathleen, and recited the details of his recent victory to several newly arrived guests. It was the fifth re-telling of the evening, but there was no way he could get out of it. The guests were all cops and they all outranked him.

“Were you trying to get him to come after you? Was that a plan or a lucky break?” The cop standing in front of him (Moodrow couldn’t remember his name or his rank) was middle-aged and stubby. As he spoke, he pulled on the thoroughly chewed end of a long cigar, sending clouds of smoke into the champion’s face.

What Moodrow wanted, more than anything else, was to sit down. No, lie down. His upper body ached, every inch of it, from his neck to his waist. His right shoulder spit fire whenever he lifted it to shake another hand.

“I had to make him come to me,” Moodrow said. “I knew I couldn’t catch him.”

What he knew was that he looked like one of the gargoyles on St. Patrick’s Cathedral. X rays had shown that his nose wasn’t as badly broken as he and Epstein had thought, but it was definitely broken. The doctor in the Bellevue Hospital emergency room had fitted his nose with a V-shaped metal plate, then covered the plate and half of Moodrow’s face with white surgical tape.

But the doctor hadn’t bothered to cover the eleven stitches he’d put in his patient’s eyebrow. They stood out like insects, like ants, and drew even more attention to the swelling around Moodrow’s eye. The bruise hadn’t begun to darken yet. It was still red and puffy, but within a few days it would turn black, then green, then yellow. It wouldn’t disappear for a week.

Moodrow’s three inquisitors, the ritual of congratulations now complete, turned tail and headed for the bar. Moodrow watched them with contempt. How was it possible that what he did in the ring somehow made them better? It was funny how they were perfectly willing to share in the victory, but they couldn’t feel any of the pain. They could raise their shoulders without a twinge and they did so eagerly, glasses of Irish whiskey clutched in their hands.

“How ya doin’, Stanley?” Kathleen Cohan’s arm encircled his waist and squeezed. The gesture was meant to be affectionate, but the sharp protest from his bruised ribs made it seem more like atrocious assault.

“Easy, Kate. My ribs are killing me. You got any aspirin?” He looked down at her upturned face and smiled. She was so perfectly, wonderfully Irish, with her pug nose and blue eyes and the spray of freckles high on each cheek. He could never quite accept the fact that she loved him. Especially since she hated violence. He’d managed to get the attention of half the Department with his fists, but what in the world had gotten her attention?

“Sure, I’ll get you some,” she said, but before she could move away, her father entered the room and approached the two of them.

“You okay, boyo?” he said to Moodrow.

“I’d like to make it a short night, if you don’t mind, Pat. My face feels like a water balloon.”

“I understand,” he replied shortly. Moodrow’s air of independence irritated Pat Cohan. It wasn’t that Moodrow didn’t want to show the proper attitude. He just didn’t know how. “I’ll make the announcements right away.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned to his guests. “Your attention, ladies and gentlemen. Your attention, if you please. I’ve two important announcements to make.” He paused while the assembled cops and cops’ wives moved closer. “The first thing I have to say is that Patrolman Stanley Moodrow is a patrolman no more.” He held up a thin leather billfold, hesitated for a moment, then let it drop open to reveal the coveted gold shield. “He is now to be called Detective, Third Grade, Stanley Moodrow.” Cohan handed the billfold to Moodrow. “My heartiest congratulations.” He grabbed Moodrow’s sore right hand and gave it his Irish best. “If ever a man deserved his reward, it’s you, boyo.”

The guests, on cue, broke into light applause. Pat Cohan held up his hands, palms out, and the applause stopped. “I don’t want to belittle Stanley’s victory the other night, but …” He wrapped his arm around his daughter’s waist and pulled her close. “But long after Stanley Moodrow’s pugilistic skills have evaporated, long after his triumph is forgotten, he’ll still be savoring the fruits of his second victory which I announce here tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, my good friends, and, you, too, Salvatore.” He paused again, waiting for the laughter to fade. “As of this night, Detective Stanley Moodrow and my darlin’ Kathleen, my one true treasure, are engaged to be married. May their union be long and healthy. And may they not wait too long to give me a grandson.”

Pat Cohan raised his glass on high. Thirty other glasses rose to meet it. “Hurrah,” Pat shouted. “Hurrah,” they answered.

“ ‘Ah, my darlin’ Kathleen,’ ” Moodrow imitated. “ ‘My one true treasure.’ ”

“Stop it, Stanley.” Kathleen Cohan somehow managed to shake her head in disapproval and giggle at the same time. She loved her daddy with all her heart, but sometimes he was pompous. Kathleen was twenty-two years old, too old to be called ‘my darlin’ Kathleen,’ but Daddy was Daddy and no one told Pat Cohan what to call his own daughter.

They were standing in a small closed porch. The front door was open behind them and they could hear the buzz of conversation from inside the house.

“And why would ya be so hard on me, girlo, when I’m only after larnin’ the ways of the Department?”

“He doesn’t talk like that.” Now she was laughing out loud. “Stanley, you’re terrible.”

Kathleen Cohan, educated by the nuns and priests from kindergarten through college, had been a good girl all her life. Upon graduation from St. Mary’s College, she’d chosen to teach at Sacred Heart Grammar School when she could have gotten a lot more money teaching public school. But she didn’t want to get away from the faith any more than she wanted to get away from the father who needed her so much. Needed her because her mother had walked away from the family on the day the telegram had come, the one announcing the death of Rose Cohan’s only son. Her only son and, for all the affection she’d ever shown her daughter, her only child. She’d walked away from the family and buried herself in the broad bosom of her faith.

Kathleen Cohan never spent much time worrying about her mother. She was a practical woman and there was too much to be done at home. The house had to be cared for and even if she didn’t have to do it herself, she still had to supervise the colored girl who came in twice a week. And somebody had to balance Daddy’s checkbook and pay the mortgage and get the plumber when the pipes leaked.

“Stanley?” she whispered.

“No.”

“How do you know what I’m going to say?”

“I don’t want to live here. I don’t want to live with your father.” He would have given her his most determined look, the one with the narrowed eyes and the pinched lips, but his face hurt too much. He had to settle for saying ‘want to’ instead of ‘wanna.’

They’d been having the same argument for months, ever since her father made the offer. They’d probably be having it until the day he moved her into her own apartment. Not that he was complaining. What he liked best about Kathleen Cohan was her stubborn determination. Most of the time she dressed like a high-school girl. Right now, she was wearing a starched white blouse and a blue pleated skirt that covered her knees. Add that to the freckles and the long, honey-blonde hair and she seemed as insubstantial (and as sexy) as the fairy on a bottle of White Rock ginger ale. But underneath that schoolgirl uniform, she wasn’t insubstantial at all. She was heavy-boned and solid and believed in herself as much as she believed in her God. Or her father.

Ignoring the sharp twinge in his shoulder, Moodrow put his arms around Kathleen and pulled her in close. He kissed her on the lips and felt her mouth open beneath his. He wanted to slide his hand down over her buttocks, but the door was open and there was always a chance one of the assembled cops would look up from his drink at the wrong time. Besides, she was undoubtedly wearing a girdle-she almost always wore a girdle under her dresses and skirts because it gave her that “smooth line.” Girdles, in Moodrow’s estimation, were the modern equivalent of the medieval chastity belt. You couldn’t seduce a woman wearing a girdle. You couldn’t slide a girdle over a woman’s hips. It took so long to get it off, the act had to be deliberate, had to be premeditated. It couldn’t just happen.

But maybe that was all to the good. More than a few of Moodrow’s peers had gotten their girlfriends pregnant despite the conscientious use of Trojans. Almost all those peers had done the right thing, but he knew of one girl who’d gone uptown for an abortion and come back home on a slab. The suits had tracked down the doctor who’d implicated the boyfriend who was now doing eight to twelve in Sing-Sing. Moodrow, having listened carefully to Pat Cohan’s warnings, would rather do the time than confess that he’d gotten the Inspector’s daughter pregnant. Pat Cohan was president of the NYPD Holy Name Society. He was an officer in the Knights of Columbus and a patron of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He would neither be understanding nor forgiving.

Of course, that didn’t mean there weren’t times when they’d worked up enough heat to scorch the plastic cover on Inspector Pat Cohan’s living-room couch. Times when darlin’ Kathleen had pressed Moodrow’s face into her breasts, not even bothering with the ritual “no,” not protesting even when his lips and tongue ran over the smooth skin of her belly. Times when she’d opened her legs to allow his fingers to work their way under her slacks, her white cotton underpants.

“Doesn’t this hurt?” Kathleen asked, pulling back.

Moodrow touched his fingers to his puffy lips. “It does, now that you mention it.”

She reached out and took his left hand, bringing it to her cheek. “I have to go back inside.”

“Why? Your father’s in his glory. He wouldn’t care if you stayed out here until tomorrow morning. He probably wouldn’t even notice.”

“Stanley, it’s freezing. I don’t have a coat on.” She took a step back, but continued to hold onto his hand. “I won’t see you for three days.”

“Unless you visit me.” Moodrow had three days’ vacation coming to him and he intended to pass them going from his bed to a hot bath to the kitchen table. He was scheduled to report to the lieutenant at the 7th on Tuesday morning and he didn’t want to walk into the squadroom a cripple.

“I can’t, Stanley.” She dropped his hand and looked down at her shoes. “Daddy …”

“I can understand ‘old-fashioned.’ Your father wants to protect you and I guess that’s all to the good. But you’re not sixteen years old. You’re a college graduate, a working woman. And we’re engaged, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain.”

Moodrow put his hands on Kathleen’s waist-he wanted to put them on her shoulders, but he couldn’t raise his hands that high-and looked directly into her eyes. “If you wanna wait until you’re married to become a woman, that’s okay with me. And I’m not talking about sex, either. But once the priest says ‘I now pronounce you man and wife,’ you’ve gotta stop being ‘darlin’ Kathleen’ and start being Katie Moodrow. What scares me is that I don’t think you have any idea who Katie Moodrow is. I can see the woman in you, but you can’t. Or won’t.”

“You can be very hateful, Stanley.”

“I don’t wanna marry your daddy.”

“He needs me, too.”

“Katie, your mother spends half the day in church and the other half in her room with a rosary. It’s sad, but it’s not your fault. Just tell Pat that you’re coming to see me and let that be the end of it. You’re twenty-two years old and you’re engaged to be married. That entitles you to come to my apartment when I’m too sore to get up and come to you.”

She didn’t want him to leave like that. Didn’t want him to walk out carrying the same argument they’d been having for months. This was 1958. He was right about that. She should be able to do as she pleased, guided by her own conscience and not her father’s.

“I’ll try,” she said. “I’m not promising, but I’ll try.”

“Good,” Moodrow grunted, “because as soon as I get you inside, I’m gonna lock the door, rip off your clothes and force you to do ten or fifteen obscene acts I learned from all the prostitutes I was forced to arrest in the course of doing my duty.”

“Stanley, you’re impossible.” She was grinning up at him, happy again. He had a way of making things better, of easing their arguments. As if he knew it would be all right, even if she didn’t.

“Not impossible, Katie. Just very, very unlikely.”

Jake Leibowitz was sitting at the far end of his mother’s kitchen table, the end closest to the living room. He had two reasons for doing this. First, it was as far as he could get from his mother, Sarah, who was cooking breakfast, and, second, he could see the open closet by the door leading out of the apartment. The closet held his “reward for a job well done.” Jake always treated himself to a reward when a job came off successfully.

Of course, there were some people, like his mother, who thought it was stupid to spend two hundred on a reward when you only took in three hundred, but Jake had to disagree. He wasn’t throwing his money away. Nor was he trying to play the big shot in front of his associates. He was conditioning himself for success.

Jake, as far as he could remember, had never liked to read. He tended to see letters upside down and words in reverse order. Not that he couldn’t read. It was just that extracting the information locked up in those letters was closer to an all-out siege than a leisurely pastime. Still, there were lots of empty hours in prison, hours when time seemed to reach out to the edge of a very flat earth. Jake, like the majority of his prison peers, spent most of those hours lost in common, if complex, sexual daydreams. But he couldn’t spend all the hours dreaming-there were just too many-so, somewhere in his fifth year of incarceration, he began to read Life magazine. He chose Life for two reasons. First, because it was on the warden’s list of approved periodicals and, second, because it only came once a week. Jake needed a week to get through an issue. A week was an absolute necessity when you had to work on the words a letter at a time.

Jake was in his ninth year at Leavenworth when he came on the article in Life that changed his life. It was the missing link in Jake Leibowitz’s formula for success. The article was on a Soviet psychology experiment which was called “conditioning.” It was mostly about a man named Pavlov who did an experiment with his dog. He rang a bell each time he fed his dog and after a while the dog started drooling every time he heard a bell, even if there wasn’t any food. At first, Jake thought this was pretty funny. He imagined Pavlov walking his dog down the street. Whenever the dog hears a fire bell or a church bell, it starts dribbling away. Like on some old broad’s hightop shoes.

But the article stuck to Jake, despite its clownish aspects. The way he understood it, the commies were saying that you could make something happen by getting someone to expect it to happen. Maybe that was why he kept screwing up in life. He was always kicking himself when he made a bad move, always putting himself down. What he should be doing, he figured, is rewarding himself when he did something right. That way he’d get used to being successful. He’d get conditioned.

“Eat your eggs.” Sarah Leibowitz banged the plate down so hard, the salami omelet bounced several inches into the air, then settled back on the plate with an audible plop.

“You still pissed off, ma?” Jake knew the answer to the question. He was sorry he’d asked it before the words were out of his mouth.

“He asks am I angry?” Sarah hugged her enormous belly with both arms and rocked from side to side.

“Don’t do a speech, ma,” Jake begged. “For cryin’ out loud. Give it a rest.”

“He asks am I angry,” she repeated, ignoring him altogether. “Here is a boy goes out and buys himself a two-hundred-dollar overcoat when his mother is wearing a rag. A rag, mind you, that’s not even wool. It’s a cotton rag without a lining. Here is a boy who puts lambswool on his back …”

“Cashmere, ma. It’s called cashmere.”

“Lambswool on his back when his own mother is wearing a twenty-four dollars and ninety-five cents winter coat she got off the sales rack at Klein’s. So why should I be angry that my son thinks he’s gotta be Prince Jake, but it’s okay his mother should freeze her tuchis off whenever she steps out of the house to go shopping for his dinner? Why, I’m asking?”

Jake wolfed the eggs down as fast as he could. He had work to do and he didn’t want to distract himself by fighting with his mother. She never lost a fight, anyway, because she mostly ignored whatever he said.

“You’re going where today?” Ma Leibowitz asked.

“Mamaleh, mamaleh.” Jake gave his mother a hug. She accepted his arms, but he knew what was coming next, so what he did was take three quick steps back after letting go. Ma Leibowitz’s right hand just missed his face.

“Hugs are for cheapskates,” she shouted. “Fur coats are for mamalehs.”

Jake paused at the apartment door long enough to throw his new black overcoat a wistful glance, then took his navy peacoat off the hook and put it on. The peacoat was the cheapest coat in his closet, but it was warm and completely inconspicuous. There were thousands of them walking around the streets of New York. All on the backs of ordinary workingmen. Jake had nothing but contempt for wage slaves, but when he pulled the black watchcap down over his head and checked himself out in the mirror, he had to admit his mug would look perfectly normal behind the wheel of a truck.

The effect was exactly what he was looking for and he remembered to reward himself before he walked out the door. “You done all right, kid,” he said, nodding the way his father would’ve nodded. If he’d had a father.

Jake felt good enough to take the four flights two stairs at a time, but when he opened the outer lobby door, the cold hit him like a hammer. It was twenty-four degrees in New York and the wind was blowing out of the northwest at twenty miles an hour.

“Damn!” Jake’s eyes began to tear before the door closed behind him. He blinked rapidly for a moment, then opened them to find Abe Weinberg lounging against the side of the Packard as if he was basking in the July sun. Abe was wearing his favorite black leather jacket which he hadn’t even bothered to zip up, because he wanted everyone to see the white T-shirt he was wearing underneath it. Abe, or so he’d told Jake, had seen The Wild Ones eighteen times.

“Whatta you, a fuckin’ snowman?” Jake asked.

“You shouldn’t talk that way in front of my new girlfriend,” Abe said defensively. “It ain’t right.”

“Your new what?” Jake noticed the girl for the first time. She was also wearing a black leather jacket and black motorcycle boots. And she couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old.

“This is Maria Roccantelli. She lives on MacDougal Street.”

“Pleased to meetch’ya,” Maria said, extending her hand.

“Likewise.” Jake allowed his fingertips just to graze hers. He was familiar with the term jailbait and he was pretty sure it didn’t apply to touching alone, but he wasn’t taking any chances. “Don’t you gotta be in school or something?”

Maria giggled. “I just come by ’cause Abe said I should meet ya.”

Jake looked at Abe, who was leaning against the car again. “Wake up, Abe. It ain’t Rock-Around-the-Clock time. Say goodbye to ya girlfriend and let’s get outta here.”

“See ya later, alligator,” Maria said jauntily.

“Take off,” Abe hissed out of the side of his mouth.

The reason Jake held it in as long as he did-five endless minutes-was that it didn’t matter much anyway. Maybe it made things harder, but it wasn’t going to change the spots. He told himself that what’s done is done, but what he said was, “How can you be so stupid as to bring your girlfriend along when we’re goin’ out on business?”

Abe, who was working on his pompadour with a long black comb, looked over in surprise. “We’re only goin’ out to check locations, right? It’s not like we was doin’ somethin’ wrong.”

“I don’t give a shit. There’s times when you’re workin’ and there’s time when you’re social. I been tryin’ ta tell you that for the last six months. What I don’t understand is how a guy who’s been in the joint could be so goddamned casual. And that broad ain’t even a broad. That broad is a kid. She can’t be no more than sixteen and she looks like twelve. Here we are killin’ ourselves to get in with the wops and you wanna pump some guinea’s sixteen-year-old daughter. You gotta be stupid and I don’t need stupid.”

Abe Weinberg slouched down in the seat and drew his lips up into a sulky pout. It was the same pout Elvis had used in Jailhouse Rock, but it had no apparent effect on Jake Leibowitz.

“C’mon, Jake, smile. Ya gotta smile.” Abe torched a Lucky Strike and blew a thin stream of smoke at the windshield. “Maria’s seventeen, Jake. She graduates in June. Her parents like me.”

“Do they know you’re thirty years old? Do they know you’re a gangster?”

Abe didn’t answer and Jake didn’t bother to pursue it, because it didn’t matter anyway. Abe Weinberg was the kind of problem that could give Jake and all his efforts a bad name. It wasn’t about putting on a show. It was about low profile. It was about doing what you had to do without the whole city knowing your business. Guys who got too much attention-who got their names and faces in the goddamned newspapers-ended up in a Jersey swamp. Which was exactly where they were going.

“You up for this?” Jake asked.

They were passing through the toll on the far end of the Lincoln Tunnel. Abe was practicing the art of curling one corner of his mouth into a sneer and the question caught him by surprise.

“Whatta ya mean?”

“I’m talkin’ about what we’re gonna do.” Jake shook his head in disgust. If he didn’t know Abe Weinberg was a Jew, he wouldn’t believe it. “You’re probably adopted, right? Tell me you’re adopted. Your real parents were Okies who made a wrong turn and ended up in New York instead of California.”

“C’mon, Jake. I just wasn’t expectin’ the question.” Abe cracked the vent window and lit another cigarette. He liked the way he looked with a cigarette dangling from his lip, but the smoke was hurting his eyes. “The answer is, yeah, I’m ready. Like I already told ya when you first brought it up.”

“You’re ready to pull the trigger?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure you could do it?”

“If the money’s right, I’ll machine-gun Madison Square Garden on fight night. That answer your question?” This time he got himself so far down in the seat that his knees were up against the dash. “Didn’t I do the fuckin’ spic?”

“That was in a panic, Abe. That was stupid. I’m talkin’ about doin’ it cold.”

Jake paused, waiting for a reply, but Abe stared out the window and began to hum the melody from Chuck Berry’s tune, Rock and Roll Music.

“This is an honor the wops are givin’ us here,” Jake continued. “We do this right and we’re on our way.”

“Well, we’re not doin’ it today, right or wrong,” Abe finally said. “All we’re lookin’ for is a place to dump a stiff that ain’t even a stiff yet. So what I can’t figure out is why you’re makin’ such a big deal outta nothin’.”

This time it was Jake who didn’t bother to answer. They were driving through a huge swamp west of Secaucus. It should have been beautiful, at least from inside the car. The cold winter winds had driven away most of the pollution and the sun was shining in the brown and gold tips of the cattails and reeds lining the roadway. It also shone brightly on mounds of garbage left by illegal dumpers, many of them commercial haulers.

Jake turned on an unmarked side road and began to criss-cross the swamp. He made lefts and rights at random, but he never got close to being lost. Abe, on the other hand, stared at the unfamiliar landscape as if he’d been transported to the moon on a Russian sputnik.

“You got a map, Jake?” he asked. “So we could find our way outta here.” Though he didn’t say it, the idea of being in the swamps late at night scared him a lot more than bumpin’ off some guinea.

“In my head is where I got my map, Abe. I never get lost.”

“The world’s first Jewish Indian.”

“Yeah,” Jake laughed, “call me Tonto. Tonto Leibowitz.”

A much-relieved Abe Weinberg joined in his pal’s laughter. “Yeah, yeah. Pathfinder Leibowitz.”

“Wait, this looks like a good spot.” Jake stopped the car. “In fact, it looks perfect.”

The road was so narrow, one car would have had to put two wheels on the shoulder to let another car pass. The reeds were higher than the car and the piles of garbage were higher than the reeds. A track leading into the swamp disappeared fifteen feet from the edge of the road.

“All right,” Jake announced, “you wanna be an actor? You wanna be Marlon Brando? You wanna be Elvis Presley? Now’s your big chance. We’re gonna do this exactly like next week. I’m gonna be you and you’re gonna be this guy who’s gettin’ what he’s got comin’ to him.”

“Ya don’t think we could reverse the parts, do ya? I kinda like bein’ the hero.”

“You tryin’ ta tell me Elvis wouldn’t end up in a swamp at the end of one of his movies? That’s too bad, ’cause the way he sings, it’d be a mitzvah.”

They were both laughing, now.

“Hey, remember Marlon Brando at the end of Viva Zapata?” Abe asked. “When they dump him in the street? The people couldn’t even recognize him. That’s how many times he got shot. If Marlon could do it, I could do it. An actor’s gotta have range.”

“Great.” Jake opened the door and stepped out of the car. Abe followed a moment later. “I’m gonna talk it through while we’re goin’. First, this is the gun we’re gonna use.” Jake held up a.22 caliber revolver. “We don’t need no forty-five goin’ off like a howitzer. From up close, a twenty-two is just as deadly and you’re gonna be right on top of him. But remember, we wanna do this guy in the swamp. That means you can’t shoot him before we get here unless you absolutely gotta. So, what you’re gonna do is keep your finger off the trigger. Like this.”

Jake held the.22 up again. He took his index finger off the trigger and laid it underneath the cylinder.

“What if he tries to run?”

“How’s he gonna run when he’s handcuffed inside a locked car? Ya getting me pissed off again, Abe.”

“Ya can’t learn if ya don’t ask questions.”

“Ya can’t learn if ya don’t ask questions,” Jake mimicked. “What do I got here, a goddamned schoolteacher? What ya should be thinkin’ is that ya can’t learn if ya don’t shut ya mouth and listen.” He waited for the message to sink in before he continued. “When we get here, I jump out of the car first. I come around to your side and cover this guy in case he decides to run. Then you unlock the door and get him movin’. Now, we’re both gonna go up the path here, but you’re gonna be the one who’s right behind him. Don’t get too close. If ya get too close, he could turn and kick the rod outta ya hand. But, also, don’t get too far away. If he jumps into them bushes, we’ll never find him. Remember, it’s gonna be dark. I don’t wanna use a flashlight unless it’s so black we’re gonna fall over each other. What you gotta do is stay arm’s length plus two steps away. Let’s try it.”

Jake walked over to Abe with his left arm outstretched. He stopped when his fingers were touching Abe’s chest. “Now, take two steps back. Perfect. Memorize this distance. Ya don’t let him get no closer and ya don’t let him get no further away. Ya got that?”

“Yeah, but one thing. When we’re marchin’ him up the path, do I still keep my finger off the trigger?”

Jake looked up at the clean, blue sky. “How come it’s always me, Lord?”

“What’d I say, now?”

“Abe, this is where we’re gonna do it. Ya don’t think he’s gonna know that? Ya don’t think he’s gonna know this is his last chance? Once he gets outta the car, you gotta be ready. Don’t be a schmuck.”

“All right, all right. I get the point.”

“Good, now let’s walk in there and see what it looks like.”

What it looked like was perfect. The narrow track wound among the cattails for a hundred yards, then ended abruptly in a small clearing. There was a pond on one side of the clearing (which would have been a great place to dump a stiff except that it was frozen like a rock) and a solid wall of reeds on the other. All you had to do was dump the body ten or fifteen yards off the clearing and by the time the rats got through with it, it’d be nothing but bones.

“Okay,” Jake said, “we’re here. Whatta ya do next?”

“I make him kneel with his head away from me so he can’t see it comin’.”

“Do it.”

“C’mon, Jake. I’ll ruin my pants.”

“I’ll buy you another pair.”

Abe knelt down and stared into the reeds. “Is that all right? Do I pass, teacher?”

“I gotta give it to ya,” Jake admitted, firing three shots into the back of his buddy’s head. “You ain’t as stupid as ya look.”

Stanley Moodrow sat in the kitchen of his Avenue B apartment, thumbing his way through a copy of the Daily News while he waited for the coffee to boil. Moodrow had been reading the Daily News at the kitchen table for a long time. He couldn’t remember exactly when he’d begun to take an interest in the news of the day, but he could clearly recall his father passing him the comic section at a time when he’d been too young to do more than look at the pictures. And he could remember his mother picking up the paper, too. After his father went off to work. That’s when she got her breakfast.

The way Moodrow saw it, his family had gone through a lot of ups and downs when he was a kid, but there’d always been two fixed pillars in their lives. Heirlooms to be handed down from generation to generation. One was the Daily News and the other was a baseball team called the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was reading the Daily News, but the Dodgers were out of his life. Permanently and forever.

What did the sportswriters call Walter O’Malley? The most hated man in New York? And it was true-even Yankee fans hated O’Malley. For Dodger fans, the feeling was almost pathological. Moodrow could easily imagine putting a bullet into Walter O’Malley’s fat carcass. All those years waiting for a World Series? His father hadn’t lived to see it. His mother, either.

Moodrow got up to check the glass bulb on top of the percolator. The bubbling liquid wasn’t really coffee yet, but it wasn’t all that far away. He left it to boil and took a box of Cheerios out of the cupboard. Moodrow wasn’t crazy about cereal, but the soreness in his ribs had eased considerably and he didn’t want to upset the applecart by messing with pots and pans. He was scheduled to report for assignment in two days and he was determined to do nothing more than eat, read the papers and watch television in the meantime.

The doorbell rang before he could sit down. “Be there in a minute, Greta,” he called, reaching for his robe. It was a little early for Greta Bloom, his mother’s oldest old friend, to come up from the second floor, which she did whenever Moodrow was sick or hurt.

“I just wanna see you’re okay. What’s the harm?”

That was her answer whenever he tried to discourage her. Greta Bloom was a professional philanthropist. An impoverished philanthropist. Living on social security, the only thing she had to give was time. Greta went out to the shul on Clinton Street every day. She belonged to a dozen charitable “societies” and had more energy than Stanley Moodrow on fight night.

“Good morning, Stanley. I know it’s early, but I wanted I should catch you before you went to work.” Greta Bloom, in a worn yellow housedress, was barely five feet tall. She peered up at Moodrow through pale gray eyes. Her face was small and round with sharp, narrow features that complemented her nervous energy. Even the wrinkle-lines on her forehead danced in time to her enthusiasm.

“I’m not going to work today, Greta, so it doesn’t matter.”

“Oy vey, Stanley. You’ve been fighting again. I thought you gave that up. I thought you were a policeman.”

“Sometimes a policeman has to fight, too. You want coffee?”

“I can’t stay. The sisterhood meets at ten o’clock and I didn’t even get into the shower yet. I was wondering could you do me a favor? Not for me, for a neighbor. Rosaura Pastoral who lives in 2D. You know her?”

“Maybe if I saw her, I …”

“It doesn’t matter. So many people moving in, moving out … it’s impossible to keep count.”

“Unless you hang around the mailboxes and gossip all morning.”

“Please, Stanley, I don’t have time for your wiseguy remarks. I told you I’m in a hurry. Anyway, Rosaura has a boarder-had a boarder, I should say-named Luis Melenguez who got killed on Pitt Street the day after Christmas. With a gun, Stanley. Somebody shot him. It’s been a week and nobody knows nothing. Rosaura went down to the precinct and the detectives wouldn’t even talk about it. Told her to go home and mind her own business. Can you imagine?”

Moodrow could imagine. Cops know they have to take abuse from the victim’s family. It’s expected and you deal with it. But the landlady?

“You want me to teach them some manners?” he asked without so much as cracking a smile. “Slap ’em around a little bit?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. And it’s not me. It’s not what I want. It’s for your neighbor, for Rosaura Pastoral. She’s a very nice woman.”

“What’s for Rosaura Pastoral. What do you want me to do?”

“Find out what’s going on. You told me last time you were gonna be a big-shot detective. That’s what I told Rosaura when I saw her last night. ‘Stanley’s gonna be a big-shot detective. He’ll find out what’s going on.’ ”

Moodrow knew better than to refuse Greta Bloom. A compromise was the most he could hope for. “I’ll ask around, Greta. Find out who’s handling the case and where it’s going. But don’t expect me to jump in and solve the crime. This isn’t Gunsmoke and I’m not Matt Dillon.”

“Stanley, don’t have a heart attack. Nobody expects miracles. If you tell Rosaura that everything’s kosher, I’m sure she’ll be satisfied. Now, I gotta run, bubbe. And put some ice on your face. You look like Frankenstein.”

He closed the door behind her, then headed back for the kitchen. The doorbell rang again before he got to his Cheerios. “What did you …” he asked as he swung the door open.

The sight of Kathleen Cohan in her new fox coat froze him in mid-sentence. It was funny how you could spend half the summer in a bathing suit, but you felt almost obscene in a striped bathrobe with your hairy calves sticking out.

“Jeeeeeesussss Christ.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name, Stanley. I’m hoping that Jesus isn’t watching me, anyway.”

“What are you doing here?”

“You invited me, remember? Anyway, I’ve come to observe your domestic habits.” She pranced into the room and took off her coat. “I think it’s important to really know a person before marriage. Especially if you’re a Catholic and you have to stay married forever.”

“Yeah? Great. Only don’t put that coat down or the roaches’ll kidnap it. My domestic habits ain’t that good.”

“Ugh. You have cockroaches? I hate them.”

“Everybody in the city has roaches.” He hung her coat in the hall closet.

“I live in the city and I don’t have cockroaches.” She snuck up behind him, put her arms around his waist and squeezed gently.

“Bayside, where you live, ain’t the city.” He paused for a second. “And that hug didn’t hurt. I must be getting better.”

“If Bayside isn’t in the city, why do I pay city taxes?”

He turned and kissed her. “For kids who grew up in this neighborhood, Bayside is Never-Never Land. Peter Pan lives in Bayside.”

“In that case,” she giggled, “you can call me Tinkerbell.”

He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. She responded eagerly, wrapping her arms as far around his back as they’d go. Moodrow, despite the fire pulling at his crotch, didn’t quite know what to make of her sudden appearance. He’d been trying to get into bed with her for the better part of a year, but he’d always respected her whispered refusals. That was the way good girls were supposed to act. At least according to the prevailing mythology. Was it possible that an official engagement changed the rules? He let his fingers slide down her spine, expecting to find that latex chastity belt under her skirt, but what he felt was the firm globes of her buttocks.

“Kathleen …”

“I’m supposed to be with Joanna. At the movies.” Joanna Buchanan was Kathleen’s best friend.

“What?” Preoccupied as he was, Moodrow barely understood the words.

“Daddy thinks I’m with Joanna. I actually was with her. We had breakfast after church, but then I came to see you. Joanna went to the movies. With her boyfriend.”

Moodrow didn’t know what to say next, but he was smart enough to realize that she was running the show. And smart enough to let her, too.

“I thought I’d probably find you in bed,” she declared. “I mean, if you’re in too much pain to come out and see me, you should at least be flat on your back.”

“Right now, you could definitely knock me over with a feather,” Moodrow admitted. He waited for her to say something else, but she just stood there, grinning. Finally he asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee.

“Great.”

“Sit on the couch and relax. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He was pouring the coffee when he figured it out. She’d come here to go to bed with him. Deliberately and consciously. Yet he still had to seduce her. The realization didn’t come easily. The girls he’d known before he met Kathleen had mostly grown up on the Lower East Side. Some of them would do it and some wouldn’t, but whichever way it went, they didn’t need to play out this elaborate charade. Sex was a lot different in Bayside. In fact, as far as Stanley Moodrow was concerned, sexual politics out in the suburbs were more complicated than the politics at the U.N.

Moodrow congratulated himself on his insight (“pretty deep for a twenty-five-year-old kid,” was what he told himself) and walked back into the living room prepared to do what he had to do. The only problem was that Kathleen wasn’t there. He glanced over at the front door, half expecting to find it open, but it was closed and locked.

“Stanley?”

There were only two other rooms in the apartment and they were both bedrooms, so that was where she had to be. In a bedroom. If his career as a detective went anything like this, he’d be back to walking a beat in a month.

The bedroom was dark when he came in, but he could see well enough to know that she was in his bed. And that her clothing was draped over the back of a chair. He reached out to put the cup on the bureau and missed by a foot. The cup landed on the wood floor and splattered hot coffee over his right foot. He didn’t notice it any more then he’d noticed the punch that’d broken his nose.

“I love you, Stanley,” she whispered. “And I don’t want to wait anymore. Not another minute. Even if you do look like Frankenstein come back from the dead.”

Moodrow touched a finger to the tape covering his nose. He thought about taking it off, then realized that what he was going to have to take off was his bathrobe. With Kathleen watching.

“I thought the girl was supposed to do the striptease,” he said.

Kathleen giggled. “Take it off. Take it off.”

“All right, I will.”

Moodrow sat on the edge of the bed and slowly drew the covers back. Kathleen, surprised, started to cover her breasts with her hands, then fell back on the pillows. Her breath was shallow, her eyes half-closed. Moodrow laid the fingers of his right hand on her throat, then slid them gently down her throat, over her breasts and along her smooth, flat belly. When his fingers crossed the dark triangle of hair and dropped into the moist flesh below, she moaned softly and her legs came apart.

“Be gentle, Stanley,” she whispered. “Don’t hurt me.”

But he knew he was going to hurt her. Of all the dirty tricks nature had laid on human beings, this was the dirtiest. There was no painless way, short of surgery, for a woman to lose her virginity. But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be pleasure, too. Moodrow had been thinking about it for a long time and he’d already decided what he was going to do. If she let him. If she didn’t withdraw from what she had to see as a perversion.

He let his lips and tongue follow the line his finger had traced, though he took much longer, playing with her nipples and her belly and the soft hollow spot on the inside of her thigh. Her milky white skin reddened until it seemed like her whole body was blushing, but the deep, almost guttural sound coming from her throat indicated something other than embarrassment. At some point, she began to call his name. Repeating it until the single word became lost in a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a scream.

Moodrow sat up on the bed and yanked off his bathrobe and his underwear. Kathleen, he knew, was as ready as a virgin, male or female, could be. Her eyes were joyous (if somewhat glazed) and her body was completely open to him. It was the perfect moment to enfold her in his arms, to gently lift her legs …

And that’s exactly what he would have done. If he hadn’t put the Trojan on backwards. If he hadn’t ripped it and had to fumble in the nightstand for another one. By the time he managed to open the foil and get it on, the glaze in Kathleen’s eyes had disappeared.

“I’ve never seen one of those before,” she said.

“That makes two things you’ve never seen before.”

She ignored the humor, reaching out to take his erection in her hand. He would have expected her to be reluctant, but she seemed more curious than naive. She drew him into her, opening for him, accepting his thrusts until he began to call her name, until he was lost in his own fire.

By the time Moodrow finally rolled over to one side of the narrow bed, they were both covered with sweat. He knew that he should take her in his arms, that she needed to be reassured, but somewhere along the line he must have smacked his nose, because it hurt like hell.

“Are you all right, Stanley?”

“My nose,” he answered. “I think I broke my nose again.”

He opened his eyes to find her propped up on one arm. Her breasts were inches from his face. Suddenly, the realization that he would marry this woman, that he’d spend his life with her, rushed over him. What he felt was grateful.

“I love you, Kathleen,” he said, ignoring his nose.

“I love you too, Stanley.” She leaned down to kiss him gently on the lips. “We’re going to have a good life together. A great life.”

The sergeant at the duty desk, Stefan Kirsch, grinned from ear to ear when Stanley Moodrow walked into the 7th Precinct.

“Jesus, Stanley,” he said, “I thought you won the fight.”

“That’s just a rumor, Sarge. The real truth is that only the doctor won.”

Moodrow felt awkward coming into the stationhouse in a suit and tie. He’d been proud enough when he’d examined himself in the privacy of his bedroom, but now he felt almost naked. He felt like a civilian.

“Well, congratulations, anyway. You deserve it.”

“Thanks, Sarge.”

There were several other uniforms in the outer lobby, all cops Moodrow had been working with for the past five years. They, too, greeted him like the celebrity he was supposed to be. One, James Curley, walked over and ran his fingers along Moodrow’s lapel.

“Where’d ya get the rag, Stanley? Robert Hall?”

“Robert Hall? If you wanna say I’m cheap, why not try S. Klein’s?”

“Alright, S. Klein’s.”

“Jimmy, the suit’s custom-made.” Moodrow wasn’t lying, even if he’d left out the part about going down to Robert Hall and not finding a suit big enough to fit him. He didn’t mention the part about the tailor, Larry Chin, working out of his apartment on Division Street, either. Or the one about the bolt of cloth being a factory second from a mill in South Carolina.

“I’m only kiddin’ ya, Stanley.” He took Moodrow’s hand and shook it. “Congratulations on the Gold Shield. Lookin’ at your face, I’d have to say you deserve it.”

“That seems to be the general opinion.”

The needling was just what Moodrow expected. After all, he (in their minds, at least) had been fighting for every cop in the Department and for the cops in the 7th in particular. That was why they’d come to watch two men beat the crap out of each other. Because they somehow shared in the victory.

“I’ll see you later, Jimmy. I gotta report upstairs.”

For Stanley Moodrow, walking up those stairs was a far greater reward than having the referee lift his arm. Uniformed cops almost never left the first floor of the 7th Precinct. The second story contained the captain’s and the lieutenants’ offices, as well as the detectives’ squad room. Going up there was like being given a day pass to Mount Olympus.

Now, he’d be walking up these stairs every day. The squad room would be a second home, the other detectives a second family. Which is why he was hoping for a big hello from those detectives who happened to be at their desks. What he got, on the other hand, was ignored.

The 7th Precinct squad room (like every other detectives’ squad room in New York City) was nothing more than a large room crowded with wooden desks. Ancient wooden desks. Desks blackened with decades of grime and covered with unfinished paperwork. The telephones were so old, the numbers had worn off the dials.

Moodrow picked his way between the desks. He knew a few of the detectives from one or another of his fights, but even the familiar faces kept their backs turned to him. Of course, there was always the possibility that this was the way they treated all newly appointed detectives, third grade. Maybe their studied indifference was a kind of initiation rite, like fraternity hazing.

Not that he had much time to think about it. He had to report to Detective Lieutenant Salvatore Patero, the precinct whip, for assignment to one or another of the many detectives’ squads and Patero’s office was just on the other side of the room. As he knocked on the door, Moodrow wondered just where he’d be assigned. He was hoping for homicide, but it was more likely he’d begin at the beginning, with vice or burglary.

“Come on in.”

Patero’s face was buried in the Herald-Tribune when Moodrow entered the small office. He took his time before looking up, but when he saw Moodrow, he managed a smile.

“Welcome to the detectives, Stanley.”

“Thanks, Lou. Glad to be here.”

“Siddown a minute. And don’t call me ‘Lou’ or ‘Lieutenant.’ Sal’ll be fine.” Patero waited for Moodrow to seat himself before continuing. “You’re gonna be working with me, Stanley. You’re gonna be my personal assistant. At least temporarily.”

Moodrow waited for Patero to say something else, to at least explain the nuts and bolts of personal assistantship, but Patero wasn’t talking. He lit a cigarette, a Kent, and leaned back in his chair.

“Uh, Sarge,” Moodrow finally said, “the thing is that I’m not sure that I’m qualified to be your assistant. I don’t know anything about the paperwork or the procedure. I …”

“Can you drive a car?”

“Yeah. Of course. How can you be a cop if you can’t drive?”

“For now, that’s all you gotta know.” Patero pushed back his chair and grinned. “What’s the matter, Stanley? You don’t look happy.”

What Moodrow felt was cheated. He wasn’t sure who’d done the cheating, but he knew that he hadn’t fought his way to a Gold Shield in order to become Sal Patero’s chauffeur. Or his secretary, either. Moodrow felt the anger begin to rise, but when he spoke, his voice was calm.

“I was hoping to, you know, just start in the regular way.”

Patero leaned over the desk. “In that case, maybe you should’ve become a detective in the regular way. But you didn’t, Stanley. You got here because you met the right people, not because of what you did on the street. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not puttin’ you down. In the job, politics is what it’s all about. Everybody knows that. But when your rabbi’s an inspector and when you’re engaged to your rabbi’s daughter, there’s no more regular to your career. You’re gonna ride with me and neither of us has any say in the matter. If you got a problem with that, go to your future father-in-law. Capish?”

