There are three prominent fraternal organizations for actors in New York, and years ago an actor named Maurice Jenkins-Lloyd had summed them up to anyone who’d listen. “The Players are gentlemen,” he’d intoned, “pretending to be actors. The Lambs are actors, pretending to be gentlemen. And the Friars—the Friars are neither, pretending to be both.”

I don’t know which category Jenkins-Lloyd belonged in. When I knew him he was mostly drunk, pretending to be sober. He used to drink at Armstrong’s, which used to be on Ninth Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth. His drink was Dewar’s and soda, and he could drink it all day and all night without showing it much. He never raised his voice, never turned ugly, never fell off his chair. Toward the end of an evening he might slur his words some, but that was about it. Player, Lamb, or Friar, he drank like a gentleman.

And died of it. I was still drinking myself when he died of a ruptured esophagus. It’s not the first cause of death you think of for alcoholics, but it doesn’t seem to happen to other people. I don’t know exactly what causes it, whether it’s the cumulative effect of pouring booze down a gullet for all those years or the strain of vomiting a couple of times every morning.

I hadn’t thought of Maurice Jenkins-Lloyd in a long time. I thought of him now because I was going to an AA meeting on the second floor of what used to be the Lambs Club. The elegant white building on West Forty-fourth had some years ago become a luxury the Lambs could no longer afford, and they had sold the property and shared space with another club somewhere else in midtown. A church of some sort had bought the property, and it now housed an experimental theater along with facilities for other church activities. On Thursday nights, the Fresh Start group of Alcoholics Anonymous paid a nominal fee for the use of a meeting room.

The meeting ran from eight-thirty to nine-thirty. I got there about ten minutes early and introduced myself to the program chairman. I helped myself to coffee and sat where he indicated. There were eight or ten six-foot tables arranged in an open rectangle, and my seat was at the far end from the door, next to the chairman’s.

By eight-thirty there were about thirty-five people sitting around the tables and drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. The chairman opened the meeting and read the preamble, then called on someone to read a portion of the fifth chapter of the Big Book. There were a few announcements—a dance that weekend on the Upper West Side, a group anniversary in Murray Hill, a new meeting added to the schedule at Alanon House. A group that met regularly at a Ninth Avenue synagogue was canceling its next two meetings because of the Jewish holidays.

Then the chairman said, “Our speaker tonight is Matt, from Keep It Simple.”

I was nervous, of course. I’d been nervous from the minute I walked into the place. I’m always like that before I lead a meeting, but it passes. When he’d introduced me there was a round of polite applause, and when it died down I said, “Thanks. My name is Matt, and I’m an alcoholic.” Then the nervousness was gone, and I sat there and told my story.

I talked for about twenty minutes. I don’t remember what I said. Essentially what you do is tell what it used to be like, what happened, and what it’s like now, and that’s what I did, but it comes out different every time you tell it.

Some people’s stories are inspirational enough for cable television. They’ll tell you how they were down and out in East St. Louis and now they’re president of IBM with rising expectations. I don’t have that kind of story to tell. I still live in the same place and do the same thing for a living. The difference is I used to drink and now I don’t, and that’s about as inspirational as I get.

When I finished there was another round of polite applause, and then they passed a basket and everyone put in a dollar or a quarter or nothing at all toward the rent and the coffee. There was a five-minute break, and then the meeting resumed. The format varies at different meetings; here they went around the room, and everybody had his turn to say something.

There were maybe ten people in the room I recognized and another half-dozen or so who looked familiar. One woman with a strong jawline and a lot of red hair took off from the fact that I’d been a cop.

“You coulda come to my house,” she said. “We had the cops there once a week. My husband and I would drink and fight, and some neighbor’d call the cops, and they’d come. The same cop showed up three times running, and the next thing you knew I was having an affair with him, and before you knew it him and I had a fight, and somebody called the cops. People were always calling the cops on me, even when I was with a cop to start with.”

At nine-thirty we said the Lord’s Prayer and closed the meeting. A few people came over to shake hands and thank me for leading the meeting. Most of the others hurried out of the building so they could light their cigarettes.

Outside, the night was crisp with early autumn. Summer had been brutal, and the cool nights now were a relief. I walked half a block west, and a man stepped out of a doorway and asked me if I could spare any change. He was wearing mismatched pants and suit jacket and he had wornout tennis sneakers on his feet, and no socks. He looked thirty-five but he was probably younger than that. The street ages you.

He needed a bath and a shave and a haircut. He needed a whole lot more than I could give him. What I did give him was a dollar, fishing a single out of my pants pocket and pressing it into his palm. He thanked me and asked God to bless me. I started walking, and I was almost at the corner of Broadway when I heard someone call my name.

I turned and recognized a fellow named Eddie. He’d been at the meeting, and I’d seen him around now and then at other meetings. Now he was hurrying to catch up with me.

“Hey, Matt,” he said. “You want to get some coffee?”

“I had three cups at the meeting. I think I’ll just head for home.”

“You going uptown? I’ll walk you.”

