Jesus, it felt great. I got all the way to Columbus Circle, carried along on adrenaline, riding the wave with my blood singing in my veins.

Then the rush wore off and I felt like an asshole.

And a lucky one at that. Fate had smiled at me, handing me the perfect adversary, someone bigger and younger and even more of a lout than I. It had filled me with righteous anger, always the best kind, and it had even furnished a maiden whose honor I could defend.

Wonderful. I’d almost killed the kid. I’d beaten him up good, launching what the courts would have rightly called an unprovoked assault. I might very well have done some real damage to him, and I’d run the risk of killing him. I could have crushed his windpipe, or ruptured internal organs when I kicked him. If a cop had witnessed the incident I’d be on my way downtown now. I’d wind up in jail, and I’d deserve to be there.

I still couldn’t work up much sympathy for the kid with the flattop. He was by all objective standards a first-rate son of a bitch, and if he came out of this with a sore throat and a bruised liver he wasn’t getting a whole lot more than he had coming. But who appointed me the avenging angel? His behavior was none of my business, and neither was his punishment.

Our Lady of the Swollen Ankles hadn’t needed me to defend her. If she’d had enough of an aversion to heavy metal she could have bestirred herself and waddled away. And so could I.

Face it—I’d done a number on him because I couldn’t get anyplace with Motley. I couldn’t stop his taunting, so I silenced the kid’s radio instead. I couldn’t win when I was face-to-face with him on Attorney Street, so I evened things up by putting the boot to the kid. I was powerless over what mattered, so I made up for it by demonstrating power over what didn’t matter.

Worst of all, I’d known better. The rage that had empowered me had not been quite strong enough to shut out the little voice in my head that told me to cut the shit and act like a grown-up. I’d heard the voice, just as I’d heard it before when it counseled against buying the booze. There are people who never hear their own inner voices, and maybe they can’t honestly help the things they do in life, but I’d heard it loud and clear and told it to shut the fuck up.

I’d caught myself just in time. I hadn’t taken the drink, and I hadn’t kicked the kid’s head in, but if those were victories they struck me as small ones.

I didn’t feel very proud of myself.

 

* * *

 

I called Elaine from the hotel. She had nothing to report and neither did I, and we didn’t stay on the phone long. I went into the bathroom to shave. My face had recovered enough so that I felt I could use a disposable razor instead of the electric thing. I shaved carefully and didn’t nick myself.

Throughout it I was aware of the smell of alcohol wafting up from the drain. I don’t think it was real, I don’t see how it could have been, but I smelled it all the same.

I was patting my face dry when the phone rang. It was Danny Boy Bell.

“There’s somebody you ought to talk to,” he said. “You free around twelve, one o’clock?”

“I can be.”

“Come up to Mother Goose, Matthew. You know where that is?”

“Amsterdam, I think you said.”

“Amsterdam Avenue and Eighty-first Street. Three doors up from the corner, east side of the avenue. Some nice soft music, do you good to listen to it.”

“No heavy metal?”

“What a nasty thought. Shall we say twelve-thirty? Ask for my table.”

“All right.”

“And Matthew? You’ll want to bring money.”

I stayed in my room and watched the news, then went out for dinner. I had the urge for hot food, and it was the first real appetite I’d felt since the ambush on Attorney Street, so I wanted to indulge it. I was halfway to the Thai place when I changed my mind and walked over to Armstrong’s. I had a big plate of their black-bean chili, adding a lot of crushed red pepper to the already potent mixture the waitress brought me. It left me feeling almost as good as smashing that radio in the park, and I was considerably less likely to regret it afterward.

I used the john while I was there, and there was blood in my urine again but it wasn’t as bad as it had been, and my kidney hadn’t been bothering me lately. I went back to my table and drank some more coffee. I had Marcus Aurelius along for company but I didn’t make much headway. Here’s the passage I read:

 

Never surpass the sense of your original impressions. Perhaps they tell you that a certain person speaks ill of you. That was their sole message; they did not go on to say you have been harmed by him. Perhaps I see my child suffers illness; my eyes tell me so but do not tell me his life is in danger. Always keep to your original impressions; add no interpretation of your own and you remain safe. Or at the most add a recognition of the great world order by means of which all things come to pass.

 

That seemed to hold some advice for a detective, but I wasn’t sure if I agreed with it. Keep your eyes and ears open, I thought, but don’t try to make any sense out of what you see and hear. Or was that what he was saying? I played with the idea for a while, then gave up and put the book away and enjoyed the coffee and the music. I don’t know what it was, something classical with a full orchestra. I enjoyed it, and didn’t feel driven to smash the machine that was playing it.

 

I got to the meeting a few minutes early. Jim was there, and we chatted for a few minutes by the coffee urn without either of us referring to our earlier conversation. I talked to a few other people, too, and then it was time to take a seat.

The speaker was from the Bronx, an Irishman from the Fordham Road section. He was a big florid-faced fellow, still working the same job as the butcher in a neighborhood supermarket, still married to the same woman, still living in the same house. Alcoholism had left him visibly unscarred until it put him in a detox three years ago with nerve and liver damage.

“I was a good Catholic all my life,” he said, “but I never said a real prayer until I got sober. Now I say two prayers a day. I say please in the morning and thank you every night. And I don’t take that drink.”

During the discussion an older fellow named Frank, sober since the Flood, said there was one prayer that had served him well over the years. “I say, ‘God, thank you for everything just the way it is,’ “ he said. “I don’t know what good it does Him to hear it, but it does me good to say it.”