“I understand.”

“I wanna get along with you, Stanley. Because, personally, I think you’re a good guy. I doubt very much that Pat Cohan bothered to look at your service folder, but I went through every inch of it. I liked what I saw. And I’m also glad to hear that you want to go into one of the squads. Eventually, if I can swing it, you will. But right now your job is to learn how things work and my job is to teach you. Take the keys to my car and go make sure it isn’t blocked in. You won’t have a problem finding it. Being as I’m a big shot in the Seventh, I get a white Chevy instead of a black Chevy.”

Patero’s white ’57 Chevrolet, though unmarked, was far from unrecognizable. Moodrow, sitting behind the wheel with the engine running, recalled a time when he’d been working traffic on the corner of Houston and Clinton. The kids were coming out of school and his job was to get them safely across

Houston Street’s eight lanes of cars, trucks and buses. Patero had come cruising up Clinton in his white Chevy. A bunch of kids, grammar school kids, were following behind, yelling, “Here comes the lieutenant. Here comes the lieutenant.”

Maybe, Moodrow figured, if he spent enough time with Patero, the kids would call out, “Here comes the lieutenant’s dog.”

Patero strolled out ten minutes later, still carrying the Herald-Tribune. He got in the car, instructed Moodrow to drive over to Madison and Montgomery Streets, then buried his face in the newspaper. Moodrow, not knowing what else to do, pulled the car away from the curb and began to work his way along the narrow Lower East Side streets. They were stopped at a light when Patero spoke up.

“Stanley,” he said, “ya wanna hear somethin’ funny?”

“Anything.”

“Awright, you remember a kid named Bobby Gaydos?”

“The kid who killed his mother?”

“Right. Cut her throat with a Boy Scout knife last Thursday. Well, yesterday, four detectives take him over to the funeral home where she’s laid out and he breaks down and cries for two hours. Boo-hoo-hoo. Whatta ya wanna bet some commie judge sends him to a nut house for treatment? Instead of the electric chair, where he belongs. I mean the kid made a goddamned confession.”

“Two goddamned confessions.” The truth, and Moodrow knew it, was that the kid had withdrawn his confessions and his grandmother was providing him with an alibi for the time of the murder. Moodrow also knew that interrogating officers routinely extracted confessions the way dentists extracted teeth. But he didn’t say any of what he was thinking. Partly because his own thoughts ran counter to an official NYPD myth that blamed all crime on bleeding-heart judges and partly because he was a detective, third grade, and Sal Patero was a detective lieutenant. The difference between Patero’s rank and his own was like the difference between champagne and vinegar.

When they arrived at the intersection of Madison and Montgomery, Patero ordered Moodrow to make a right and park.

“We’re goin’ in there,” he announced, pointing to a candy store halfway up the block. “When we get inside, I don’t want you to say a word. Not a fucking word, capish?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You’re here to learn. You don’t have no opinions in this matter. But, maybe you could still help me out with somethin’. The guy I’m gonna be talkin’ to-his name is Joey Fish-is givin’ me trouble. I want you to stand there and stare at him. Don’t say nothin’, right? Just keep your eyes in his face. The way your mug looks, you could scare a gorilla.”

Without waiting for an answer, Patero stepped out of the car and began to walk up the block. Moodrow, scrambling to follow, banged his ribs against the steering wheel (cars didn’t fit him any better than off-the-rack suits) and let out an involuntary yelp.

“What’d ya say?” Patero stopped and turned to face his assistant.

“I hit my ribs. They’re still pretty sore from the fight.”

Patero’s smile was friendly and open. “Jesus, Stanley, what you did to that fireman …” He shook his head. “Don’t worry. You ain’t gonna have to fight anyone today. The kind of problem we got with this jerk, we don’t handle with our fists. You’re kinda like a … What’s the word? Reinforcement. That’s right. You’re a visual aid.”

The candy store in question was as nondescript as any of the hundreds of others dotting the Lower East Side. Newspapers lay on a shelf near the cash register. A long counter, covered with formica and lined with revolving stools, ran all the way to the back wall. Racks of magazines, school supplies and greeting cards paralleled the counter. Moodrow had spent a good part of his childhood in stores exactly like this, graduating from penny candies to chocolate egg creams to banana splits as he moved through grammar school and junior high.

In the course of his candy store education, he’d also come to learn that many of these neighborhood establishments had back rooms that catered to the needs of adults. As he watched Patero cross the room without acknowledging the elderly man behind the counter, he had a pretty good idea of where they were going and what they were going to do. He was glad that he wasn’t inside one of his old haunts, that he didn’t, for instance, know either of the two customers sitting at the counter.

But Moodrow did know Joey Fish. Or, at least, he knew Joey Fish’s kid, Alan, from high school.

“Jeez,” Joey Fish said as Moodrow ducked through the doorway, “what happened to him?”

Moodrow responded with the blank stare requested by Sal Patero.

“I remember you.” Fish shook his finger at Moodrow. “You’re that kid who used to fight in the Gloves. The big one who went to school with Alan. Whatta ya, still fightin’?”

Moodrow continued to stare and Joey’s face underwent a transformation as he put Moodrow’s hostility together with his reputation. Joey Fish turned as white as the chalked odds scrawled on the blackboards covering the walls.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” Fish said, turning to Patero, “whatta ya doin’ here? You puttin’ the muscle on me?”

“Cut the crap, Fish. You got what you owe me?”

“Lieutenant …”

“Just tell me. Yes or no. Without the bullshit.”

Fish opened the desk drawer and withdrew an envelope. He passed it to Patero who weighed it in his palm.

“It’s all here, right? Current and past due?”

“Every penny. And ya didn’t need to bring in a palooka ta get it. I told ya I had a problem. Some of the boys was past-postin’ at Hialeah and I got my balls caught in the squeeze. All I asked was a few weeks to recover.”

“Don’t bother me with ya problems, Fish. You got a business to run. Did ya call the phone company and tell ’em, ‘I can’t pay my bill because some hustlers past-posted in Florida’? What you shoulda done was collect from the bums that cheated you. Not hold out on me.”

Fish glanced at Moodrow, then shrugged. “Some guys you gotta pay. Even if they’re cheatin’ ya. Even if ya know ya bein’ cheated. Some guys ya gotta pay.”

“Very sharp, Joey.” Patero was already heading for the door. “Some guys ya do gotta pay. And I’m one of ’em.”

They continued to make the rounds for the rest of the morning, neither of them speaking very much. Moodrow spent the time reflecting on the felonies he was committing, one after another. For Patero, on the other hand, the business they conducted was routine, a time-honored ritual that predated the existence of the modern NYPD by fifty years. Gambling and prostitution were tolerated in certain neighborhoods because the voters wanted gambling and prostitution. No matter how often or how loudly Cardinal Spellman condemned the sins of the flesh. Of course, the citizens weren’t especially fond of the violence that flowed naturally from the existence of an institutionalized underworld. But wasn’t that where the cops came in?

The unspoken policy was control and containment. And how could you complain if the cops in charge of implementing this policy, in return for breaking the oath they’d taken to support the Constitution of the United States and enforce the laws of New York State, felt they needed a bit of extra compensation?

“Stanley, you ready for lunch?”

“Whatever you want, Sal.” It was the only thing he could say, under the circumstances. Besides, his stomach was rumbling like a Con Ed steampipe about to explode.

“See if ya could work your way over to Grand and Mott. The Castellemare Cafe.”

Moodrow took a left on Delancey and began to fight his way through the traffic. Delancey Street was the connecting link between the Williamsburg Bridge on the east side and the Holland Tunnel. Jersey-bound trucks, loaded with Brooklyn freight and headed for points west, packed Delancey Street from early morning until after dark.

“Light up the bubble, Stanley. I’m in a hurry.”

Moodrow put the red light on top of the Chevy and flicked the switch that set it spinning. The truckers, grudgingly, began to move out of the way. A cop directing traffic at Delancey and the Bowery stopped all north- and south- bound traffic as he cleared a lane for the white Chevy. Moodrow recognized the patrolman. His name was Paul Scotrun and he’d made the mistake of spending most of a night tour in a bar on Second Avenue. The duty sergeant, by way of teaching him a lesson, had placed him in a position of high visibility. Now, his face red with cold, he managed a smile and a wistful salute as the Chevy passed.

Five minutes later they were seated at a small table in the Castellemare Cafe. The restaurant, in the heart of Little Italy, was decorated in the best tourist trap tradition. Gondolas made their way along the walls and the bar was dominated by a highly polished cappucino machine. All the waiters wore white aprons and the tables were covered with red-and-white checked tablecloths. The neighborhood had been solid Italian before the war. Now, the sons and daughters of the immigrants who’d founded Little Italy were leaving as fast as the moving industry could supply the trucks. On the other hand, the tourists, pie-fed Midwesterners mostly, couldn’t seem to get enough calamare fra diavolo. They were thicker than ever.

“I gotta use the toilet, Stanley. Order me a Rheingold and get whatever you want for yourself.”

Patero left without waiting for his assistant to answer. He made his way to the bathrooms in the rear, but instead of entering the door marked “KINGS,” he knocked on an unmarked door, then quickly pushed it open.

“How come ya don’t wait for someone to say, ‘Come in’?” Joe Faci’s tone was mild, his face expressionless.

“Because you already knew I was comin’. You knew I was here before I got to my table. Ain’t that right?”

Faci shrugged. “It don’t make a difference anyway.” He opened a desk drawer and removed an envelope. “Mr. Accacio wants to know how things worked out. With the Puerto Rican.”

“I’ll bet he does.” Patero put the envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket. Stanley, he reflected, wouldn’t be seeing this one. “I’ll bet it’s real important to Mister Accacio. That’s why I wanna deliver the message personally.”

“I could take it to him. I got Mr. Accacio’s complete confidence.”

In Sal Patero’s opinion, Joe Faci was an amazing guy. You couldn’t make him mad-at least not so it showed-but it was fun trying. “Cut the crap, Joey. Stop makin’ out like you got Lucky Luciano in the back room.” He gestured to a door in the far wall. “Steppy’s a neighborhood punk who’s tryin’ to make his way up. He ain’t the fucking capo di tutti capi or whatever you’re callin’ the big boss these days. I got a message to deliver and I wanna deliver it personal.”

Patero’s message was simple enough: the situation had been contained, but don’t let it happen again. Don’t kill civilians. Except for the smell, nobody cares about dead gangsters in the trunks of cars. But if you start blowing away citizens, sooner or later you’re gonna kill someone who matters.

The intercom on Faci’s desk emitted a sharp buzz. “Send him in, Joey.” The voice belonged to Steppy Accacio. “So I could hear his message personal.”

Moodrow sat quietly at his table, sipping at a Schaefer. He was monumentally pissed off. Not that he was surprised by what Patero and he had been doing all morning. He wasn’t even opposed to it. Not really. Cops referred to it as ‘the pad’ and it had been going on for a long time. Moodrow’s Uncle Pavlov had explained it before Moodrow took the entrance exam.

“If you become a cop, Stanley, sooner or later people are gonna offer you money. What you gotta understand is that, as far as the Department is concerned, there’s clean money and dirty money. The boss in the coffee shop won’t let you pay for lunch? That’s clean. That’s expected. Likewise for the mechanic who tunes up your car for half-price. But don’t take money from a burglar. Or a dope addict. Or, God forbid, a rapist. That’s as dirty as it gets. You know about the pad?”

“No.”

Uncle Pavlov had gone on to explain the setup. Every precinct had a bagman who collected from the bookies and the pimps. The captain took the biggest piece, then the lieutenants got theirs, then the sergeants, then a few detectives.

“Beat cops like me get nothing,” he concluded.

“You’re saying that the money just comes along like your paycheck?”

“See, that’s the thing, Stanley. Is the pad clean or is it dirty? Not everybody participates. In fact, if the captain’s clean, there ain’t no pad. If the captain’s clean, then it’s every cop for himself. By the way, I’m sure you heard that gettin’ transferred out to Staten Island is a horrible punishment for a cop. Ask yourself why that should be? A lotta cops live on Staten Island. There’s no violence out there. You could do your tour without worrying that someone’s gonna toss a brick off a roof. So I ask ya, Stanley, why is gettin’ transferred out to the boondocks a punishment?”

“Because there’s no money out there. No pad.”

“Congratulations, my boy, you’ve just won a free trip to the real world.”

What had stuck in Moodrow’s mind was the part about “not everybody participates.” He’d never given it much thought while he was fighting his way into the detectives, but he’d expected to have a choice, to think about it before it was shoved into his face. Sure, people wanted to make bets. They wanted to get laid, too. But when these same people got in over their heads, the bookies sent guys with baseball bats to do the collecting. And the pimps weren’t any better. They controlled their stables with anything that came to hand. Fists, chairs, lit cigarettes, razors, knives. Anything.

Moodrow had seen it close up. It was always a beat cop who arrived first when the bookies got through collecting. A beat cop who picked up the pieces and loaded them into an ambulance. Besides, the story Moodrow kept hearing was that the bookies and pimps were employees. They worked for bosses who also distributed the heroin that’d hit the Lower East Side like a biblical plague.

What it needed was sorting out. No matter what the cops did, even if they never took a dime from anybody, the gambling and the whores would still be there. You couldn’t stop it and the politicians would never legalize it. The cops were the regulators, the only regulators. It wasn’t what they were set up to do, but if they didn’t do it, the situation would be a lot worse.

“You in dreamland, Stanley?”

Sal Patero was smiling. He had no inkling of what was going on behind the swelling and the bruises on Moodrow’s face. Fighters are trained not to show an opponent what they’re feeling. A triumphant grin might inspire a beaten fighter to give it one more try. Showing fear or pain, on the other hand, encourages an even greater beating. If you were smart, you learned to show nothing. You learned, for instance, to hold yourself erect after a left hook just turned your liver to jelly.

“No, no. I’m here. I was just thinking.”

“Have something to eat. It helps prevent that condition.”

The waiter was already standing by the table. He took their order, veal for Patero and the shrimps in hot sauce for Moodrow, then disappeared into the kitchen.

“I was thinking about what we’ve been doing all morning,” Moodrow said.

“I was afraid you were gonna say that.”

“The thing of it is that if you’d given me a choice, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Whether I would’ve gone into it or not. But now that I’m already in the soup, I wanna try to understand what I’m eatin’. So’s I don’t get indigestion.”

“Keep goin’, Stanley.”

Patero was obviously irritated, but Moodrow wasn’t really concerned about Patero. Pat Cohan had set this up and unless Pat Cohan decreed otherwise, they were stuck with each other.

“This is the pad we’re doing, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re the precinct bagman, right?”

“Don’t make this into a cross-examination, Stanley. I don’t feature being interrogated. Especially by you.” Patero’s ears were red, the veins along his temples swollen.

“How often do we have to do this?”

“Whenever I say so.”

“C’mon, Sal. I got a right to know. Is this it? Eight hours a day, five days a week until I earn my pension?”

“You want out? There’s ten thousand cops who’d give their right arms to be in your position. You want out, just say the word.”

“That’s not what you told me this morning. This morning you told me if I had a problem, I should take it to Pat Cohan.”

“Fuck Pat Cohan.”

“Ya know, Sal, you should try to put yourself in my position. Five years I’m a cop and the most I ever got out of it was a free hamburger. I’m a detective for five hours and I’ve committed five felonies. Five counts of bribery, if not outright extortion. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming you. But I think I got a right to know what’s going on. You haven’t even told me what my piece is.”

Patero stared into Moodrow’s eyes for a moment. “You tryin’ to tell me that Pat Cohan didn’t spell this out for you? That’s impossible.”

Moodrow leaned over the table. “He didn’t tell me shit.”

Instinctively, Patero sat back in his chair. There was something unpredictable about Stanley Moodrow, something he didn’t care for at all. “Pat Cohan is a prick.”

“This I already know.”

“He wants to see what you’ll do. Before you marry his daughter. In a way, you can’t blame him.”

“But what does the pad have to do with it?”

“You grew up here, on the Lower East Side, right?”

“So?”

“Me, I grew up in Red Hook, near the docks. My father was a longshoreman. When I was ten years old, someone put a hook through his head. Left him in the hold of a banana boat. I never found out who did it. I never even found out why it was done. That’s the way life was in those neighborhoods. Still is, for that matter. Anyway, right after I came into the job, I married a Jewish girl from Forest Hills, Andrea Stern. I loved the hell out of her, but our marriage didn’t work out.

“Andrea grew up in one of those apartments on Queens Boulevard, the kind with the fountains in the lobby. That’s what I liked about her. She was innocent, a child with a woman’s body. In fact, I was so crazy about Andrea that I didn’t give a lotta thought to what was gonna happen after we got married. Which I should’ve, because it turned out she couldn’t take Red Hook. She tried like hell, but it was too much for her. Too rough in every way. Meanwhile, I’m makin’ four thousand dollars a year and there’s no way we can afford to go anywhere else. When Andrea offered to find a job, her parents went through the roof. They couldn’t live with the disgrace of their daughter having to go out to work. They offered to give us money.

“I don’t wanna make a long story outta this, but the moral is I should’ve thought things out before I got married. Only I was too much in love to think about anything but the wedding night. You? You’re in the same boat. Or, at least, that’s what Pat Cohan believes. You and Kathleen come from two different worlds. Her world is easy to get used to. Yours ain’t.

“You know what a house costs today? Even a little house out in Flushing goes for nineteen thousand. Whatta you make, six thousand five hundred? You’re on the pad for four bills a month. With that kind of money, plus what you’re gonna get from the wedding, you could set yourself up with something nice. You could even afford to give your father-in-law the grandchildren he wants.”

Moodrow took his time answering. He’d calmed considerably by this time. Mainly because most of what Patero was saying had already occurred to him. Most white people on the Lower East Side were either moving out or planning to move out. The Jews, the Italians, the Poles and Russians and Ukrainians-they were all heading for suburbia. “White flight” is what the newspapers called it. Moodrow wasn’t sure whether they were fleeing the tenements and the poverty or the Puerto Ricans who were coming in by the thousands.

The Puerto Ricans didn’t particularly bother Moodrow. He’d known any number of black and Puerto Rican fighters. Some of them were okay and some of them were assholes, just like his white neighbors. The problem was Kathleen. It was all right for a girl to work before she was married, but afterward she was supposed to stay home and take care of the house and kids. Kathleen might be willing to hold onto her job for a few years, but the Church (to say nothing of Pat Cohan) was opposed to any kind of birth control and Kathleen was as religious as they come. Once they were married, she’d want kids.

“Four hundred bucks a month, right?”

“Give or take a few. Plus it goes up if you get promoted or pass the sergeants’ exam.”

“What about being a detective? What about making arrests?”

Patero shook his head. “Ya still ain’t figured it out, Stanley. I’m the precinct whip. My job is to supervise the detective squad, the whole squad, and I’m real good at it. The crap we’re doin’ now only happens the first few days of the month. The rest of the time, I do my work like any other cop. As for you, you don’t have to worry about nothin’. You’re gonna get your collars and you’re gonna move up in the job. With Pat Cohan for a rabbi, it’s guaranteed.”

Jake Leibowttz, sitting in the back seat of his mother’s Packard, was already bored with the New Jersey landscape. It was nothing but houses, dirt and trees. How could anybody live in a place like this? Why would they want to? That’s what he’d ask Steppy Accacio if Joe Faci ever got around to introducing them.

Accacio had moved himself and his family out to Montclair more than two years ago.

“Wake up, Jake,” he muttered to himself. “You’re here on business. This ain’t the guided tour.”

“You say somethin’, boss?” Izzy Stein asked, without turning his head. Izzy was as down to earth in his driving as he was in everything else, a fact Jake Leibowitz greatly appreciated.

“Nah, I’m just thinkin’ out loud.”

Jake liked sitting in the back seat. True, the move from riding shotgun to perched like a big shot, had been forced on him. Just like the wop who was riding shotgun in his place.

“I got a kid,” Joe Faci had said. “He needs a job. Maybe you could take him with ya.”

The ‘maybe,’ as Jake understood it, had meant ‘do it or get the fuck out of here.’ Well, what cannot be cured, must be endured, right? Life had a way of dumping on you and if you didn’t learn to shovel in a hurry, you’d be buried up to your neck. The kid had turned out to be Santo Silesi, eighteen years old and just out of reform school. Santo seemed eager to please, but Jake understood that the kid’s first loyalty would always be to the guineas. Jake Leibowitz was just a rest stop on the road to becoming a made man.

What it is, Jake decided, is that I’m never gonna turn my back on Santo Silesi. Because maybe Santo will become a made man by making Jake Leibowitz disappear. Like Jake Leibowitz made Abe Weinberg disappear. Which was most likely part of Joe Faci’s plan for good old Jake, anyway. Faci hadn’t exactly ordered Jake to eliminate his buddy, but he’d made his position perfectly clear. There was no way Steppy Accacio would continue to do business with a man who couldn’t control his employees.

“So, do what ya think is right, Jake,” Faci had said. “Then get back to me.”

They were driving south along the Jersey coast on Route 9, making their way from town to town. Their target was a SpeediFreight tractor-trailer heading up from Virginia tobacco country to a warehouse near Matawan. The driver would be using the turnpike for most of his ride through New Jersey, but at some point he’d have to transfer to smaller, local roads. His final destination was twenty-five miles east of the turnpike.

There were any number of ways for the driver to go. (SpeediFreight encouraged its drivers to mix up their routes, especially when they carried cigarettes.) But in this particular case the driver would exit the turnpike near South Brunswick. He’d take Route 617 to a large truck stop outside of Old Bridge and go to lunch, making sure to leave the doors unlocked. When he came out, Jake would be waiting.

“This ain’t the way I like to do things,” Jake had informed Joe Faci. “I mean I don’t have any control, here. Suppose I gotta get out in a hurry? One wrong turn and I’ll be wanderin’ through Jersey ’til the tires fall off. Or suppose the driver gives me trouble and I gotta do what I gotta do. Where do I dump the body? What do I do with the truck? No disrespect intended, Mr. Faci, but I wanna work as an independent.”

“Please, call me Joe.” Faci, unperturbed, had sipped his espresso, then added more sugar to what was already a cup of black mud.

“Okay, Joe.”

“I could understand ya reluctance, but I need ya ta do me this one favor. Because I’m in a bind. I got a regular crew for the job, but they had an unfortunate problem in Hell’s Kitchen last week and they ain’t available. So what I’m askin’ ya to do is help me out this here one time. If it goes good, which I’m sure it will, I could set you up permanent. I could introduce ya to one of the dispatchers at SpeediFreight. After that, you’re on your own.”

Faci hadn’t bothered to add “as long as we get our piece,” but Jake had gotten the message. What Faci was doing by setting Jake up with the SpeediFreight dispatcher was putting another layer between his boss and the operation. Jake could be trusted to do his time like a man if he got busted, but the dispatcher was probably some greedy citizen with a big family and a bigger mortgage. If the feds grabbed him, he’d roll over before they put on the cuffs.

“So tell me somethin’, Santo,” Jake asked, “where’d ya learn to handle a truck?” The plan was for the kid to drive the rig to a warehouse in Brooklyn where the cartons would be counted. Jake’s cut was twenty cents per carton. The first thing he’d thought, when Faci had announced the price, was that he could get a dollar a carton if he sold them to someone else.

“Hey,” Santo replied, “call me Sandy. I ain’t in the ‘Santo’ generation.” He turned to face Jake. “See, no mustache.”

Jake unconsciously touched his own mustache. “You don’t like mustaches? Well, a blond kid like you shouldn’t grow a mustache, anyway. Blonds gotta have thick beards to make a mustache look good. It ain’t for kids. Now why don’t ya tell me where ya learned to drive a truck?”

Sandy Silesi turned away, concealing his face, but the tips of his ears, much to Jake’s satisfaction, flamed red.

“My uncle had a trucking company. In the Bronx. I worked there in the summer. I used to move the trailers around the yard.”

“Ya got a license ta drive a semi?”

“Nah.”

“Then take it easy. Real easy.”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t mouth off to me.”

“I didn’t mean nothin’.”

“Because if ya mouth off to me, I’ll pull ya baby ass outta this car and send ya back to Joe Faci in pieces.”

The truck stop in Old Bridge turned out to be so big that Jake thought he’d turned into an army base. There must have been forty or fifty rigs parked in the truck lot and another fifty cars on the other side of the restaurant. Unfortunately, none of the tractor-trailers bore the name SpeediFreight, much less the number 114. Which is not to say that Jake was caught off guard. The drive up from Virginia took nine hours under perfect conditions. Which meant Jake had to be in Old Bridge nine hours after the rig was scheduled to leave Richmond. But suppose the driver ran into a bad accident? Or it was raining in Virginia? Or snowing in Pennsylvania?

“Me and Izzy are gonna go inside and get some lunch,” Jake announced. “You wait in the car. If ya spot the rig, come and get us.”

“Whatever you say.”

Jake took his time getting out of the Packard, trying to decide if the kid was being sarcastic. He couldn’t make up his mind, but then he figured it didn’t matter, anyway. Maybe he would have to teach the kid a lesson. That didn’t figure to be a problem. But this wasn’t the time or the place to do it.

When they got inside, Jake asked the lady with the menus for a table close to the door. The lady dropped the menus on the first table she came to and walked away.

“I can see they like us already,” Jake said.

“This kid is a piece of shit,” Izzy replied. “Santo Silesi. He’s gonna screw us first chance he gets.”

“Jesus, Izzy, not again.”

“It’s meshugah, Jake. It’s like carrying a snake in your pocket. Sooner or later, you gotta get bit, nu?”

“Don’t talk that Jew talk, all right? This is 1958. Ya sound like a Lithuanian rabbi. Next thing I know you’ll be growin’ a beard.”

“How I’m talkin’ ain’t the point.”

Jake shook his head in disgust. “The point is that we already talked about this. Three times. Get it through ya head: we got no choice.” Why was it that Jews never knew their place? Why couldn’t they take no for an answer? It was a curse. The curse of the big mouth. “The point is that there’s fifteen thousand cartons of cigarettes in that truck and we’re gettin’ fifteen cents a carton. That comes out to twenty-two fifty, our end. Ya wanna go back to gas stations and liquor stores? I could fix it.”

“That ain’t it, Jake. That ain’t what I’m sayin’. I just don’t wanna be a slave to some wop who can’t write his own name.”

“It ain’t slavery. We give a piece to Steppy Accacio and he gives a piece to someone else and they give to someone else. I figure there’s gotta be a big boss at the top, but I don’t got the faintest idea who it is. Maybe it goes on forever. Maybe it goes in a circle. Whichever way, if ya don’t give up that piece, ya can’t operate. Ya might as well go out and get a job.”

“C’mon, Jake, I ain’t …”

They were interrupted by a tall, middle-aged waitress in a yellow uniform. The wad of gum she was chewing made a huge lump in her right cheek. It looked like she had a toothache. “What’ll it be, folks?”

Santo Silesi appeared in the doorway behind the waitress. He nodded at Jake, then spun on his heel and disappeared. “What it’ll be,” Jake said, “is some sandwiches to go.”

“Take-out is at the counter.”

“You couldn’t get it for us?”

She walked off without bothering to answer. Jake grinned at Izzy, then stood up. “Must be an anti-Semite.”

They found Santo in the parking lot. He nodded toward a SpeediFreight trailer parked off by itself in the back of the lot. “The driver’s inside the restaurant.”

“All right, you and Izzy go back to the car. And when we get movin’, stay close. If I run into a problem with the driver, I want you right behind me.”

He watched them walk away, then turned his attention to the SpeediFreight trailer. The way the driver had parked his rig, it could be seen from anywhere in the truck stop. If this was a set-up (and there was always that possibility-you couldn’t ignore it), he, Jake, would be spotted before he got within fifty feet of the rig. And it might not be the cops, either. A company as big as SpeediFreight had to have its own security. For all Jake knew, the driver had been involved in a dozen heists.

The walk across the asphalt reminded Jake of the first time he’d walked across the yard at Leavenworth. He hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that everybody was watching him. Just waiting for an opportunity to put a shiv in his back. Well, he’d survived that walk and he’d survive this one, too. He was sure of it, despite the fact that he was sweating, despite the fact that it was twenty-two degrees and windy. By the time he pulled himself into the passenger’s side of the cab, he was breathing heavily, the icy air cutting into his chest like broken glass.

Jake took the.45 out of his waistband, laid it in his lap and immediately felt better. His little jaunt across the parking lot wasn’t going to lead him back to prison. It was the road to Park Avenue. Once he got his hands on the SpeediFreight dispatcher, he’d squeeze the bastard until his toes bled. SpeediFreight was one of the biggest outfits on the East Coast. They hauled everything-TV’s, hi-fi’s, clothing, furniture, appliances.

Six months of good luck. That’s all he was going to need before he put a few goons (Jewish goons, naturally) between himself and the actual heist. Hijackings didn’t really interest him, anyway. At best, they were no more than a means to an end. The end was the drug business, specifically heroin. Dope, horse, skag, doogie-no matter what they called the stuff, it came to the same thing. It came to profit margins that hadn’t been seen in the criminal world since the end of Prohibition. Best of all, the industry was just getting off the ground. There was still room for an ambitious ex-con named Jake Leibowitz.

Jake didn’t let himself become so lost in his plans for the future that he failed to keep an eye on the front door of the restaurant. He spotted the driver as soon as he stepped onto the asphalt. The man was tall, middle-aged and nearly bald.

Hatless despite the cold, he walked with his head down, flashing his shiny dome. He came directly to the truck, then hauled himself up and into the cab without looking at Jake.

“Ya know what this is all about, right?” Jake said.

“Yeah.”

“I want ya to make ya way over to Route Nine, then head up toward the city. Any problems?”

“Naw.” He pressed the starter button on the dash and the engine roared to life.

“What’s ya name?” Jake asked as the rig began to move.

“Dayton. Dayton McNeese.”

“You from down south, Dayton?”

“Mississippi.”

“I guess that explains it.”

“Explains it?”

“Explains why ya don’t like hats.”

Jake Leibowitz was so happy at the way things had turned out that he wasn’t even bothered by the fact that he couldn’t see the mustache he was attempting to trim.

“I’m movin’ on dowwwwwwn the road,” he sang in imitation of every colored inmate he’d run across in Leavenworth. “Movin’, movin’ movin on dowwwwwwn the road.”

But the truth, as he saw it, was that he was moving up the road. And it wasn’t a road, either, but a goddamned turnpike. They’d dropped off the SpeediFreight driver a mile from the Bayonne Bridge, then hotfooted it through Staten Island to a trucking warehouse in Brooklyn where the cartons had been unloaded and counted. The count had come out exactly as advertised, fifteen thousand cartons straight from the R. J. Reynolds factory. The payoff had been a little tricky, because Jake had told Izzy and the wop he was only getting fifteen cents a carton when he was actually getting twenty. But Joe Faci had been smart enough to hand over the money in the privacy of his office.

“Three grand,” Joe Faci had said, “like I promised. And this here is the name and the phone number of the dispatcher at SpeediFreight who’s been working with us. Call him and arrange a face to face. You should be aware that he sometimes needs a little encouragement.”

Izzy’s cut had been 30 % of twenty-two fifty. Silesi had settled for 20 %. Which had left Jake with a very satisfying eighteen seventy-five.

“As in one thousand eight hundred and seventy-five dollars and no fucking cents,” Jake said, straightening his tie.

The first thing Jake had done was stop off in Mrs. Pearlstein’s Ladies’ Garments on Norfolk Street and pick up the largest rabbits’ fur coat on the rack. Not that he was stupid enough to actually tell his mother it was rabbits’ fur when he handed it over.

“It’s raccoon, mama,” he’d said. Then he’d broken into a sweat when she tried it on. If the goddamned thing hadn’t buttoned over her fat gut, if she’d had to have her raccoon coat altered, if the equally fat woman who ran Mrs. Pearlstein’s had laughed in Mama’s face … But it hadn’t happened. The coat had fit loosely enough and neither his mama nor her old-country girlfriends could tell the difference between mink and cat.

Jake hadn’t forgotten about his own reward, either. He’d gone uptown, to Leighton’s on Broadway, and bought himself a pearl-gray, double-breasted overcoat and a matching homburg. The homburg, with its softly rolled brim, made him look older, more mature. It made him look established. Which was the whole point, really.

“Ya beggin’ days’re over, Jakie-boy,” he said as he dressed. “Time ta show the world where ya comin’ from.”

Fifteen minutes later, he was down on Pitt Street, stepping out of the Packard and walking up to a familiar door. He knocked softly and waited until it opened, until he was face to face with Al O’Neill.

“What could I do for ya, mister?” O’Neill asked.

“Ya don’t remember me?” Jake took off his hat and leaned forward. “I’m insulted.”

“Hey, mister, I see a lotta guys …” Then it hit him and he staggered back. “We’re payin’,” he said. “We’re payin’ everything. We’re payin’ on time.”

“Relax, Al, I ain’t here on business. I’m here on pleasure.”

“Yeah?” O’Neill took another step back, then his face brightened. “Yeah?”

“Everybody gotta get laid, right? If it wasn’t fa that, where would you be?”

O’Neill managed a laugh. “Can’t argue about that one. Now, whatta ya intrested in? Ya got anything special in mind?”

“Young and willin’, Al. That’s all that matters.”

Stanley Moodrow, sitting at his kitchen table, a cup of coffee in one hand and the Daily News in the other, was more than annoyed. It wasn’t the events of the last few days that had him going. He’d become reconciled to making the rounds with Salvatore Patero. Not that he actually approved (or even that he was committed to the money), but there was nothing he could do about it. Not in the short term, at least. The cards had been dealt and now he had to play them. It was like the sky falling on Chicken Little. The smart thing was examine the pieces, then do what you had to do.

He’d learned that lesson the hard way. He’d been fifteen when his father died quickly, twenty-three when his mother died slowly. Whatever he’d meant to say to his father or been afraid to say to his mother was going to go forever unsaid. For a few minutes, at his mother’s wake, he’d thought he might die himself. Just stop where he was.

“If you can get through this, you can get through anything.” That’s what he told himself. And the truth was that compared to sitting on that folding chair by the coffin while friends and relatives murmured their condolences, his problems with Sal Patero and Pat Cohan were less than two piles of dogshit on the sidewalk. No, what bothered Stanley Moodrow as he dawdled over his breakfast was the weather.

It was cold and windy. Again. Looking out of his bedroom window as he’d dressed, Moodrow had followed the hunched backs of workingmen as they made their way to buses and subways. Checking the weather was a habit he’d picked up as a patrolman. It was funny, in a way. The newspapers wrote about cops all the time. Likewise the novelists. And while the reporters were mostly critical and the novelists full of bull, neither of them seemed to understand the physical aspects of the job.

On cold days, if you managed to keep moving, you’d stay warm from your neck to your ankles. Above and below, you froze no matter what you did. Your ears and feet would hurt for the first hour, then go numb and stay that way until you finished your tour. Which wasn’t so bad until you came back to the station house and thawed out. On really cold days, the pins and needles would have more than one cop dancing in front of his locker.

The summer wasn’t much better-you sweated all day and tended your rashes at night. By the time the dog days hit, your feet and armpits were permanently inflamed, the powder you put on in the morning was white greasy mud by noon, your balls were floating in a lake of sweat by ten o’clock. What got you through the discomfort was nothing more than dogged persistence. You learned to accept the discomfort like an ox accepting the yoke.

The telephone interrupted Moodrow’s daydreams and he left the kitchen to pick it up. He was expecting to hear Sal Patero’s voice, but found his fiancee on the line instead.

“Stanley,” she said, almost whispering, “I only have a minute, but I have to talk to you.”

“Are you at home?”

“No, I’m at Sacred Heart. I just went to confession.”

“And?” The next part wasn’t going to be any better than the weather and Moodrow knew it.

“What we did the other day, Stanley? It was beautiful, even if it was technically a sin.”

“Did you tell that to Father Grogan?”

“It was Father Ryan. And no, I didn’t. I told him that I knew I’d hurt Jesus and I was sorry for that. Which I am, Stanley. But the important thing is I had to promise not to do it again. You know that I had to.”

Moodrow did know it. In order to make a true confession, in order to receive forgiveness, you had to do two things. You had to be truly repentant and you had to believe that you wouldn’t go out and sin again. Moodrow had been all of fourteen when he’d realized that he was going to do certain things over and over again. No matter how many oaths he took in the confessional. He’d handled this insight by avoiding confession. Compounding the felony was what the lawyers called it.

“All right,” he muttered. “I admit it. But you’re also expected to avoid ‘the near occasions of sin.’ Does that mean we can’t see each other until the wedding?”

“You don’t have to be cruel, Stanley. You’re a Catholic, too.”

“I’m a phony Catholic, like ninety-nine percent of all the Catholics in the world.” He hesitated a moment. “Look, I’m sorry, Kate. I don’t want to attack your faith. The other day … well, if I gotta wait another six months, I’ll wait. That’s all there is to it.”

“Actually, there’s something else, Stanley. I probably shouldn’t have gone to Father Ryan. I should have gone to Father Grogan, because he’s a lot easier. Maybe I felt guilty. I don’t know, but it’s done now. Father Ryan wants me to tell my father. As part of the penance.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name, Stanley.”

As he made his way to the 7th Precinct, Moodrow was hoping against hope. He knew he was dealing with a fifty-fifty proposition at best. Maybe Kathleen wasn’t a religious fanatic, but she did believe in sin and the ritual of forgiveness. Which always included a penance. Most penances consisted of saying a rosary or lighting a candle, but apparently Father Ryan had considered Kate’s sin to be especially evil.

What Moodrow had managed to do, after much persuasion, was to make Kathleen agree to go back to Father Ryan and beg for mercy. At least that postponed the confrontation. Maybe, if he had a few days to think about it, he’d come up with a better plan. One thing for sure, he wasn’t going to take a lot of shit from Pat Cohan. A rabbi was one thing-every up-and-comer in the Department had a rabbi-but Moodrow didn’t figure he needed a master. He had no intention of playing the monster to Pat Cohan’s Doctor Frankenstein.

He nodded to several uniformed cops inside the 7th Precinct’s lobby, then quickly made his way to the detectives’ squad room. Once again, the detectives working at their desks ignored him altogether. Moodrow had already stopped hoping that the cold shoulder was some kind of ritual. The truth was they resented the hell out of him.

Patero’s door was open when Moodrow approached. There were two detectives sitting next to the Lieutenant’s desk. Moodrow stopped for a moment, not quite knowing his place.

“Stanley, come in.”

Patero was smiling, so, whatever was going on, it couldn’t be all bad. Moodrow walked through the door and nodded to the suits. “Morning,” he said.

“Stanley, this is Pete O’Brien.” Patero jerked his chin at a tall, beefy cop. “And this here is Mack Mitkowski.”

Mitkowski was small and wiry. His face was all flat planes except for a nose that seemed to jump out of his skull. He stared at Moodrow through dark blank eyes. “Whatta ya say, Stanley? How’s it hangin’?”

Patero interrupted before Moodrow could reply. “We’re gonna take a piece of slime off the streets today, Stanley. Ya know the guy they call the Playtex Burglar?”

“I know what he’s done, but we’ve never actually been introduced.”

The Playtex Burglar had been breaking into one or another of the small clothing stores clustered near Orchard and Delancey for the past six months. As far as Moodrow was concerned, he was strictly small-time, even if he was miraculously successful. What made him interesting to the cops (as well as a minor sensation in the newspapers) was the fact that in addition to a few decent suits and coats, he always grabbed several pieces of intimate lady’s apparel. Lace bras, silk panties, a black shortie nightgown, a full-length slip. At first, the detectives who’d picked up the beef had assumed he was taking them home to his wife or his girlfriend. But as they’d gotten deeper into his m.o., they’d realized that he usually left a small pile of rejects in front of a full-length mirror.

“Well,” Patero continued, “we got the little prick. Tell him, Mack.”

“Piece of cake,” Mack Mitkowski said. “He must’ve lost his regular fence, because last night he approached someone else for the first time. A new fence. This someone else (who I ain’t gonna name) looks just like a rat, but he sings like a canary. He bought the whole load, then called me to come down and take a look at it. It matches with what went outta Kaufman’s loft two days ago. The scum’s name is Victor Zayas, a Puerto Rican. He lives on Avenue D, across from the projects. Works two blocks from here in the kitchen at Ratner’s.”

Patero shook his head. “Imagine. A spic who wears lace panties. Whatta ya think’s gonna happen to him when he goes upstate? Think he’ll be the belle of the ball?”

Moodrow started to laugh, then noticed that Mitkowski and his partner had maintained their neutral expressions.

“Mack and Pete are gonna toss the spic’s apartment,” Patero continued.

“We’re gonna go over to Ratner’s and bring him into the house. See if we can persuade him to own up to his foul deeds.”

Questions began to form in Moodrow’s mind, questions he was smart enough not to ask. First, he wanted to know if they had a warrant to search the apartment. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to use what they found in court. And they probably didn’t have a warrant, because if they did, they’d wait to see what they came up with before approaching Zayas. What Mitkowski was doing was protecting his informant. Or maybe the informant would never agree to testify in an open courtroom.

It amounted to the same thing. All they had was a name. That wasn’t the same as proof or evidence or anything else that would stand up in court, even if they were sure Zayas was guilty. Of course, they could put Zayas under surveillance for the next month. They could try to catch him in the act. But it would take six experienced cops to maintain round-the-clock observation. Six cops times thirty days equals a hundred and eighty payroll days which equals eight or nine thousand dollars. Maybe the captain of the 111th out in Bayside would approve the expense. Bayside was a nice, safe, low-crime neighborhood. But the 7th saw crimes involving knives and guns every day, not to mention a flourishing heroin trade. Captain McElroy wasn’t likely to invest that kind of money in the Playtex Burglar. The whole game hinged on getting Zayas to confess.