We took Broadway to Forty-seventh, walked over to Eighth Avenue, turned right and continued uptown. Of the five people who asked us for money en route, I shook off two of them and gave the others a dollar each and was thanked and blessed in return. After the third one took her dollar and extended her blessing, Eddie said, “Jesus, you gotta be the softest touch on the whole West Side. What are you, Matt, just a boy who can’t say no?”

“Sometimes I turn them down.”

“But mostly you don’t.”

“Mostly I don’t.”

“I saw the mayor on TV the other day. He says we shouldn’t give money to people on the street. He says half the time they’re addicts, they’re just gonna spend the money on crack.”

“Right, and the other half’ll squander it on food and shelter.”

“He says there’s beds and hot meals available free of charge to anybody in the city who needs it.”

“I know. It makes you wonder why so many people sleep in the streets and eat out of garbage cans.”

“He wants to crack down on the window washers, too. You know, guys wipe your windshield whether it needs it or not, then hit you for a handout? He says he doesn’t like the way it looks, guys working the street like that.”

“He’s right,” I said. “They’re able-bodied guys, too. They ought to be out mugging people or knocking over liquor stores, something that’s out of the public eye.”

“I guess you’re not a big fan of the mayor’s.”

“I suppose he’s all right,” I said. “I think he’s got a heart the size of a raisin, but maybe that’s a requirement, part of the job description. I try not to pay too much attention to who the mayor is or what he says. I give away a few bucks every day, that’s all. It doesn’t hurt me and it doesn’t help anybody very much. It’s just what I do these days.”

“There’s enough of them out there asking for it.”

And indeed there were. You saw them all over the city, sleeping in the parks, in the subway tunnels, in the bus- and train-station lobbies. Some of them were mental cases and some were crack addicts, and some of them were just people who had lost a step in the great race and had no place to live. It’s hard to get a job when you don’t have a residence, hard to keep yourself presentable enough to get hired. But some of them had jobs. Apartments are hard to find in New York, and harder to afford; with rent and security and broker’s commission to pay, you might need upwards of two thousand dollars to get in the door of an apartment. Even if you could hold a job, how could you save up that kind of money?

“Thank God I got a place,” Eddie said. “It’s the apartment I grew up in, if you can believe it. A block up and two blocks over, near Tenth. Not the first place I lived in. That’s gone now, the building came down, it’s where they built the new high school. We moved out of there when I was, I don’t know, nine years old? Musta been, because I was in the third grade. You know I done time?”

“Not in the third grade.”

He laughed. “No, it was a little later than that. Thing is, the old man died while I was up in Green Haven, and when I got out I didn’t have a place to stay, so I moved in with my ma. I wasn’t home much, it was just a place to keep my clothes and stuff, but then when she got sick I started staying there with her, and after she died I kept the place. Three little rooms up on the fourth floor, but, you know, it’s rent-controlled, Matt. $122.75 a month. A hotel you’d be willing to step into, in this town, shit, you’d pay that for one night.”

And, amazingly enough, the neighborhood itself was on its way up. Hell’s Kitchen had been a tough, hard-bitten neighborhood for a hundred years, and now the realtors had people calling it Clinton and turning tenement flats into condos and getting six-figure prices for them. I could never figure out where the poor people went, or where the rich people came from.

He said, “Beautiful night, isn’t it? Of course before we know it we’ll be griping that it’s too cold. One day you’re dying of the heat and the next minute you’re wondering where the summer went. Always the way, huh?”

“That’s what they say.”

He was in his late thirties, five-eight or -nine and slender, with pale skin and washed-out blue eyes. His hair was light brown and he was losing it, and the receding hairline combined with an overbite to give him a slightly rabbity appearance.

If I hadn’t known he’d done time I would probably have guessed as much, although I couldn’t tell you why beyond saying that he looked like a crook. A combination, perhaps, of bravado and furtiveness, an attitude that manifested physically in the set of the shoulders and the shiftiness of the eyes. I wouldn’t say that it stood out all over him, but the first time I noticed him at a meeting I had the thought that here was a guy who’d been dirty, a guy who had most likely gone away for it.

He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I shook my head. He selected one for himself and scratched a match to light it, cupping his hands against the wind. He blew out smoke, then held the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and looked at it. “I ought to quit these little fuckers,” he said. “Sober up and die of cancer, where’s the percentage in that?”

“How long are you sober now, Eddie?”

“Coming up on seven months.”

“That’s great.”

“I been coming around the program for close to a year, but it took me a while to put down the drink.”

“I didn’t catch on right away, either.”

“No? Well, I slipped around for a month or two. And then I thought I could still smoke dope, because what the hell, marijuana wasn’t my problem, alcohol was my problem. But I guess what I heard at the meetings finally soaked in, and I put down the grass, too, and now I’ve been completely clean and dry for close to seven months.”

“That’s terrific.”

“I guess.”

“As far as the cigarettes are concerned, they say it’s not a good idea to try to do too many things at once.”