Moodrow stepped back to allow Mitkowski and O’Brien to get to the door. He sat down as soon as they were gone.

“Cheer up, Stanley,” Patero said. “You’re gonna get your picture in the papers today.”

“What am I gonna do, kill somebody?”

“What you’re gonna do,” Patero said, “is bust the Playtex Burglar. I already called the reporters. They’ll get the cameras down here whenever I give the word.”

More questions to which Moodrow knew the answers. But this time he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

“How is it my bust? Mitkowski was the one who nailed him.”

“It’s your bust, because I say it’s your bust.” Patero’s voice was sharper. He couldn’t understand why Moodrow didn’t just play the game. It was a gift, this arrest, and as far as Patero was concerned, Moodrow should be grateful.

“I hear what you’re sayin’, Sal, but what I’m seeing is that these guys hate my guts. I’m supposed to be out there developing my own pack of rats. A detective’s only as good as his information. That’s what everybody says.”

“I thought we reached an understanding the other day.” Patero lit a cigarette and sucked in a cloud of smoke. He held it for a second, then let it drift out through both nostrils. “I’m tryin’ to cut down, but it only makes the ones I do smoke taste better.” He took another drag before returning to Moodrow.

“First of all, it doesn’t matter what Mitkowski and O’Brien think of you. They’re nice guys and halfway decent detectives, but they’re not going anywhere and they’re not gonna complain. Second, them and everybody else in the squad would give their right arms to be where you are now. Third, what you’re gonna learn, startin’ today, is how to do something more important than beggin’ some slimeball for a name. You’re gonna become the Seventh’s liaison with the DA’s office. You’re gonna be the one who makes sure that all the evidence and all the paperwork is in order before a case goes to trial. Take my word for it, Stanley. You won’t believe what kind of assholes you’re gonna be dealin’ with. We had a detective, first grade, name of Galowitz who once sent a thirty-eight over to the lab without doing any paperwork at all. Just dropped it off on his way home. Naturally, it turns out the thirty-eight was used in a robbery in which a homicide occurred. Before we can arrest the scumbag who owns the gun, he shows up with a lawyer. The judge threw out the thirty-eight at a preliminary hearing and the perpetrator never went to trial. I’ve been asking the captain to give me a full-time assistant for the last two years. Just when I gave up hope, you dropped into my lap.”

Victor Zayas didn’t make any fuss when Sal Patero and Stanley Moodrow showed up in Ratner’s kitchen. He didn’t even glance at the badge Patero flashed.

“What do you want?”

“We want ya to come over to the precinct and model a pair of panties for us,” Patero hissed. “Black silk panties. Trimmed with lace.”

Zayas’s face dropped through the floor. Scared shitless was the way Moodrow read it. When Patero put on the cuffs, Zayas began to tremble, a small, skinny kid made almost ghostly by his fear.

They marched him back to the 7th, letting the neighborhood get a good look at him. The idea, as Patero had explained it, was to break him down, then give him a way out. Most of the process would take place in a basement interrogation room, but it didn’t hurt to begin at the beginning. Zayas was now in the hands of the police. They could hold him for seventy-two hours without charging him. More than enough time to do what had to be done. Moodrow didn’t think the kid would last through the morning.

“All right, punk, welcome to your new home.” Patero pushed open the door to a small room and shoved Zayas inside. The only piece of furniture in the room was an armless wooden chair. The chair was bolted to the floor. “If ya want room service, I’m afraid ya gotta yell. We ain’t got around to installing telephones. Not that it matters. The filet mignon is shit here anyway.” He shoved Zayas into the chair, then cuffed his wrists and ankles to the chair’s legs. “Comfy?”

“What are you gonna do?” Zayas asked.

“We just wanna see what kind of panties you’re wearing,” Moodrow said. He noted Patero’s approving grin, then loosened Zayas’s belt and yanked his corduroys down. “Boxers.” He shook his head in disgust.

“Why are you doing this?”

“You tell us,” Patero said.

“I want a lawyer. I’m entitled to a lawyer.”

“He talks pretty good for a spic. Don’t he, Stanley?”

“My grandfather came here in nineteen oh-three. I know my rights. I want a lawyer.”

“All right, already.” Patero raised his hand defensively. “Don’t get hot. We’ll go out and find you a lawyer. You wait here.”

Patero led Moodrow into a small anteroom. He closed the door, then turned out the overhead lights. Zayas was clearly visible through a glass panel, though what Zayas saw, when he looked at the glass, was himself, handcuffed to a chair.

“You’re gonna be the good cop, Stanley,” Patero said. “After Mitkowski and O’Brien get through with him. You know what to do?”

“I’ve seen it done, but I’ve never done it.”

“Yeah, well, ordinarily I wouldn’t expect ya to bring it off. I’d let ya watch a few more times, before ya tried it yourself. But this Zayas is a punk. We pulled his jacket this morning and he came up clean. Just wait until the boys soften him up, then go in and hold his hand.” Patero took a sheet of paper out of his inside jacket pocket and tossed it over to Moodrow. “Here’s a list of burglaries we’d like him to cop out on. Addresses and dates.”

Moodrow scanned the list quickly. “These go back more than two years. I thought the Playtex Burglar’s only been working for the last six months?”

“First rule of law enforcement, Stanley,” Patero grinned. “The system runs on success. Ya gotta clear a certain percentage of the crimes committed in your command. It’s a competition. One precinct against another. Second rule of law enforcement: everybody cheats. When I first got appointed to the detectives, I was stationed up in the Two twenty-second. In the east Bronx. The captain there had a motto: ‘If it ain’t dead, it ain’t a felony.’ We had the lowest felony rate in the city for six years running.”

“Some of these burglaries were big,” Moodrow insisted. “This one on Division Street netted thousands of dollars in furs. You put that on the kid, he’s gonna go upstate for a long time.”

Patero advanced until his face was six inches from Moodrow’s chest. He looked ridiculous-like a chicken confronting a turkey-but he was much too angry to notice. “What’re you supposed to be? Sir fucking Galahad? Why don’t ya just give me your gold shield? Take it out right now and hand it over. I’ll get the captain to put ya back directing traffic for kids comin’ outta school. That way you’ll sleep good at night.”

The door opened before Moodrow could respond. O’Brien, carrying a paper bag, entered the room, followed by Mitkowski. If either of them noticed anything wrong, they didn’t show it.

“Home run,” O’Brien announced, emptying the bag onto a metal table. “Panties, slips, bras, nylons, garter belts. This one’s my favorite.” He held up a blue silk peignoir.

“He livin’ with a broad?” Patero asked.

“Negative, Sal. No dresses, coats, shoes.”

“Cosmetics?”

“A ton of it. Perfume, too.”

Patero stepped away from Moodrow. He was smiling again. “Might as well get to it.”

“I had a great idea on the way over,” Mitkowski said. “Ain’t that right, Pete.”

“Great idea,” O’Brien admitted.

Mitkowski took off his jacket, tie and shirt, then slipped into the peignoir. “Whatta ya think?” Mitkowski was small enough to button the peignoir, but his chest, covered with wiry black hair, somehow ruined the effect.

O’Brien took a scarred nightstick off the top of a filing cabinet and began to twirl it. In his expert hands, it spun like a yo-yo. “Just in case the punk ain’t impressed with Mack’s charms.”

Patero flipped on the intercom as soon as O’Brien and Mitkowski were in the room with Zayas. “I’m gonna take off, now. I got some paperwork in my office needs takin’ care of. You stay here. Do whatever you gotta do. One thing, though. You fuck it up, I’m takin’ it back to Pat Cohan. I’m gonna tell him I can’t work with you. I’m gonna say, ‘You asked me to teach Stanley about the Department, but Stanley don’t wanna learn. Whatta ya gonna do about it?’ ”

He left without waiting for an answer and Moodrow turned his attention to the interrogation room. The cops in the 7th called this room the Canary Cage, because so many suspects, caught within its walls, had been induced to sing whatever song the cops wanted to hear. Victor Zayas, however, was almost certainly a punk with no one larger than himself to give up. Which meant there was only one way out of the Canary Cage for the Playtex Burglar-his signature at the end of a confession.

Moodrow watched Mitkowski strut across the room, swinging his hips as he went. “And thith design,” he said, “is bound to get hith attention. All hith attention.” He sashayed over to Zayas and sat on the small man’s lap. “Whatta think, Victor? Do I look the part? Or would ya like to show us how ya do it for ya boyfriend?”

“I want a lawyer,” Zayas announced. “I know my rights.”

O’Brien stepped forward, grabbed Zayas’s nose between his thumb and forefinger, then twisted sharply. “I don’t wanna hear that shit. Not from no faggot like you.”

Zayas tried to pull away, but there was no place to go. The act was meant to remind him of his helplessness and O’Brien continued to drive the message home until Zayas cried out in pain. Then, seemingly satisfied, O’Brien strolled over to the far corner and picked a dusty telephone book off the floor.

“Did that bad, bad polithman hurt you, Vickie?” Mitkowski crooned.

“I want a lawyer.” Zayas was near to tears. “I’m entitled to a lawyer.”

“Oh Vickie, Vickie, Vickie.” Mitkowski was having the time of his life. When the boys in the squad room heard about this one, they’d buy his drinks for the next month. “Why are you rejecting me, Vickie? You know how thenthitive I am. Is it because I’m a fucking faggot? That doesn’t make me a bad perthon. I could thuck every cock in Manhattan and still be a good perthon. I mean it’s what’s in your heart that counth. Ithn’t it?”

This time Zayas kept his mouth shut. He sat in the chair, his eyes closed, clearly determined to ride out the storm. Of course, Zayas wasn’t the first suspect ever to demand a lawyer. Suspects were entitled to speak with a lawyer before questioning, assuming they knew their rights and requested one.

Interrogating officers usually divided knowledgeable suspects into two categories: hardened ex-cons and well-informed citizens. Most of the ex-cons would take a beating and laugh in the cop’s face. Having been through the game before, they knew that a beating only lasts for a few days, but prison goes on for years and years. Well-informed citizens, on the other hand, tended to see their right to a lawyer as an abstraction and the pain of a beating as very, very concrete.

“All right,” Mitkowski said, getting up. “I know when I’m not wanted.” He took off the peignoir, draped it over Zayas’s shoulders, then buttoned it under his throat. “Here, it looks better on you, anyway. Pete, gimme the phone book.”

O’Brien, standing behind Zayas, passed the phone book over to Mitkowski. “You gonna make a call, Mack?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna call Victor’s conscience.” He took the phone book and carefully dusted it off. “Wouldn’t wanna get ya perm all dirty, would we, Victor?” He paused, but Zayas didn’t answer. “What we’re gonna do now is for your own good. Because what I noticed here is that ya got very bad posture and how could ya be a model if ya posture’s bad? So what we’re gonna do is put the phone book on the top of ya head. Your job is to keep it there, keep ya neck and head straight. Believe me, this is great trainin’, Vickie. Course, ya could move and let the book fall down, but if ya do, I’m gonna take out my cock and make you suck it.” Mitkowski’s voice suddenly hardened. “You understand me, faggot? You understand what I’m tellin’ ya? Don’t try me, ’cause I never bluff.”

“I want …”

Mitkowski slapped Zayas’s face, a quick, sharp blow that would have knocked Zayas down if he hadn’t been handcuffed to the chair.

“No more bullshit about a lawyer. Not one fuckin’ word. Whatta ya think, we’re playin’ around here?”

“All right,” Zayas muttered.

“That’s better.” Mitkowski laid the phone book on Zayas’s head, balancing it carefully. “Very good, Vickie. See how ya holdin’ ya shoulders? And how ya neck forms a straight line? Just hold it for another minute and I’ll give you a nice reward.”

The reward turned out to be O’Brien using the nightstick like an axe, bringing it in a long smooth arc, from behind his knees to straight over his head to the top of the Manhattan phone book. The crack was sharp enough to make Mitkowski wince. Zayas, on the other hand, did nothing for a moment. Then he screamed, a long howl so elemental it was neither male nor female. It filled the room, as solid as the walls and the floor, a single note, a song of sorrow as much as pain, freezing the two detectives until it finally died out. Until Zayas, head bent, tears streaming down his cheeks, began to sob uncontrollably.

“Look what ya did,” Mitkowski said calmly. “Ya moved ya noggin and the phone book fell on the floor.” He picked it up, then grabbed Zayas’s face and lifted his head. “Now what I’m gonna do is put this phone book on ya head again. I know ya first instinct is gonna be to shake it off. Hey, it’s only natural. But ya should think about this. If there ain’t no phone book up there, then there ain’t nothin’ between ya faggoty skull and Pete’s nightstick. See what I mean?”

Mitkowski didn’t wait for an answer. He balanced the phone book on top of Zayas’s trembling head, then stepped back and nodded to O’Brien who once again brought the club through its arc. This time Zayas didn’t scream. He slumped forward, his eyes fluttering, nearly unconscious.

Zayas would have remained that way for a long time, preferring the blank dizziness to the reality awaiting him, but the sight of Stanley Moodrow crashing through the door overrode any common sense he might have had.

“What the fuck is goin’ on here?” Moodrow demanded.

“Jeez.” Even Mitkowski, who’d been expecting Moodrow’s entrance, was impressed. Like most of the cops in the 7th Precinct, he’d witnessed the Liam O’Grady fight.

“I asked you a question,” Moodrow repeated.

“Drop dead, Stanley,” O’Brien said. “We’re just doin’ our jobs.”

Moodrow strode across the floor and grabbed O’Brien’s lapel, yanking him in close. “What you are is a fucking animal, Pete. And what I am is an animal trainer. I want you out of here. You and that asshole dwarf you call a partner.”

“Take it easy. Take it easy.” O’Brien instinctively pushed back Moodrow’s chest. It was like pushing against a concrete pillar. “Jeez,” he said, echoing his partner’s sentiments.

“Look here, Stanley,” Mitkowski muttered, “this asshole belongs to us. You try to play the big hero, we’re gonna go to the lieutenant.”

Moodrow released O’Brien and turned to Mitkowski. “Go anywhere you want, Mack. As long as it’s out of here. And give me a key for those cuffs. Whatta ya think ya got here, public enemy number one?”

Mitkowski fished a key out of his pocket and threw it at Moodrow. “We’ll be back,” he announced.

“Don’t slam the door on your way out.”

Of course, they did slam the door. O’Brien slammed it as hard as he could and Moodrow had to wait for the crash to die down. When it was quiet in the room, he knelt beside Zayas and removed the handcuffs on the little man’s wrists and ankles.

“That feel better, Victor?” Moodrow asked.

Zayas nodded. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“What they did was wrong.” Moodrow went back into the anteroom and picked up a small table and a chair. He carried them back into the interrogation room and set them in front of Zayas. “How do you take your coffee, Victor? Milk and sugar? Light and sweet?”

Zayas stared at Moodrow, uncomprehending.

“Your coffee, Victor. How do you like it?”

“Black.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Moodrow reappeared a minute later with a steaming mug in his hands. He placed it in front of Zayas before sitting down. Carefully, almost reluctantly, he took out his ballpoint and his notebook. “You smoke, Victor?” he asked.

Stanley Moodrow sat at his kitchen table, an untouched bowl of Hormel chili (customized with strips of Kraft’s Sliced American) in front of him. He was trying to read the Daily News, the same edition he’d been reading before Kathleen’s call, but the stories seemed trivial, absurd. Albert Anastasia, the ultimate high-profile gangster, was in the headlines again. The reputed head of Murder, Inc., Anastasia had been gunned down in a barber’s chair the previous October. Ever since, publicity-seeking DAs and congressional committees had been dragging in one mobster after another for what they called ‘questioning.’ Now it was Meyer Lansky’s turn, Lansky and Sam Trafficante who were, according to the story, in Havana trying to buy the country of Cuba from its dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

Despite his best efforts, Moodrow kept asking himself the same question: what did Albert Anastasia and Meyer Lansky and the DA, Frank Hogan, have to do with what had happened in the Canary Cage? As Patero had predicted, the reporters had come to photograph Moodrow leading a handcuffed Playtex Burglar out of the 7th Precinct and into a waiting van. Would the story they printed have anything to do with what had gone on in that basement room? Would they, for instance, reflect Patero’s anger? Because he, Moodrow, had never taken Patero’s list out of his pocket. He’d simply written down whatever Zayas had said and had the kid sign on the bottom line.

Moodrow was honest enough to admit that he’d known about the game all along. His uncle had enlightened him before he’d entered the Academy. It was simple enough, really. The courts (the lower courts, at least) would admit any confession, no matter how it was obtained. The higher courts, assuming the convict had the money for an appeal, were as likely to reverse these convictions as not, but this meant less than nothing to the NYPD. As far as the cops were concerned, cases were cleared the minute a conviction was obtained, no matter what happened two years down the line. Of course, clearing cases wasn’t the only way up for an ambitious precinct commander, but failing to clear as many cases as your competitors was a sure way down.

Maybe, Moodrow thought, it was like your first murder scene. You never forgot the first one-it dug under your skin like the teeth of a bloodsucking tick-but, after a while, you simply got used to the violence. After a while, you could stand there, inhaling the coppery stink of drying blood, and chomp on your doughnut like a real veteran.

The doorbell rang before Moodrow could drag himself back to the Daily News. He got up, hoping against hope that it was Kathleen come to tell him that Father Ryan could go to hell. But it wasn’t Kathleen. It was his neighbor, Greta Bloom.

“Good evening, Stanley,” she announced, marching past him into the apartment.

“Why don’t you come in, Greta?”

“I’m already in, thank you.” She turned back to the door. “Rosaura, please. Don’t stay in the hallway. You’ll get a draft.”

The middle-aged woman who stepped into the apartment was so large that Moodrow couldn’t believe that he hadn’t noticed her in the hallway, had nearly shut the door in her face.

“Stanley,” Greta said, “this is your neighbor, Rosaura Pastoral. Rosaura, this is our policeman, Stanley Moodrow.”

Our policeman? Moodrow managed a nod despite his annoyance. He reminded himself that Greta had been his mother’s best friend, had nursed her through her illness. If it wasn’t for Greta Bloom, his mother would have spent the last six months of her life in a hospital.

“What could I do for you, Greta? Somebody lose a cat?”

“What you could do is ask us to sit down. And don’t be a wiseguy, Stanley. I told you a million times about that.”

“Greta, Mrs. Pastoral, please sit down.”

Then he remembered. A homicide on Pitt Street. A stiff named … Melenguez, that was it. Luis Melenguez. He was supposed to ask around, find out what happened.

Greta perched herself on the edge of the couch. “Nu, you shouldn’t bother with coffee and a nosh. It’s late and we won’t be staying long.”

“Gee, Greta, I was just about to create my world-famous onion dip.”

“Please, Stanley. This is serious business.”

Moodrow sat down and looked the two women over. Rosaura Pastoral looked to be about five foot eight. She weighed maybe a hundred and eighty pounds. Greta Bloom, tiny, nervous, fluttering like a parakeet, had never weighed more than a hundred pounds in her life.

“What it is,” Moodrow said, trying for a smile, “is I forgot all about it. I mean what you asked me the other day. Things got a little crazy in the precinct and I forgot to ask around.”

“He forgets a murder? How is this possible?”

How could he explain it? All the times he’d responded to a crime scene to find a DOA lying in a pool of blood. It was always gruesome, no doubt about that, but it had long ago ceased to be exotic.

“What could I say? I’m sorry.” What he wanted to do was get rid of them without listening to the harangue already showing in the expression on Greta’s face. “I’ll tell you what, Greta. As long as you brought Mrs. Pastoral with you, why don’t you let her tell me why she feels something’s wrong here. That way I’ll know what to ask when I go into the precinct tomorrow.”

Greta Bloom sniffed once. “That’s smart, Stanley. But I’d be happy you shouldn’t embarrass me again. If you’re not interested in doing a favor, you should come right out and say so.”

Moodrow turned to Rosaura Pastoral without answering. Now that she was sitting in front of him, he did recognize her. Maybe he’d seen her by the mailboxes or carrying a bag of groceries up the stairs. He couldn’t really remember and that was too bad, because there was a time when he could name every family in the building.

“Maybe you better tell me about it,” he said.

“Senor Moodrow,” Rosaura Pastoral spoke for the first time. Her voice was deep and slightly hoarse. “This thing happens the day after Christmas. My boarder, Luis Melenguez, goes out for the evening and he don’ come back. For five days I don’ hear nothing. Then someone tell me he is killed in a house on Peet Street.”

“Peet Street?”

“She means, Pitt Street,” Greta interpreted.

“I’m sorry for my English is no too good. I try to learn, but it comes very slow.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Moodrow said. “Just tell your story.”

“When I’m hearing this about Luis, I go to the police station and talk to the officer at the desk. He is sending me to a man in a suit, Detective Maguire. Detective Maguire is telling me the investigation is … progressing. Tha’ is the word he use. Progressing. Then I ask him why nobody come to see me. I am Luis’s landlady. He live in my home. Why nobody come to as’ me who is his friends? Who is his enemies? Ayyy, Dios mio, Detective Maguire get so angry. He say I don’ know nothin’ about it, so why don’ I go home and mind my own business. I do like he say, but no is right thing. I don’ think so.”

Moodrow took a minute before he responded. He’d been in the final stages of training for his bout with Liam O’Grady on December 26 and knew less than nothing about the murder. But the fact that more than two weeks had gone by without an arrest meant that, statistically, at least, the murder was unlikely to be cleared.

“You say that nobody came to interview you. Nobody?”

“No, Senor. I never hear from nobody abou’ this thing. Luis Melenguez is only in this country six months. He leaves his wife and his children in Puerto Rico to come here. Luis never hurt nobody in his life. In his country, he is a … I don’ know the word for this.”

“A peasant, Stanley,” Greta said. “And believe me, from peasants I have experience.”

The Department, Moodrow knew, cleared a high percentage of homicides, usually within the first forty-eight hours. And the way they cleared them was by investigating the people closest to the victim. Of course, there might be any number of reasons why Maguire hadn’t followed standard operating procedure, not the least of which was the distinct possibility that Rosaura Pastoral was lying through her teeth. But even if Rosaura was telling the truth, even if Maguire had no good reason for sitting on his hands, there remained the question of what he, Stanley Moodrow, could do about it.

“You should understand something here,” he said, more to Greta Bloom than Rosaura Pastoral. “I’m not the commissioner. There’s not much I can do.”

“Stanley, please, no one expects you should go out and make miracles. But also you should remember that Rosaura is your neighbor. She comes to you for help, because there’s no other place for her to go. The machers at the police station don’t have no use for a pisher like Rosaura Pastoral. Let me tell you a story so you should understand what I’m trying to say.”

“Please,” Moodrow groaned. Greta’s stories had a way of extending themselves through several generations.

“Stanley, make me a promise you’ll listen close and I swear I won’t be too long.”

“Keep it short and I’ll repeat it word for word.”

“Huh,” she snorted, “always with the smart mouth. One day you’ll get in trouble with a mouth like that.”

“One day?”

“When I came to this country,” she said, ignoring his response, “I was already thirty years old, a married woman with two children. This was in 1920. All my life before that I lived in a shtetl in Poland. A shtetl is a small village. For me, a goy was one of two things. A goy was a peasant with a club or a Cossack with a sword. Believe me, Stanley, I’m not exaggerating even a little bit. I saw plenty growing up-Jews beaten, robbed, killed. It was an expected thing. So, when I found out that my husband, who came here before me, was living in an apartment with a goy next door, I was so crazy I couldn’t talk.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“Little by little, I learned there were goyim in the world who didn’t hurt Jews just because they were Jews. There were goyim who were neighbors, who helped you out when you were in trouble. This maybe sounds to you like nothing, but, for me, it was a revelation like even the prophets didn’t know. It changed my life and all my thinking. Rosaura is like me when I first came to America. She don’t know a soul. She don’t know how things work. But she’s my neighbor and she’s your neighbor, too. Just like her boarder, Luis Melenguez. From my thinking, when a neighbor asks for a favor, you do what you can. That’s how we survived in 1920 and that’s how we survive today.”

“What’s the favor, Greta? What exactly does she want me to do?”

“Stanley, don’t be a schmuck. First you should find out what’s going on. Then you’ll think of something.”

Pat Cohan was near to tearing his mane right off the top of his head. He just couldn’t get it right. Just couldn’t. Whenever he patted the last feathery wisp into place, whenever he was about to turn away from the mirror and face the plague that’d fallen on him over the last few days, another white knot popped out and fell over his eyes like the fine lace veil his wife put on every time she left the house.

What it made him feel was incompetent, disheveled, out of control. Which, in his mind, was the same as old. Which was the same as retired. Which was the same as dead. Which …

The point was that he could remember a time when he took problems in stride, when he actually looked forward to problems. Because if there was anything the Department appreciated, it was a cop who could make problems disappear. Especially the kind of problems that embarrassed the NYPD.

He looked at himself in the mirror, fingers automatically fluttering over his mane. His face was bright red, which meant his pressure was up again.

“Ya look like a boozer, Pat,” he muttered to his reflection. “Ya look like a damned Irish drunk.”

What he felt like doing was covering his head with vaseline like some punk rock-and-roll singer. Or just shaving the whole mess off. Wear it military-style and to hell with his image. But what he did, finally, was fish a can of Clairol hairspray out of a bureau drawer and coat his mane until it was stiff as a board. Which he didn’t mind all that much. No, what really bothered him was the sweet perfumy smell. It would cling to him for the next hour, no matter what he did.

Sighing, he turned out the lights and headed downstairs to the den. Once there, once the door was closed and he felt safe, he intended to light the biggest cigar he could find and fill the small room with smoke. Unfortunately, in order to get to the den, he had to pass through the living room.

“What’s that smell?”

Pat Cohan turned to confront his daughter. She was sitting in a leather wing chair. His favorite chair. And she was grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“Isn’t there something you should be doing, Kathleen? Maybe your mother needs help.” Ordinarily, he enjoyed her teasing, actually encouraged it.

“Mother can pray the rosary without me, Daddy. But if you’d like to go up and ask her if she wants assistance …”

That was just what he needed. A visit to his wife’s private hell, to windows and doors draped in black velvet, to an agonized, bloody Jesus hanging on the cross. The endless drone of his wife’s prayers sounded more like the hum of a mindless insect than human speech. The dead mourning the dead.

“When Stanley shows up, I want to see him.”

“Okay, Daddy. Sal’s here, by the way.”

“Patero?”

“Who else? I didn’t want to disturb you, so I put him in the den.”

Pat Cohan felt his face begin to redden. His fingers automatically drifted up to his hair, then dropped back to his side. He left his daughter and crossed the living room.

What he wanted to do was get it over with. He wanted to handle this problem the way he’d handled every other problem that stood between himself and the top of the heap. But this problem happened to be dope, and dope simply refused to be handled. It wasn’t clean, like gambling or prostitution. Dope was an open sewer pouring disease onto the city streets. It infected everyone around it, the innocent as well as the guilty, with a mechanical indifference that was near to maniacal.

The only way to handle dope, he’d decided long ago, was to stay as far away from it as possible, to retire before he had to deal with it. That strategy had failed. It’d failed because the same people who controlled the gambling and the whores were moving into heroin. They had no choice in the matter. The potential profits were enormous. To surrender those profits to another gang would be the economic equivalent of cutting your own throat.

He opened the door to his den and stepped through it to find Sal Patero sitting behind his desk. His handcarved, mahogany desk with the eagle’s claw feet.

“Get the fuck out of my chair.”

“Good evening to you, too, Pat.” Patero got up and moved around the desk. “Am I allowed to sit at all?”

“Cut the bull, Sal. I’m not in the mood for it.”

“What’s that smell? It smells like perfume. You wearin’ some kinda sweet aftershave?”

Cohan felt his face redden. He closed his eyes and silently counted to ten.

“Take it easy, Pat. Ya gettin’ ya pressure up. What’s the matter with you, tonight?”

How could he answer that one? My hair won’t stay put? I’m too old to handle the bullshit anymore? My only daughter’s future husband is a fucking fool?

“All right, Sal, why don’t we just get to it.” He sat behind his desk, opened the center drawer and took out a long fat cigar. The cigar was a gift from the Chief of Detectives, a handrolled Cuban import. He unwrapped it quickly, snipped off the end and lit it up.

Patero leaned forward in his seat. “I spoke to Accacio again, like you said. To get a better picture of what he wants from us. Pat, he ain’t askin’ for protection. What he says he needs is information. Like where the narcs are operatin’, their targets and like that. Accacio figures he can keep his boys out of trouble if he can see the trouble coming.”

“I suppose he expects us to hand over all the paper in the Narcotics Squad?”

“No way, Pat. Accacio ain’t stupid. He wants to operate along the East River, from Fourteenth Street down to the Brooklyn Bridge. All them projects? The ones already built and the ones goin’ up? The Housing Authority is fillin’ ’em with Puerto Rican welfare. Accacio figures it’s like a captive market. Between the welfare and the low-cost apartments, they’ll never move out. Every time one of them goes on dope, Accacio’s got a customer for life.”

Pat Cohan suddenly relaxed. He leaned back and tried, unsuccessfully, to run his fingers through his stiff white hair. “Sal, the public sees dope as worse than murder, worse than rape. We’re under tremendous pressure to do something about it. Think for a minute. Drugs are federal. The FBI goes after drugs. The FDA goes after drugs. Suppose the feds really turn up the heat. Suppose they put a hundred agents in Manhattan. Suppose they analyze our paperwork and discover that arrests for heroin are virtually non-existent in a certain section of the Seventh Precinct. Suppose …”

“Accacio understands that, Pat. He told me he didn’t care if we busted every junkie in his territory, because they come right back to the needle as soon as they get out of jail. He doesn’t care if we bust a few of his street dealers, either. All he wants is enough advance warning to keep the people close to him out of it.”

“That way he protects his dope, right? That way he makes sure we never seize enough to really hurt him.”

“Pat, we could do this all night. My problem is I don’t see an easy way out of it, short of committing suicide. We’re in too deep. If Accacio drops a dime on us? I don’t have to draw no pictures, do I?”

“Stop right there, Sal.” Cohan set his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Are you tellin’ me the little greaseball actually threatened us?”

Patero shook his head. “You know, it’s funny, Pat. You didn’t turn a hair at the idea of covering up a homicide. But now you’ve got your balls in an uproar because Accacio dared to challenge your authority. It sounds like you’ve got things all backwards.”

Pat Cohan ignored the jibe. “What you said before? About Accacio dropping a dime on us? Well, Sal, I’ve never met the man, have I?”

It was Patero’s turn to blush and Pat Cohan watched the process with satisfaction.

“We’re the cops, Sal, remember? There’s twenty-four thousand of us. Prostitution? Gambling? The last I heard, they were called vices. And we own the Vice Squad. What we could do, if we wanted to, is hit every one of Accacio’s outlets on the same night. Teach the wop a lesson. If we wanted to.”

“He could still give my name to Internal Affairs.”

“Nobody cares about the pad, Sal. The pad is clean. Plus, the one thing we are in the Department is loyal. If Steppy Accacio breaks the faith, I’ll see to it that he never operates in New York City, again. Never.”

“I appreciate that.” Patero, much to his surprise, felt a wave of emotion roll over him. It took him a moment, but he finally recognized the emotion as pride, not gratitude. He was proud of an NYPD that protected its own, proud of a Pat Cohan who put loyalty before everything else, proud of himself for being part of the process. “I mean it, Pat. It makes a difference.”

Pat Cohan cleared his throat and looked down at his hands. “Meanwhile, we haven’t been threatened. All it is, when you think about it, is a simple request. So, let’s consider it. How much are we talking about here?”

“Right now, we’re gettin’ a grand a month out of Accacio. Six hundred for you, four hundred for me. We help him out and he’ll double that, for starters.”

“Can we do it? Assuming we want to do it. The Narcotics Squad is pretty clean. If anyone’s taking, they’re keeping it to themselves.”

“Pat, I’m a Boy Scout. I come prepared. Ya know Wolf? The Jew in Safes and Lofts? Well, he’s in my pocket. Been there for more than a year, so I know he ain’t gonna fold. What I wanna do is transfer him over to Narcotics. Nobody’ll think twice, because I been under pressure to beef up Narcotics, anyway. Wolf’ll be my ears inside the squad. Accacio says all he wants is information, so information is what we’ll give him.”

Pat Cohan relit his cigar. “The thing is we can’t stop it. I mean the dope. Maybe if we’d started right after the war, when it was still small, we could’ve done something, but now it’s out of control.”

“For once, I gotta agree.” Patero sat up in the chair and crossed his legs. “The only thing we can do is regulate it.”

“Tell ya what, Sal. You go see Accacio tonight. Tell him we accept his offer, but it’ll take some time to set things up. Which it will, of course. Just make sure you tell him we’re expecting the first payment now. That’ll give us a month to make up our minds.”

They were silent for a moment, their silence constituting a kind of agreement. Pat Cohan, satisfied with his decision, let his thoughts wander lightly over his possessions-his home, his numerous bank accounts, his sad, sick wife, his only daughter. They finally came to rest on what had been bothering him all along. Stanley Moodrow.

“Let’s talk about Stanley for a moment,” he said.

Patero sighed, shrugging his shoulders. “I already clued you in, Pat. Stanley’s not a bad kid, but these things we’re doin’ ain’t right for him. And it ain’t his fault. It’s yours. You rushed him along too fast.”

“But he hasn’t actually refused to cooperate?”

“Do I have to go through it again? I gave Stanley a list of burglaries. I told him to include all of them in Zayas’s confession. He didn’t do it. Detectives, third grade, are not allowed to make their own decisions. It’s that simple. Plus, even if he did go along on the collections, I could see he didn’t like it. He asked to be put in one of the squads. Pat, I know you got a special interest here, but I ain’t got the time to be your future son-in-law’s psychiatrist. Either straighten him out or get Kathleen to find another boyfriend. Meanwhile, there’s somethin’ I ain’t told ya, somethin’ I didn’t wanna talk about over the phone.”

Pat Cohan sighed. “I can’t wait to hear it.”

“Ya remember the spic who got iced on Pitt Street? In the whorehouse?”

“I’m not senile. Yet.”

“Well, Stanley asked me about him this afternoon.”

Cohan’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline. He rejected his first thought, that Stanley Moodrow was one of the headhunters from Internal Affairs, because it was too gruesome to contemplate.

“It ain’t what ya thinkin’,” Sal continued. “The spic, Melenguez, was a friend of one of Stanley’s neighbors. All Stanley wants to know is how it happened and where the investigation’s goin’. I told him I’d check on it and get back to him.”

“This is what happens,” Cohan grunted, “when you put a cop in his home precinct. Cases become personal. It destroys perspective.”

“The perspective here is that we’re not doin’ shit to find the perpetrator. The perspective is that even if we don’t know who the shooter is, we know who sent him. Now, whatta ya wanna tell Stanley?”

Pat Cohan took his time thinking it over. He re-lit his cigar, then blew on the ash until it glowed. “The first thing we better do is take it out of the precinct. Kick it up to the Organized Crime Task Force. They’ve already got a backload of mob killings that’ll keep them busy for the next five years. I expect to see Stanley tonight. I’ll tell him the spic was a pimp and we think his killing was mob-related, part of a turf war.”

“Sounds okay.” Patero glanced down at his watch. “Jeez, it’s almost nine o’clock. I ain’t laid eyes on my kids in two days. Lemme get the hell out of here. Maybe I’ll be home before they go to bed.”

Pat Cohan left his desk as soon as the door shut behind Sal Patero. He walked across the room, to a small table near the window, and sat down. A half-finished jigsaw puzzle lay on the table and he began to pick up individual pieces and fit them into an apple tree in the right hand corner of the puzzle. With his hands busy, his mind was free to consider his daughter’s boyfriend.

That’s the way he wanted to think of Stanley Moodrow-as a boyfriend, an unsuitable suitor, not as Kathleen’s fiance. Cohan had been aware of Moodrow’s independent streak all along. Aware of it as a potential problem, especially if Stanley had a conscience to go along with it. Now the chickens were coming home to roost. Or, better still, the fox was in the chicken coop.

Like any good farmer, Cohan understood that the fox had to go. One way or the other. Unfortunately, the chicken, in this case, couldn’t be replaced by a fertilized egg. He thought, briefly, about living alone in his fine big house. Alone except for his crazy wife. He was fifty-nine years old. Retirement was coming, whether he liked it or not. He’d been counting on Kathleen and the grandchildren she’d give him to make that retirement bearable. If he forced her to choose between himself and Stanley Moodrow, there was always the possibility she’d choose Moodrow. He, Pat Cohan, was far too close to the situation to make an accurate judgment.

What he needed to do, he decided, was to move slowly. Wait for Moodrow to fall on his face. The kid was headstrong, stubborn. Sooner or later, like any other beginner, he’d make a mistake. And when he did, Pat Cohan would be standing there, shotgun in hand, like any good farmer with a fox in the coop.

Ten minutes later, when Moodrow knocked on the door, Pat Cohan was ready.

“It’s not locked,” he called, moving back to his desk.

“Evening, Pat.”

“Ah, Stanley. Yer lookin’ good, son. Swelling’s gone down. Bruises almost gone. Lookin’ good, all right.” He fumbled in his desk drawer. “Have a cigar?”

“No thanks, Pat. You know I don’t smoke.”

“Well, boyo, now that your fightin’ days are in the past, it might be time to cultivate a few healthy vices.”

“Maybe you’re right, but I don’t think I wanna begin at the top.” He nodded toward the cigar. “One of these days, maybe I’ll start with a cigarette and work my way up.”

Pat Cohan chuckled appreciatively. He swiveled his chair away from the desk, opened a cabinet built into the bookcase behind him, and fetched a bottle of Bushmill’s and two glasses. “Perhaps I might interest you in a different vice.”

“Sure, Pat, that’d be great.”

Cohan filled the two glasses halfway, then handed one to Moodrow. “Down the hatch, boyo.”

Moodrow managed not to choke, despite the fire that raged in his throat. “Damn,” he said, “I’m not used to this.”

Pat Cohan allowed himself to chuckle sympathetically, then straightened in his chair. “I’m afraid we have something serious to discuss, Stanley. Something unpleasant.”

“This I already figured out.”

“Sal Patero’s complaining. He says you’re not cooperating. He says you don’t care for what you’re doing.”

Moodrow sat back in his chair, looking for the right words, the words that would get his message across without offending Pat Cohan. He, too, had given the matter a lot of thought and he, too, was unsure of what Kathleen would do if forced to choose between her father and her lover.

“The first thing is that what Sal’s got me doing came as a complete surprise. I know you’re only trying to look out for me and Kathleen. I got no problem with that. But I gotta admit that I would’ve liked to work my way up. The other guys in the squad hate my guts and I always got along with everybody.”

“Stanley, if ya want to get ahead, you can’t worry about what some …”

“Let me finish, Pat. Before the lecture.” The whiskey was rapidly going to Moodrow’s head. Its main effect, at that moment, was fearlessness. “I went along with the collections, with the pad. I can live with that, because it’s been goin’ on for a long time. Also, the thing Sal’s got me doing with the DA’s office, the paperwork and that, is also acceptable. I’d rather be conducting investigations, but I understand that I’m doing something important. What bothers me is what he asked me to do with the kid, Zayas. I won’t put these heavy beefs on some punk kid’s head. It’s not right.”

Pat Cohan started to interrupt, but Moodrow waved him off, again. “Everything Zayas did, all those burglaries, don’t add up to a thousand dollars. Zayas is nothing but an amateur who’s small enough to get through a ventilation duct. I can’t go along with making him into a major criminal.”

“Is it my turn, now?” Cohan waited for Moodrow to nod, then continued. “It’s a question of loyalty here, boyo. Not loyalty to me or to Sal Patero. We’re talkin’ about loyalty to the Department, to the tradition. The public doesn’t give two figs for our problems. All the public wants is results. You really can’t blame them. Between the papers and the TV, they’re scared to death. I’m tellin’ ya, Stanley, your average good citizen sees a mugger on every corner. They see rapists under their beds. Murderers in the closet.”

Cohan took a minute to suck on his cigar. “There’s no way to educate the public, boyo. There’s no way to show them how things really work. Yet, we have to protect the Department from its enemies. Think about it, Stanley. Every time we turn around, we’re being attacked by some nigger-loving politician out to pick up a few votes. We have to protect ourselves.” Cohan sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I don’t wanna turn this into a book, Stanley, because the answer is simple enough. We protect ourselves with statistics. As long as our bullshit statistics compare favorably with the bullshit statistics coming out of other cities, nobody can fault us. Now, it’s true, boyo, some of the things we do to protect the Department aren’t particularly pleasant. But those of us who’ve been in the game for a long time understand that our first loyalty is to the NYPD, not to some spic from the Lower East Side. And let me tell you one more thing, Stanley. A cop who fails to exhibit that loyalty, can’t move up the ladder. I don’t care if he’s got the mayor for a rabbi.”

“You have a point there, Pat, but I’m not gonna do it, anyway.” Moodrow, to his surprise, answered without hesitation. “The bad guys are the bad guys. They have to pay for their crimes, even if it means doing what O’Brien and Mitkowski did to Zayas. But I’m not gonna frame some poor schmuck. If that means I never get above detective, third grade, then so be it.”

Pat Cohan refilled his glass, then offered the bottle to Moodrow. “Have another, Stanley.”

“No thanks, Pat. I’m still recovering from the first one.”

“I know this is delicate, boyo.” Cohan sipped at his drink, taking his time. “And the last thing I want to be is the interfering father-in-law. But, you know, Kathleen’s my only child.” He took another sip of the Bushmill’s, swishing it over his tongue before swallowing. “The question I keep asking myself is whether Kathleen can take life on the Lower East Side. Everything looks so easy, when you’re young, but …”

“I already got the lecture from Sal. Kathleen and I are gonna have to take our chances. Like every other couple startin’ out. With both of us working, there’s no reason why we have to live on the Lower East Side. That’s even if you knock me off the pad, which I don’t think you’re gonna do.”

“Damn it, I don’t want my daughter working after she’s married.” Pat Cohan finally lost his temper. “I didn’t want her to work before she got married.”

“You trying to say she wouldn’t listen to you?”

Cohan felt his face begin to redden. He couldn’t believe this detective, third grade-who, by all rights, should still be walking a beat-had the gall to challenge him. Then he reminded himself that he’d already decided to dump Stanley Moodrow. “There’s no sense in pursuing this, is there?”

“Pat, it’s not like I’m talkin’ about goin’ to the press. Or Internal Affairs. I’m satisfied with what I’m doing. It’s just that I’m not willing to send the Playtex Burglar upstate for the next five years to make New York’s statistics better than Chicago’s.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Cohan let his fingers drift up to his stiff hair. “I’ll calm Patero down. In fact, I’ll beat Patero down, if I have to. You try to cooperate every way you can.”

“No problem.”

“Good, now there’s one other thing. Sal told me you were asking after a stiff named Melenguez.”

It was Moodrow’s turn to blush. “This is embarrassing.” He took a deep breath and launched into it. “I’ve got this neighbor. Greta Bloom. Used to be my mom’s best friend. Greta’s the kind of woman who sticks her nose any place it’ll fit. I’m sure you know what I mean. Anyway, it turns out that Melenguez used to room with another neighbor, Rosaura Pastoral. Rosaura is also Greta’s friend, so when Rosaura went to Greta, Greta came to me. She thinks I’m Dick Tracy or something. Anyway, I promised Greta I’d ask about Melenguez. It’s one of those things you can’t get out of. Like goin’ to the dentist.”

“Ya know, boyo, for a minute there, you had me worried. I was afraid you were close to this Melenguez. Now, as far as we can tell, Melenguez was a working pimp. From the way it went down, we’re sure it was a contract killing. The case is in the process of being kicked out to boro-wide Homicide and Organized Crime. They’ll share the information and work on it from different angles. It’s funny, in a way. These little greasers come over here and start committing crimes before they put down their suitcases. Welfare isn’t good enough for ’em. We do everything we can do to make their lives easy and this is how they reward us.”

What Moodrow wanted was Kathleen Cohan back in his apartment on the Lower East Side. What he got was Kathleen Cohan so repentant that she was afraid to come within two feet of him. Kathleen had had her little talk with Father Ryan, a talk that turned out to be a lecture about the impossibility of forgiveness unless the penance was performed. And, of course, she would not be allowed to receive Communion until her sins were forgiven.

Moodrow, listening to Kathleen recite the details, felt his heart drop into his shoes. “Kate,” he said when she was finished, “we’ve got enough troubles with your father. We don’t need any more.”

He went on to describe, in detail, the events leading up to his conversation with Pat Cohan. What he wanted, naturally, was for his fiancee to back him up a hundred percent. He wanted her to burn with indignation at the idea of forcing a man to confess to crimes he didn’t commit. What he got was a puzzled, frowning Kathleen Cohan.

“This Zayas,” she finally said, “is a homosexual and a thief. Did I get that right?”

“He steals women’s clothes and dresses up in them. I guess that’s a pretty big hint.”

“Well, why do you care about him?”

If Kathleen’s voice had been challenging or angry, Moodrow would have known how to respond. But Kathleen was clearly puzzled. She wanted an answer she could understand and Moodrow didn’t have one. Or, at least, he didn’t have one that would please her.

“Zayas was pitiful, Kate. Most likely, there are things happening to him right now that I can’t even describe to you. They took him over to the Tombs and he can’t make bail. I mean there’s a fair chance that he won’t even survive.”

“What I’m thinking,” Kate interrupted, “is that some liberal judge is going to have the same attitude you do. I’m thinking he’s going to give Zayas probation. Zayas is a homosexual. Do you want him out on the streets? Do you want him hanging around the schoolyards? Maybe homosexuality isn’t a sin. Maybe it’s a disease, like the psychiatrists say. But, even if it is a disease, it’s a contagious disease. The only way I know to control a contagious disease is to isolate it until the doctors invent a cure.”

Moodrow felt his mouth tighten down until it was a short straight line, almost a scar frozen on his face. “And what do you want me to do, Kate? You want me to be the judge and the jury? You want me to write my own laws? You want me to be God?”

Kathleen jerked backwards. The movement was involuntary and, for a few seconds, she was really frightened. She’d never gone to any of Moodrow’s fights, never witnessed his potential for out-and-out ferocity.

“Stanley, please …”

“What?”

Suddenly, she reached out and pulled him toward her, burying her head in his chest. “I want you to get along with Daddy,” she said, holding onto him as tightly as she could. “I’m begging you, Stanley. Daddy is all alone in the world except for me. It’s been hard for him. When he lost Peter, when he lost his only son, he was devastated. In a way he’s lost his wife, too. Maybe this is worse than losing her. What I’m saying is I need my father and he needs me. If I lost him, I think I’d die.”

Jake Leibowitz was lost in dreams when the first blow struck the exposed flesh of his back. He was dreaming of prison, of cooking up and hiding a batch of prison hooch in his cell. Somehow, despite the sharp pain and the crack of the leather belt, he failed to wake up immediately. Only the character of his dream changed. It changed from the gleeful anticipation of alcohol intoxication, to a surprise visit by club-wielding prison guards. Still asleep, Jake did what any smart con would do under the same circumstances. He put his hands over the back of his head, curled himself into a ball and waited for the hacks to tire.

When he finally opened his eyes, only to discover his pillow instead of the concrete walls of a prison cell, Jake became slightly disoriented. Somebody was screaming at him, but he couldn’t make out the words. Then, very slowly, inch by inch, it came to him. He wasn’t in prison. He was home in his own bed. And the person beating him wasn’t using a club. She was using a leather belt. And she wasn’t screaming about prison contraband. She was screaming, “A rabbit? A rabbit? A rabbit?”

Timing the rhythm of his mother’s assault carefully-the last thing he needed was to catch a shot in the face-Jake rolled away from the wall, grabbed his mother’s arm as the next blow descended, and pulled her onto the bed.

“Jesus Christ, ma,” he said, as he scrambled to his feet, “you shouldn’t of …” He didn’t finish the sentence, because he knew that he did deserve what he’d gotten.

“A rabbit for a mamaleh,” she moaned. “A rabbit for a mamaleh.”

“What did you do?” Jake gestured toward what remained of his mother’s coat. She’d cut it into pieces and scattered it all over the floor. Which meant, Jake suddenly realized, that while he was sleeping, she’d been standing next to his bed with a pair of scissors. “Mamaleh, I’m sorry.”

Jake’s mother, still gasping for breath, slowly pulled herself upright. “You, you, you … you goy!” Fueled by this insult, she got to her feet and yanked the mattress off the bed. “Where is it?” she demanded. “Where is it?”

“Where’s what?” Jake asked, though he knew exactly what she was looking for.

“Don’t play the shmegegge with me. I’m looking for the money.” She began to rip the drawers out of his dresser, scattering his carefully folded clothing among the bits and pieces of mutilated rabbit.

“Enough.” Jake finally grabbed his mother, holding her arms tight against her sides. “There’s no money here.”

“Don’t lie to me. A goniff doesn’t put his money in the bank.”

“The money’s not here, mamaleh. Not that I have a whole lot, because I’m just gettin’ started in business. But what I do have ain’t here. Just try to calm down. I said I was sorry and I promise to make it up to you. I promise that tonight, when I come home, I’ll have a new coat for you.”

“You think I’d trust you to buy my coat? You think I’m a schmuck?”

“Okay, you’re right. Tonight, I’ll give you a hundred dollars to buy your own coat.”

“Five hundred,” she said calmly. “Not a penny less.”

“I’m not made of money,” Jake moaned. “For five hundred dollars, you could buy mink.”

“Five hundred.”

“Two.”

“Two?”

“Two hundred.”

“Four. I’ll make do with four hundred.”

“Two-fifty, mamaleh. And that’s my last offer. If ya don’t take it, I’m gonna move out and find a place of my own.”

“You act like a big macher, but what you are is a cheapskate. A bum.”

“I’m not changin’ my mind.” He felt her relax in his arms, heard her murmured assent, and let go.

“So, when do I get this money?”

“Tonight, when I come home.”

“Tonight? It’s already three o’clock in the afternoon. Tonight, for a big shot like you, means four o’clock in the morning.”

“I’ll leave it on the kitchen table.”

“Okay, Jacob, I’m trusting you. But take one piece of advice from a poor old mamaleh. If you don’t leave the money, don’t go to sleep. Now, I’ll make you a nice breakfast while you get dressed. And don’t bother about the room. I’ll clean it after you leave.”

Jake got himself showered, shaved and dressed in record time. In a way, his mama had done him a favor. He was supposed to meet Izzy Stein at four o’clock. Not that Izzy wouldn’t hang around if Jake showed up late, but Jake had made a very important decision about his own future and Izzy was a key part of that decision.

The rush didn’t bother Jake, either. He and Izzy had business to take care of. Which meant he’d be wearing his working clothes. Somehow, a sweatshirt, khaki pants, work boots and an ancient peacoat didn’t require a lot of care. His mother’s salami omelet, on the other hand, went down very slowly. He couldn’t understand why his mother insisted on adding a ton of garlic to everything she cooked. Not that he was foolish enough to ask her.

“Jake, you gotta get out of here,” he muttered to himself, as he washed the omelet down with several mugs of bitter black coffee. It wasn’t the first time he’d made the observation. He looked at his mama standing by the stove. She was nearly as tall as he was. And she outweighed him by fifty pounds.

“You said something?” she asked, dropping a spoonful of Crisco into the hot frying pan.

“We’re a team, mamaleh. That’s what I said.”

“That’s nice, Jakey. Such a sweet boy.”

Ten minutes later, Jake was out in the street. He took a moment to note the overcast skies and the warmer temperature. It looked like rain, which was just fine with him. Rain would keep the honest citizens off the street, the ones who felt it was their duty to report a crime. The morons.

He walked the few blocks to Izzy Stein’s hotel, the Paradise, and entered the lobby.

“You wanna go ’round the world with me, baby? Ten bucks. I do you good.”

It was too early for the whores to be out on the street, but that didn’t mean they weren’t working. Jake ignored them, nodding to the desk clerk before climbing the stairs to the second floor. Izzy had had a number of rooms in the months since Jake had gotten out of prison, always on the second floor, rear. If worse came to worst, Izzy had explained, he could jump out the window without killing himself.

“Who is it?” The voice from inside 2C was sharp and suspicious.

“It’s Jake.” The door opened and Jake walked inside. “Who were you expecting?”

“Careless got me sent up the river. It ain’t happening again.”

Jake looked the small room over, shaking his head. A bed, a table, a chair, a tiny chest. “Damn, Izzy, you could do better than this. Ya movin’ up in the world. It’s time ya had a decent front. So’s you could get respect.”

Izzy sat on the edge of the bed. “Big places make me nervous. Too many rooms. Anybody could be hiding anywhere.”

“Ya could still live in a hotel room,” Jake insisted. “Ya could just make it a better hotel room.”

“I hope ya didn’t come down here to talk about my domicile. Because Sandy’s gonna be here in half an hour.”

“Sandy? Don’t make friends with that wop, Izzy. I don’t plan for him to be around too long. He’s nothin’ but a spy for Steppy Accacio.”

“Ya know somethin’, Jake, you got one big problem. Ya worry about the wrong things. Ya wanna find out how much I care about Sandy? Tell me to kill him. Then, you’ll know. Now, what’s up?”

Jake took a deep breath. “We’re movin’ faster than I expected. Maybe we got lucky or maybe we got so much talent we deserve it. Whichever way, if we don’t look out, we’re gonna get in over our heads. What we gotta do is organize.”

“Ya don’t hear me arguin’.”

“Lemme explain, all right? Don’t interrupt. Now, the way I see it is like this. First, we got the SpeediFreight thing goin’ strong-next week, we’re doin’ another load of cigarettes and there’s plenty more comin’. Plus, now Accacio’s givin’ us a piece of the dope. We’re gettin’ the retail for all the projects on Avenue D, from Fourteenth Street to Houston. There’s ten thousand people livin’ in those projects and we’re gonna serve as many of them as we can. And that’s the point, that bit about as many as we can. I don’t know about you, but I got no desire to peddle dope on the street. If ya don’t get busted, ya gotta worry that some junkie’s gonna pipe ya for ya stash.”

“Let him try it.” Izzy lit a cigarette and tossed the match on the floor.

“Ya know what you need, Izzy? Ya need a woman. A Jewish man without a woman is helpless.”

“C’mon,” Izzy sighed. “Get to the point.”

“The point is that we gotta find some help. We need a couple of young guys. Guys just startin’ out. As long as they ain’t wops. I don’t care if they’re fucking Chinamen, as long as they ain’t wops.”

“You got anyone in mind?”

Jake grinned. “That’s where you come in, Izzy. You’re gonna be my lieutenant and ya first job is to recruit us some employees. I’d do it myself, except that I don’t know anybody. All them years in a federal joint in fucking Kansas? Talk about a wasted youth.” He shook his head sadly. “See, what I’m hopin’ is that in a few months, we won’t personally touch nothin’. We organize. We collect. But we don’t touch nothin’. Whatta ya say?”

Izzy took a moment to think it over. “I guess I could do it. You got any objection to the Irish?”

“Whatta you, an idiot? No Irishman’s gonna work for a Jew. It’s impossible.”

“No Italians. No Irish. You want I should find some Apaches?”

“Look, Izzy.” Jake took his time, reminding himself to be calm. “Try to remember what it was like to be a Jew inside the walls. How many cons could ya really trust? I know what I’m asking ain’t easy, but it’s gotta be done. Accacio thinks he can control us, because we’re weak. Just a couple of kikes on a string. What we’re gonna do is put together an organization that can stand by itself. That don’t gotta go beggin’ for crumbs. The dope business is the coming thing. It’s gonna be bigger than Prohibition. Once I get my hands on a chunk of it, I don’t have no intention of letting go.”

Izzy managed a grin. “You shoulda been a lawyer.”

“Then it’s settled?”

“I’ll get on it startin’ tomorrow.”

“Great, now I hope ya didn’t tell Santo what we’re doin’ tonight.”

“I didn’t have to tell him. He already heard it from Joe Faci.”

“Yeah? Well hearin’ is one thing, but seein’ is something else. He ain’t comin’ with us. I got a little surprise for young Santo.”

Fifteen minutes later, young Santo knocked on Izzy’s door. He came into the room with his habitual grin firmly in place.

“Whatta ya say, Iz? How’s it hangin’?”

“Long and low, Sandy. How’s by you?”

“Everything’s everything. Whatta ya say, Jake? We workin’ tonight?”

“You ain’t.” Jake was beginning to hate everything about Santo Silesi, especially his easy grin and his refusal to take offense, no matter how hard Jake pushed him.

“Whatta ya mean?”

“What I mean is I got a special job for ya. A job ya could be in charge of all by yourself. I’m sure ya relatives already told ya what we’re gonna be doin’ with the dope. Right?”

Silesi nodded. “They said somethin’ about it.”

“Yeah? Well here’s what I got to say about it. I need someone to go in there regular. Somebody to take care of the customers. That’s you, Santo. You’re gonna have regular places to be and regular times to be there. According to ya relatives, we could dump between a hundred and two hundred bags a day. For starters. What you’re gonna do is come to me every morning and every afternoon. I give you the dope and you give me the money. Any problems?”

“You want me to go in there alone, right? You’re not worried that I’ll get ripped off.”

Jake laughed. “You tryin’ to tell me ya scared of the Puerto Ricans? I thought you wops were supposed to be so tough?” He watched the blood rise into Santo Silesi’s cheeks and ears. “Here’s the thing, Santo. This is what I need ya to do. For now, anyway. You got a problem with it, you could always quit and go back to ya relatives.”

“Why do you have such a hard-on for me, Jake?” Santo spoke quietly. “I’ve done whatever you asked me to do.”

Jake walked across the room, stopping three feet away from the younger man. “People who work for me do what I say. And what I say is take a fuckin’ hike. Ya don’t like that? Well, there’s nothin’ between us, but air.”

Santo Silesi broke for a moment. His friendly eyes turned to stone. The anger in them was cold and implacable, the icy glitter of sunlight reflecting off the face of a glacier. Jake grinned and braced himself. Twelve years in Leavenworth? A Jew in Leavenworth? If Santo Silesi came forward, Jake fully intended to kill him.

“Hey, guys,” Izzy said. “This don’t make no sense. It’s stupid.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Silesi said, struggling to manage a smile. “I’ll play it whatever way you want, Jake. As long as I get my piece.”

“I don’t welsh,” Jake said. “So that ain’t a problem for you. Now, take off. I’ll see ya tomorrow morning.”

Once Santo was out the door, Jake turned to Izzy. “Ya see that, Izzy? Ya see that?”

“I seen it,” Izzy replied, calmly. “The wop’s colder than he looks. So what?”

“One day, when Steppy Accacio don’t need us anymore, this is the guy who’s gonna try to kill us. That’s ‘so what.’ ” He paused to allow Izzy to reply, but Izzy kept his mouth shut. “Somethin’ else I found out from Joe Faci last night. He says he’s gonna feed us information on what the narcs are doin’. He says he’s got a lieutenant from the Seventh in his pocket and this lieutenant’s got connections higher up. If there’s heat, we’re gonna see it comin’.”

“Ya wanna hear somethin’ funny, Jake. It seems like this guy Faci’s spendin’ a lotta time lookin’ out for us. I mean considering how you keep insistin’ that he’s gonna kill us.”

Jake put his hands on Izzy’s shoulders. “Listen, Izzy. We ain’t family to Joe Faci. We ain’t Sicilians or even Italians. We’re Jews. When Steppy Accacio puts us on the line, he’s only takin’ a step back to protect himself. If protectin’ himself means we gotta go, he’ll put us down without thinkin’ twice. Now, whatta ya say we get to work?”

Izzy shrugged into a black turtleneck sweater. He pulled a wool Eisenhower jacket over the sweater, then added a heavy watchcap and leather gloves.

“Is it cold out, Jake?”

Jake strolled over to the window. “For once, it ain’t cold. But it’s rainin’.”

“Should we take an umbrella?”

“Sure, and don’t forget to put on ya rubbers.”

“Why, we gettin’ laid?”

Jake put his arm around Izzy’s shoulders. “Izzy, you’re a riot. You oughta be on television.”

They strolled out the door and down the stairs. The whores were still in the lobby. They’d probably stay there until their pimps forced them out into the rain. Several called out to Izzy and he acknowledged them with a nod and a tight smile.

“Hey, Izzy,” Jake whispered, “maybe you’re gonna need them rubbers after all.”

They pushed through the doors and stepped out into a cold, steady rain. Jake turned up the collar of his peacoat. It was the only concession either of them made to the weather. The rain slowly worked through their jackets as they walked back to get the Packard. Jake knew that he should have driven the car over to Izzy’s. He half expected Izzy to make some comment, but Izzy just kept walking. He didn’t even hurry his pace when the car came into view.

Jake felt proud to have an associate like Izzy Stein. And happy to be rid of an asshole like Abe Weinberg. That was a lucky stroke, he realized as he started the car. If it wasn’t for Joe Faci’s demand, he, Jake, would still be dealing with that rock-and-roll moron.

“Here, take this.” Jake handed a clean handkerchief to Izzy. “The defroster ain’t workin’ right. Ya gotta use the snot rag to clean the windows.”

They drove over to a small playground on the north side of Houston Street between Avenue D and the river. There were no kids in the playground, only adults on business.

“You see our boy, Izzy?” Jake pointed at a tall man in a trench coat. “Name’s Rocco Insalaco. Cute, huh? Like a rhyme.”

Izzy peered through the small circle of clean glass. “You sure he don’t have a partner watchin’ out?”

“Faci says he works alone. He’s connected, but his people don’t approve of dope. Nobody’s gonna come back on us for what we’re doin’.”

“I tell ya what I don’t like, Jake. I don’t like usin’ this car. If some schmuck picks up the license plate, it’d come right back on us.”

“Well, that’s the fucking problem we were talkin’ about. We need more guys. We need guys who can get into cars, guys who can do locks and safes. We gotta get organized, instead of takin’ chances all the time. The way it is right now, we don’t have no choices. Not that I’m expectin’ problems. It’s rainin’ and the streets are empty. Besides which the people livin’ here know the deal: you get in bed with the cops, you wake up in a swamp. Keep in mind that we ain’t a couple of assholes workin’ on our own no more. We’re connected.”

One by one, the men in the playground, their business conducted, moved off to find a quiet place to enjoy their purchases. When the man in the trench coat was alone, Jake reached into the back seat of the Packard and grabbed two baseball bats. He handed both of them over to Izzy and grunted. “Ya know what to do.” Without waiting for an answer, he climbed out of the Packard and walked into the playground.

Jake kept his right hand in his pocket. Gunshots weren’t part of the plan, but if Rocco Insalaco picked up on what was about to happen and decided to run, Jake was determined to do what he’d come to do.

But Rocco Insalaco didn’t run. He held his ground, eyeing Jake coldly. “Do I know you?” he asked when Jake was still ten feet away.

“That depends,” Jake answered, pulling the.45 out of his pocket. “You know who Malakh-hamoves is?”

“Hey!” Rocco took a step back, then froze in his tracks. “I don’t know nobody named Malik.”

“I didn’t think so. I didn’t think a wop would be acquainted with the Angel of Death.”

“Whatta ya want? Whatta ya want?”

Jake watched the man tremble, watched Izzy approach from behind, watched the bat as it whooshed through the air and slammed into the back of Rocco Insalaco’s head.

“Ya must be losin’ ya touch, Izzy. Either that or Rocco’s got a skull like a nigger. Gimme a bat. We’ll take turns.”

They took their time about it. This was one body that wasn’t going to end up in a swamp. Tomorrow morning, when the junkies heard about Rocco’s fate, they’d have plenty of respect for the man who came to take his place. Santo Silesi wouldn’t be operating on his own. He’d have the fate of Rocco Insalaco covering his back.

Stanley Moodrow sat at his kitchen table, a cup of coffee near his right hand and a bowl of untouched Cheerios in front of him. He’d already given up on the Daily News. In the first place, New York had been quiet on January 14th. There’d been no juicy murders, no subway wrecks, no crooked politicians to expose. The lead story concerned an unemployed chef who’d robbed a Queens bank with a non-existent bomb. The part about a “Queens bank” was the giveaway. The Daily News, not unlike New York City’s politicians, rarely paid any attention to the outer boroughs.

In the second place, Moodrow couldn’t stop thinking about his job and what it was doing to his plans for the future. He felt like Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall. If he fell, if the hurricane pushing at his back shoved him over the edge, nobody would ever put his career back together again.

What made it funny was all the daydreams he’d had before he got his appointment to the detectives. He’d spent the six weeks before his bout with the “Fightin’ Fireman” sitting in a training class at the Academy. Everyone else in the class had already been appointed, but the idea had been to give Moodrow regular hours while he prepared for the big fight. Moodrow found the classes easy, easy enough for him to dream about life as an NYPD detective. He’d imagined himself rising through the ranks, imagined his name and picture in the Daily News …

Well, he’d gotten this name and his picture in the papers. The Journal-American had printed a photo of Moodrow leading the Playtex Burglar through the side door of the 7th Precinct. The contrast between the small, slender burglar and the giant cop hadn’t been lost on the editor who’d written the caption. “Beauty and the Beast” was the way the paper had chosen to put it.

The notoriety hadn’t given Moodrow any satisfaction, but that couldn’t be said of the job he’d been doing for the last week. Sal Patero had been right about the cops in the 7th Precinct. They had an uncanny ability to mess up the paperwork. Maybe that was because the paperwork was irrelevant in all but a handful of cases.

Most of the felons on the Lower East Side couldn’t afford a lawyer. They copped out to the charges, because demanding a trial inevitably resulted in a longer sentence, usually in one of the harsher prisons like Dannemora. But there were trials. There were hardened ex-cons who laughed at the third degree, who were smart enough to use their ill-gotten gains to keep an attorney on retainer. There were also first-time criminals-husbands who’d gone berserk on their wives, friends who’d cut each other to pieces in a bar-who simply had the money to hire a lawyer. In these cases, the paperwork had to be right and it almost never was.

Which is why, once they’d determined his competence, the DA’s office had welcomed Stanley Moodrow like a conquering hero. Before he’d come upon the scene, they’d been cleaning up the mess by themselves. Now, they could put the burden on Moodrow. They could complain, order, cajole and, most importantly of all, blame someone else when cases fell apart due to sloppy policing.

Moodrow recalled a case that had had the prosecutors near to madness. Two patrolmen had arrested a man named Robert White for a double homicide. It should have been an open-and-shut deal, because even though the.25 caliber automatic they’d found on Mr. White hadn’t exactly been smoking, ballistics had matched it to the slugs taken out of the victims’ bodies. The only problem was that the gun couldn’t be matched to the perpetrator. The special Property Clerk’s Invoice used when firearms were confiscated was nowhere to be found.

The two patrolmen who’d made the arrest swore they’d done the paperwork. The detectives handling the follow-up thought otherwise.

“They oughta put them assholes in the Midtown Tunnel,” one had insisted.

“Didn’t you check the paperwork to make sure it was all there?”

“Hey, it wasn’t my case. All I did was interview a few drunks who overheard White braggin’ about the homicides.”

Moodrow had chosen to believe the two patrolmen. Which meant the paperwork had to be somewhere in the precinct. The search had taken the better part of a day, but he’d finally run down the missing form in the file of a sixty-year-old pornography dealer named Richard White. The prosecutors had taken him to lunch. Better yet, they’d called Patero and thanked him for sending them Stanley Moodrow.

So, Moodrow supposed, he was a hero, now, instead of a stubborn, uncooperative bum. Now Patero, as Moodrow drove him back and forth from the 7th Precinct to NYPD headquarters on Centre Street, chatted easily. Now, there was no further mention of “first loyalties” or “acceptable statistics.”

Moodrow had the distinct impression that he was being given a second chance, by Sal Patero if not Pat Cohan. Sooner or later, he was going to be invited to make another arrest, to pile on more charges. The only thing was that Stanley Moodrow wasn’t sure he wanted a second chance. He’d taken a stand-at least, he thought he had-and stands were supposed to be final. Now, he wasn’t sure what he’d do if faced with another Playtex Burglar. He even wasn’t sure what he should do. That was why he’d invited his old trainer, Allen Epstein, to stop over for coffee. It was also why he answered the doorbell in his underwear.

“Oh, shit,” he moaned, slamming the door on Greta Bloom, Rosaura Pastoral and a young woman he didn’t recognize.

“I have to put something on, Greta,” he shouted through the door. “I’ll be back in a second.” He ran into the bedroom, reached for a robe, then changed his mind.

“Lemme get this right,” he muttered, tossing a clean white shirt and a pair of pants onto the bed. He threw on the shirt, buttoned it wrong, re-buttoned it, jumped into his trousers, fumbled in his drawer for a pair of socks without a hole in the toe, dug his slippers out from under the bed, ran a comb through his short hair. By the time he got back to the door, he was breathing hard.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” he explained. “I was expecting someone else.”

“But I called last night,” Greta said, pushing past him into the apartment. “Remember? You said you asked about Luis.”

“Yeah, Greta, but you didn’t say you were coming over at seven o’clock in the morning.”

“So, when should I come? You work all day and at night you go out to Queens to see your girlfriend.” She sat down on the couch. “You remember Rosaura, right? And this is Nenita Melenguez, Luis’s wife. She came to New York to make arrangements.”

“Mrs. Melenguez,” Moodrow nodded. “Please, everybody sit down. Would anyone like coffee?”

“You are expecting the company,” Rosaura Pastoral said, “so we should no be stayin’ too long.”

“Are you sure?” Moodrow was stalling for time. The slight figure perched on the edge of his couch looked like anything but a pimp’s wife. She wore a beltless cotton dress that fell to her ankles and a cloth coat so thin it wouldn’t keep her warm in Miami. Her eyes were riveted to the carpet, her head bent forward so that he couldn’t see her features very well.

“So tell us what you found out,” Greta said, smiling.

That was the problem. That was why he was stalling. How could he tell this woman that her dead husband was a pimp? Unless she already knew. Unless the dress and the coat were pure bullshit. Moodrow decided to find out.

“According to the lieutenant, Luis Melenguez was a pimp. A whoremaster. He was deliberately executed by person or persons unknown. The investigation’s ongoing, but nobody expects a quick arrest. Right now, the case is in the process of being turned over to a squad that investigates organized crime.”

He expected a reaction, but not the one he got. Nenita Melenguez, totally uncomprehending, looked up at Rosaura Pastoral and said something in Spanish. Moodrow understood the first words, por favor, but nothing else.

“She don’ understand Eenglish,” Rosaura explained. “I am suppos’ to be translating, but I don know how I can say thees.”

“She can’t say it,” Greta interrupted. “Stanley, you should please take a another look at this woman. Nenita is not the wife of a pimp. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”

“My nose’s been broken too many times to be plain.”

“Stanley …”

“I’m not making this up, Greta. I went to the lieutenant, just like you asked, and I’m telling you what he told me. You wanna make up a story for Mrs. Melenguez, you go ahead and do it.”

“No, I tell her wha’ you say.”

Rosaura Pastoral turned to Nenita Melenguez and quickly translated. The effect, though it didn’t surprise Moodrow, wasn’t the one he hoped to get. The woman raised her eyes to meet Rosaura’s, then dropped them when Rosaura’s message became clear. “No,” she whispered. “Noooooo.”

“Look what you’ve done,” Greta said, taking Nenita’s hand.

“What I did is what you asked me to do,” Moodrow insisted.

Before Greta could respond, Nenita Melenguez began to speak. Her voice was soft and halting, the words spilling out in short, murmured phrases that Rosaura Pastoral easily translated.

“She say, ‘I have know my husban’ since he was a little boy. I know hees whole family. Luis marry me when I am fifteen. We have together three children. All hees life, Luis work in the sugarcane. He is wha’ they call palero. Thees is a man who takes care of the maclaines …’ Wait, I don’ know thees word maclaines.”

Rosaura spoke quickly, then listened for a moment before nodding her head. “A maclaine is a ditch for bringin’ water to the cane.” She nodded to Nenita who continued. “She say, ‘Palero is a good job. Paleros sometime make fifteen dollars in a week. But tha’ job goes away, because the rematista, the foreman, is bringin’ a machine that digs the ditches faster than ten men. Luis goes back to cutting the cane, but the rematista brings other machines, like aranas, spiders, that load the cane onto the oxcarts. Then motors are put on the carts and all the carreteros who take care of the oxen are out of work. Luis’s papi, who was a carretero, calls la familia together. He says someone mus’ to go to Nueva York, to see if they can have a life in El Norte. Luis is chosen, because he is young and he is a hard worker, because he don’ spend his nights in the nickelodeons. Luis is only here for six months. His letters tell me how hard it is for him. How he saves his money to buy tickets for la familia.’ ”

Nenita Melenguez fumbled in her tiny purse for a moment, then withdrew a worn photograph and handed it to Moodrow without looking up. Moodrow examined the picture carefully, noting the young-old man standing in front of a tin-roof shack, the narrow Indio eyes, the mahogany skin, the full lips and flat nose, the long oval face and sharp protruding chin.

“This is Luis Melenguez?” he asked.

“Tha’ is heem,” Rosaura answered.

Moodrow looked back at the photo. Melenguez was wearing a white guaya-bera shirt, baggy trousers and leather shoes without socks. His face was serious, composed. The posture of a man wearing his Sunday best.

“Look, I don’t want to hurt anyone. But what can I do except report what I learned? I’m in an impossible position here.”

Greta rose abruptly. “I think we better go,” she said.

The two women followed her to the door, then Rosaura Pastoral turned to shake Moodrow’s hand. “Gracias, senor. For takin’ thees time for us.”

Moodrow, properly chastised, at least in his own mind, opened the door for the three women. Greta, clearly unaware of his inner contrition, was the trailer.

“I’m only happy your mother didn’t live to see this,” she said, without looking at him.

It took all of Moodrow’s self-control to close the door quietly. He went back into the kitchen, picked up his coffee then set it down again. The undeniable fact was that Greta Bloom had always been there for his mother. Nancy Moodrow had died of breast cancer, though Stanley could never figure out why it should have been called that because the cancer was everywhere in her body. It was in her lungs, her liver, her stomach, her very bones.

Death had been a long time coming. If it hadn’t been for Greta, Moodrow would have had to put his mother in the hospital. And not in a private hospital, either. He would have had to put her in one of the city-run hellholes. No, there wasn’t any doubt about it-Stanley Moodrow owed Greta Bloom. But did that mean he had to manufacture a story that fit her personal sense of justice?

What he’d do, he decided, was go down to her apartment and make it up to her. Maybe he’d bring her some halavah. There was a guy working out of a stall in the East Side Market who made his own. Greta’s sweet tooth was legendary …

The doorbell interrupted his thoughts. He answered it, half-expecting to discover Greta Bloom returning for a second assault, but found a smiling Allen Epstein, instead.

“Just like the old days. Right, Stanley? You ready for some road work?”

Moodrow managed a smile. “C’mon in, Sarge. You want coffee?”

“Sounds good to me.”

Moodrow poured Epstein a mug of coffee, then topped off his own mug. Already depleted by Greta’s visit, he launched into his story, detailing the events following his rise to the rank of detective, third grade.

“The thing of it is, Sarge,” he concluded, “I don’t want the money or the bullshit that goes with it. I just wish I could see a way to get out from under without screwing up the rest of my life.”

Epstein took the time to put his thoughts together. He’d dealt with a lot of would-be fighters in his role as trainer-manager of the Manhattan South Boxing Club. Moodrow wasn’t the only one who’d come to the ring full of ambition. But Epstein had never met a cop or a fighter as determined as Stanley Moodrow. It both surprised and saddened him to find his protege floundering.

“Ya wanna hear something funny, Stanley?”

“Anything.”

“Me, I don’t take a dime. As a sergeant, I’m entitled to my piece of the pad, but I told the lieutenant to leave me out of it. He didn’t like it, but there was nothing he could do. That’s because I got my rank through civil service. Now, I’m not saying that I’m better than anyone else. It’s just that I see a day coming when the pad is gonna explode in everyone’s face. Sooner or later, some politician is gonna run through the department with a machine gun and I don’t wanna get mowed down. It’s happened so many times in the past that it’s gotta happen again. It’s gotta. Cops talk about ‘clean money’ and ‘dirty money,’ but the politicians only see cameras and votes.”

“Sarge …”

“Wait a second. I’m not finished, yet. The way I see it, your problem isn’t with Patero or with the pad, either. Your problem’s with your girlfriend.”

Moodrow snorted. “Ya wanna know something, Sarge, you’re a better psychiatrist than you are a trainer. I could tell Pat Cohan to go fuck himself, but how do I explain it to Kate? How do I tell her that her father’s a crook? Kate worships her old man.”

“When are you getting married?”

“June fifteenth.”

“You’re gonna do it in a church, right? In a Catholic church?”

Moodrow smiled again. “Kate’s religious. Very religious.”

“So, once you’re married, you’re married forever, right?”

“What’s the point?”

“The point is that you have to develop a strategy. And it has to be long-term. Right now, Cohan’s holding an axe over your head. But after you’re married, the axe is in your hands. Catholics marry for life. You wanna pick up stakes and move a thousand miles away, Kate’s gonna figure it’s her religious duty to go with you. It’s just a matter of holding out. And not getting used to the money.”

Moodrow shook his head in wonder. “You’re a devious bastard, Sarge. But what about the Playtex Burglar? What do I do if they ask me to make another ‘arrest’?”

“Look, Stanley, as slow as you were, you oughta be able to figure it out for yourself. Give ground. Take some punishment. Hold on when you’re hurt. The closer you get to the wedding, the harder it’s gonna be for Cohan to get between you and Kate. The thing is, Stanley, that I always figured you for a tough guy, but I only saw you in the ring. What you want here is a quick answer. It’s only natural. But that isn’t gonna happen. You gotta keep your guard up and go the distance.”

“All right, Sarge, I get the picture. Maybe I should’ve studied for the sergeant’s exam, instead of reaching out for the detectives. That’s what I was doing before you came along.”

Epstein looked at his watch. “I gotta get out of here, Stanley. It’s almost eight o’clock. You goin’ into the house?”

“Later. I’ll be in later. I’m supposed to meet with an ADA at nine-thirty.”

“Banker’s hours. I guess being a big-shot detective isn’t all bad.”

Moodrow ignored the comment. “There’s one other thing I wanted to ask you about, Sarge. You remember a guy named Luis Melenguez?”

“Can’t say that I do.”

“He got killed in a Pitt Street whorehouse the day after Christmas. A pimp.”

“Oh yeah, I remember him. I responded to the scene. What makes you say he was a pimp?”

“That’s what Pat Cohan told me. Melenguez was a friend of a friend. That kind of thing. I asked Patero about it, but it was Pat Cohan who told me it was a mob rubout.”

“Pat Cohan told you bullshit. Melenguez was blown apart with a forty-five. I admit that the crime scene was pretty messed up by the time I got there-you can imagine what happens when a beat cop walks into a building with twenty half-naked women-but, from what I could make of it, Melenguez was standing in a doorway when he bought it. At the time, I figured he walked into the middle of a robbery. You know what I’m talking about, right? It was your basic wrong place/wrong time situation. We questioned the whores and the pimp who ran the place, but, naturally, nobody saw anything. The suits got there before we were finished and I turned it over to them. Standard procedure.”

“Maybe that was the only chance the mob had to get him. Maybe they just saw an opportunity and took it.”

“I can’t buy that, Stanley. The guy was dressed poor. Real poor. He looked like he just came off the boat. Besides, nobody uses a forty-five to make a hit. Not if they know what they’re doing. A forty-five sounds like a cannon when it goes off. Plus, when you’re putting one behind the ear from six inches away, you don’t need that much power. No, if Melenguez was a pimp, then I’m the Pope.”

Moodrow sat back in his chair. “What I’m hearin’ is that somebody’s bullshitting me. And what I don’t understand is why they’re doin’ it.”

“Stanley, the job runs on bullshit. Get used to it. As for why? Well, you’re a detective, right? You wanna find out the truth, go detect.”

For Antonio “steppy” Accacio, this was the best time of the day. He was in the bathroom of his ten-room Montclair, New Jersey, home and his wife, Angela, was shaving his face. He would have preferred to have his own barber, his personal barber, do the shaving, but the ungrateful bastard simply refused to make the trip from Mulberry Street to Montclair despite everything he, Steppy Accacio, had done for the man.

But that was the way it was in life. You had to accept the bad with the good. Sure, you found some piece-of-shit swamp guinea and lent him the money to start his own business. Sure, you expected a little gratitude, something over and above the 20 % interest you were charging. That didn’t mean you’d get it.

“Hey, no laugh. You laugh, I cut.”

Steppy opened his eyes to look at his wife. She was leaning over him, patiently scraping away at his heavy beard. As usual, his eyes dropped to her breasts. Angie was ten years younger than he was and her jugs were still firm. He wanted to touch her, to feel her dark nipples pushing against the palm of his hand. But the last time he’d tried that move, she’d sliced him so bad, he ended up with four stitches in his right earlobe.

“Almos’ finish,” Angela said.

“Looks like I survived again. Right, Angie?”

“No talk.”

She wiped his face with the hot towel she’d used to soak his beard, then slapped on the aftershave. Steppy inhaled the fragrance of Roma Brava. It was sweeter than Aqua-Velva. More in keeping with the old country, which was where it came from. Which was where his wife came from. Steppy had no particular love for Italy. He’d never been there and had no desire to go, but these little touches impressed the ‘mustache Petes’ who still clung to the reins of power. Who needed to be impressed as much as they needed the millions of dollars pouring into the pockets of their six-hundred-dollar suits.

Steppy got off the chair and shrugged into the silk dressing gown his wife held out to him.

“We’re havin’ company,” he announced. “Three, four guys. Make sure you got enough coffee and pastries.” He threw her a hard look. Like most Sicilian women, she had a sharp tongue. He’d been trying to break her of the habit, but had yet to come up with a method that didn’t require breaking her body as well.

“You tell me this lassa night. Why you gotta repeat? I’m no stupido.”

What you are, Steppy thought, is halfway to being a fuckin’ nigger. It was funny how her cousins’ descriptions had left that little fact out. Olive was how they’d described her complexion. Well, there were two kinds of olives, green and black, and Angela was a lot closer to the black kind. Not that she really looked like one of them. Not that she had a flat nose and big lips. Not that anyone would actually say anything about her complexion. But, still, the cousins should have told him.

He watched her butt twitch as she walked through their bedroom, then turned to admire his own complexion in the mirror. The simple fact that his parents were not from Sicily stared back at him. Blond hair, blue eyes, milky skin that burned in the sun. One thing for sure, his ancestors hailed from the highlands of Tuscany, not the mountains of Sicily, a fact which (at least according to the prevailing mythology) meant he couldn’t rise much beyond his present station.

“Let ’em keep their secret fuckin’ society,” Steppy muttered, patting his blond hair into place. “I know where I’m goin’, even if they don’t.”