“I know it. I figure when I make my year is time enough to quit these things.” He sucked hard on the cigarette and the end glowed red. “This is where I get off. You sure you don’t want to get some coffee?”

“No, but I’ll walk over to Ninth with you.”

We walked the long block crosstown and then stood on the corner talking for a few minutes. I don’t remember much of what we talked about. On the corner he said, “When he introduced you he said your home group was Keep It Simple. That’s the group meets over at St. Paul the Apostle?”

I nodded. “The official name is Keep It Simple, but everybody just calls it St. Paul’s.”

“You go there pretty regular?”

“More often than not.”

“Maybe I’ll see you there. Uh, you got a phone or something, Matt?”

“Sure. I’m at a hotel, the Northwestern. You just call the desk and they’ll put you through to me.”

“Who do I ask for?”

I looked at him for a second, then laughed. I had a small stack of wallet-size photos in my breast pocket, each stamped on the back with my name and phone number. I took one out and handed it to him. He said, “ ‘Matthew Scudder.’ That’s you, huh?” He turned the card over. “That’s not you, though.”

“You recognize her?”

He shook his head. “Who is she?”

“A girl I’m trying to find.”

“I don’t blame you. Find two while you’re at it, I’ll take one of ’em off your hands. What is it, a job you’re working?”

“That’s right.”

“Pretty girl. Young, or at least she was when this was taken. What is she, about twenty-one?”

“Twenty-four now. The picture’s a year or two old.”

“Twenty-four’s pretty young,” he said. He turned the card again. “Matthew Scudder. It’s funny how you’ll know the most personal things about somebody but you won’t know their name. Their last name, I mean. Mine’s Dunphy, but maybe you already knew that.”

“No.”

“I’d give you my phone if I had one. They cut it off for nonpayment a year and a half ago. One of these days I’ll have to get it straightened out. It’s been good talking to you, Matt. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow night at St. Paul’s.”

“I’ll most likely be there.”

“I’ll make a point of getting there. You take care now.”

“You too, Eddie.”

He waited for the light, trotted across the avenue. Halfway across he turned and gave me a smile. “I hope you find that girl,” he said.

I didn’t find her that night, or any other girl, either. I walked the rest of the way to Fifty-seventh Street and stopped at the desk. There were no messages but Jacob volunteered that I’d had three calls spaced half an hour apart. “Could be it was the same person each time,” he said. “He didn’t leave no message.”

I went up to my room, sat down and opened a book. I read a few pages and the phone rang.

I picked it up and a man said, “This Scudder?” I said it was. He said, “How much is the reward?”

“What reward?”

“Aren’t you the man looking to find that girl?”

I could have hung up, but instead I said, “What girl?”

“Her picture’s on one side and your name’s on the other. Don’t you be looking for her?”

“Do you know where she is?”

“Answer my question first,” he said. “What’s the reward?”

“There might be a small reward.”

“How small is small?”

“Not enough to get rich on.”

“Say a number.”

“Maybe a couple of hundred dollars.”

“Five hundred dollars?”

The price didn’t really matter. He didn’t have anything to sell me. “All right,” I agreed. “Five hundred.”

“Shit. That’s not much.”

“I know.”

There was a pause. Then he said, briskly, “All right. Here’s what you do. You know the corner of Broadway and Fifty-third Street, the uptown corner on the side towards Eighth Avenue. Meet me there in a half hour. And have the money with you. If you don’t bring the bread, don’t bother coming.”

“I can’t get the money at this hour.”

“Ain’t you got one of those all-night bank cards? Shit. All right, how much you got on you? You can give me some now and the rest tomorrow, but you don’t want to stand around, man, because the chick might not be in the same place tomorrow, you dig what I’m saying?”

“More than you know.”

“Say what?”

“What’s her name?”

“How’s that?”

“What’s the chick’s name?”

“You the one looking for her. Don’t you know her damn name?”

“You don’t, do you?”

He thought about it. “I know the name she using now,” he said. It’s the stupidest ones that turn crafty. “That’s probably not the name you know.”

“What name’s she using?”

“Uh-huh. That’s part of what you be buying with your five hundred dollars.”

What I’d be buying would be a forearm across the windpipe, possibly a knife between the ribs. The ones who have something for you never start out asking about a reward, and they don’t want to meet you on streetcorners. I felt tired enough to hang up on him, but he’d just call back again.

I said, “Shut up for a minute. My client’s not authorizing any reward until the girl’s recovered. You haven’t got anything to sell and there’s no way you’re going to hustle a buck out of me. I don’t want to meet you on a streetcorner, but if I did I wouldn’t bring money with me. I’d bring a gun and a set of cuffs and a backup, and then I’d take you somewhere and work on you until I was sure you didn’t know anything. Then I’d work on you some more because I’d be pissed at you for wasting my time. Is that what you want? You want to meet me on the corner?”

“Motherfucker—”

“No,” I said, “you got that wrong. You’re the motherfucker.”

I hung up on him. “Asshole,” I said aloud, to him or to myself, I’m not sure which. Then I took a shower and went to bed.