He left the bathroom, crossing his bedroom and going downstairs to the den. The journey didn’t take very long. How could it? The small frame house wasn’t exactly a mansion in Upper Saddle River. On the other hand, it was a long way from the roach-infested tenements of lower Manhattan.

The deep chimes of the doorbell interrupted his reverie and he quickly took a seat in the leather chair behind his desk. He loved making his workers come all the way to New Jersey for business meetings. He loved it as much as they obviously hated it.

“Ya company’s here,” Angie yelled from the living room.

“Send ’em in,” Steppy called back, his face reddening with anger. The bitch was supposed to usher his guests into his presence, not scream like a vendor in the Fulton Fish Market.

“Steppy,” Joe Faci said, walking into the room, “sorry we’re late. The snow held us up. How are ya doin’ this morning?”

“That depends, Joe.” Steppy rose to offer his hand to Joe and his companion, Santo Silesi. “It depends on what you’re gonna tell me. Siddown.”

Before they could begin talking, Angie Accacio appeared, pushing an oak serving cart. A small pot of steaming coffee, a creamer and sugar bowl, three small cups and saucers, and a plate of small pastries were carefully arranged on its polished surface.

“Would yiz serve, Angie?” Steppy kept his voice even, despite the fact that it wasn’t a request. He waited patiently as she filled the cups and handed them, first to the guests and then to him. Until she walked out, closing the door behind her.

“All right, enough with the bullshit,” he snapped. “The Hebe’ll be here in a few minutes. Let’s get to it. How’d ya make out, Sandy?”

“What they did to Rocco? I didn’t see any of it. The Jew wouldn’t let me near it.”

“This I already know. Joe told me.”

“Then you also know that he’s got me standing around in project playgrounds with fifty bags of heroin.”

Steppy Accacio smiled indulgently. Santo Silesi was his oldest sister’s firstborn, a Tuscan on both sides. That was one thing the Sicilians had right. That bit about the family. It wasn’t a foolproof protection against treachery, but it was as close as you could get.

“Just be a little patient, Sandy,” Accacio said. “I’ll pull ya outta there as soon as possible. Meanwhile, ya should watch everything goin’ on with the Jew. Where he lives. Where he goes. Who he hangs out with. When the time comes, I wanna be able to find him.”

Silesi raised his hands, palm up. “Whatever it takes, right? That’s the only way to look at it. By the way, sales were better than we expected. I moved three hundred bags yesterday.”

“The take’s better,” Joe Faci interrupted, “but that might not be so good for us. The Hebe wants to buy in quantity. He claims he’s got the bucks to go for half an ounce. He’ll package himself.”

Accacio bit into a cannoli. The crust was flaky, the filling moist and sweet. “I don’t mind so much that the Hebe’s ambitious. I mean where’s he gonna go? He can’t do nothin’ without we say so first. My problem is that I had a bitch of time gettin’ hold of the territory we got. Which, you mighta noticed, ain’t all that big. What I figured on doin’ was maximizing the profit. If I sell to the Jew wholesale, I’m gonna have to expand and I ain’t too sure I can get permission. Not right away.”

“Why don’t we just shoot the mother-fucker,” Santo blurted out. “I mean every time I turn around the sheeny’s makin’ me eat shit.” He didn’t bother to add the simple fact that he was afraid of Jake Leibowitz.

“Yeah,” Steppy said, “I heard about that. What you gotta do, Sandy, is keep ya self-control. Like I said, I’m gonna pull you outta there soon. And when I do, I’m gonna make the Hebe report directly to you. I’m gonna put you in charge.”

“He ain’t gonna like that,” Joe Faci said.

“That’s the idea.”

All three were laughing when the doorbell sounded. They were still wiping the smirks off their faces when Angie led Jake Leibowitz into the room. “Jake,” Steppy Accacio said, rising to offer his hand, “we meet at last.”

Stanley Moodrow spent most of the day thinking about what he was going to do. Thinking about whether he should do anything. Greta was already pissed off, whereas Sal Patero had stopped being pissed off. Pushing his nose into Patero’s business wouldn’t necessarily make Greta happy, but it was guaranteed to make Sal unhappy. It would be the same as calling Patero (and Pat Cohan) a liar. Of course, there was always the chance that Patero was a liar. Moodrow wasn’t sure he wanted to know that, either.

But there was also the chance that Patero was right, that Allen Epstein was simply mistaken. Maybe the sergeant was confusing Melenguez with someone else. Maybe, despite all appearances, Melenguez’s death had been a mob hit. Maybe the detectives had concluded that Melenguez was a pimp on the basis of information from their informants.

In the end, there were too many ‘maybes’ for a man as inherently curious as Stanley Moodrow. What he did was go down to the files and pull the paperwork. He didn’t expect anyone to notice and nobody did. Paperwork was Moodrow’s job.

He went through the file systematically, beginning with the patrolman’s report and proceeding to Epstein’s observations, the preliminary reports of the two detectives and the forensic unit’s description of the crime scene. Melenguez had been gunned down from inside an office on the first floor, rear, of 800 Pitt Street with a.45 caliber pistol. There was no doubt about it. Melenguez had been hit four times and all four slugs had been recovered, two from the hallway behind the victim and two from the victim’s body.

Moodrow turned to the Medical Examiner’s report. The M.E.’s description was gruesome enough-the first shot, the one that’d killed him, had blown away half his face; the next three had turned his abdominal cavity into tomato soup-but there was nothing in it to contradict the detectives’ preliminary assessments.

The witness interviews came next. There were fourteen interviews with women and one with a man, a further indication, assuming 800 Pitt Street wasn’t a nunnery, that Melenguez had been gunned down inside a whorehouse. Moodrow scanned the interviews as quickly as possible, noting the name of the only man.

Finishing, Moodrow realized that Epstein had been right about one thing: none of the witnesses, even though all had been isolated during the questioning, had been willing to admit they’d eyeballed the shooting. Which raised several questions. Melenguez had been standing in the doorway. The perpetrator had been standing inside the office. Epstein was of the opinion that Melenguez had wandered into a robbery in progress. But wasn’t it also possible that Melenguez had been the robber? According to the preliminary reports, no weapons of any kind had been found at the scene. If Melenguez had been armed, someone had taken the time to remove the weapon. Or maybe one of the whores had scooped it up with the intention of selling it on the street.

Moodrow turned to the follow-ups, the DD5’s. The two detectives handling the case, John Samuelson and Paul Maguire, had interviewed Melenguez’s employer, a trucker named Levy, as well as several co-workers. The portrait that emerged was of a hard-working, ambitious immigrant. Melenguez had been in New York for slightly less than six months. He’d shown up for work every day. He had no friends outside of his fellow workers and spent his nights listening to the radio and writing letters home.

Moodrow recalled the picture Nenita Melenguez had shown him. He tried to imagine the tiny man with the jug ears packing a rod, pulling it on the pimp who ran the whorehouse. He couldn’t even come close.

The obvious next step was to speak to the suits who’d handled the case before it was farmed out of the precinct. As it happened, Moodrow knew Paul Maguire fairly well. Maguire had still been in uniform when Moodrow came onto the job and for a short time before Maguire’s appointment to the detectives, the two of them had walked overlapping beats.

That was on the plus side. There was a minus side as well. Moodrow knew he could return the file with no one the wiser. He could still put it back and forget the whole thing. But once he started talking to other cops, he had no way to predict who might whisper what message into Sal Patero’s ear. Paul Maguire had always been friendly, but how was Moodrow to know where Maguire’s loyalties lay? Ordinarily, jobs were given out to any detective foolish enough to be loitering in the squad room when a call came into the precinct. On the other hand, Patero might have personally assigned the case to Maguire because he knew Maguire could be trusted to do what he was told.

Moodrow went back to the filing cabinets and replaced the paperwork, then strolled over to the squad room and poured himself a cup of coffee. Samuelson and Maguire had back-to-back desks in a far corner of the room. Moodrow looked over, hoping they were out in the field, but found both men pounding away on their respective Underwoods. He recalled what Epstein had told him about going the distance, using time to his own advantage.

What I oughta do, he thought, is forget about this bullshit. What I oughta do is stay close to Kate and brown-nose her old man until after the wedding. What I oughta do is find an apartment in Flushing and move out of the Lower East Side. What I oughta do …

Sound advice, he couldn’t deny it, but his long legs kept moving across the squad room. Kept moving until he was standing next to Paul Maguire’s desk.

“How ya doin’, fellas?”

Maguire and Samuelson looked up in surprise. Just as if they hadn’t seen him coming.

“What’s goin’ on, Stanley?” Maguire said.

“You know the Melenguez case?” Moodrow paused, but neither man spoke. “Well, I was looking over the paperwork.”

“Somethin’ missing?” Samuelson asked. “Not that it matters, because the case is goin’ away from us. In fact, it’s already gone.”

“No, that’s not it. Nothing’s missing.” Now that he was in the middle of it, Moodrow couldn’t decide what he wanted to ask. The two detectives weren’t any help. They continued to stare at him with blank expressions. “All right, there’s a couple of things bothering me. If Melenguez was shot from inside the office, either the pimp or someone the pimp knows had to be the shooter. How else would the perpetrator get in there? Sal thinks Melenguez was hit by a professional. But that doesn’t make sense, either. Why would anybody want to rub out Luis Melenguez?”

“Wait a second, Stanley,” Maguire interrupted. “Are you saying the lieutenant’s not happy with the work we did?”

“Just the opposite. Sal’s already signed off on the case. What I’m doing here is personal. Rosaura Pastoral, Melenguez’s landlady, happens to live in my building. She asked me to check it out.”

As far as Moodrow could tell, his explanation had exactly no effect on the two detectives. Their faces remained blank. They didn’t even look at each other.

“Everything’s in the file,” Samuelson finally said. “Whatever we found out, that’s where it is. We got nothing to add.”

Moodrow remembered to thank the men before walking away. He felt like an idiot, but the feeling didn’t make him unhappy. No more bullshit, he told himself. No more Sherlock Holmes. Mind your own goddamned business before you do something to put your ass in a permanent sling.

He went back to his own desk and began to review a case the ADAs had sent over in the morning. There were two statements missing, one from the complainant and one from the accused. The defendant’s lawyer was demanding both and the prosecutor intended to drop the indictment if they couldn’t be located.

Two hours later, the missing statements found and already on their way to the DA’s office, Moodrow signed out and began to walk through the remains of the morning’s snowstorm to his apartment a few blocks away. He was due out in Bayside at eight-thirty and his thoughts were on Kate and what she might have told her father. The last time they’d spoken, he’d begged her to defy the priest. Kate, after much argument, had agreed to think about it. What bothered her was the distinct possibility that Father Ryan might decide that, despite the theoretical sanctity of the confessional, it was his Christian duty to have a little talk with Pat Cohan. It had happened too many times in the past to be entirely discounted.

“Stanley.”

“Huh?” Moodrow turned to the man who’d fallen into step beside him. It was Paul Maguire.

“Just keep walkin’, Stanley. I wanna have a little talk with you.”

“Whatever ya say, Paul.”

“The thing of it is, Stanley, that this conversation never happened. Understand? Never.”

“Sure.”

“Because if it gets back to Sal Patero, I’ll be walkin’ a beat in Far Rockaway. It gets real cold out there near the ocean. The wind never stops blowin’.”

“Paul, I get the message.”

“Okay, what you said about Melenguez? You’re right. There was no hit and Melenguez was in the building to get laid. One of the whores told me she’d just finished takin’ care of him.”

“I didn’t see that in the interviews.”

“Maybe somebody took it out. Maybe your buddy, Sal Patero, took it out. I’m not here to solve this crime. All I wanna do is whisper a few words in your ear. Then, it’s up to you. You hearing me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“O’Neill runs the house. Him and his wife. I’d bet my gold shield that both of them were in the office when the shooting went down. Someone put a heavy beating on the pair of ’em and it sure as shit wasn’t Melenguez.”

“The beating wasn’t in the files, either. What you’re sayin’ is that somebody’s covering up a homicide. A fucking homicide.”

“Stanley, I’m here to give you a piece of advice. If you’re smart, you’ll keep your nose out of it. This goes a lot further than Sal Patero. But, if you’re stupid, here’s what you should do. O’Neill and his old lady are still running the show on Pitt Street. Squeeze ’em. Squeeze ’em like tubes of fucking toothpaste. I got a hundred bucks here that says the same guys who pounded on O’Neill and his old lady shot Melenguez. I got another hundred that says O’Neill knows the shooter.”

Stanley Moodrow knew he’d stepped in it when the door of Kate’s home opened to reveal her mother, Rose. Decked out in widow’s weeds, the small slight woman took a backward step and raised her fist to her mouth. A rosary, its onyx beads as black as her dress, dangled from bony fingers.

“Mr. Cohan wants to see you,” she hissed.

“Where is he?”

She continued to back away until her heels were against the first riser of the staircase. Then she turned and fled.

Moodrow stood in the open doorway for a moment. A mixture of emotions coursed through him-dread, rage, fear. He didn’t want to sort them out; he wanted to flee from the situation, just as Rose Cohan had fled. It’s bad, he thought. It’s so bad it can only get worse.

He recalled a day, early in his fighting career, when he’d been asked to spar with a hotshot middleweight named Virgil Thomas. Already over a hundred and seventy-five pounds and cocky as hell, he’d jumped at the chance. Thirty seconds later, as the slap of leather against flesh echoed through the small gym, he’d known he was in deep trouble. He also knew there was no remedy except to go through with it and that was what he’d done. Now, he was going to have to go through with it again.

Moodrow crossed the living room and opened the door to Pat Cohan’s den without knocking. He’d been hoping against hope to find Kate inside, but Cohan was alone.

“You don’t knock?” Cohan asked.

“Where’s Kate?”

“What’s the hurry, Casanova? You so horny you can’t spend a few minutes talking to me?” Cohan lit the stub of a cigar and sucked it into life. He was fully dressed, his jacket and vest buttoned, his hair sweeping out and back like the lion’s mane he imagined it to be.

“Where’s Kate?” Moodrow stepped forward. There was a chair between him and Pat Cohan’s desk. He swept it away with a casual wave of his right hand. “Where’s Kate?”

“I thought it best she not be here for this.”

Moodrow watched Cohan shrink back in his chair. The Inspector was staring, not into his eyes, but at the still-red scar on his brow. Moodrow, like all fighters, drew energy from his opponent’s fear.

“Why’s that?”

“Look here, boyo …”

“I’m not your fucking ‘boyo,’ Pat. I’m twenty-five years old. And Kate’s not your ‘darlin’ Kathleen,’ either. She’s a twenty-two-year-old woman. You can’t keep her in diapers forever.”

“I didn’t call you in here to fight with you, Stanley.”

“This I already figured.”

Pat Cohan’s face contorted with anger. “Listen, you little prick, I made you and I can break you.”

“That works both ways, Pat. The way I see it, we’re in this together. Till death or the Department do us part.”

Cohan managed a thin smile. He sucked on his unlit cigar. “That’s not entirely true, Stanley, but I’m not here to threaten you. If you remember, I only asked one thing of you when you requested permission to see Kathleen. I asked you to keep her pure until after the wedding.”

Moodrow finally sat down. He shook his head in disgust. “Why don’t you cut the bullshit. Stop living in Never-Never Land. She’s a woman, that’s all. And this ain’t the fucking junior prom. Nobody cares unless the woman gets pregnant. And the people I grew up with don’t even care about that. As long as you do the right thing.”

“She committed a sin, Stanley. And you should have known better. You should have stopped her. Kate is innocent. She’s inexperienced, naive.”

Moodrow thought back to that morning when she’d shown up on his door- step. Innocent? Naive? What she really was was stupid for going to the wrong priest. What she really was was weak for not telling him to stick his penance in his breviary.

“All right, Pat. Let’s say it was a sin. Let’s even say that I took advantage of a naive young girl. So what? It’s over now and there’s nothing you can do to fix it. Kate and I are engaged. That means whatever advantage I took, I’m gonna be makin’ it up to her for the next forty or fifty years. Ya know, when I went to Catholic school, the nuns taught me that my sins were between me and God. So what are you doing here? You so high up in the job, you think you’re God?”

Pat Cohan put the stub of his cigar in the ashtray. He ran his fingers through his silvery hair and leaned forward. “What I want, Stanley, is for you to go away. Take it from a man trapped in a miserable marriage, you and Kate aren’t right for each other. You’re not even close. So why don’t you tell me what you want?”

“What I want is Kate. And if you say she doesn’t want me, if you put that lie in her mouth, I’ll drive my fist through the back of your head.”

“I believe you would, Stanley. But I’m not here to lie to you. I haven’t sent Kathleen to a convent. She’ll be home tomorrow. In the meantime, why don’t you think about what I’ve said? Do you want Homicide? Narcotics? Safes and Lofts? How about a jump in rank? Detective, second grade, with a guarantee of first grade in a year.”

Moodrow felt his anger begin to evaporate as the central truth of Pat Cohan’s message sunk in. This man, Kate’s father, had decided to prevent the marriage. It was just that simple.

“Why are you doing this, Pat? And don’t tell me it’s because we went to bed together. You don’t give two shits about the Church. You’re the biggest goddamned thief in the Department.”

“I’ll ignore that last comment, boyo.” Cohan opened the center desk drawer and took out a fresh cigar. He studied it for a moment, then turned to Moodrow. “As for my reasons, I don’t know where to begin. I thought you were a tough guy, but I was wrong. You’re only tough in the ring. Mentally, you’re not prepared to do what’s necessary to guarantee Kate and her children the kind of life I want them to have. I wouldn’t say it’s your fault, exactly. No, I’d have to say the error was mine. But that doesn’t change anything, does it?”

“Keep going.”

“You’re impulsive and headstrong. Maybe that’s what comes from being victorious. You fought your way into the detectives, just like you fought your way into your engagement. But you never stopped to consider the consequences. You’re like a traveler who desperately wants to arrive at a certain destination without any clear understanding of what he’ll do after he gets there. Patero’s afraid of you. He thinks you’re unpredictable. Of course, Patero’s right in the middle of it, so perhaps he has a right …”

“Bullshit.” Moodrow stood up. “All those rounds? All that training? I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be a detective. You made me into the precinct bagman. As for Kate, you think I’m using her the way I used the ring, but that’s not true. I love Kate and I want her to be my wife. Now, here’s something you might wanna think about: if you fight me and I win, I’m gonna take Kate and migrate to California, like everybody else in the country. Kate’s a religious girl, Pat. She takes all that bullshit about ‘love, honor and obey’ very seriously. If I tell her we’re going, she’ll pack her bags and get on the plane.”

“You’re quick with the threats, Stanley.”

“What have I got to lose?”

“Everything, boyo. Everything.”

“Ya know what I think, boyo? I think your promises are bullshit. Once you’ve got Kate under control, you’ll fuck me any way you can. That’s your rep, Pat. That’s what they say about you. Inspector Cohan never forgets. Never forgives, either. I got nothing to lose.”

Moodrow backed toward the door. He expected Cohan to make some sort of protest, but Cohan merely lit his cigar and leaned back in the chair.

“Something else you might wanna think about, Pat.” Moodrow opened the door without turning away. “Luis Melenguez. You lied to me about Luis Melenguez. It wasn’t a little white lie, either. It was a big black lie. Go confess to Father Ryan. Maybe he’ll order you to tell me the truth.”

Stanley Moodrow, sitting down to breakfast, knew he had to make a decision about Luis Melenguez. He’d been angry the night before, angry enough to threaten his benefactor, Pat Cohan. He’d also been shrewd enough to recognize (and enjoy) the fear his threat inspired. But that didn’t mean he would or should follow through. Sure, he wanted Kate Cohan. That was obvious. But he couldn’t see how investigating the murder of Luis Melenguez would result in the two of them walking down the aisle. In fact, no matter how Moodrow examined the situation, it seemed that tracking down Melenguez’s killer would have the opposite effect. Especially if Pat Cohan was trying to cover it up.

What he needed to do was think it out. The only problem was that he couldn’t manage to concentrate on anything more complex than the Daily News. His eyes scanned the paper while his brain spun like a raindrop in a tornado.

A Brooklyn judge named Leibowitz had ordered a special grand jury to investigate the practice of giving high school diplomas to kids who couldn’t read above the fifth-grade level. This was the same judge who’d charged the grand jury to investigate “the tide of terror and lawlessness” in Brooklyn schools, then later approved the grand jury’s recommendation that cops be stationed in every high school.

Moodrow started to lay the paper down when another headline caught his eye. Housing Board Bias Probe Is Voted by Wagner Group. The charge, “racial and religious discrimination” in the projects, was nothing new. When the first of the projects had gone up before WWII, they’d been used to service individual neighborhoods. On the Lower East Side, for instance, the Italians had gotten the Governor Smith Houses while the Jews had gotten the Jacob Riis Houses. The policy had seemed reasonable at the time, an attempt to keep neighborhoods and traditions intact. The only problem was that five hundred thousand impoverished Puerto Ricans had migrated to New York in the ten years following the war. More than a million blacks had come as well, fleeing southern poverty and Jim Crow legislation. The city had responded by constructing tens of thousands of low-income apartments, but no matter how fast projects went up, there were far more applicants than apartments. Waiting lists were created, lists based on ethnic, racial and neighborhood considerations. Now, the chickens were coming home to roost.

Moodrow discarded the Daily News and went to refill his coffee cup. It was funny, in a way. New York City, at least according to the newspapers and television, was a filthy, dangerous place. The schools, for instance, were so violent that Judge Leibowitz wanted cops stationed in every high school in Brooklyn. So why did Melenguez and half a million of his countrymen leave their homes to come here? And why did they stay? The Republicans blamed it on easy access to the welfare system, but there hadn’t been any welfare at the turn of the century when the Jews and the Italians arrived. Nor when the Irish and the Germans had come before them.

The answer, when Moodrow hit on it, was obvious enough. They were coming to occupy the same tenements that he intended to flee. If the Lower East Side was so horrible that a girl like Kathleen Cohan couldn’t be expected to live there, Luis Melenguez didn’t stay because he loved the Big Apple. He stayed because what he’d left behind was worse. Which was exactly why Moodrow’s own parents had come and stayed.

“Fuck them,” Moodrow said aloud. Fuck who? he thought.

Another idea popped into his mind before he could even consider the question: Luis Melenguez has a right to revenge. Because that’s what the cops really did. Ordinary citizens weren’t allowed to get even. If they tried it, they were subject to arrest. Punishment? Retribution? Justice? There was only one safe way for Joe Citizen to go and that was to the cops, the courts and the prisons.

But I could still make it right, he thought. If I go to Pat and apologize, if I promise to love, honor and obey …

Stanley Moodrow giggled, the sound spilling from his lips unbidden. The truth was that Pat Cohan was determined to break him. If he got the chance. The situation was funny, because he and Cohan were going to have to do a little dance while they slugged it out. They were going to dance a minuet around “darlin’ Kathleen,” neither sure of her reaction when she found out what was really happening.

And Kathleen Cohan wasn’t the only issue. Moodrow’s career, his very job was at stake. Detectives, third grade, didn’t challenge inspectors. Pat Cohan had a reputation as a man who always got even, no matter how long it took. Moodrow had threatened to break the Inspector’s bones. He’d questioned Pat Cohan’s physical courage, the ultimate slight to every cop’s self-image. Inspector Pat Cohan wouldn’t react to the insult by meeting Stanley Moodrow in some back alley. He’d either wait for Stanley Moodrow to make a mistake, to drop his guard, or he’d try to set him up.

“He thinks he’s got all the ammunition,” Moodrow said aloud. And that was obvious, too. Cohan’s arrangement with Patero was basically unprovable. Especially considering that he, Moodrow, had a personal interest. Any charge he leveled at Cohan would be extremely suspect. Cohan, on the other hand, could use Patero (and God only knew who else) as an instrument of revenge.

What you are, Stanley, he thought, is a schmuck. You’re supposed to lead with your left, not with your chin.

He should never have challenged Cohan directly. He should have retreated, begged for mercy, promised to reform. He should have played for time while he gathered ammunition of his own.

And that was assuming there was anything out there to gather. Because it was just possible that Pat Cohan hadn’t been lying about Luis Melenguez. In fact, it was more than possible that Cohan was simply repeating what Sal Patero had told him. Cohan’s office was down on Centre Street, not in the 7th Precinct, and Cohan’s job was purely administrative. He played no direct part in the investigation of criminal complaints.

Still without any clear line of action, Moodrow went to the phone, called the 7th Precinct, and told the duty sergeant that he wouldn’t be coming to work.

“A personal matter,” he explained before hanging up. One good thing about his job as Patero’s assistant: no cop below the rank of captain had the guts to challenge him.

He went back to his bedroom and looked out the window. It was eight-thirty and the streets were alive with workers trudging through the remains of yesterday’s snowstorm. Moodrow noted the coats buttoned to the throat, the caps pulled down low to cover the ears. Well, he could deal with the cold. He laid out a set of long johns and two pair of heavy wool socks, then began to dress.

The doorbell rang while he was buttoning his shirt. For a fleeting moment, he managed to conjure up a picture of Kate Cohan standing on the other side. Then he returned to reality.

“Hello, Greta,” he said, as he swung the door inward.

“Stanley, how are you this morning?”

“I’ve been better. C’mon in.” The truth was that he had no way to keep her out and he knew it. “You want coffee?”

“Please.”

He poured out the coffee, then waited for her to speak first. He didn’t have to wait long.

“So what did you find out?”

“About what?” If he couldn’t actually discourage her, he could at least break her chops.

“About Luis Melenguez, of course. His wife went home yesterday.”

“I’m sorry about the other day, Greta. I didn’t want to hurt Mrs. Melenguez, but I was only repeating what I was told.”

“I understand. And I’m also apologizing if I said anything nasty. So, nu, what did you find?”

“Look, Greta, you’ve got to try to understand that I’m just starting out in the detectives. I got no connections for information. I got no informants out on the street, either. I’m not gonna argue that Melenguez was a pimp. I know he wasn’t. For whatever reason-and I don’t know the reason-the lieutenant decided to lie to me. The only thing is that I’m not sure what I can do about it. If anything.”

“Please, Stanley, you shouldn’t get so discouraged. Let me tell you a story.”

“You always do.”

Greta was the only person Moodrow knew who spoke in parables. And it was impossible to discourage her. She was incredibly strong-willed, as were most of the women his mother knew. Maybe the simple fact of their gender made them even stronger. They couldn’t get their way by ranting and raving the way men did when they were angry. The women persisted, no matter what obstacles were thrown in their way.

“Do you know how your grandmother died, Stanley?”

Moodrow felt the hairs on the back of his neck begin to rise. “I know she died twenty years before I was born. My mother never talked about it.”

“Your grandmother’s name was Trina. She came here from Poland when your mother was only a few months old. Came with her brother and his wife. She had no husband, because he’d been taken into the Polish army right after Trina became pregnant and from there nobody knows what happened to him. The army told the family he was dead, but in those days men who went into the Polish army seldom returned anyway. I don’t want to make such a long story that you miss your lunch, but …”

“Just say what you have to say, Greta.” Moodrow had spent a good part of his life avoiding Greta’s stories, but this time he was all ears.

“After she got settled, Trina went to work like everybody else. She got a job as a helper in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory across the street from Washington Square. When I tell you this job was hell, you should believe me. The girls were paid according to how much they did and Trina had to bring work home to make four dollars a week. The factory was, you should pardon the expression, a shithole. Fabric piled everywhere. Lint and dust so thick you couldn’t see from one wall to the other. The owner paid off the fire inspectors so that when there came a fire in 1911, the workers couldn’t get out. The emergency exits were chained because the boss didn’t want the girls to sneak off. Why the boss should worry that girls would sneak off I can’t understand, since they were getting paid according to how much work they did and not by the hour, but that’s the way it was. The fire only lasted eighteen minutes, but a hundred and forty-six workers died, most of them young Jewish and Italian girls. The flames were so hot the workers jumped out the windows to escape. Your grandmother was one of the women who jumped.”

“What happened to the owner?”

“Nothing happened except he lost his factory. You can’t look at these things like it was today, Stanley. The bosses were kings in 1911. They paid off the police and the firemen and the politicians. When the workers tried to organize, the strikebreakers attacked the picket lines and the police sat on their horses and laughed. Or they joined in with their billy clubs. And this is the point I’m making here. Your mother was only fifteen when the union put her to work as an organizer. She was so young and pretty, the bosses didn’t suspect her. But on the picket lines she was a demon. What I’m telling you now, I saw with my own eyes. So many times she had her head cracked I couldn’t even count them. And she gave as good as she got. One time I remember like it was yesterday. The cops were driving their horses into the picket line, hammering the workers with their clubs. Your mother pushed a hatpin into the horse’s tuchis. I’m telling you, Stanley-right in there. The horse jumped up and the cop fell off. He fell into a circle of strikers. That day we got even a little.”

“I don’t know anything about this.”

“That’s the point. Your mother was not a young girl when you were born. She was almost thirty and she figured she’d done her duty. The garment workers were mostly organized by then, anyway. What was the point of looking for trouble? She decided to stay home with you while you were young. Then came the war and everybody went off to fight Hitler.”

Moodrow refilled Greta’s cup without asking. He put a few jelly doughnuts on a plate and set them out on the table.

“My mother must have been pretty disappointed when I became a cop,” he said.

“If she was, she didn’t say anything to me about it. I think by that time she was just happy you weren’t going to be a boxer. She was afraid you were some kind of a savage. Also, times had changed. When there came a strike, the cops protected the workers instead of attacking them. And remember, your father’s brother was a policeman and your mother knew he wasn’t a bad man.”

“Greta, I know I asked you this before, but what do you expect me to do here? About Melenguez. I …”

Greta Bloom, straightening up in her chair, seemed to transform herself. The kindly neighbor disappeared and her eyes grew hard. “Nothing happens without risk. When your grandmother died, your mother could have said, ‘See, this is what happens. This is the way it is. What can I do about it?’ Instead, she fought back. That thing with the horse? It didn’t just happen. She brought the hatpin with her, because she knew the cops would use their horses and there was no other way to bring the horses down. Now, I have to go. I got the laundry and my shopping to do. Plus, I also have a Hadassah meeting at the shul. I tell you, Stanley, I’m busier now in my old age than when the children were young.”

“Wait a minute, Greta. This time I have a question for you. Did you tell these stories to your own children? I mean your kids went to City College. They’re professionals. Now they live out on Long Island somewhere.”

Greta Bloom sighed. “I told them, but they don’t wanna know from the old days. What’s the use of complaining? Every time I turn around, somebody’s kids are moving out. But you, Stanley, you’re different. You’re a fighter like they never were. You could understand what I’m trying to say. Luis Melenguez’s killer should not go unpunished.”

Steppy Accacio was in a towering rage. In the first place, it was only eleven o’clock in the morning, way too early to be dealing with major problems. In the second place, his bitch of a Sicilian wife was nowhere to be found.

“Where ya hidin’, Angie?” he shouted. “Ya humpin’ the paperboy? Ya humpin’ the goddamn Fuller Brush man? Who ya humpin’, Angie?”

Accacio roared through the house, screaming his wife’s name at the top of his lungs. He knew he was wasting time, wasting valuable time, but he couldn’t help himself. When his temper went off, it went off. There was nothing he could do except ride it out.

Still, he’d feel better when he found his lazy wife and gave her a few good reasons to answer him the first time he called her name. When he let the pressure roaring in his temples out through his fists.

He was down in the basement, still shouting, when he heard his Cadillac (his brand-new Cadillac) pull into the garage. There she was, out shopping when he wanted her. Playing around in the department stores. Buying some kind of bullshit they didn’t need and never would need.

“Welcome home, bitch,” he hissed as she came into the kitchen with a bag of groceries in her arms.

“I got fresh rolls,” Angie said, holding the paper bag between them. “And some fruits. For you breakfast.”

Steppy Accacio slapped the groceries out of her hand. The truth was that he didn’t care what was in the bag. He didn’t give two shits if it was filled with hundred-dollar bills. The bitch was gonna get what she deserved. Even if she didn’t deserve it. He slapped her in the face, then slapped her again.

“I want you here when I want you here,” he shouted. “I don’t want you somewheres else.”

She made no move to defend herself, her arms limp at her sides, head lowered. For some reason, this made Steppy Accacio even angrier. It made him want to really work her over, to bust her ribs, crack her nose, split her lips. He could almost taste the blood.

But there was no time for it. Joe Faci and Santo Silesi were on their way over. If he did the job on Angie, she’d require some kind of medical attention and that would only complicate what was already getting out of hand.

He reached out and pulled her coat off, then grabbed her blouse and yanked it so hard the buttons flew across the kitchen.

“Get out of those clothes,” he ordered. “You could sit up in your bedroom for the rest of the day. I don’t wanna see ya dressed. Maybe you won’t go nowheres if ya tits’re hangin’ out.”

Angie, already tugging at the hooks on her bra, started to walk past him, but he pushed her back against the kitchen table. “Do it here. I wanna make sure ya don’t defy me. Bein’ as ya not a person I could trust.”

Steppy grinned, enjoying her obvious humiliation. She was probably blushing, he decided, even if you couldn’t see it through that dark Sicilian skin. Angie was a devout Catholic, and despite all the bullshit about Sicilians being so lusty, sex with her was an obligation, like going to church on Christmas and Easter. Ordinarily, he much preferred the kinds of games he played with the whores under his control, but this was different. This was an opportunity. He felt the blood pounding in his temples start to pound in his crotch.

“Nice tits, Angie. I admit it. Ya got a nice set of bazoomas.”

And it was the truth, too. Maybe, someday, their kids (if they ever managed to have kids) would drag those grapefruits down to her waist. But for now they rode high, pointing right at his lips. He reached out and took her nipples between his fingers and twisted until he was sure it hurt. She didn’t cry out, of course. She never cried out.

“Keep goin’, Angie. I’m gonna give ya what ya deserve.”

He watched her step out of her shoes. Watched her wriggle out of her skirt, then slide her panties down over her hips.

“Open ya legs. Open ’em wide. That’s a good girl. That’s a very good girl. See how nice I am when ya give me what I want? Now, turn around, Angie. Show me that sweet brown ass.”

He stepped forward, pushing his crotch into her buttocks, then slammed her down against the tabletop.

“Reach behind ya, Angie,” he hissed. “Reach behind and take it out for me. I’m feelin’ lazy at the moment.”

Thirty minutes later, when Joe Faci and Santo Silesi finally arrived, Steppy Accacio’s mood had gone from bad to good to bad again. The way Accacio saw it, the small, fragile niche he’d managed to carve for himself on New York’s Lower East Side, his stepping stone to bigger and better things, was being threatened by forces he’d thought were under control. True, he didn’t have all the facts yet. Maybe, just maybe, his young nephew had misjudged the situation. Maybe Sandy had simply panicked. But one thing for sure, the bosses who’d given him permission to occupy his little niche would yank that permission the minute they felt he couldn’t control his territory. There was no shortage of aspiring businessmen looking for the same chance he’d been given.

Accacio didn’t bother showing Faci and his nephew into the den. With Angie naked in their bedroom, there was little chance of being overheard. He didn’t bother with espresso and pastries, either. What Accacio felt as he led the two men into the living room was cold hard fear. It was like being nineteen years old and back in the army again, back in that minefield in France. The lieutenant had led them into that field as if they were taking a stroll through Central Park. It wasn’t until the first mine exploded, showering the platoon with bloody chunks of PFC Trevor Jones, that the dumb bastard figured it out. The following hour had been the longest in Steppy Accacio’s life. He still dreamed about it.

“Awright, Sandy,” Accacio said, his voice surprisingly quiet, even to himself, “let’s hear it.”

“There’s not much to tell. I’m supposed to go into O’Neill’s twice a week to drop off forty bags of dope. If he needs anything extra, he sends one of the whores out to pick it up. Yesterday, I’m making my regular delivery and I find the front door wide open. I knock and call out, but O’Neill doesn’t answer, which is very unusual because he mostly stays by that door. Now I don’t like the situation, but I still wanna deliver the dope because I’m finished for the morning and if O’Neill doesn’t take it, I’m gonna have to hold onto the forty bags all day. So, I’m walking back to the office, still calling O’Neill’s name, when someone says, ‘C’mon in.’ Me, I think it’s O’Neill, but when I go inside, I find this cop sitting on O’Neill’s desk. My first instinct is to get the hell out of there, but I manage to hold together and make the delivery. I figured the cop would be more suspicious if I ran.”

“But you didn’t actually hear what they were talkin’ about,” Accacio said. “For all ya know, they coulda been talkin’ about the weather. I mean it coulda been the cop was tryin’ to shake the pimp down. Happens all the time.”

“I thought about that and I guess it’s possible. But what keeps bothering me is the look on O’Neill’s face when I walked into the office. I thought the pimp was gonna have a heart attack. I’m telling you, Steppy, his face was dead white, like he was looking into his own coffin. Then the cop tells me that him and O’Neill are having a private conversation.”

“Did O’Neill say anything? Anything at all.”

“Not a word. But his hands were shaking so bad, he could hardly count out the two hundred.”

“If the situation was so fucking serious, how come you waited this long to tell me?” Accacio’s voice rose as he asked the question. He could feel his anger returning.!

“The kid didn’t do nothin’ wrong,” Joe Faci interrupted. “Him and the hebes had to go to Jersey in the afternoon. Then he had to go back in the projects at night. He called me as soon as he was finished, but you was already outta touch by then.”

“Yeah,” Sandy said quickly. “The thing was I didn’t wanna tell Jake before I spoke to you. The job we had to do in Jersey with SpeediFreight? If I didn’t show up for that, Jake would’ve known something was wrong. He’s not a dope, Steppy. He’s smart, like all the Jews. What I did was go through the day like nothing happened. Then, after I got finished in the projects, I found Joe and told him exactly what I’m telling you.”

Steppy Accacio leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. His nephew’s story was based on nothing more than instinct. Instinct, Steppy knew, was important. You couldn’t really make your way in this business without it, but you could also let it get away from you. Facts were a lot better, but sometimes facts were hard to come by. You might spend weeks digging out the facts and, meanwhile, your whole life was going down the drain.

“Could you describe this cop? Would you know him again if you saw him?”

“That’s easy,” Santo Silesi replied. “He was a fucking giant. Six-five, at least, and built like a refrigerator. Plus, he had a scar in his eyebrow. The scar was still red, so he must’ve gotten it recently. I could make out the stitch marks.”

“I seen this cop before,” Joe Faci said quietly.

“You know him?” Accacio asked. “You know who the fuck he is?”

“I didn’t say that, Steppy. I didn’t say I actually knew him. I only said I seen him.”

“You wanna tell me where you seen him? Or do you wanna make it a goddamned mystery.”

“The last time Patero came in for his piece, the big cop was with him. The reason I remember it so clear is because the cop still had the stitches in his eye.”

“Holy shit,” Accacio shouted, jumping out of the chair. “Holy shit. Holy shit. Did Patero bring him into the office?”

“Nope. Left him outside at a table. They had lunch after you and Patero finished ya business.”

Accacio sat back down. “Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe O’Neill got behind on his payments to Patero, like he did with us. Maybe the cop was there to teach him a lesson. Jesus, if the sheeny didn’t shoot that spic, we wouldn’t be worried about this bullshit. Sandy, you didn’t say nothin’ to the Jew, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, we gotta move fast. And it ain’t the cops I’m mostly worried about. We’re just startin’ out, just gettin’ established. If we look like a bunch of fuck-ups, Tommy Rosario’s gonna cut us out like he was pullin’ a used rubber off his dick. Sandy, you go back to Leibowitz and tell him Joe Faci wants to see him. Joe, you tell Leibowitz that O’Neill and his old lady gotta go. What I’m thinkin’ here is that even if this bullshit with the cop ain’t directed at us, O’Neill’s junkie wife is a liability. They seen the spic go down. It’s like a sword hangin’ over my head and I want it outta there. You tell the sheeny to do it quiet, Joe. Like he done his buddy. I want them two pimps should disappear like they never been born. Meanwhile, I’m gonna personally call Lieutenant Patero. I’m gonna tell him that if he can’t control what goes down in his own precinct, he can take his protection and shove it up his fuckin’ ass.”

Pat Cohan was so pissed off he couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t felt this way in years, not in years. What he wanted to do was fire his long-unfired.38 into Stanley Moodrow’s chest. Except that Stanley Moodrow wasn’t there and Sal Patero was. Sal Patero was sitting in a chair with his legs crossed like nothing was happening.

“You know what’s buggin’ you, Pat?” Patero said. “What’s buggin’ you is that you totally fucked up when you picked this kid out to marry your daughter. You misjudged his character and you put him in a position he couldn’t handle. Now you got your family mixed up in it and you don’t know what to do.”

“Listen, you little wop,” Cohan screeched, “don’t tell me what I shouldn’t have done. You’re the one who put me onto Steppy Accacio. I was clean before that. You hear me? Clean.”

“You never been clean a day in your life. And what you’re doin’ right now leads me to believe it’s time you got out of the game. You’re not being objective. You oughta be thinking about what you’re gonna do. Instead, all you can think about is what you’ve already done.”

“What I wanna do is kill the bastard.” Cohan, once he’d gotten it out, began to calm down. Patero was right, of course. The important thing was to stop Moodrow before he did any damage.

“You wanna go out and kill a cop, Pat? Is that what you wanna do?”

Cohan sat in a chair behind his carved mahogany desk. He lit the stub of a Cuban cigar and blew out a cloud of gray smoke. “I’m not sayin’ we should actually kill him.”

“Why don’t we talk about the future? Let’s talk about what we are gonna do.”

“I suppose you’ve got that all figured out.”

“I haven’t been wasting my time thinkin’ about the past.”

“Look, you guinea bastard, keep the sarcasm to yourself. I don’t need that crap.”

Patero laughed. “Hey, Pat,” he said quietly, “you and me are sleepin’ in the same bed. If I get fucked, you get fucked. Why don’t you try to clear the potatoes out of your stupid Irish brain? Just long enough so you could hear what I’m gonna say. The first thing is we gotta separate young Stanley from the Seventh Precinct. I’m not talkin’ about a suspension. Just a two-week vacation, followed by a transfer to the Hundred and First in Far Rockaway. That’s step number one. Step number two is I make it clear to the squad that Stanley Moodrow is not to have access to the paperwork in the Melenguez case. Under pain of following young Stanley out to the boonies. Maybe we could also spread the rumor that Stanley is talkin’ to the press, that he’s tearin’ down the blue wall. I’m not sure the boys’ll buy it, but it can’t hurt us.”

“Wait a second, Sal. How do you know he hasn’t already seen the file?”

“Seeing the file is one thing. Copying it is something else. Now, step number three is we prepare a case against Stanley for corruption. Or dereliction of duty. Or disobedience. Or spitting on the sidewalk. Something to use if he doesn’t take the hint. Because the thing about it is we can’t call him off. Any cop has the right to investigate any crime when he’s off-duty. It’s a tradition and we can’t mess with it. Now …”

The doorbell rang, interrupting Patero’s lecture. Pat Cohan knew who it was. He also knew that he should stay in his den, that there was nothing to be gained from a confrontation with Stanley Moodrow. But he got up anyway, got up and walked out of the den to find his darlin’ Kathleen in Stanley Moodrow’s arms.

“Lord Jesus,” he muttered. “What have I done to myself?”

The young couple gave him plenty of time to think about it. Reacting like any pair of lovers after a separation, they continued to hold each other, continued to press their lips together.

“Stanley,” Pat Cohan said when he could stand it no longer. “Stanley.”

Kate jumped back, her hands unconsciously smoothing her skirt. “Daddy,” she said, “I didn’t know you were there.”

“It’s all right, darlin’, I was young once, too. Stanley, boyo, do you think I could have a moment? Just a moment, then I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.”

“Sure, Pat. Whatever you want.”

Pat Cohan felt his ears begin to redden. There hadn’t been a hint of fear in Moodrow’s voice. It was as if he was totally unaware of what happened to cops who made enemies of NYPD inspectors. Unaware or unconcerned.

“Hey, Stanley,” Patero said as Moodrow came into the den. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Nothing much, Sal. How’s by you?”

“Enough of the bullshit,” Cohan said, trying to keep his voice down. “Just what in hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m visiting my fiancee.”

Cohan’s mouth opened, but no words came out. Stanley Moodrow was staring directly into his eyes.

“Relax, Stanley,” Patero said. “You know what Pat’s talkin’ about. He’s talkin’ about your visit to the Pitt Street pimp. Can I assume you weren’t there to sample the merchandise?”

“What I do on my own time is my own business. The job doesn’t own me twenty-four hours a day. Maybe you wanna tell me why you bullshitted me about Luis Melenguez.”

“If you had a problem with what I told you,” Pat Cohan shouted, “you should’ve come to me.”

“Sal,” Moodrow said, ignoring Cohan altogether, “We’re talking about a homicide. You’re a cop. How can you bury a homicide?”

“What makes you think I’m burying anything?”

Moodrow hesitated, then smiled. “Melenguez was my neighbor. I saw his wife the other day. She came from Puerto Rico to pick up her husband’s effects. We talked for a long time. A long time. What you told me about Melenguez being a pimp was pure bullshit. He was just an ordinary citizen who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Think of it like this, Sal-if you’re not guilty, then you got nothin’ to worry about.”

“You,” Pat Cohan said, “you have plenty to worry about. I’m going to bury you so deep, they won’t be able to find you with a steamshovel.”

“You already gave that speech,” Moodrow growled, turning back to the inspector. “Two days ago. Wanna hear something funny? I believe you a hundred percent. Which means I don’t have a hell of a lot to lose.”

“All right, enough small talk.” Patero got up and approached Moodrow. “Here’s what’s gonna happen, Stanley,” he said, poking his index finger into Moodrow’s chest. “You’re on vacation, starting right now. You got a problem, take it to the P.B.A. Plus, I don’t wanna see you in the Seventh. Maybe I can’t lock the door, but I got a lotta friends in that building. You come in there, someone’s gonna be watchin’ you every minute. Besides which the Melenguez paperwork’s already gone over to Organized Crime. Where everybody’s my friend.”

Patero continued to jab Moodrow’s chest as he spoke, his thin smile gradually widening into a grin. “You figure out what I’m sayin’ yet, Stanley?”

“I know what you’re trying to do, Sal,” Moodrow answered. “You want me to hit you. You want me to hit a superior officer in front of an officer who’s even superior to him. But I gotta tell you something you haven’t figured out yet.” He grabbed Patero’s wrist and held it motionless. “If it comes down to a street-fight, you’re gonna get your ass kicked. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll go join my fiancee.”

Pat Cohan waited until the door closed behind Moodrow before he spoke. He was much calmer now. “Know what I’m gonna do, Sal? I’m gonna transfer the bastard out, just like you said. Then I’m gonna wait. A year. Two years. Until he thinks I’ve forgotten. When the right time comes, I’m gonna set him up. I’m gonna put him in prison, then I’m gonna visit him and tell him what I did. Because nobody …”

“Look, Pat, you’re …”

“Don’t interrupt me, Sal. I want you to get to Faci tonight. I want you to tell him the shooters have to go. I don’t care if he ships them across the ocean to spaghetti heaven or buries them in a swamp. They gotta vanish.”

“I’m not gonna say any such thing, Pat. It’s much too early to panic. How do you know what Stanley’s gonna find out? Besides, Faci and his boss aren’t stupid. If we let them know what’s happening, they’ll handle things on their own.”

“Give me a number, Sal.”

“What?”

“Give me a phone number. Faci’s. Accacio’s. I don’t care which one. Give me the number and I’ll take care of it myself.”

Stanley Moodrow couldn’t stop thinking about how easy it would be. He and Kate were sitting together on the living room couch watching television. Pat Cohan was upstairs, presumably asleep. The image on the screen was revolving wildly, but neither he nor Kate showed any inclination to adjust it. They’d just come out of a long embrace, an embrace that had begun with Kate’s lips drawn tightly together, then quickly escalated to all-out passion. Kate had pulled away first, as expected, but she continued to breathe heavily as she straightened her skirt.

What Moodrow figured he could do, assuming he wanted to, was draw Kate Cohan into his bed. Despite Father Ryan’s penance, despite all the good-girl myths, despite her fear of her father, Kate’s body would get the better of her. He could seduce her and get her pregnant and that would be all she wrote.

“Maybe we ought to talk about something else,” Kate said.

“I don’t recall us talking at all.”

She took his hand and squeezed it. “Stanley, what were you and Daddy fighting about? I heard him shouting.”

What could he say? Your father’s pissed off because I’m trying to prove he covered up a murder?

“I think his hair got messed up.”

“Don’t be evasive, Stanley. What were you fighting about?”

“I know you love your father, Kate, but you have to admit he has his faults.” He waited for her to nod in agreement. “And one of his faults is he thinks of you as a medal he’s giving out. If I want the medal, I have to earn it. Which basically means obeying him, even if what he wants has nothing to do with your welfare.”

“Daddy’s just being protective. The way fathers are supposed to.”

“But where does that leave me? I’m not a dog on the end of his leash. I have to live my own life. And after we get married, your life and mine are gonna be one and the same. The point I’m making is that sooner or later your old man has to let go.”

What he wanted to do was bury his lips in her throat, to run the tips of his fingers over her body, to join their flesh until neither of them could tell where one body left off and the other began. But he didn’t do any of that. It was the wrong time and the wrong place and he knew it.

“I suppose he does,” Kate said, “but I think it’ll come naturally. After we’re married. Daddy respects marriage.”

“Yeah, well, I hope so. But there’s something else we have to get straight and that’s where we’re gonna live.” The issue had been bothering him ever since he’d realized they were going to have to survive on his salary. If they saved their pennies, they might someday be able to afford a home of their own, but that was going to be in the future. Way in the future. “Because the thing of it is that I’ve already got a two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment right now. For which I’m paying eighty dollars a month.”

“But the neighborhood, Stanley. It’s falling apart.”

“Look, I know the Lower East Side isn’t much. It never was. But half a million people live there and they mostly get along. What I want you to do is come to see me tomorrow. It’s Sunday so you oughta be able to get away. Let me take you around, show you what the neighborhood’s really like. If you still think you can’t live there, we’ll find some other place. But at least come and take a look.”

The thing about Jake Leibowitz, Jake Leibowitz thought, is he never kids himself. He faces up to the crap reality throws at him is what he does. He deals with the bullshit.

When Santo Silesi brought him the word that O’Neill and his bitch had to go, Jake’d seen it as a routine piece of business, as the price you pay for your mistakes. That routine had changed dramatically when he, Izzy and young Santo found 800 Pitt Street deserted. Jake had figured it out right away. The O’Neills were a link between Steppy Accacio and the electric chair: O’Neill to Jake to Faci to Accacio. That’s how it went. Take the O’Neills out and the chain breaks.

But with O’Neill and his old lady most likely talking to the cops, the only sensible thing for Steppy Accacio to do was move up to the next link. Which happened to be Jake Leibowitz. Jake and his buddy, Izzy Stein.

Well, Jake Leibowitz wasn’t going to run. Not from Accacio and not from the cops. And he wasn’t going to panic, either. He’d waited too long to get his piece of the action. What he’d do is watch his back at all times. Watch his back and wait for Santo Silesi to make a move.

“Yoo-hoo, Jakey, are you decent?”

Jake, staring at his reflection in the mirror, rolled his eyes. “Yeah, ma, c’mon in.”

Sarah Leibowitz pranced into the room, her rotund body encased in the rattiest fur coat Jake had ever seen. “You like?” she asked, spinning around to give him the big view.

“Great, ma. What kind of fur is it?”

She threw him her darkest look. “A hundred percent fox. If you knew from fur, you wouldn’t ask.”

“That’s what I was gonna say. Only I didn’t wanna look bad in case it was mink.”

Ma Leibowitz sniffed. “So why are you dressed so fancy-pancy? You getting married?”

“I gotta go out, ma.”

He looked back at the mirror, at his beautiful gray suit. The suit he’d almost fought the salesman at Leighton’s to get. “Continental,” the salesman had insisted. “Continental is the fashion now.” Then he’d brought out a three-button jacket and a pair of trousers with a little buckle in the back. “I’d rather wear a fucking dress,” Jake had said. “What I want is double-breasted and no bullshit about it.” The suit he ended up buying was a compromise because even though it was double-breasted, it only had one button. Way at the bottom.

“This is crap,” he’d told the salesman, but then he’d tried on the jacket, looked in the mirror and known right away. The damn thing draped his chest like a Roman toga. He looked like he’d just stepped off the cover of Esquire. “Do the cuffs. I’ll pick out some shirts while I’m waitin’.”

Now, he never wanted to take the suit off. Even though his business this morning was routine. He was supposed to meet Santo Silesi in the projects on Houston Street and hand over the day’s supply of heroin. Dope was a seven-day-a-week business. Miss a day, even a Sunday, and your customers went somewhere else. Later, after Santo had his pockets full, Jake and Izzy were going to meet down at Katz’s Delicatessen for some breakfast and a strategy session. The strategy wasn’t hard to figure: locate O’Neill before it’s too late. Find him or get ready to fight. Jake wanted to know if Izzy had come to the same conclusion. Especially about the fighting part of it.

Jake took his.45 from under the pillow and shoved it into his belt.

“What’s with the gun?” Sarah Leibowitz asked.

“You want fox, mind your own business.”

“For me he has no respect,” Sarah moaned. “For me …”

“Cut the crap, ma. I ain’t got the patience for it.”

“Huh,” she sniffed. “You could at least straighten your tie.”

He did straighten his tie. Then he left the bedroom. “I’ll be back when I’m back,” he said, shrugging into his black overcoat. “Don’t wait up.”

It was cold outside, cold and windy, as usual. Jake held his hat with one hand as he walked along Avenue D It was like being in Kansas, in Leavenworth, Kansas, where the wind came across the prairie like a bullwhip in the hand of a sadistic hack. The only good thing about this winter of 1958 was that Santo Silesi had to spend hours every day standing in it.

“I’ll bet the little prick has a face the color of Santa Claus’s costume,” Jake said to himself as he hurried along. “I’ll bet his face is so raw he screams when he shaves.”

When he finally located Silesi in a park near the river, Jake’s first thought was, “Good, he’s got customers.” But as he moved a little closer, Jake realized that something was very wrong. Silesi was surrounded by five Puerto Rican kids wearing identical baseball jackets. Jake could see young Santo’s head swiveling as he tried to watch everyone at the same time. What it was, what it had to be, was a rip-off. Pure and simple.

Jake pulled the.45 and laid it alongside his coat. Santo and the five kids were standing just off the path and Jake waited until he was abreast of the group, then turned, stepped forward and smashed the.45 into the nearest kid’s head. The kid dropped without so much as a groan.

“Who’s talkin’ here?” Jake asked, looking from one kid to another. “Who’s the big shot?” He paused, allowing the barrel of the Colt to swing in a slow half-circle. “What’s the matter? Nobody got nothin’ to say? You a bunch of patos? You a bunch of faggots?”

Their eyes were riveted to the.45. They couldn’t even think of anything else.

“Somebody better wake the fuck up,” Jake said. “Because I ain’t gonna slap the next one.” He drew the hammer back.

“I am the president,” a tall, slim kid announced.

“That’s funny,” Jake said, pointing the.45 at the center of the kid’s chest, “you don’t look a bit like Dwight David Eisenhower. Not with all that greasy hair. Ike’s bald.”

“I am president of the Tenth Street Dragons.”

“Dragons? More like the Tenth Street Cucarachas.”

“You have the gun, senor.”

“Here, Santo, take this.” Jake passed the.45 to Silesi, then took off his overcoat, folded it carefully and laid it on a bench. His hat followed, then his jacket. “Okay, El Presidente, let’s see what you got.”

Jake could see the kid was scared. He was scared, but he couldn’t chicken out. Not with that macho attitude every Puerto Rican was supposed to have. He had to fight.

“Ya know somethin’, kid? I was havin’ a very bad day. But since I met you, it’s picked up considerable.”

The kid threw a slow clumsy left. Jake took it on the forehead, a nothing punch that made no impression whatsoever, then slammed his right hand into the kid’s face. He felt the kid’s nose flatten under his knuckles, watched him fall.

“What’s the matter, El Presidente, you don’t wanna get up?” The kid didn’t want to get up. That was obvious. He was sitting on the frozen ground, holding one hand to his face, trying to shake off the dizzyness.

“C’mon, don’t be a pussy.” Jake drove the toe of his fifty-dollar Bostonians into the kid’s ribs. That got him going. The kid rolled away, trying to get to his feet, but Jake moved with him, waiting for an opening. When he saw it, he kicked the kid again, this time right in the balls.

“Guess the party’s over,” Jake said. “El Presidente musta ate somethin’ that didn’t agree with him. He’s pukin’ all over his sneakers. What I gotta say to the rest of you punks is that ya boss is lucky. He’s lucky he ain’t fuckin’ dead. Which is exactly what you’re gonna be if ya try this bullshit again. Look at yourselves. Wearin’ them stupid jackets and them sneakers in the middle of winter. Why don’t ya get a goddamned suit? A decent pair of shoes?” He paused for an answer, but nobody said a word. “Awright, pick up ya buddies and get your asses outta here. And don’t come back. Next spic that fucks with me is goin’ for a swim in the river.”

Jake took the.45 from Santo, then waited in his shirtsleeves until the kids disappeared into the projects. What he was showing them was that he didn’t feel the cold, but what he was doing was freezing his ass off. The minute they were gone, he put on his jacket, overcoat and hat. Then he started walking.

“Let’s move up to Sixth Street. In case somebody’s momma decides to call the cops.”

They walked over to Avenue D, then turned north. “What were ya doin’, Santo?” Jake asked. “Were you just gonna let ’em rob ya?”

“They weren’t thieves,” Silesi replied evenly. “The Dragons aren’t a fighting gang.”

“Then what the fuck did they want?”

“They wanted me to stop bringing heroin into the neighborhood. They said it was destroying the community.”

“No shit?” Jake shook his head in wonder. “Puerto Rican social workers. Who woulda believed it.”

“What could I say, Jake? It surprised me, too.”

“Did they happen to mention what they were gonna do? In case you decided not to take their advice.”

“You showed up before they got to that part.”

“Well, you could forget about them. They ain’t comin’ back. There’s somethin’ else I wanna talk about anyway. Ya told me your uncle had a police lieutenant in his pocket. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“So what I wanna know is how come we gotta worry about the cops? Because Joe Faci told me it was fixed. I mean was he bullshitting me or what? It seems to me if ya really got a lieutenant in ya pocket, you could find out where the cops hid the pimp and his old lady.”

“That’s not my end of it, Jake. All I know is some cop’s making a fuss and Steppy’s dealing with it.”

They were interrupted by what Jake, thinking about it later, called a miracle. A woman, dressed in a dark cloth coat and a woolen scarf, stepped out of a doorway and approached them. Her hands were shaking, her nose running freely.

“Sandy,” she said, “ya gotta help me out.”

Jake recognized Betty O’Neill immediately. Which is not to say that she recognized him. She wasn’t even looking at him. The bitch only had eyes for her pusher.

“I’m sick,” she said. “I gotta have a fix. I gotta.”

“I just dropped off forty bags the other day,” Silesi said calmly. “You must have some kind of habit, Betty. Maybe it’s time for you to kick.”

“It ain’t that,” Betty said. “Al dumped it in the toilet. He said that dope is what got us into the mess we’re in. I asked him, ‘What mess?’ but all he can say is we gotta run. I don’t know what’s the matter with him, Sandy. He’s turned into some kind of a pansy.”

“Was he talkin’ to the cops, Betty?” Jake asked. Now she was looking at him, trying to place him. He smiled innocently. “I mean I’m only askin’ because there’s rumors goin’ around and what with you and Al takin’ off, people are startin’ to get worried.”

“A cop did come to the house, but Al didn’t tell him nothin’. I swear it.”

“Then why did he run away?”

“Because he’s a damned coward, that’s why.” She paused long enough to run the sleeve of her coat across her mouth and nose. “Al figured that when Santo seen him and the cop together, he’d jump to conclusions.”

“Betty,” Jake said, “do you know who I am?”

“You’re Santo’s boss.”

“That’s right.” He took a small paper bag out of his overcoat pocket and let her take a look at what was inside. “You know what that is, don’t ya?”

“Dope.” Her hand floated up for a moment, then dropped to her side. “I got money. I’ll take it all.”

Jake shook his head. He counted out ten caps, then handed the rest to Silesi. “Go take care of business, Santo. You got customers need servicin’.” He waited until he and Betty were alone before speaking again. “What would ya give for this, Betty?” he asked. “What would ya give?”

Betty managed a crooked smile. “I’d give ya whatever ya wanted.” She put her hand beneath her coat and let it slide down her belly.

“What I want is your husband. And I ain’t no fag, either. I just gotta make sure he’s all right, that he ain’t talkin’ to the wrong people.”

“That chicken ain’t talkin’ to nobody. He don’t hardly answer the door.”

“I got an idea, Betty. Why don’t you and me go some place private? That way you could take care of what you gotta take care of. When you’re all better we could talk about this … this problem.”

“Where are we goin’?”

“To paradise. The Paradise Hotel. A friend of mine has a room there.”

The news, as far as Jake was concerned, was all good. Al O’Neill wasn’t being protected by the cops. He had to be holed up somewhere on his own, because if the cops were involved, Betty wouldn’t be roaming the streets looking for dope. She’d be climbing the walls in some locked room.

Jake led the way down Avenue D and across Houston Street. He didn’t bother watching Betty O’Neill. (He could hear her sniveling as she trotted alongside him like a stray dog sniffing at a roast beef sandwich.) Instead, he thought about what was wrong here. If Al O’Neill was talking, the first thing the cops would’ve done is drag his sorry ass into the precinct to look at the mug books. Jake was in those books. Izzy and Abe, too. So, how come …

Maybe O’Neill hadn’t talked to anyone. Maybe it was all Santo Silesi’s imagination. Maybe Silesi was only trying to make himself more important to Joe Faci and Steppy Accacio. Maybe Accacio himself was nothing more than a chickenshit sissy who panicked every time he heard a noise in the house. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But none of that mattered and Jake knew it. Because what he should’ve done was take care of Al and Betty when Abe plugged the spic. What he should have done was eliminate the witnesses on the spot. He’d made a mistake, just like Abe Weinberg had made a mistake, and now he had to pay for it. Or Betty O’Neill had to pay for it. That was closer to the truth. Betty and her old man had to pay the price. Permanently.

Jake wasn’t surprised to find the lobby of the Paradise Hotel deserted. The assorted whores and hustlers who lived in the Paradise weren’t exactly early risers. Plus it was Sunday, and the desk clerk wouldn’t come on duty until noon. Jake led Betty up the stairs to Izzy’s room on the second floor.

“Good morning, Izzy,” Jake said when the door opened. “I brought a guest.”

Betty O’Neill may not have recognized Jake Leibowitz, but she knew Izzy Stein well enough. “Oh, Lord,” she muttered. “Lord, Lord, Lord.”

“Don’t be shy, Betty,” Jake said, pushing her into the room. “Izzy won’t hurt ya. As long as ya tell the truth.”

“Where’d ya find her?” Izzy asked. “She fall down outta the sky?”

“Next thing to it. She come lookin’ for dope.” Jake took out three bags of heroin. “Here ya go, Betty. Have a party.”

“It ain’t enough,” she said. “I gotta have more than that.”

“Do this much first,” Jake said. “I don’t need ya so stoned ya can’t get off the floor.”

Betty took the heroin, then stripped off her coat and rolled up the sleeves of her blouse. She fumbled in her purse for a moment, then found a cracked leather billfold and dumped its contents on the table: a crusted eyedropper, the tip of a reusable needle, a bent, blackened tablespoon, a wad of cotton, a narrow strip of paper torn from a dollar bill. Despite her trembling hands, she fitted her works together in record time, wrapping the strip of paper around the open end of the eyedropper, then forcing the needle over it.

“I need water,” she said.

Izzy retrieved a glass of water from the table next to his bed. It’d been sitting there for two days.

“Thanks.” Betty tested the works by filling and emptying the eyedropper and needle several times. When she was satisfied, she squirted water into the tablespoon, added the heroin, then lit a match and heated the mixture until it came to a boil. Finally, she dumped a small piece of cotton into the spoon and set it down to cool.

“Better not leave that too long,” Jake said. “The roaches’ll drink it.”

“Ha, ha.” Betty fumbled with her sleeve again, trying to roll it up past her bicep. “Goddamn winter. It gets in your way.” She pulled her blouse off, stripping down to a lace brassiere, then wrapped a cloth belt around her upper arm and pulled it tight with her teeth. The veins at her elbow and along her bicep were black with scar tissue, but she patiently worked her finger along the dark lines until she was satisfied, then picked up the dropper and jammed the needle into her flesh. Almost miraculously, a crimson drop blossomed in the clear liquid. With a sigh, she let the belt drop out of her mouth and squeezed the bulb.

Her hands stopped trembling and her nose stopped running within seconds. Her whole body straightened as the knotted muscles in her back began to smooth out.

“That better?” Jake asked.

“Listen,” Betty said, ignoring the question, “ya gotta understand that I didn’t say nothin’ to that cop. I don’t know what’s happening to Al. Maybe he’s gettin’ soft in his old age. But I didn’t have nothin’ to do with nothin’ as far as the cop is concerned.”

“I believe ya,” Jake said. “That’s how come I know ya wouldn’t mind helpin’ us out here. I mean you was there and I wasn’t.” He waited for Betty to nod before continuing. “What’d the cop want?”

“He was askin’ about the john who got killed right after Christmas.”

“And what’d ya tell him?”

“I didn’t tell him nothin’.”

“What’d Al tell him?”

“See, that’s the thing. The cop locked me in the toilet so’s I couldn’t hear what was goin’ on.”

“You were in there all the time?”

“No, he took me out later and locked Al up. Then he asked me a whole lotta questions about that night the john got shot. But I didn’t say nothin’ except I wasn’t there. I told him I got run over by a car and I was sleepin’ upstairs at the time.”

“If you were in the toilet, how do ya know Santo was there when Al was talkin’ to the cop? Santo didn’t say nothin’ about seein’ you.”

“Al told me.”

“What else did he tell ya? What’d he tell the cops?”

“That’s what I’m tryin’ to say. I don’t know. All Al said is Santo seen us so we gotta run. I told him we can explain it. I mean what’re we supposed to do? Ya can’t stop the cops from comin’ around, can ya?”

“Maybe Al has a guilty conscience.”

Betty didn’t answer and Jake let it go. He looked over at Izzy and smiled. “Gimme ten caps, Iz. I got a feelin’ Betty’s gonna need it.”

Izzy crossed to the far corner and yanked up one of the floorboards. He pulled out a mason jar filled with small bags and counted out ten of them.

“See, Betty?” Jake said. “I could keep ya high forever. I mean if you was my woman, that’s what I’d do.”

Betty attempted a coquettish smile. She squared her narrow shoulders and pushed her chest out. “I don’t know what’s happened with Al. He ain’t the man I married, that’s for sure. I mean he ain’t come near me in years. If I want some, I gotta go to one of the girls. Ain’t that unbelievable?”

Jake took the heroin from Izzy and tossed five bags on the table next to Betty’s eyedropper. Betty started to go for it, but Jake caught her arm. “It ain’t time yet. First I gotta get some answers.” He flipped her onto the bed. “I’m not gonna blame you for what ya husband said to the cops. But I don’t want no more bullshit. Ya either come clean or what I’m gonna do’ll make what Izzy done to ya seem like a honeymoon hump.”

Betty’s head swiveled back and forth, from the heroin to Jake’s face. “You ain’t gonna kill me, are ya? For what Al said?”

“As a matter of fact, I got a proposition for ya. In Providence, Rhode Island. See, ya can’t stay around here ’cause the cops’ll find ya. But I got a small establishment in Providence that’s runnin’ all fucked up. The woman there can’t keep the whores in line. I figured maybe you could take it over. Get it back to makin’ a decent profit. All I need to know is what Al told the cops and where he’s hidin’ out.”

Betty leaned back, letting her head fall against the pillows. “Ya know I used to be pretty good. When I was in the trade.”

“Cut the crap. I been patient long enough.”

She sat back up and straightened the straps of her bra. “He told the cop that Santo and the guys that beat us up both work for Steppy Accacio. The cop made Al write it out and sign a paper. Then he let us go.”

“He didn’t take ya down to look at no mug shots?” Jake felt himself getting excited. Maybe this wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. An idea began to form in his mind. The cop had eyeballed Santo Silesi, but he didn’t know who Jake was or what he looked like. If the cop went after Santo and Accacio, if he took them out of the picture, there’d be a big hole in the Lower East Side heroin business. A hole for Jake to fill if could find himself another dope connection. What Jake didn’t know is why the cop had released Al and Betty. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but if Al was holed up by himself, it also didn’t matter.

Betty shook her head. “I got the feeling he was in a hurry. Maybe that’s why he didn’t work me over.”

“Where’s ya husband now?”

“He went out to Jersey. To visit his mother. That’s how come I got out. I ain’t good enough for his mother.”

“I mean where’s he stayin’? In the city.”

“We got a room in Hell’s Kitchen. That’s where Al grew up. We had the room for years. Use it once in a while to get away from the business.”

“Could we go there now? Could we go over and wait for Al?”

“Just lemme do up them caps first. Then, whatever ya want. I mean Al gotta pay the price, right? If he didn’t wanna pay, he shouldn’t’ve done what he done.”

“That’s the right way to look at it, Betty. The dope is yours. Take ya time. Enjoy.”

Jake nodded to Izzy and both men crossed the room. They waited patiently until Betty pressed the bulb of the eyedropper, until she rocked back in the chair, her eyes fluttering. “Bring the saps and a knife, Izzy,” Jake whispered. “We wanna do this quiet.”

“Stanley, I’m heating up my world-famous cheese blintzes. You’re maybe interested in one or two?” Greta Bloom set a mug of coffee in front of her guest, then turned back to the stove.

“I’d be more interested in ten or twelve,” Moodrow said, pouring cream into his mug. “How come you’re not making me use that white powder in my coffee?”

Greta shook her head. “From kosher you’ll never learn. I’m making blintzes. That’s dairy. With dairy you can have cream. So, how many blintzes should I put up?”

“A dozen’ll do.”

“Just like your father. Max wasn’t as big as you, but no one could fill him up, either.” She turned back to the stove, then began to giggle. “I just remembered a story about your mother and father. You wanna hear?”

“As long as you don’t forget the food.”

Greta pushed a cookie sheet dotted with cheese blintzes into the oven and closed the door. “Your mother was a very pretty girl. Even with a ring on her finger, men didn’t leave her alone. As it happened, we were working in a loft on Grand Street, sewing lace onto satin wedding gowns. This was considered skilled work by the bosses and the pay was good for that time. Anyway, there was a foreman in the loft named Kawitzski. A brute, Stanley, and always making remarks to the girls about coming into the storeroom. He went crazy for your mother. Every minute he was standing by her machine.”

“Wait a second. My mother was married at this time? Or single?”

“Married. And practically a newly wed. You can believe me when I say Nancy Moodrow had no use for Kawitzski. But what could she do except laugh it off? It was common for men in the garment business to makes passes at the girls. Bosses? Foremen? They strutted like Cossacks in a peasant’s cottage. A few of the girls went along, too. It means a lot to get the better jobs when you’re doing piecework. But that’s neither here nor there. One day this Kawitzski touched your mother in a way he shouldn’t have. It was not a thing you could throw off with a laugh. When your mother left work, she was so mad that she told your father what happened the minute he got home.”

“Pop always had a temper. What’d he do, kill the guy?”

“Killing is what he wanted to do, but like I already said, this Kawitzski was a brute. He saw your father coming and hid behind a door. When your father walked past, Kawitzki jumped out and hit him a tremendous punch. Down goes your father and Kawitzki starts to jump on top, but Nancy has a little trick of her own. Five rolls of pennies in a tiny purse. She hit Kawitzki such a blow I don’t think he woke up to this day. Then we all ran out before the cops came. Your father was so mad he didn’t talk to your mother for a week. Everybody was laughing at him for hiding behind a woman’s skirts.”

Moodrow blew on the steaming coffee, then sipped carefully. “I never got to know my father. He was always out working and he died before I was old enough to really talk to him. It was different with my mother. Especially after my father passed. I was serious about my boxing at that time, so I didn’t go out much. Between school and training, I had no time for a social life.” He hesitated for a moment, took the mug in his hands, then set it down. “I think what I’m trying to say is that I miss her. Things fall away and you can’t get them back. It makes you crazy if you think about it too much.”

“I miss her, too, Stanley.” Greta took the blintzes out of the oven and set them on top of the stove. “To tell you the truth, the way I feel this morning, pretty soon I’ll miss myself.” She crossed to the refrigerator, took out a bowl of sour cream and put it on the table. “Nu, so tell me. With the case, what’s happening?”

“I kind of messed it up.” Moodrow dug out the sketch of Santo Silesi and laid it on the table. “This guy’s first name is Santo. He’s a small-time heroin dealer. The men who killed Luis Melenguez work for Santo’s boss. What I’m trying to do is locate Santo so I can ask him a few questions, but I think I’m going about it the wrong way.”

“You’re going about it how?”

“The story I got from O’Neill …”

“O’Neill?”

“O’Neill ran the house of prostitution where Luis was murdered. The killers were there to teach O’Neill a lesson and Luis Melenguez walked into the middle of it. O’Neill gave me a statement, but you can forget about him testifying in court. He’s running for his life.”

“You’re a cop, Stanley. You could protect him.”

“I could if there weren’t other cops protecting his killers. You think those blintzes are ready?”

Greta forked several blintzes onto a plate and passed them over. “Stanley, would the cops doing this protecting be somehow related to your father-in-law?”

“I’m not married, Greta. I’m engaged.”

“Don’t be technical. Answer the question, please, or tell me I should mind my own business.”

“Yes, my father-in-law is protecting the killers. And you should mind your own business.” Moodrow cut a blintz in two, covered the half on his fork with sour cream and popped it into his mouth. “I spent most of yesterday knocking on doors in the projects where I think Santo works. I didn’t run into anyone I know and I didn’t get anywhere, either. I’m gonna go about it a little different today. I’m gonna visit some of the guys I grew up with and some of the guys I met when I was boxing. Even if nobody recognizes the picture, I’ll still be ahead of the game, because at least I can be sure I’m not being lied to.”

“To me it sounds good.” Greta said, shoveling blintzes onto Stanley Moodrow’s plate. “And I hope things work out with Kate. It’s not your fault her father’s a crook.”

The phone rang before Moodrow closed the door behind him. What he wanted to do was let it ring, to grab his gun, badge and coat, then get on the street where he could work. Unfortunately, the caller, almost as if he could read Moodrow’s mind, refused to hang up.

“Yeah?”

“Stanley, it’s Allen Epstein. I been phoning every ten minutes. Where you been?”

“I been having breakfast with my girlfriend.”

“Is Kate there?”

“Just kiddin’, Sarge. What’s up?”

“The pimp and his wife are dead. The cops in the Tenth found them last night. The way I hear it, the apartment was a slaughterhouse. There was blood in every room, even the toilet.”

“Sounds like somebody put up a fight.”

“Yeah, but not the pimp. He was sitting on the couch when the killer sliced his throat. It must have been his old lady. She was stabbed twenty-seven times.”

“Any chance the killer was injured? Any chance some of that blood was his?”

“It’s too early to know. With that many samples, the lab’ll need at least three days to separate them out. Anyway, I got something better than blood. There was a witness.”

“You’re bullshitting.”

“Oh, so I got your attention, eh?”

“Don’t play with me, Sarge.”

“Awright, I don’t have a name or an apartment number. I don’t even know if it was a man or a woman. What I do know is the witness lives in the building. Apparently, the killers made a lotta noise and the witness opened the door as they were leaving.”

“Ya know somethin’, Sarge,” Moodrow said after a moment, “this doesn’t have to work in our favor. If Patero and Cohan find out there’s a witness, they’re gonna pass the information on to Accacio. Any idea who caught the squeal?”

“Not yet, but soon.”

“So we don’t know if the witness is being protected or not.”

“Protection can work both ways, too. Whatta you lookin’ for, a guarantee?”

“No guarantee, Sarge. But I’m not gonna sit on my ass, either. I’m heading out to work.”

“Can’t wait to get busy, right?”

“Right.”

“It’s kinda funny you haven’t asked me about getting a look at the mug shots.”

Moodrow hesitated for a moment, then laughed. “You should’ve been a cop, Sarge. You got natural suspicion.”

“Forget the bullshit, Stanley. What’s goin’ on?”

“I already have what I need. I went to an artist I know and had him make a sketch. It’s not a photo, but it’ll do for a start.”

“I take it you don’t trust me, Stanley. Being as you didn’t mention this before.”

Moodrow took his time answering. When he finally spoke, his voice was cold. “Up until right now, I didn’t trust anybody. Not you. Not anybody. But if you were in bed with Patero and Cohan, you never would’ve told me about this witness. Or about the O’Neills, either. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings, but I know what I have to do and I’m gonna do it the way I see it.”

It was Epstein’s turn to think it over. He waited a long time, until Moodrow was ready to hang up, before he finally spoke. “I guess I can’t blame you. The way you went from walking a beat to the bullshit you’re in now would shake anybody up. Most likely it would’ve worked out better if you’d spent the first five years of your career learning the politics of the job instead of waltzing around a boxing ring. But what’s done is done. You still wanna get inside the precinct?”

“It depends on whether I have any luck on the street. What I’d like to do, assuming I can’t find Santo by myself, is give you the sketch and let you go through the books. It can’t hurt if Patero and Cohan think I’m sitting on my hands. If they think I’m scared shitless.”

“All right, Stanley. But one piece of advice before you hit the bricks. You’re gonna need friends if you expect to get through this in one piece. And I’m in a much better position to know who to trust. I’ve been living with the bullshit for a long time. If I tell you somebody’s okay, they’re okay.”

“Yeah? You sayin’ you wanna come out in the open on this? You wanna put your name right next to mine on Inspector Pat Cohan’s shit list?”

“If you’re asking me to step into your shoes, the answer is ‘go fuck yourself.’ What you have to realize is that you can’t do it yourself. Once you get that tiny little thought firmly planted in your tiny little brain, you’ll stop taking so many punches.”

Moodrow, stepping out onto the street, looked up at an overcast sky and shook his head. After weeks of freezing days and below-freezing nights, it was finally warming up. That was the good news. The bad news was that it’d be raining by noon. And it’d probably keep raining until strong Canadian winds pushed the soup back toward Virginia where it belonged.

It was eight o’clock in the morning and Moodrow was headed for Berrigan’s, an amateur boxing gym on Allen Street that had to work around school schedules in order to train its aspiring champions. The gym was run by Father Samuel Berrigan, a no-nonsense Catholic priest who used early-morning workouts as a way to separate the serious from the merely foolish. He lectured his boys constantly, insisting that the most important factor in a fighter’s career was simple desire. Stanley Moodrow had been his favorite example.

“He’s slow. He’s ugly. He fights with his face. Stanley has no right to win, but he wins anyway. That’s because he wants to win. He desires victory.”

By the time Moodrow ran into a fighter with equal desire and far more talent, he’d moved through several trainers, leaving Father Sam far behind.

The gym was open and functioning when Moodrow walked through the door. There were fighters on both speed bags, sharp middleweights competing with each other to make the bag dance. Moodrow watched them for a minute, then drifted over to a boxing ring in the center of the gym. The two kids sparring inside couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, but they were giving it all they had. The shorter of the two, stocky and short-armed, was bobbing and weaving frantically. The other kid was firing one jab after another, following each jab with a crisp left hook or a straight right hand. The only problem was that the short kid didn’t know how to close the space between himself and his opponent, while the taller kid didn’t have the timing to hit a moving target.

“I do believe those boys’re doin’ the lindy hop. There’s no way you could call it boxing.” Father Sam was short and bow-legged. He’d been a fighter before he’d turned to the priesthood and his rapport with the tough, street-wise boys of the Lower East Side was legendary. His gym was open to everyone and many a Jewish father had dragged his troubled son through Father Sam’s door.

“I can remember when you trained ’em to be a lot meaner,” Moodrow said, turning away from the ring.

“You can’t teach mean, Stanley. Can’t teach brave, either. I saw your last fight.”

“Against the fireman?”

“Yeah. Pure desire. It made me proud. What’re you doin’ here. You slummin’?”

“I’m lookin’ for somebody.”

“One of my boys?”

“No.” Moodrow fished Santo’s sketch out of his jacket pocket and passed it to the priest. “This guy’s dealing dope somewhere in the neighborhood, probably out of the projects by Avenue D.”

“What’d he do, kill somebody?”

“Dope dealing’s not enough?”

“It’s enough, Stanley. It’s enough to mess up more than one of my boys. Only I didn’t think you cops gave a damn. Being as they’re dealin’ it right out in the open.”

“Look, Father, I can’t speak for the entire Department. No more than you can speak for Cus D’Amato.” Cus D’Amato, Floyd Patterson’s manager, refused to let the champion fight serious contenders, preferring rank amateurs and club fighters. The sportswriters never lost an opportunity to rake him over the coals. “But you’ve known me for a long time, so you can believe me when I tell you that the people I’m after need to be taken off the street. Permanently.”

The priest took Moodrow’s arm and pulled him to one side of the gym. “Now, Stanley, I know you’re talkin’ justice here, but it seems more like a favor to me. Of course, people in the community should be doin’ favors for each other. It’s the neighborly thing, right? Now, I’ve got this Jewish boy. Joseph is his name. Joseph Green. The boy got himself in a little trouble. Drinkin’ is what it was. He got so drunk, he smacked a cop.”

“The cop was in uniform?”

“ ’Fraid so.” The priest shrugged. “Joey’s not a bad kid. Stupid, yes, but not really bad.”

“Is he charged with assaulting a police officer?”

“Yeah, that’s it. They’re gonna give the boy hard time if he goes to court and loses. The boy doesn’t deserve hard time just for smackin’ somebody. I don’t care if it was a cop. People down here smack each other all the time.”

“Was the cop hurt bad?”

“Now, that’s the thing. Joey knocked the cop down and he hit his head on the sidewalk. I understand there were some stitches involved.”

“What’s the kid’s name again?”

“Joe Green.”

“Okay, Father. I’ll ask around, find out what’s happening. Maybe I know the cop.”

“Go see the boy, Stanley. Talk to him. He’s not a bad kid. Just stupid, like I said.”

“I’ll do what I can, but don’t expect miracles. If he’s got a record, he’s goin’ away.” Moodrow held up Santo Silesi’s picture. “You know this guy or not?”

“Well,” the priest scratched his head, then smiled, “I don’t believe he shows up for the six-thirty Mass at St. Ann’s.”

“This is serious, Father. If you don’t wanna bother, don’t waste my time.”

“Patience, Stanley. Isn’t that what I taught you? Slow fighters have to be patient. Now, it happens there’s a boy changing up in the locker room named Henry Sanchez. He lives in those projects. If you think you can refrain from callin’ him ‘Chico,’ we could ask him to look at your picture.”

“I’ll do my best.”

They walked through the gym, Father Sam leading the way, to a small locker room at the far end of the building. Henry Sanchez was pulling on his shoes when they entered the room. He looked up, glanced at Moodrow, then turned to his trainer.

“Wha’s up, Father.”

“Give me the picture,” the priest said, pulling it out of Moodrow’s hand. “You recognize this man, Henry?”

Sanchez took his time studying the sketch, then handed it back to his trainer. “Why you wanna know?”

“It has nothing to do with me,” Father Sam said. “This here’s Stanley Moodrow. He used to fight for me. Now, he’s a police officer. Stanley’s looking for the man in that picture. Says that man’s dealing dope in the projects.”

“Tha’s funny,” Sanchez said, staring straight up at Moodrow, “I been thinkin’ the cops don’ arres’ no dealers. The headknockers only arres’ the junkies.”

“Now, that’s your whole problem, Sanchez. That’s why you can’t learn to hook off the jab. You think you know all there is to know. I’m tellin’ you that Stanley’s on the up and up.”

“I still wanna know is he gon’ to arres’ this man?”

“Look, Henry,” Moodrow interrupted, “There was a killing on Pitt Street the day after Christmas. The victim’s name was Luis Melenguez. The man in the sketch, his first name is Santo, knows who the killers are. If I find Santo, I’ll find the killers. Simple as that.”

Sanchez took a minute to think it over. “Tha’s the name,” he finally said. “Santo. Every day he’s bringin’ dope to the projects. I seen him down by tha’ little park on Houston Street. Near the river.”

“Any special time?”

“Mos’ly I seen him when I’m comin’ back from school. But, like, he ain’ punchin’ no clock.”

“He come alone?”

“Si. Only I ain’ watchin’ thees maricon every minute.”

“All right, thanks Henry. I appreciate the information.”

Moodrow headed for the door, Father Sam trailing behind. “Slow down, Stanley,” the priest demanded. “You were never in a hurry when you were trainin’ for me.”

“Sorry. I can’t think about anything but what I have to do.”

“You were like that as a fighter, too. That’s why you won. Lord knows, you didn’t have any talent.”

Moodrow turned to face the smaller man. “Is there a point here, Father?”

“Now, don’t go workin’ yourself up. Just think about how easy it was for you to waltz in here and find out what you needed to know. This gym could be a real nice connection for a cop like yourself. A cop with desire.”

“Enough with the lecture. Whatta you want?”

The priest managed a beatific grin. “What I’m gettin’ at is how I could use some help. Somebody with desire to show these boys the fundamentals. Every time I turn around, they’re out there smokin’ marijuana cigarettes. Or some gangster is tryin’ to make ’em turn pro before they’re ready. Could be if you start comin’ down regular, you’d be doin’ yourself a favor.”

Moodrow was still in bed, still asleep, when the phone began to ring. He glanced at his Big Ben, saw it was after eight o’clock and jerked himself upright. The intense jab of pain that shot through his skull reminded him why he hadn’t set the clock. Then the phone rang again and he realized that it didn’t take movement to set his head to throbbing. Sound would do, as well.

Let it ring, he thought. Just let it go away. Just let the whole goddamned morning disappear.

But whoever it was apparently knew Moodrow was home, because they wouldn’t hang up. Not after five rings, not after ten, not after fifteen. Moodrow got out of bed and crossed the room, desperately wishing for a cup of coffee.

“Yeah?”

“Stanley? It’s me, Epstein.”

“Jesus, Sarge, you could’ve picked a better time.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I got attacked is what’s wrong. I got smacked on the head with a baseball bat. Louisville Slugger, Gil Hodges model, to be exact.” He went on to give the details, including the sudden appearance of Samuelson and Detective Lieutenant Rosten. “I’m looking at the complaint right now,” he concluded. “They both signed it.”

“This Rosten is a lieutenant?”

“That’s what Samuelson said. I didn’t ask for i.d.”

“The rule is one detective lieutenant to a precinct. Something must be happening with Patero.”

“You haven’t heard any rumors?”

“I didn’t go into the house yesterday. That’s what I’m calling to tell you. I’ve got the name of the witness, the one in the O’Neill killings. Pearse O’Malley. Another Irishman.”

Moodrow didn’t know how to respond to the last part. Hell’s Kitchen had been Irish for a long time. The Lower East Side, too, back when it was called the Fourth Ward. In fact, the whole damn city had been Irish once. Finally, he decided to ignore the comment altogether.

“This O’Malley, he talkin’?”

“I don’t know, Stanley. I know he’s being protected, but my man inside the Tenth warned me to stay away from the two suits who caught the squeal. Names are Gordon and Russo.”

“Where they keeping the witness? West Street?”

“He’s in his apartment, with a cop sitting out in the hall. A uniform.”

“You got an address and an apartment number?”

“Yeah, 2211 Tenth Avenue. Top floor, 6B.”

Moodrow sighed. “I guess I gotta go up there. Try to bluff my way past the uniform.”

“You do that, you’re gonna tip your hand to Patero and Cohan. That what you want?”

“Somebody’s gotta warn the guy, Sarge. That cop sitting in the hallway isn’t protecting Pearse O’Malley. He’s keeping him prisoner.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m not gonna take the chance. Besides which O’Malley might be able to identify the men who killed the O’Neills. I’m not saying I know the O’Neills’ killer and the Melenguez killer are the same person. But I am saying if I get my hands on either one, I’ll find the other.”

“I can’t argue with that. Anything else I can do for you?”

“Yeah, Maguire said the lab boys lifted some prints at the Melenguez scene. You think you can get me a copy of those prints?”

“Why, you got a suspect?”

“I just wanna be ready when the time comes. Those prints are the only physical link we have and I got a funny feeling they’re gonna disappear. That’s if they haven’t disappeared already. It shouldn’t be a problem, because there’s gotta be several copies in the files. Forensics always makes up a bunch in case they’re needed in other precincts. Just pull one and send it out to me.”

“Those prints could belong to anyone. I’m not saying I mind snatching them for you, but don’t get your hopes up. It’s most likely a wild goose chase. Mob killers don’t leave fingerprints.”

“These guys didn’t go to the O’Neills’ with any intention of killing. They were there to teach a lesson to a couple of pimps who couldn’t complain to the cops. Plus, they had to figure Patero would cover for them if anything went wrong. Get the prints, Sarge. It couldn’t hurt.”

Pat Cohan took the envelope in his hand, thanked the officer who’d delivered it, then closed the front door of his Bayside home. Don’t smirk, he told himself. In fact, don’t even smile. Model yourself on Little Jack Burns. No one’s seen him smile in years.

Little Jack operated Burns Funeral Parlor on Utopia Parkway. His gravely sympathetic expression never changed, not even when he added up the tab and took your check. Not even when he deposited your check. The rumor was that his wife had left him because she didn’t like sleeping with a corpse. Little Jack put that same expression on the face of every stiff he touched. What Mrs. Burns didn’t know (and didn’t want to know) was who was imitating who.

So that was it. Jack Burns all the way. In recognition of Kate’s loss. Which, Pat Cohan supposed, must seem just like a real death.

“Daddy? Breakfast’s ready.”

“Be right there.” He took a second to examine his reflection in a mirror hanging over the mantle. His hands fluttered up to his hair, but there was nothing for them to do. His mane was perfect.

He came into the kitchen to find his wife sitting at the table. Rose was praying over her food, as usual. Or, at least, he guessed she was praying. He couldn’t understand a word of it. Her mumbling sounded more like a continuous low belch than human speech.

“Morning, Kate,” he said.

“Is something wrong, Daddy?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know.” Kate shook her head and laughed. “You sounded like you were going to a funeral.”

“A funeral? Well, I suppose it’s not so far off.”

Kate put down the pot she was scouring and shut off the water in the sink. “What’s wrong, daddy?”

He took a deep breath before speaking. “Stanley’s going to be arrested, Kate. You don’t know how sorry I am to have to tell you, but it’s better you hear it from me. I’ve got a copy of the warrant in my hand.” He passed it over and waited until she was looking at it before continuing. “It happened last night. Stanley assaulted another police officer.”

“But, why?”

“The officer was on surveillance. He was following Stanley when it happened. I can only assume that Stanley lost his temper. The nets are closing, Kate, and he knows it. Maybe the pressure was too much and he reverted to what he spent so many years training to do. It doesn’t matter. The officer was badly beaten. He’s in the hospital and he’ll stay there for a week.”

Pat Cohan watched his daughter cry for a moment, then reached out and took her in his arms. Her sobs, he noted, blended nicely with his wife’s mumbling. They gave some variety to the general drone.

“My darlin’ Kathleen,” he whispered, “my darlin’, darlin’ Kathleen. Life doesn’t always work out the way you expect it to. Sometimes there’s an awful lot of pain. What you’ve got to be is strong, girl. Strong enough to face the losses. Now, there’s something I think you should do. I think you should call Stanley.”

“I can’t, Daddy. I can’t do that.”

“He’s going to need a lawyer, Kate. The sooner, the better. Somebody has to warn him and I think it should be you.”

“Please, Daddy. You do it. I can’t.”

“He needs to know that you know.”

Kate shook her head. “You’re talking like it’s all over, but I still love him. It doesn’t just disappear.”

“All the more reason. If there’s any hope for the future, you’ve got to be honest with him.”

Pat Cohan could read his daughter’s indecision, see her mind jumping back and forth. Yes or no? Yes or no? Like pulling the petals off a daisy. In the end, he knew, she’d decide to obey her father. Yes, she’d decide to obey, and that decision, once made, would cut Stanley Moodrow out of her life forever. It was her father she’d be choosing, whether she knew it or not. Her father over her lover. Not that he, Pat Cohan, enjoyed seeing his darlin’ Kathleen in such obvious pain. He was doing it because it was necessary. Because if he let Stanley Moodrow, a rookie, triumph over Inspector Pat Cohan, he might as well hike on down to Jack Burns’s place and pick out a coffin.

“All right, Daddy, I’ll do it. But I want you to listen to what he says. If he has a defense, I want you to hear it.”

“Fine, Kate. I’ll pick up in my office.”

He was tempted to run for the phone, like a kid for a cookie, but he held himself in check. What he had to do was savor the moment. That was his first obligation. Stroll through the parlor, light a fat Cuban cigar, blow a thick white smoke-ring at the ceiling. Sure, he was getting old. Sure, he was rushing headlong toward retirement and a rocking chair. But, still …

When he finally picked up the phone, it was already ringing.

“Hello.”

“Stanley, it’s Kate.”

“How ya doin’, Kate?” Moodrow’s voice, much to Pat Cohan’s disgust, was soft and gentle. “I’ve been thinking about you. Wondering when you’d call.”

“Don’t, Stanley. Please don’t make it any harder. I’m calling to say you’re about to be arrested for assaulting a police officer. I’m warning you, so that you can get a lawyer.”

“ ‘Get a lawyer?’ ” Moodrow began to laugh. “That’s gotta be your father talking. Gotta be.”

“You think it’s funny. I’ve seen the warrant.”

“That sounds like your father, too. Tell me something, Kate, did he bring it home or did he have it delivered? Maybe he suggested that you call me?”

“You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?” Kate was close to an explosion. It was obvious to both listeners.

“Look, Kate, I’ve got a terrific headache. I looked in my medicine chest and all I can find are Carter’s Little Liver Pills. What I was trying to do, before you called, was figure out how they got there. It’s a mystery, see. Like how I can be arrested for getting smacked on the head with a baseball bat. What I’m laughing at is the way things work out.”

“Are you saying you’re innocent?”

“What I’m saying is that your father’s guilty. He’s guilty and he’s gonna pay.”

“Stanley, the arrest warrant’s for you, not Daddy.”

“What happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?” He waited for Kate to respond, but she kept silent. “The thing is that you’ve already made a choice. Whether you know it or not.”

“But I still love you. I do.”

“Love isn’t enough. It just isn’t.”

“So, that’s it? There’s nothing more to be said?”

“That’s it for now. Later on, maybe …”

“Goodbye, Stanley. And good luck. You’re going to need it.”

Pat Cohan, puffing at his cigar, imagined his daughter sitting by the phone in the kitchen. He could almost see her shoulders heaving as she sobbed into her cupped hands. He should, he knew, go out to comfort her. He should take her in his arms, hold her gently until her tears dried, tell her that he’d do everything possible for poor, misguided Stanley Moodrow. But there was one more thing to be accomplished before he saw to his daughter’s needs. He picked up the receiver and quickly dialed Stanley Moodrow’s number.

“Yeah?”

“Stanley, boyo, how’s it going? How’s your headache?”

“Gettin’ better, Pat. I found some Bufferin over the sink. How’s things by you?”

“Couldn’t be finer.”

“Glad to hear it. By the way, did Samuelson tell you that I have a signed copy of the complaint? He tell you there’s a baseball bat with my blood on it? He tell you the suspect wasn’t wearing gloves, so if the bat’s wiped clean of prints, someone’s got a lot of explaining to do? He …”

“Don’t waste your breath, Stanley. I’m not a fool. I know the arrest won’t stick. But it will take your gun and badge away. It will tie you up for the next couple of months. It will give me time to think of something else. How does corruption sound?”

“It sounds like you’ve gone off the deep end. It sounds like you’re ready for a straitjacket. It sounds like you’re willing to sacrifice your daughter to get to me.”

“Ah, Kate. Well, boyo, I’ve made a few mistakes in my life and matching you up with Kate was the worst of ’em. Not that mistakes can’t be corrected.

Not that I won’t have grandchildren to comfort me in my old age.”

“Tell me something, Pat. What’re you gonna do when she figures it out?”

“That’s never going to happen, boyo. You and Kate are finished.”

“Don’t count your chickens, Pat. It only leads to disappointment. By the way, you got your people waiting outside to arrest me?”

“Actually, I do. And as soon as I make a phone call, they’ll be on their way up. See you in jail, boyo.”

Moodrow, working quickly, gathered up the statements given by Al and Betty O’Neill, the complaint form signed by Rosten and Samuelson, and his personal notebooks. What he had to do was get them safe. If the arresting officers decided to search his apartment (which they would) and found the papers (which they also would), he’d have about the same chance of survival as a mouse in a lion’s cage.

He left his apartment, walked down two flights and knocked on Greta Bloom’s door.

“Stanley, come in, please.”

“I haven’t got time, Greta. What I’ve got is a problem and being as you’re the one who got it started, I figure you won’t mind helping me out.”

Greta stepped back and folded her arms across her chest. Her head barely came up to Moodrow’s lower ribs. “Maybe you could stop with the remarks and tell me what you want?”

“I’m about to be arrested. What I need you to do is hold onto these papers and find me a lawyer in case I have to make bail.”

The look in Greta Bloom’s face went too far back for Stanley Moodrow to read. It went all the way back to a small village in northeastern Poland.

“The bastards,” she whispered.

“Say that again.”

“It doesn’t matter. Quick, come in. I’ll hide you.”

“Just the papers, Greta. I’m too big to hide.”

“You can’t let them take you.”

“Hey, this is 1958. It’s not like the old days.” Moodrow could read Greta’s disbelief in the way she held her head off to one side, in the thin line of her tightly pressed lips. “Look, I could run away, find someplace to hide, but if I do that, I’m finished. I won’t be able to go out on the street. I won’t be able to investigate. But if I let myself get arrested, I’ll most likely be released without posting bail. Which means that as long as I don’t break any laws, they have to leave me alone.”

“Don’t believe it, Stanley. Once they put you in a cage, they can do anything.” She reached out and touched the wound on the side of his head. “You’ve got stitches. Tell me what happened.”

“That’s what I’m being arrested for.”

“Somebody breaks your head and you get arrested?”

“The other somebody, who got hurt much worse than me, is also a cop. And he’s singing a different song. Those papers you’re holding? They’re gonna get me out of this.”

“Tell me, Stanley. Your father-in-law is involved here?”

“Jesus, you’re a nosy old woman.”

“Jesus don’t have nothing to do with it. Better you should call on Moses or Abraham. Anyway, please answer the question.”

“My father-in-law, Pat Cohan, is what they call a full inspector. Do you understand? There are twenty-four thousand cops and forty-two full inspectors in the Department. That’s one for every …”

“Five hundred seventy-one regular cops.” She sniffed loudly. “Don’t give a look, Stanley. I worked twenty years in retail. And we didn’t have no adding machines like today.”

“Did I open my mouth?”

“You were thinking. I could hear you.”

“I gotta go, Greta. I wanna be upstairs when they come for me. If I’m not, they’re liable to wreck my apartment when they search it.”

“First say what you were gonna say.”

Moodrow sighed. “The point I was gonna make is that I don’t know who I’m fighting. It’s a problem for me. A big problem. For instance, the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association will supply me with a free lawyer. Only I don’t know if I can trust them. I don’t know if I can trust anyone. Except you, of course.”

“Of course.”

“So what I want you to do is, first of all, keep these papers safe. Second, stay by the phone for a few hours. If I need a lawyer or they start talking bail, I’ll call you. Third, leave the hatpins in the hats.”

“It was pretty amazing, Sarge,” Moodrow said as he filled Allen Epstein’s mug with steaming coffee. “I come walking down the hall, thinkin’ about what I’m gonna do if the uniform gives me any trouble, when I see this old cop sleeping in a chair outside O’Malley’s door. I swear, Sarge, he looks like he’s been dead for twenty years, like somebody unwrapped the mummy and dressed him in a blue uniform. I don’t know how these guys hang on, but this one’s much too old to stay awake at night. So what I do is kick the chair out from under him, jab my shield in his face and start screaming about how he’s endangering the life of a witness and I’m gonna have his pension for a midnight snack. By the time I finish, he’s ready to polish my shoes with his tongue. He doesn’t even ask for my name. Meanwhile, O’Malley turns out to be sharp as a tack. The first thing he wants to know is why he’s being held prisoner.

“ ‘The filthy Brits have been abusing us for a thousand years. Tell me, now, copper, could it be I’ve come all the way to America only to arrive in Belfast? Do ya think maybe the captain had a wee bit of a nip and sailed himself a great circle back to Ireland?’

“What happened was the suits gave him a choice: sit in his apartment or be held as a material witness in the West Street jail.”

Epstein grunted. “They wanted him where they could find him.”

“Which makes sense from a police point of view, because O’Malley, in addition to being a witness to murder, also happens to be in this country illegally. According to him, the British are trying to nail him for a series of bombings and shootings in Belfast. I got his confidence by telling him about Pat Cohan and Steppy Accacio before I showed him Jake’s mug shot.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said, ‘Do ya know of the troubles in Ireland, laddie? Do ya know the history of the poor unfortunates in that sad land? Do ya know how the sons and daughters of old Ireland have been driven to awful deeds in the name of freedom?’ ”

“You’ve got the accent down pat, Stanley, but does it have to be word for word?”

Moodrow stirred a teaspoon of sugar into his coffee. He was feeling too good to take offense. One of the latents found in O’Neill’s office had matched Jake Leibowitz’s left index finger. Add that to O’Malley’s signed statement placing Jake in the hallway just after the O’Neill murders and it added up to a search warrant for Leibowitz’s last known address, his mother’s apartment, and an arrest warrant for Jake himself.

“What O’Malley’s gonna do is take it on the lam as soon as he figures a way to get out of there. He’d be gone already if the fire escape outside his window wasn’t hanging by a thread. Which means that we have to move fast. We’ve gotta get the DA’s office to pull O’Malley off the street before he takes a hike. Or before someone kills him. Maybe Maguire’ll help. I didn’t wanna ask him to come out in the open, but if O’Malley disappears, the case against Leibowitz is thinner than Olive Oyl’s butt.”

Epstein held up a hand. “What you said about me being a hero for not busting you? It turned out to be a hundred percent accurate. I told McElroy that I went to your apartment to ask you to surrender. I was afraid of what you might do if someone else showed up. Then you gave me Patero’s confession and the rest of the evidence. You said that you’d go to the papers if I tried to arrest you. What could I do? I’m only a sergeant. How could I make a decision like that? By the time I finished describing Patero’s confession, the captain was ready to give me a medal. McElroy guarantees that you will not be arrested before Leibowitz goes down. He begged me to help keep the lid on. You don’t need Maguire, Stanley. You can go to the DA’s people for whatever you want.”

Moodrow got up and walked over to the kitchen window. He pulled aside the curtain and looked down at the street below. It was six o’clock in the morning and he was anxious to get to work.

“Why did McElroy cave in so fast?”

“A couple of reasons. He kicked me out of his office at one point. Asked me to wait in the bullpen for a few minutes while he made some calls. I figure he phoned his rabbi, who has to be at least a deputy chief, and his rabbi ordered him to hold off. McElroy’s only forty-five. He’s a cinch to make inspector and he could go much higher. But not if he has a major scandal in his precinct. Think about it, Stanley. It’s the precinct commander’s job to keep things running smoothly. Business as usual is what it’s all about. If the papers get their hands on Patero’s confession, McElroy’s career is over.”

Moodrow watched the raindrops bounce off the sidewalk. The temperature was down in the thirties and the few pedestrians were hunched beneath umbrellas as they hustled toward the subway. Some were actually running.

“There’s a kid named Moretti in the DA’s office. He’s eager, real eager. I think I’m gonna use him for the warrants, Sarge. Make sure it’s done right. The judges don’t read the warrants before they sign them. It could be that Cohan has enough pull to get an ADA to blow the paperwork.”

“That’s stretching it, Stanley.”

“I just wanna be sure.” Moodrow dropped the curtain and walked back to the table. “Moretti comes in early to work on pending cases. I’ve gotta get to him before he goes to court. You wanna come along and keep an eye on me? Maybe they’ll make you commissioner.”

Santo Silesi was getting very tired of trailing Mama Leibowitz through the Essex Street Market. How could anyone, even a Jew, spend an hour choosing pickled tomatoes from a barrel? Why didn’t the pickle man shove one of those tomatoes up her gargantuan butt? What the hell could they be talking about?

When Mama Leibowitz shifted her attention to a tub of double-sours, Santo emitted a groan of genuine pain. If there was any other way to get into Jake Leibowitz’s apartment, any other way to trap his uncle’s killer, he’d take it in a hot flash. Except, of course, simply kicking the door down, the only other way he could think of. Santo’s hatred of Jake Leibowitz hadn’t quite driven him over the edge. Not yet. Not while Mama Leibowitz was available to lead him through that door.

“You are having the pain, senor?”

Santo glanced down at the shoe salesman kneeling at his feet. You had to feel sorry for the little greaseball. Six pair of shoes and no hope of a sale. Not at Paolo’s Zapateria with its two-dollar cardboard specials. The shoes were so goddamned pointy they looked more like deadly weapons than something you’d wear on your feet.

Puerto Rican Fence Climbers. That’s what everybody called them. The perfect size for a chain-link fence in your neighbor’s back yard.

“Don’t you have any brown shoes?” Santo asked. He looked at his own Florsheim wing tips sitting next to one of Paolo’s specials, two thoroughbreds next to a plow horse, and shook his head. Spics and sheenys-what had the world come to?

“This is disgusting,” he said.

“You no like the shoes, senor?”

“Too greasy,” Santo muttered, slipping his feet into his own shoes. The bitch was moving at last, sliding her blubber along the concrete floor. As she passed each stall, she shouted a greeting to the proprietor.

“Yoo-hoo, Solly, how’s by you today? How’s business?”

How’s your son? Your daughter? Your wife? Your grandchildren? How’s your heart? Your liver? Your second cousin’s hairy butt? How’s … Disgusting. But maybe not as disgusting as all the bullshit he’d taken from Jake Leibowitz. He could remember every episode. Word for word. The way Santo Silesi saw it, there were only two options and both of them spelled death. Death for Jake Leibowitz. Or death for Santo Silesi.

When Mama Leibowitz stopped at Moishe’s Kosher Poultry, Santo ducked into the first available stall: B amp;B Foundation Garments.

“You want maybe a girdle?”

Santo stared down at the old lady who’d asked the question. She couldn’t have been more than four feet tall and she was skinny as a rail. Meanwhile, there was no fear in her voice. None whatsoever.

“Sorry,” Santo said, “wrong sewer.” He crossed the aisle between stalls and began to sort through a tray of men’s wallets. Mama Leibowitz showed no sign of moving on. She was busy examining a live chicken in a little wooden cage. Santo wondered what she was looking for. The cage was so small, the animal could barely move. As he watched, the proprietor, a tall skinny man with an adam’s apple that bobbed up and down like a yo-yo, put the cage back and brought out another.

“This is a chicken?” Santo heard Mama Leibowitz cry out in disbelief. She sounded the way she would after he, Santo Silesi, blew the top of her son’s head off. “This chicken is so old it’s a duck.”

“Why should an old chicken be a duck?”

“Please, I didn’t come off the boat this minute. I want a chicken that’s a chicken for roasting, not a hen for stewing.”

“Maybe you’d like to come around the counter and pick one for yourself? Before I get a hernia from carrying the cages?”

“That would be fine.”

Santo watched the proprietor swing a section of the counter up. Even turned sideways, Mama Leibowitz could barely squeeze her fat gut through the opening. Then she was in the back, surrounded by squawking birds and the acrid stench of manure. The chickens, perhaps sensing her intentions, began to flutter in the cages, sending up a thick cloud of feathers that veiled her bulk.

Maybe she’ll disappear, Santo thought. Maybe she’ll pull a Houdini and vanish.

The chickens were squawking in near panic, but nobody in the market appeared to notice. It was everyday stuff to the shoppers and the shopkeepers. The chaos. The gossip. The dirty concrete floor and the ill-kept stalls piled with shoddy merchandise. All perfectly natural in this universe of sheenys and spics.

Well, the hell with it. The fat bitch didn’t know him from Adam. Santo walked right past her to the hot dog wagon near the Delancey Street entrance to the market and ordered two franks and a beer. Naturally, he didn’t get to finish the first frank, before she up and walked right past him. Without the chicken.

What I’m gonna do, Santo thought, as he imitated her slow-motion walk through the neighborhood, is make sure Jake looks me right in the eye before I kill him. He’s gotta know who’s pulling the trigger. Maybe I’ll gut-shoot him first. So I could watch him flop around until he begs me to finish him off.

Mama Leibowitz seemed to know everybody on the Lower East Side, calling out greetings to passersby as she waddled the four blocks to her apartment. It’d finally stopped raining and the housewives were out in force, so she had plenty of company. The five-minute stroll took almost an hour. She’d shuffle forward a few yards, her body swaying like a metronome as she tried to pick her feet off the sidewalk, then it would begin: “Sadie, how’s by you? Your husband’s arthritis, it’s better, maybe?” Santo thought he was going to go off his rocker.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. Despite the stops and starts, Mama Leibowitz never turned around, not once, not even when Santo followed her through the entrance to her building, when he practically clipped her heels as she hauled herself up three flights of stairs. Not even when he yanked out his.44 and came up directly behind her as she turned the key in the lock.

Santo slammed the revolver into Mama Leibowitz’s head with all the force at his command. He was trying to kill her. Actually trying. Not that there was time to check her out. He pushed her body through the door, then stepped across her blubbery butt as he swept the open space in front of him. He was standing in the living room. The kitchen was on his right. He could see most, but not all of it. On his left, a hallway led to the bedrooms.

He stepped out into the center of the living room, extending the revolver, holding it with both hands. The bitch fell without a sound, he reminded himself. There’s no rush. Jake can’t know you’re here. Do it slow and do it right. Because the very worst thing that could happen is to die knowing you let the Jew off the hook.

The kitchen was empty. Santo crossed the living room, keeping his body close to the wall. The bathroom door at the far end of the apartment was open. It, too, was empty. Unless Jake was hiding in the tub. But Santo couldn’t worry about that. You couldn’t look in the closets until you covered the obvious places. Which meant the bedrooms, two closed doors on the left side of the hallway.

If I’m not afraid to die, Santo asked himself, then why am I sweating? Why’s my hand shaking? This isn’t the way it happens in the movies. It isn’t the way it happened with Izzy Stein, either. Izzy went out like a man. He was tough and he made it easy. What if Jake was behind one of those doors? What if he was kneeling behind the bed with a.45 aimed at the very space Santo Silesi was sure to occupy?

A moment followed in which there were no thoughts. A dead space, a lost chunk of time when the world simply didn’t exist. Wasn’t there a thing in the Bible about time standing still? Or the sun standing still? There were objects in front of Santo’s eyes, but he couldn’t see them, couldn’t focus. They were there and they weren’t there. Like ghosts in a movie.

I’m not cut out for this, Santo thought. I’m not a pro. And if I don’t get my act together, I never will be.

What he wanted to do was run from room to room, throwing open doors and closets, to scream Jake’s name, calling him out to a fair fight. There’s only room for one of us in this town, pardner. Come tomorrow at noon, that one is gonna be me.

In the end, when the world was solid again, when chairs and tables were chairs and tables, when the sofa didn’t shimmer like a desert mirage, Santo took it very slowly. He tiptoed over to the first door and put his ear against the wood, reminding himself that Jake couldn’t know there was anyone else in the apartment. The fact that all he, Santo, could hear was dead silence, didn’t mean that Jake was inside with a.45 trained on the door.

Santo turned the knob carefully, almost rejoicing in its smooth motion, then pushed it open, careful to keep most of his body behind the frame. Still, his heart beat wildly as his eyes surveyed the empty room.

What I should’ve done, he thought, is wait somewhere for Jake to come to me. Because I can’t control this shit.

He scanned the room quickly. It was a woman’s room, Mama Leibowitz’s most likely. There was no one under the neatly made bed, he could see that much, but the closet door was closed. Jake could be in that closet, squatting down, a shotgun cradled in his arms. He could be just about to kick it open, to come out blasting …

Santo closed the bedroom door. He had to close it. To get to that other room before he drowned in fear. Quickly and quietly, he moved to the next door, laying his ear against it as he had with the first. The cool wood felt somehow comforting and his first thought was to leave his face there, to rest it against the door as he would against a woman’s breast. There was no sound on the other side.

Finally, as though he were under water and pushing against a tidal wave, Santo managed to turn the knob and shove the door open. The room was deserted.

He stepped inside, already beginning to feel like a cowardly fool. The closet door was mercifully open. A few suits and jackets hung inside, far too few to conceal Jake Leibowitz or anybody else. The truth, despite Santo’s racing pulse, was that Jake Leibowitz had flown the coop. He’d taken it on the lam, which, under the circumstances, was the only thing he could have done.

You’re a punk, Santo told himself, a miserable punk. And this don’t mean you’re off the hook, either. You still have to find the Jew and take care of him. Because if you don’t revenge Steppy, you’ll never be able to hold up your head in this town again. You might as well go out and buy yourself a lunchpail. You might as well get a job.

Santo shoved the.44 down into the waistband of his trousers. A few minutes ago, he’d been hoping that Mama Leibowitz was dead. Now, he saw her as his ticket to Jake. Of course, he couldn’t be sure that she knew where Jake was hiding, but if she did, he, Santo Silesi, would find out.

“You’re maybe looking for somebody?”

Santo spun on his heel to find a bloody Mama Leibowitz standing right behind him. She was holding the biggest handgun Santo had ever seen, holding it right up to his face. It was a vision beyond even his worst nightmare. The blood streamed down over her bloated face. It dripped onto her ratty fur coat, matting the long hairs.

“Where’s your sword, you Cossack bastard? Where’s your horse?”

“Wha, wha, wha …”

“Ha, so you’re plotzing, already.” She grinned, showing a full set of small bloody teeth. “You brought, maybe, a change of underwear?”

“I, I, I … I don’t get it? I don’t …”

“Don’t worry about nothing, sonny. This you’re gonna get.”

The force of the slug blew Santo Silesi halfway across the room. It picked him up and tossed him backwards as carelessly as a superstitious housewife tossing spilled salt over her shoulder. Mama Leibowitz walked after him, holding the revolver in front of her, looking for any sign of life. She needn’t have bothered. The hole in Santo’s forehead was small and neat, but the back of his head was missing altogether.

“Oy,” Mama Leibowitz groaned, “what a mess.” She stepped over a small lump of wet gray brain and squatted next to Santo. Using just the tips of two fingers, she tugged at his.44 until it came free, then dropped it on the carpet next to his right hand. Finally satisfied, she walked back into the kitchen and called the police.

If you absolutely have to stand around outside, Moodrow thought as he took up a position on the north side of Houston Street near the East River, you couldn’t pick a better day, not in the winter in New York.

It was seven o’clock in the morning and the temperature was already in the forties. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky above the tenements to the west or the river to the east. The edge of a solid-gold sun was just visible over the factories and warehouses lining the Queens side of the river. Its sharply angled light sparkled on the red-brick facade of the nearly completed Baruch Houses across Houston Street. The Baruch Houses, when finished, were expected to provide a little over two thousand heavily subsidized apartments to as many worthy families. There was a fly in the proverbial ointment, however. According to the Daily News, the waiting list already held ten thousand names.

Moodrow was standing in front of another project, the Lillian Wald Houses, one of the known dealing addresses of Santo Silesi. It seemed as good a place to do random canvassing as anywhere else. He didn’t expect much to come of his efforts, but that didn’t mean he could allow himself to duck them. He held his badge in one hand and his quarry’s photo in the other, approaching residents as they came out of the doorway.

“Can I talk to you a minute? You know this guy?”

Most hurried past with a quick glance and a quicker shake of the head. A few stopped for a closer look. Fewer still were known to Moodrow, some from school and some from his days in the gym. They were friendlier, more willing to consider the problem, but one and all, they professed ignorance.

Whenever possible, Moodrow filed away the names and faces of those who tried to help. He’d always had a prodigious memory. That was why he’d done so well at St. Stephen’s where a premium was placed on the rote learning and eventual regurgitation of simple, unconnected facts. Moodrow fully intended to put that asset to work for him. Every detective in the NYPD had informants, but very few could count on ordinary citizens for a steady flow of information. Having grown up in the neighborhood, Moodrow knew from experience that Joe Citizen often lived cheek by jowl with some of the most vicious maggots on the Lower East Side. That, for instance, keeping your kids away from the bad apples usually made the difference between college and prison for the younger generation. If he could tap into their knowledge, gain their trust …

It was almost nine o’clock when a tall Spanish kid, his nose heavily bandaged, strolled through the project doorway. He wore the tightly pegged pants and the satin baseball jacket typical of teenage gang members. Moodrow approached him with caution.

“Excuse me, son.” He flipped his shield in the kid’s face. “You know this guy?”

The kid glanced at Moodrow’s badge, then at Jake Leibowitz’s photograph. He started to push by, muttering some proof of his impending manhood, then stopped in his tracks.

“You know this guy?” Moodrow repeated.

He looked up at Moodrow for a moment. “Si, I have seen this blanco. Selling decata. Say to me, Senor Policia, do you look for him to go to jail?”

“More like the electric chair.”

“You goin’ to catch him, Senor Policia?” The kid’s voice dripped sarcasm.

Moodrow stepped forward, allowing his face to lose all expression. “Dig the wax out of your ears, punk, because I’m only gonna say this once. I may be asking for your help, but that don’t mean I’m gonna take your shit. You keep running that smart mouth, you’re not gonna have to worry about whether you did your homework. My name is Detective Moodrow. I own the Lower East Side. Comprende?”

“I am no your stool pigeon, Detective Moodrow. No matter wha’ you own.”

“Take it easy. Whatta ya think, I picked you out special? I’ve been standing here for two hours and I’ve been talkin’ to everybody. Look, this guy has killed four people. I want him off the streets. What I think is that maybe you want him off the streets, too. If you know where he’s holed up and you tell me, I won’t forget it. I won’t forget it and I won’t ask why you told me.”

The kid took his time, mulling it over for a few minutes before responding. “Thees maricon, someone seen him on Henry Street.”

Henry Street was a half-mile and several hundred thousand people away from where Moodrow was standing.

“You looking for him, kid? You lookin’ for Mister Leibowitz?” Moodrow already knew the answer. He could feel it. Poor old Jake. The cops, the mob, the Tenth Street Dragons-was there anyone who didn’t want to kill him?

“Do me a big favor,” Moodrow continued. “If you find him first, leave his carcass in the street. You’ll be making life a lot easier for both of us.”

In his own way, Jake Leibowitz was also enjoying the January thaw. He was lying in a short alleyway between two tenements on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village. Lying next to half a dozen garbage cans, dressed in rags, sucking on a wine bottle filled with grape juice. He’d been lying there all night.

It wasn’t the way he wanted it, but Jake figured it was necessary. By this time Joe Faci must be staring over both shoulders and between his legs whenever he was on the street.

“The sap’s head must look like a fuckin’ pendulum,” Jake said out loud.

It was eight o’clock in the morning and the sidewalks were crowded. Several people looked over at the sound of his voice, but then quickly turned away, that special disgust reserved for terminal drunks evident on their faces. Jake raised the bottle to his lips and kissed the side of the closest garbage can.

“Fuck ’em,” he muttered. Ordinary citizens had never been more than prey to him and now that his own goose was cooked, they weren’t even that. They meant nothing; they were irrelevant. Like telephone poles or fire hydrants. Pure scenery.

What next? Jake asked himself. What next after I do the deed on Joe Faci?

Santo Silesi was his best guess. He hadn’t spoken to his mother in the last couple of days and knew nothing of Silesi’s execution or the intense police scrutiny that had followed it. What he figured was that he’d take care of Joe Faci, then go after Santo. That’d wipe the slate clean. Once young Santo was resting on a slab in the morgue, he’d be free to run. Assuming that was what he wanted to do. He didn’t know and he couldn’t worry about it. Why should he?

His chances of getting past Silesi, who lived somewhere in Brooklyn, were slim to none.

The door to 1473 Thompson, directly across the street, opened suddenly and Jake slipped behind the cans. It was Joe Faci, accompanied by his wife and wearing his Sunday best. Joe was carrying two suitcases and his lumpy old lady was dragging a third bag along the ground. They hesitated for a fraction of a second, looking up and down the block, then made their way across the street to Faci’s Cadillac.

Jake rose, his back to Faci, deliberately knocking over a half-filled garbage can. He shuffled down the alley, fell hard on the pavement, then slowly dragged himself to his feet again. Pulling his battered filthy hat over his face, he turned and stumbled forward.

Jake’s plan was to touch Faci, to get Faci’s attention by rubbing his greasy fingers on the sleeve of Faci’s lambswool overcoat. He wanted to see Joe Faci’s look of disgust slowly dissolve into pure terror.

He got his wish, though he didn’t have to make contact with Faci. Faci’s wife wrinkled her nose in disgust and pointed over her husband’s shoulder at the advancing menace.

“Watch for the bum,” she said.

Faci turned quickly, his features set into the hardest look in his repertoire. The glare didn’t phase Jake. Not one bit. His eyes never left Joe Faci’s hands, hands that remained empty too long.

“Hi, Joe, how’s it hangin’?” Jake raised his eyes to meet Faci’s. Abe Weinberg’s.45, its barrel riveted on Faci’s gut, nestled comfortably in his hand. Little Richard.

Joe Faci’s expression jumped from disgust to fear to a half-assed smile in the space of an eyeblink.

“Hey, Jake, how ya doin’? Long time no see.”

“If your old lady don’t shut her mouth, you ain’t gonna see another five seconds,” Jake answered. He jerked his chin toward Faci’s wife. Already whimpering, she looked like she was working herself up to a full-fledged scream.

“Statti citta,” Joe Faci snapped. It came out ‘stata geet,’ a far cry from anything ever heard in Rome, but enough to shut his wife’s mouth.

“I killed Steppy,” Jake announced. He was starting to get excited, starting to work himself up toward a rush of pure pleasure that seemed to get more and more familiar as time went on. Now that he knew it was coming, like orgasm at the end of sex, he wanted to take his time, to enjoy the preliminaries as much as the inevitable result. Jake slid the gun back under his overcoat without taking the business end off Joe Faci’s navel.

“Ya know what ya problem is?” Joe Faci asked calmly. “Ya problem is that ya crazy.”

“Jeez,” Jake returned, “a regular Siggy Freud. He was a Jew, too, ya know. Freud, I mean.”

“All we asked ya to do is take a vacation and you turn it into this. What’s the point, Jake? What does it get ya?”

“The point is that I done twelve years in the joint and I somehow got tired of people tellin’ me what to do. When to get up. When to eat breakfast. When to go to work. When to go to sleep. When to take a fuckin’ vacation.”

“Okay, Jake, I get the picture. But how could I know ya felt like that? Look at me. Am I a gypsy fortune teller? Me and Steppy, we thought it was for your own good. If ya remember, the heat was on you, Jake. It was you the cops was tryin’ to put in the electric chair.”

“They’re still tryin’, as far as I know.” Jake wanted to see that quick flash of fear return to Joe Faci’s face, but Faci’s voice remained calm.

“Ya know, it ain’t too late to blow town. You could still get out. Maybe they ain’t got a good case. Maybe if ya weren’t goin’ around knockin’ guys off, the cops’d forget about ya.”

Jake nodded thoughtfully. “Ya wanna live, don’t ya, Joe? Ya wanna eat dinner tonight. Watch the Honeymooners. Give your old lady a chunk of the old salami before ya fall asleep.” He paused, allowing a smile to spread across his face. “Maybe you could help me out with somethin’, Joe. Do ya think ya could?”

“Anything’s possible.”

Jake’s finger tightened on the trigger, pulling hard enough for the hammer to ease back a fraction of an inch. Not only had Joe Faci’s voice not reflected the fear Jake expected, it was damn close to sarcastic.

“What’s the matter, Joe? You had enough life? You wanna die?”

“No, I don’t wanna die.”

The sentence whistled out of Joe Faci’s mouth and Jake took it for fear. Not that Faci was broken. No, Faci wasn’t exactly pissing his pants, but he’d shown enough for Jake to offer him a little hope.

“I got a problem, Joe, and I was wonderin’ if ya could help me out with it. Ya know, for old time’s sake.”

“Look, Jake, I think it would be good if ya took something into consideration. Sooner or later, you gotta take it on the lam. Whatta ya gonna do, kill every cop in New York? No, sooner or later ya gonna have to make like a bunny and hop outta town. How ya gonna live, Jake? Rob? Steal? You go into a strange town and start pullin’ jobs, ya gonna end up back here in the electric chair. You know that as well as I do.”

“Get to the point, Joe. It ain’t like I got all day.”

“Money, that’s the point I’m makin’ here. And not a couple of grand, either. I know you, Jake. I seen the way ya take care of yourself. I could get you the kind of dough that’d let ya live in style. Maybe you could buy youself a business somewhere. Jews are good at business.”

Jake laughed out loud. “Ya got that dough in ya pocket? Maybe packed in one of them suitcases? Or do I gotta let ya go and meet ya somewhere? Like maybe under the Manhattan Bridge at midnight.”

“It ain’t like that …”

“I said ya could help me out with something, but it ain’t money. What I’m lookin’ for is Santo Silesi. Me and Santo, we gotta have ourselves a little talk.”

“Santo’s dead.” The words were out before Joe Faci could take them back.

“Whatta ya mean, dead? Who killed him?”

“Your mother.”

“Watch ya fuckin’ mouth, Joe.”

“I mean it. Santo went lookin’ for you and your mother shot him down. He’s dead.”

“And her?”

“Look, Jake, I wasn’t there so I ain’t exactly got the whole scoop. I heard she was taken to the hospital and the cops were talkin’ to her. I’m sure you could figure out what they was askin’.”

Jake sighed. So, this was the last one. Steppy Accacio, Santo Silesi and Joe Faci. That was gonna have to do it for Abe and Izzy.

“Get in the car,” Jake said. “We’re gonna take a little ride.”

“What about my wife?”

“Don’t worry, I ain’t sunk so low as to kill a broad. Ya got ya keys in ya coat pocket?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, first ya take off your overcoat. Then ya get in the car and toss the coat on the back seat, bein’ real careful that I should see ya hands every second. What I’m gonna do is get in the back and hand ya the keys. Then we’re gonna drive somewhere to get that dough you was talkin’ about. Don’t make no mistakes, Joe. One more dead spaghetti-brain don’t mean shit to me.”

Carefully, one button at a time, Joe Faci peeled out of his overcoat. He opened the door, tossed the coat in the back, then slid onto the front seat. He kept both hands exposed all the time, finally dropping them onto the steering wheel as Jake closed the door.

“You ready, Jake?” Faci asked.

“Yeah. As Abe used to say, I’m ‘Ready, ready, Teddy, to rock-n-roll.’ ”

Jake pulled the trigger three times. Once for Izzy. Once for Abe. Once for himself. The first shot killed Joe Faci. It blew his head apart, spattering blood and brains all over the side window. The mixture, as thick as oatmeal, covered the glass. In the momentary silence between the explosions and the screams of Joe Faci’s wife, Jake, much to his satisfaction, could hear it dripping down onto the seat.

It was nearly ten o’clock by the time Moodrow finished his rounds. He’d spent most of the day on Henry Street and the surrounding neighborhood, the area where Jake Leibowitz had been spotted. Working the candy stores and lunch wagons, the lofts and warehouse by day; the bars and social clubs by night. The effort had proven fruitless, as such efforts usually did, and by the time Moodrow decided to head back to Kate and Greta Bloom, his feet were swollen tight against the sides of his shoes. Trudging up Avenue B, he looked down at his almost-new wing tips and silently wished for the black brogans he’d worn as a patrolman.

Well, he thought, at least Jake Leibowitz hasn’t skipped town. Moodrow had met Paul Maguire for dinner (taking the opportunity to phone Kate and make sure Greta was coming over) and heard the news about Joe Faci. While both had agreed that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, Faci’s execution meant that two new elements would be added to the picture.

Now, Dominick Favara and his people would have to go after Jake Leibowitz. It was a matter of honor. The same principle, honor, apparently applied to the 6th Precinct as well. The crime had been committed on their turf. The manner in which it had been committed (in full view of witnesses; in full view of the victim’s wife) guaranteed a vigorous investigation.

“You know the captain over there?” Maguire had asked.

“Bettino.”

“Yeah, a hard-ass if there ever was one. He hates the word ‘Mafia,’ thinks they bring all Italians down. I went over to the Six around four o’clock and the suits wouldn’t talk to me. The word is Bettino wants the bust for himself. He’s decided that Jake Leibowitz compromised the honor of the Sixth Precinct. His precinct.”

“Wait a second. What makes him so sure Jake Leibowitz was the shooter?”

“He’s got witnesses, Stanley. It happened early this morning while people were going to work.”

“Jesus, this guy is crazy. It’s like he’s jumping off the roof.”

“That’s right. It’s just a matter of who’s gonna play sidewalk.”

Moodrow, within sight of home, felt his energy level rising. He was looking forward to this confrontation. Greta Bloom loved to function as Stanley Moodrow’s conscience. Now, it was his turn.

He took the first steps two at a time, then reconsidered when his feet screamed in protest. Maybe, he thought, I can’t afford to move out of the Lower East Side, but if I watch my pennies, I might be able to afford an elevator building.

The door to his apartment opened before he could turn the key in the lock. Moodrow looked down at Kate’s smiling face and broke into a huge grin. He’d been preoccupied all day, but now that they were face to face, he could scarcely believe his good fortune.

“How’d it go today?” Kate asked.

“It went and it’s gone.” Moodrow, spotting Greta perched on his living room sofa like a bird of prey, settled for a chaste kiss instead of the somewhat more lusty greeting bouncing around in his imagination.

“Are you hungry?”

“Not really. But I’d take a cup of coffee. I’m gonna be up for a while.”

“There’s coffee on the stove. I’ll warm it up.”

“Thanks, Kate. My feet are killing me. I don’t think I could make it to the kitchen.”

“Stanley,” Greta called, “for me you don’t have a ‘hello’?”

“For you I have much more than a ‘hello.’ ” Moodrow dropped into an overstuffed chair and slowly removed his shoes. “I’m not takin’ off the socks, because I don’t wanna see the blood.”

“If you take off the socks, we’ll have to evacuate the premises.” Greta, smiling, pinched her nose.

“Look at it as a genteel version of the third degree. You give me what I want, I’ll wash ’em.”

“Nu, so what is it you want? I don’t mean to kvetch, but I’m an old lady and I need my sleep. It’s ten o’clock, already.”

They were interrupted by Kate returning with a mug of coffee for Moodrow and a cup of tea for Greta. “Am I allowed to stay for this?”

“Allowed?” Moodrow snorted. “We’re not discussing the country’s nuclear secrets here.” He waited for Kate to sit down, before continuing. “Tell me something, Greta,” he said mildly. “Do you know Sarah Leibowitz?”

“Oy,” Greta moaned, “so this is what you want.” She leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. “You’re a bully is what you are. I’m glad your mother isn’t here for this.”

“Cut the crap, Greta.”

“Stanley,” Kate broke in, “is that necessary?

“As a matter of fact, it is necessary. I’m tired and my feet hurt. I don’t wanna be playing Ring-Around-The-Rosie until it’s time to get up tomorrow morning.”

“Stanley,” Greta said, fingering a lace doily spread over the arm of the couch, “do you know your mother made this? She was a wonderful seamstress. She could make anything.”

“Cut the crap, Greta. Do you know Sarah Leibowitz? A simple answer will do here. Yes or no?”

“I see her on the street, I recognize her. I see her in the shul, I nod hello. Is this knowing? Does this make us landsleit?”

“You belong to the same temple?”

“Yes.”

“And when you nod to her, she nods back?”

“I’m not saying no.”

“That’s ‘knowing,’ Greta. It’s enough for what I have in mind.” Moodrow sipped at his coffee, turning away from Greta to wink at Kate. “You having fun?” he asked.

“I think I will be,” Kate responded. “As soon as I figure out what’s going on.”

Moodrow turned back to Greta without commenting. “Did you know the rabbi went to see the police?” he asked.

“I heard. At the market someone mentioned this.”

“The cops were going to hold her for the gun. They were going to charge her with a violation of the Sullivan Act and hold her as a material witness. The rabbi had a talk with the captain and now she’s sitting in her own apartment. She won’t talk to anybody. Won’t even deny that she knows where her son is. As soon as a cop gets within ten feet of her, she starts screaming. Or she throws things. Or she grabs her head and moans in pain.”

“It’s not an act, Stanley. She’s a very nervous woman.”

“Greta, does she clean her house in the morning? Make her bed? Take a shower? Does she cook? Go to the market?” He paused for an answer, but Greta merely shrugged, her eyes widening. “I don’t know why, Greta, but I’m convinced that if she can do all those things, she can answer a few questions.”

Kate shifted her chair closer to Moodrow and Greta. They were staring at each other so intently, Kate felt like she was watching a movie. “I don’t see what this has to do with anything? She’s nervous. She’s not nervous. What difference does it make?”

“He wants I should be a stool pigeon is the point,” Greta huffed. “It’s against my principles.”

“What do you mean, ‘a stool pigeon’? Do you know where Jake Leibowitz is hiding?”

“He wants me to convince my friend to inform on her own son. He should bite his tongue.”

“Your friend?” Moodrow said. His face was blank, his small features immobile in his huge skull. “Sarah Leibowitz is your friend?”

“She’s not a friend friend,” Greta protested. “Stanley, please, I’m begging you. All my life I fought against the cops. I’m telling you we had battles with the police. Informing was the worst crime you could commit. It was worse than murder. I’m an old lady. I can’t change.”

Moodrow leaned back in the chair and managed a quick smile. “Greta, you run into Rosaura Pastoral lately?”

“This is not right.”

“Does she still talk about her ex-boarder? She ever mention Luis Melenguez?” He leaned forward, slapping his palms on his knees. “Maybe now that Melenguez’s widow has gone back to Puerto Rico, you don’t give a shit anymore.”

“This is not right.”

“But why should you care? Sarah Leibowitz is Jewish. She belongs to your shul. Luis Melenguez was just another Puerto Rican immigrant. You have to have loyalties, right? You have to make choices. Isn’t that what you told me when you sent me after Jake Leibowitz?”

Greta Bloom sighed. “What you are, Stanley, is a bully. A common neighborhood bully.”

“Not a bully, Greta. A cop. Did you think I was going to pull Melenguez’s killer out of a hat? If that’s what you thought, you should have thought twice, because it turns out that you’re the hat. Ain’t life grand?”

Stanley Moodrow sat at his kitchen table, the Daily News in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, and listened to the sound of water running in the shower. He hadn’t heard that sound in a long time, not unless he was standing in the tub. He could remember a time when he and his parents had made do with a clawfoot bathtub, remember the weekend his father had decided to add a vertical pipe, a showerhead and a support for a plastic curtain. Max Moodrow had begun the job in a grouchy mood. He’d felt that, considering who actually owned the property, improvements were the landlord’s responsibility. Unfortunately, when he’d brought it up while paying his rent, Ed Boyer had laughed in his face.

“You would maybe like to pay more rent, Max? Perhaps you will vote for a politician to repeal rent control?”

Max Moodrow had spent the whole day (a Sunday, his one day off) assembling a Rube Goldberg contraption of his own design. At the very end, he’d turned on the water with a great flourish only to discover that the valve designed to switch the flow of water from the tub to the showerhead wasn’t working. No matter how hard he twisted the tiny lever, water continued to pour into the bathtub.

By the time he’d given up, it was after six and there was no chance of finding an open hardware store in New York City. Not even on the Lower East Side where Jewish merchants (who closed on Saturday for Shabbes) dared the politicians and the police to enforce the Blue Laws.

Initially, Max Moodrow’s profane howls of frustration had filled the air in their apartment. But not for long. Accompanied by his son (“Stanley, from these things you learn how to be a man, not a bum.”), he’d marched down the block to Igor Melenkov’s apartment and confronted the shopowner in his own home. Melenkov had sold him the defective valve and Melenkov had to replace it. No, he couldn’t come by the store tomorrow morning. He had to work tomorrow. And the next day and the next and the next. If he didn’t get the shower going tonight, it’d have to wait the entire week.

Melenkov had shrugged into his coat and marched back to inspect Max Moodrow’s plumbing.

“You are an idiot, Moodrow. Walve is upside-down. Please in future to stick with hammer and nails. Plumbing is for plumbers. Now, give me wrench and pour for me a wodka.”

Stanley Moodrow recalled watching Malenkov unscrew the various fittings. Malenkov had crooked a finger into the freed valve, extracted a wad of soaked paper, then re-fitted the valve with the handle reversed.

The whole process had seemed magical to five-year-old Stanley Moodrow and it was years before he figured it out. He’d watched Malenkov through childhood eyes, absorbing the information without trying to understand it. The valve must have worked either way. All reversing did was move the handle from one side to the other. Malenkov had either left something inside the valve or failed to warn Max about something left by the manufacturer. His father hadn’t done anything wrong.

Moodrow sipped at his coffee and glanced down at the day’s headline: HUGE DOPE RAID TIES IN LUCIANO. The Feds had conducted simultaneous raids in Philly, New York and Washington, netting twenty-one criminals, thirty-five pounds of heroin and fifty-four pounds of opium. More than the total amount seized in the entire country in 1957.

But, of course, that was the point. There were new records every year. Dope seemed to be unstoppable, like a wall of lava flowing down the side of a volcano. The papers liked to blame it on corruption, but the truth was that no one, not the most ardent cop or social reformer, had the faintest idea what to do about it.

“Morning, Stanley, anything interesting happen last night?”

Moodrow looked up to find Kate, wrapped in a large blue towel, standing in the doorway. Her hair glistened in the harsh light of an unshielded ceiling fixture. The light illuminated the spray of freckles across her cheekbones. It sparkled in her small even teeth.

In an instant, before he could take a breath, twenty-one criminals, thirty-five pounds of heroin and fifty-four pounds of opium fled up to newspaper heaven. Moodrow, his attention riveted to the corner of the towel tucked beneath Kate’s arm, lost all capacity to consider social problems.

“Damn,” he whispered.

“Damn what?” Kate was giggling.

“ ‘Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.’ ”

They made love in the living room, Kate on the couch and Moodrow kneeling in front of it. He held her by the hips as he thrust into her. As if she might fly away if he dared to let her go. He watched her closely, the twist of her mouth, the sharply indrawn breath, the tightly closed eyes. Now she was his. The thought came to him as suddenly as the opening credits in a Technicolor movie. The theatre was dark and then … magic.

Half an hour later, they were sitting across from each other at Moodrow’s kitchen table. Moodrow was buttering a piece of toast as Kate ran a brush through her hair.

“Ya know, I heard the honeymoon suite at the Waldorf was overpriced, but I never expected this.” He waved his toast at the four walls.

“What’d you say, Stanley?”

“I made a joke.”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. Would it still be funny if you said it again?”

“It wasn’t funny the first time. You going to work today?”

“No, I’m not ready to go back. Maybe I’ll stick around to comfort Greta after you get through brutalizing her.”

“Don’t feel sorry for Greta. She knows what she has to do. She knew it before I spelled it out last night. Ask yourself this: if she had such a problem with cops, why’d she come to me in the first place? People in this neighborhood don’t go to the police. They handle their own problems whenever they can. And that includes revenge. Me, I’m a cop and I need cooperation. I get it by giving folks a reason to do what they already know is right.”

“It seemed more like the Battle of the Bulge than gentle persuasion.”

Moodrow reached behind his chair and opened the refrigerator door. He pulled a jar of Welch’s Grape Jelly off the shelf, closing the door as he turned back to the table. “You have to do what you have to do, Kate. If there’s another way to get to Jake Leibowitz, I haven’t thought of it.”

“Stanley, do you mind if I ask you a question?” Kate leaned forward, absently rolling the salt shaker between her palms.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters. It’s very personal, but I’d like to know the answer.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“From what you told me, it’s obvious that somebody’s going to get Jake Leibowitz. The cops, the mob, somebody. Why does it have to be you?”

“Jesus,” Moodrow whispered.

“Jesus has nothing to do with this. Jesus forgave the thief, remember?”

“Yeah, I heard that somewhere. Look, I gotta get down to Greta’s. As for your question, it’s like asking Roy Campanella why he wants to hit a home run. There’re plenty of cops, detectives, too, who’d spend their tours sleeping at their desks if they could. A paycheck and a pension, that’s all they want. Me, I’m not one of them. It’s my game and I want to play it. I want to be the best. Hall of Fame all the way.”

Pat Cohan glanced at his reflection in the mirror and shuddered.

“This calls for a drink,” he said out loud. The drink, a bottle of Bushmill’s, was already in his hand. He looked at it for a second, then drank deeply before turning back to the mirror.

The alcohol had done nothing to improve the image that stared back at him. His mane was as wild as a real lion’s mane. It stood almost straight out, a thin white halo that looked more ghostly than saintly.

But his mane wasn’t the worst of it. His complexion was red, bright red. He resembled one of the heavily-rouged whores he used to roust when he was working Vice.

He thought about the whores for a moment. Thought about what they’d offered him to avoid an arrest. The memory was pleasant enough, though he wasn’t aroused by the legs and breasts that flitted through his mind. No, what aroused him was the sudden thrust of an entirely different image. He saw his darlin’ Kathleen lying on Stanley Moodrow’s sheets. Her legs were wrapped around his hips and she was moaning as he rammed into her.

“Fuckmefuckmefuckmefuckmefuckmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

Now his face was really red. Flag red. Santa Claus red. Fire engine red. He shook the image out of his mind before they got to something even worse.

“Hair of the dog,” he muttered, pulling at the bottle as he turned away from the mirror. “Now there’s something you’ve got to do, boyo. And you know what it is.”

Pat Cohan walked down the hallway, surprised by his steady gait. The door to his wife’s room was closed, as usual. He could hear her moving inside, hear the monotonous drone as she pursued her various rituals.

“Are ya decent, Rose?” he called, pushing the door open. “Not that I give a damn.”

He found her kneeling on the bare floor. Staring up at the serene smile of a five-foot plaster statue.

“Holy Mary, mother of God,” she droned.

Did she even know he was there? He took a quick drink, then crossed the room and jerked her to her feet.

“A little talk, Rose. That’s what we’re after havin’.”

She turned and looked up at him, a bony old woman in a shapeless black dress. Her gray eyes, he noted, were surprisingly sane. Did that make it harder? Or easier?

“A talk,” she whispered. “Yes, a talk.” She cocked her head and looked at him out of the corner of one eye. “Is it Jesus you’ve come to talk about, Matthew?”

Pat Cohan started. Matthew was his Confirmation name. It was the name she’d called him during the early days of their marriage.

“No, not Jesus, Rose. It’s Stanley Moodrow. It’s the devil himself I’ve come to discuss. He’s ruined our lives and he must be punished. We can’t be lettin’ him have our darlin’ Kathleen, can we? We can’t be lettin’ them fornicate like dumb animals. They’re livin’ in sin, Rose. That’s what the pair of ’em are doin’. Ruttin’ around like dogs in the road.”

Rose Cohan turned back to her tiny altar, lips already moving.

“Not now, Rose. We’ve somethin’ to discuss. After which I promise never to interrupt your prayers again.”

He spun her around, once again struck by her lucid stare, and wondered if she’d been faking it all along. He, like everybody else, including the priests at Sacred Heart, had assumed that she was crazy. Was there a parish that didn’t have its share of Rose Cohans? Of shriveled old ladies mumbling their way to the grave? They were tolerated, their piety never questioned. And if they were stable enough to mop the nunnery basement, so much the better.

“You shouldn’t have made him go, Matthew. Why did you make him go? He wanted to be a priest. He was in the seminary; he didn’t have to go.”

Peter, always Peter. She’d taken that sissy and made him into a holy martyr. Why couldn’t she understand? Everybody in the Department, lieutenants, captains, inspectors, everybody was packing his kid off to fight the war. Younger cops were resigning by the hundreds. They were enlisting.

Meanwhile, his own son played priest in his seminary room. His own son pissed his pants at the thought of Hitler’s tanks.

Better a dead son to bring you honor than a live son to bring you shame. That’s what he’d thought at the time and that’s what he still believed.

“Pete was a hero and a patriot,” Pat Cohan said. “He died like a man.”

“Is that how a man dies? With thousands of other men in the waters off a beach? Is that a hero’s funeral? A letter from the Department of the Army saying ‘presumed lost’?”

He snorted in disgust. “Maybe you’re right. Hero is stretchin’ it a bit. In fact, havin’ known the little coward intimately, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn he swam all the way to the North Pole. And ya can stop prayin’ for him. Between all the prayers he said and all the prayers you’ve said, little Peter’s sure to be floatin’ around with the Big Prick himself.”

Rose Cohan started at the epithet. “It’s not Peter I pray for, Matthew. It’s you.”

She turned away, walking back to the little altar, blessing herself before kneeling.

“Well, I guess Baby Jesus hasn’t been listenin’, Rose, because I’m as unrepentant as ever.”

He slid the worn.38 from his jacket pocket as he approached her. Thinking maybe the touch of it against her skull would bring her back to the present. But she continued to pray, her lips moving quickly over the words.

Well, he thought, Rose Cohan isn’t the point anyway. The point is Kathleen, darlin’ Kathleen. The point is what’s mine and what I intend to keep.

He left Rose lying on her own altar, a gory sacrifice to a vindictive god, and strolled downstairs to his den. The telephone seemed to beckon. He raised the bottle of Bushmill’s.

“Here’s to the glories of modern life. Here’s to the death of my lovely wife.”

The alcohol slid down his throat as if it had a life of his own, as if it was eager to radiate its heat to his brain.

It’s a question of last straws, he thought, laughing out loud. Of which last straw is the last last straw.

“The last last straw,” he said, responding as if he’d been called on to recite, “is your last straw. The straw you pluck. The straw you play.”

That’s why Detective Lieutenant Irv Rosten’s phone call hadn’t been the climax it appeared to be. All it had done was bring the problem into focus. He’d been mulling over ways to bring Kate home, anyway. Had thought of nothing else since she’d walked out on him. Rosten’s call had served to sharpen his resolve. Sharpen it by placing it firmly in the present.

“What kind of fucking game are you playing?” That was Rosten’s idea of a greeting.

“Well, I …”

“Don’t bother with the bullshit, Cohan. You figured you’d retire and leave me holding the bag. Well, it didn’t work. Your papers are sitting in Chief Rooney’s desk. They haven’t been processed and they’re not gonna be.”

“Irv, look …”

“I said, don’t bother. You brought me in and it was up to you to protect me. That’s the way it works. You were my rabbi. You had a right to call in your markers, but not to put my head in the noose. I just came out of Chief Rooney’s office and it’s my pleasure to personally deliver the message. Rooney doesn’t want me, Pat. He wants you. I don’t know why, but I get the feeling it’s personal. Rooney wants your ass and I’m gonna give it to him. You ordered me to arrest Stanley Moodrow and I’m willin’ to say so. You were with Joe Faci and Santo Silesi the night Izzy Stein disappeared. I’m willing to say that, too. You shouldn’t have run out on me, Pat. I figured you for a standup guy and you made me into a sap. Now the joke’s on you.”

Pat Cohan grabbed the phone and quickly dialed Moodrow’s number. He had no idea what he’d say if Moodrow answered. Beg, probably. Beg to speak to his own daughter.

“Hello.”

Cohan heaved a sigh at the sound of Kate’s voice. It was going to be all right, now. It was going to be all right.

“Kathleen,” he whispered, “darlin’ Kathleen.”

“Don’t, Daddy. It won’t work. I know the truth.”

“ ‘And the truth shall set you free?’ ” He made it into a question. Not that he cared about her answer. The idea was to keep her talking, to make a link.

“Not free, Daddy, but freer. I used to be imprisoned by lies. From here on, I intend to make my own decisions based on the truth.”

“Ah yes, lies.” He put the bottle to his lips and drank deeply. “I won’t bother to deny ’em, Kathleen. Nor are explanations in order. It’s your mother I’ve called to talk about. She needs to see you. Needs you to dry her tears. ‘First Peter, now Kathleen.’ That’s all she can say, Kate. She’s been crying for the last twenty-four hours and I don’t know how to stop it. Is it possible you could spare a few hours for your poor suffering mother?”

He paused for a moment, listening to the metallic hiss of his own heavy breathing through the receiver. “I love ya, Kathleen. I don’t suppose that makes much difference, now. Why should it, considerin’ the things I’ve been after doin’ to ya? But that’s over. You’ve found me out, girl, and I know it can never be like it was. I know this, but does what I’ve done to ya have to mean that your mother and myself are out of your life forever? For God’s sake, Kathleen, come home for a visit. Talk to your mother. She thinks she’s never going to see you again. I swear before the Almighty that I won’t try to hold you.”

“Okay, Daddy. I have to come back sooner or later, anyway. I need my clothes and I need to settle things between us. Just give me an hour to get myself together before I leave.”

“Thank you, darlin’. Thank you.”

Pat Cohan gently lowered the receiver. He looked down at the bottle in his hand for a moment, then heaved himself erect and slowly walked up the stairs to his wife’s room.

“Top of the mornin’, Rose,” he said. “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue? You could at least be polite.”

It’d been months, maybe years, since he’d felt this good. “The last last straw,” he muttered, “is the last straw you play.”

There was an upholstered chair next to his wife’s bed. A useless ornament, really, because she never got up off her knees. He tucked the bottle under one arm, slid the chair across the room until it was facing the door, then sat heavily.

“Any regrets?” he asked himself.

“None,” he answered, putting the barrel of his.38 into his mouth, cocking the hammer, splattering his brains all over the ceiling.

“I chickened out, Greta,” Moodrow explained. “I chickened out twice. There’s no other way to look at it. When I left you and got in that car, I was determined to arrest Jake Leibowitz by myself. I wanted to drag him into the Seventh and toss him to the captain. Jake was gonna be my trophy. Proof that I was right all along. Only, I kept thinking about what might happen if he got past me. I mean he killed four men that we know about. I couldn’t take a chance, so I called in the troops. If I’d been there alone, I think I might’ve talked him out.”

He watched Greta reach into the oven and remove two sliced bagels. She dropped them onto a plate, then licked her fingers.

“Hot,” she said without turning around.

“You should use a fork.”

“One more thing to wash.” She unwrapped a bar of Philadelphia Cream Cheese and began to spread it over the bagels.

Moodrow watched her for another moment. He’d been postponing this talk for the last five days. Knowing it had to take place, despite his preoccupation with Kate and the swirl of events following her father’s suicide.

He’d come home that night to find a note: Gone to Bayside. Back this evening. Much love. The only problem was that “this evening” had already come and gone. Between a dead Jake Leibowitz, a dead cop named Strauss, more than five hundred rounds of police fire and fifty reports to be filed by fifty patrolmen, Moodrow, the only detective on the scene, hadn’t left the 7th Precinct until well after midnight.

What he’d assumed was that Kate had decided to spend the night in Bayside. The only question was whether she’d somehow fallen back under her father’s spell. But that hadn’t seemed possible. Not even to a thoroughly shell-shocked Stanley Moodrow. No, most likely Kate had called a half-dozen times and gotten no answer. Maybe she’d even called Greta. There’d been no way of knowing, because it was nearly one o’clock and he couldn’t make it into an emergency no matter how many scenarios he concocted.

He’d awakened the next morning to find Pat Cohan on the radio, on television, on the front page of every newspaper in New York City. The murder-suicide had transformed Jake Leibowitz and the rooftop shootout from a banner headline to an item on page fifteen.

The first phone call had come at ten o’clock in the morning: “John Hughes, from the Journal-American. You were Kate Cohan’s fiance. Could you …?”

Could you? Would you? Do you? It’d gone on for days. Despite his muttered, “No comment.” Despite hanging up again and again and again. It was still going on, though the volume of calls had slowed now that the funeral was over.

The sad part was that he’d answered every call, each time hoping to hear Kate’s voice. His own calls out to Bayside had been fielded by any number of unidentified friends and relatives. Most had been firm, but polite. A few had called him a bastard. One, a woman, had fairly hissed at him.

“Haven’t you done enoughhhhhhhhhh?”

Desperate, he’d driven out to St. John’s Cemetery in Flushing and watched the funeral procession pass through the cemetery gates. He’d seen Kate in the back of the limousine following the casket, a small veiled figure encircled by men in black overcoats. Were they relatives or cops? And where were the women? The helpful aunts? The trusted friends?

The questions were making him crazy. He’d sought Greta’s advice, then Allen Epstein’s. Both had delivered the same message: give her time to sort it out. Time was the only cure.

He should, he knew later, have taken their advice, because when he’d finally driven out to Bayside, the trip had made him even crazier. Kate’s Uncle Bill, her mother’s brother, had answered the door. An elderly man, he’d looked embarrassed at first. Then he’d invited Moodrow inside.

“She’s not here, lad,” he’d said. “You can look if you want.”

Moodrow, a cop to his bones, had taken the old man up on the offer, wandering from room to room. He’d found a lot of empty space and a single locked door. It led, he knew, to Rose Cohan’s bedroom.

“It hasn’t been cleaned,” Bill Brannigan had said apologetically. “It’ll have to be cleaned soon, I suppose. If we’re to put the house on the market.”

Moodrow had responded by kicking the door off the hinges. Only to find that Bill Brannigan hadn’t been lying. The room was covered with dried blood. The furniture, the floors, the walls, the ceiling. Brannigan, staring helplessly at the carnage, had begun to cry.

“Take as long as you have to, Bill. I’m not leaving until you tell me where she is.”

“She’s on retreat.” Brannigan had peered at him through bewildered eyes. “Holy Mother Church has taken Kate to her sacred bosom.”

“Stanley, you want lox on your bagel?” Moodrow looked up quickly. Telling himself to stop drifting off. Willing himself to remain in the present. Reminding himself that his career was on the line, that he had to be in Deputy Chief Milton Morton’s office in less than two hours and that he’d better be ready.

“Yeah, fine.” He sipped at his coffee and ran his fingers over his newly shaven face. “What was I saying?”

“About chickening out. Which only a meshugganer could believe you’d do.”

“Yeah, right.” Moodrow watched Greta set the plate down in front of him. “I guess ‘chickening out’ is a kid’s way of putting it, but I had choices and I made them. I didn’t have to call in the troops, but I did. And I didn’t have to obey the captain, either. When he so much as told me that he wasn’t gonna give Jake a chance, I didn’t have to help him create a diversion. I could have taken the gold shield and rammed it up his ass. Why not, Greta? If my mother could use a hatpin, why couldn’t I use a badge?”

“Nu, because a captain is not a horse.”

Moodrow bit off a chunk of bagel and began to chew thoughtfully. “I loved the hunt,” he said after a moment. “You know, the investigation. Tracking Jake down. Boxing him into a corner. That’s the way I fought in the ring. The way I had to fight. I was too slow to catch anybody on the run.”

“Stanley, please. Life is difficult enough. Only a shlemiel goes through life making things more difficult. A man is killed; a killer is dead. Nu?”

“Yeah? Well, it wasn’t ‘nu’ for Al and Betty O’Neill. Maybe they were a couple of pimps, but they didn’t deserve the death penalty.”

“This was your fault?”

“And then there’s Rose Cohan. And Kate.”

It was Greta’s turn to fidget. She brushed a small pile of crumbs into the palm of her hand and dumped them on the edge of her plate. “She’ll come around, Stanley. It’s only been five days.”

“You do one thing and ten things happen. There’s no way to control it.” He shook his head. “It’s like throwing a punch at your opponent and hitting a spectator.”

“Stanley, could I tell you a story?”

Moodrow smiled for the first time in days. “Please,” he answered.

“This happened in nineteen thirty-three. A strike at Goldman Furs. At the time, I was pregnant with my second and I wasn’t even working. But Yussel Mittman, from the union, came to me and begged me to help out. ‘It’s a mitzvah, a mitzvah. Please, we need a woman and there’s nobody else.’ ”

Greta drew a deep breath, then let it out in a long sigh. She looked up at Moodrow and shrugged. “So, what could I do? I went and I made speeches and I walked with the pickets. The morale was good, the workers inspired, but the strike went on and on. Goldman wouldn’t budge. He was a rich man, Stanley, a millionaire, but also a skinflint. Instead of bargaining, he offered to lower the wages. Five months we stood out there, all through the winter. ‘He can’t hold out forever.’ That’s what we told ourselves and we were right. Spring came around and Goldman’s two sons took over the business. I remember the celebration when they settled with the union. This was in the middle of the Depression and there were no jobs to be had, so you can imagine how the workers felt. But for me, it wasn’t such fun. I was at the party when the pains started. The doctors called it a ‘spontaneous abortion,’ which was probably the truth, but I blamed myself. I still do. You know how it is, nu? The head says one thing and the heart says another. Eventually, you live with the past and keep on going.”

An hour and a half later, Moodrow found himself in the waiting room of Deputy Chief Milton Morton’s Centre Street office. Morton’s secretary, a very grizzled, very male sergeant named Goldfarb, hadn’t even bothered with the customary, “Chief Morton will be right with you.” He’d checked Moodrow’s i.d. carefully, then nodded him into a seat.

Moodrow picked at his nails for a moment, then grabbed the Daily News off a low table and glanced at the headline: CAMPY FIGHTS PARALYSIS.

“Jesus Christ.”

“What’s that?” Sergeant Goldfarb peered over his reading glasses to nail Moodrow with his hardest stare.

“Nothing.”

Moodrow edged closer to the light and examined the newspaper closely. There were two photos on the front page. The one on the right showed Roy Campanella’s wife holding a telephone to her ear. The one on the left showed a man lying face-down on a stretcher. Oddly, the man was still wearing his hat.

Moodrow turned the pages quickly, scanning the headline as he searched for the main story. Principal Dies In Leap, Faced HS Crime Quiz; 6 Wined-Up Teeners Knife Two Girls on Stairs of Subway; 200 Police Hunt Nebraska Teen Lovers Who Killed 7; Sketch Put Out in Hunt For Knifer of UN Sec’y; 2 Ganglings Seized In Murder of Youth; Crime Rises 25 % In State; Police Budget Up $13,519,136.

He got all the way to the classifieds before he realized that he’d passed over the Campanella story. Thumbing quickly, he worked his way back through the pages until he found the story on page three. Roy Campanella, the veteran Dodger catcher, had been on his way home (the old J. R Morgan estate on East Island) at three in the morning. He was within a mile of his house when his car had skidded off the road and slammed into a light pole. Now, his neck was broken. Not only would he never play baseball again, the doctors felt he’d spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

Moodrow let the paper drop to his knees. Roy Campanella, the second Negro player in the major leagues, had come to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson. Short and squat, always smiling, life seemed to roll off his broad shoulders. Jackie may have paved the way, but Campy was the steamroller who’d held everything in place. In the ten years since he’d come to Ebbets Field, Campanella had been named National League MVP three times.

“Damn,” Moodrow said aloud, “Goddamn.”

“What’s the matter, you got a twitch or somethin’?”

Moodrow looked up at a scowling Sergeant Goldfarb. “You hear about Campy?” he asked.

“Yeah, I heard he missed a curve on Long Island and now he’s a loaf of bread.” Goldfarb leaned forward, grinning wildly. “That’s one nigger who ain’t gonna play in Los fucking Angeles.”

The intercom on Goldfarb’s desk buzzed once, a sharp jolt that brought the sergeant up short. He waved toward the door behind him. “Batter up, kid.”

Moodrow crossed the room quickly, took a deep breath and opened the door. Deputy Chief Milton Morton was seated behind an enormous wooden desk. The dark wood gleamed with polish. A gold fountain pen lay on a square of black marble. It, too, gleamed, drawing Moodrow’s attention. As, he understood, it was meant to do.

“Sit down, detective,” Morton said.

Moodrow obeyed. Just as he’d obeyed Captain John McElroy in that hallway. What he’d come to understand over the past month was that he wanted two incompatible things. He wanted to be independent and he wanted to be a cop. That couldn’t happen. Somewhere along the line, he was going to have to pay for his independence. Milton Morton’s job, as Moodrow understood it, was to name the price.

“You did well, detective,” Morton said.

Thin and sallow, Deputy Chief Morton looked like anything but a cop. The story, among the rank-and-file, was that his lofty position was a gift to the Jews of New York. Pure politics, from beginning to end. Moodrow had gotten another story from Allen Epstein. According to Epstein, Morton had been a decent patrolman, as willing as any to wade into a bar brawl or mediate a violent family dispute. Not that he stayed a patrolman very long. Within twelve years, he’d passed the sergeant’s, lieutenant’s and captain’s exams. At age thirty-six, he’d been appointed deputy inspector. Then full Inspector. At each stage, he’d demonstrated an ability to command.

“The point is,” Epstein had explained, “that whenever Morton was in charge, things went smoothly. He controlled his cops. Kept his statistics up. Never went on the take. Never made a complaint against anyone who did. The guys walking a beat think you have to break heads to be a good cop. That’s why they stay patrolman. Morton was smart enough to know that the New York Police Department is one giant headache waiting for an aspirin. He dedicated himself to being that aspirin.”

Moodrow looked over at Chief Morton, noting the folded arms and the patient expression. “Did well at what?” he asked. “I thought I was here to walk the plank.”

Morton smiled. “I’m talking about Pat Cohan. The reporters have been in touch with you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you must have been tempted, at some point or other, to put the whole thing on the table. Patero, Accacio, Jake Leibowitz-the whole thing. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t. You held it back. You protected the Department instead of protecting yourself. You did well.”

“Thanks.” There wasn’t anything else for Moodrow to say He settled his bulk in the chair and let his hands drop into his lap.

“You have a package, I believe,” Morton said.

“A package?”

“Patero’s statement, the Leibowitz case file, the other evidence against Pat Cohan. A package.” Morton paused, his eyes fixed on Moodrow, obviously waiting for a response.

“Yeah,” Moodrow finally said. “I’ve got your ‘package.’ ”

“Well, I want it. I want you to give it to me.” Morton fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and tapped it on the desk a few times before lighting it. “Coffin nails,” he said, blowing out a thin stream of smoke. “Now, I’ve told you what I want. Which also happens to be what the Department wants. The only question is what do you want?”

“You don’t waste much time.”

Morton managed a quick smile. “I don’t have much time to waste.” He gestured at the neat stack of paperwork on his desk.

“What if I don’t give you the ‘package’? What if I decide to hold onto it?”

“I believe we’re here to negotiate, detective,” Morton answered without blinking an eye. “But let me take it a step further. Pat Cohan is dead. The murder of Rose Cohan has been solved. Salvatore Patero has decided to seek employment elsewhere. As has Lieutenant Rosten. A year down the line, your evidence will be about as useful to you as five pounds of cat shit. If you’re going to survive, you’re going to need friends. You’re going to need a rabbi to protect you. I want the evidence you’ve accumulated. I want it dead and buried, just like the man it implicates. The only question, as I said before, is what you want.”

“I want to stay where I am. I want to stay in the Seventh Precinct and be left alone to do my job.” Now that it was out in the open, the request seemed modest enough.

“Is that it?” Even Morton seemed surprised. “No promotion? No transfer to Homicide or Narcotics?”

“Look, Chief.” Moodrow, suddenly annoyed, leaned forward. “I never set out to get Pat Cohan. Whatever I did, I did to survive.”

“I know all that. Believe me, I know everything that happened.”

“Then maybe you also know that what I hear you saying is that you can’t trust me. You’re afraid I’ll call in the reporters, that I’ll embarrass the Department. Let me ask you this, why should I trust a man who doesn’t trust me?”

“A good question.” Morton tapped the gray ash at the end of his cigarette into a glass ashtray. “Would you be willing to give me a copy of the evidence? To show good faith.”

“Done.”

“Good. Now tell me, Detective, do you understand the traditional relationship between a rabbi and his protege?”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

Once again, Morton failed to respond to a verbal jab. “The protege,” he said, “functions as the rabbi’s eyes and ears. He does favors for his rabbi and expects favors in return. A protege’s favors usually involve an advantageous transfer or an out-and-out promotion, but in your case, I suspect that you’ll be more interested in protection. Am I right?”

Moodrow sat back in the chair. No matter what you did, it always came back to the same thing. The politics of the job reached into every cop’s working life. There was no way to get around it. What you had to do was find a way to satisfy the Department. And there was no magic formula. One day the tightrope would be as wide as the Brooklyn Bridge and the next it would be a single strand of wire suspended over the Grand Canyon.

“There’re no rules, are there?” he asked.

“There are nothing but rules,” Morton responded. “Pages and pages and pages of rules. The only question is which of them apply to what situation.”

“All right. You can call in your marker whenever you want. Only I’m not a trained poodle so don’t expect blind obedience. You ask and I’ll check the rules to see which ones apply to the situation. In the meanwhile, I expect to do my job.”

Morton puffed on the cigarette, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs before slowly exhaling. “Did I tell you that Captain McElroy is being transferred out of the Seventh?”

“No.”

“You might be surprised to hear this, but he’s not being transferred because he’s an incompetent moron who lost control of his command. Nor is he being transferred because I want to put my own man in charge of the Seventh. McElroy, who will soon retire, is being transferred because he let a cop die unnecessarily. Keep it in mind, detective. The first rule is to succeed. If McElroy had handled Jake Leibowitz without incident, he would have been a hero. Especially if he did it before the reporters arrived. But he didn’t and now he’s out.”

“Bad for him, good for me,” Moodrow said. “We weren’t the best of friends.”

“As a matter of fact, he blamed you for all his troubles.” Morton ground out the cigarette. “Is something wrong, detective?”

Moodrow snorted. If he started naming all the things that were wrong, he’d be sitting in Milton Morton’s office until he retired. Maybe, he thought, I oughta start with what’s right. The list’ll be a lot shorter.

“Because,” Morton continued, “you don’t seem very happy, detective. Which I find somewhat surprising. You did get what you wanted, didn’t you? You did get yourself a piece of the action.”