I raised my hand and said I’d come close to a drink that afternoon, as close as I’d ever come since I got sober. I shied away from going into detail, but said I’d done every possible thing wrong except take the drink. Someone else responded to that, saying that not taking the drink was the only thing any of us absolutely had to get right.

Toward the end there was an announcement of Toni’s memorial service, to be held in one of the big rooms at Roosevelt Hospital at three Saturday afternoon. Several people had mentioned Toni during the sharing, speculating on what might have caused her suicide and relating it to their own lives.

There was more speculation along those lines afterward at the Flame. It made me uncomfortable. I knew something they didn’t know and wasn’t willing to fill them in. It felt curiously disloyal to Toni to let her death pass as a suicide, but I didn’t know how to set matters straight without causing more of a stir than I wanted and making myself too much the center of attention in the process. When the conversation stayed on that subject I thought about leaving, but then someone switched to another topic and I relaxed.

The meeting broke at ten, and I spent about an hour drinking coffee at the Flame. I stopped at my hotel to check for messages, then walked back out to the street without going upstairs.

I was early for my meeting with Danny Boy. I walked uptown, taking my time about it, stopping to look in store windows, waiting for lights to change even in the absence of oncoming traffic. Even so I reached the corner of Eighty-first and Amsterdam ahead of schedule. I walked a block past the place on the avenue, crossed the street, and planted myself in a doorway across from Mother Goose. I stayed there in the shadows and watched people go in and out of the place, keeping an eye on other activity on the street at the same time. On the southeast corner of the intersection, three people were standing around, heroin addicts waiting for the man. I couldn’t see that they had any connection with Mother Goose, or with me.

At 12:28 I crossed the street and entered the club. I stepped into a dark narrow room with a bar along the left-hand wall and a coat room on the right near the door. I handed my coat to a girl who looked to be half black and half Asian, took the numbered plastic disc she gave me in return, and walked the length of the bar. At its end the room opened up to twice its width. The walls were brick, with sconces providing muted indirect lighting. The floor was tile in a pattern of red and black checkerboard squares. On a little stage, three black men played piano, bass and drums. They had short hair and neatly trimmed beards and they all wore dark suits and white shirts and striped ties. They looked like the old Modern Jazz Quartet, with Milt Jackson gone around the corner for a quart of milk.

I stood a few feet from the end of the bar, scanning the room, and a headwaiter glided over. He looked as though he could have been a fourth member of the group onstage. I couldn’t see Danny Boy, my eyes hadn’t adjusted to the lighting, but I asked for Mr. Bell’s table and he led me to it. The tables were set close together, so it was a narrow serpentine path he led me on.

Danny Boy’s table was at ringside. There was an ice bucket on the table, a bottle of Stolichnaya resting in it. Danny Boy wore a vest boldly patterned in vertical stripes of yellow and black; otherwise his attire matched the band and the headwaiter. He had a tumbler of vodka in front of him and a girl at his right. She was a blonde, her hair cut in an extreme punk style, long on one side, cropped close to the skull on the other. Her dress was black, and cut to show a lot of cleavage. She had one of those greedy little hill-country fox faces, the kind you get growing up in a house with three or four broken cars permanently installed on the front lawn.

I looked at her, then at Danny Boy. He shook his head, glanced at his watch, nodded to a chair. I sat down, having been informed that the girl was not the person I’d come to meet, that the person in question would be along in a little while.

The set lasted another twenty minutes, during which time no one at our table said a word, nor was there any audible conversation at the surrounding tables. From where I sat the crowd looked to be about half black and half white. I saw one man I recognized. He’d been a pimp when I first knew him, and since then he’d gone through what you could call a mid-life crisis, I suppose, and re-emerged as a dealer in African art and antiquities, with a shop on upper Madison Avenue. I’d heard he was doing well, and I could believe it. He’d always done superbly as a pimp.

When the trio left the stage, a waitress came over with a fresh drink for Danny Boy’s companion, something in a tall glass with fruit and a paper parasol in it. I asked if they had coffee. “Just instant,” she said apologetically. I told her that would be fine and she went off to fetch it.

Danny Boy said, “Matt, this is Crystal. Crystal, say hello to Matthew.”

We said hello to each other, and Crystal assured me it was a pleasure to meet me. Danny Boy asked me what I thought of the group and I said they were fine.

“Piano player’s special,” he said. “Sounds a little bit like Randy Weston, a little like Cedar Walton. You can hear it especially when the other two sit out and he plays solo. He played one whole set solo the other night. Very special, very tasteful.”

I waited.

“Our friend’ll be along in about five minutes,” he said. “I thought you might like to come early and catch a set. Nice place, wouldn’t you say?”

“Very nice.”

“They treat me right. And you know me, Matthew. Creature of habit, when I like a place I’m there all the time. Every night, or pretty near.”

The coffee came. The waitress set it down and hurried off with drinks for somebody else. They didn’t serve during the set, so they made up for it by working feverishly during the breaks. A lot of the customers ordered two or three drinks at a time. Some, like Danny Boy, had a bottle on the table. That used to be illegal, and very likely still is, but it was never a hanging offense.

Danny Boy poured more vodka into his glass while I stirred my coffee. I asked what he knew about the person we were waiting for.

“Meet him first,” he said. “Look him over, hear him out.”

At one o’clock I saw the headwaiter coming our way with a man in tow. I knew he was the fellow we were waiting for because he was all wrong for the club. He was a thin white man wearing a houndstooth sport jacket over a navy-blue corduroy shirt, and he looked out of place in a room full of black men dressed like bank vice presidents. He appeared to feel out of place, too, and he stood awkwardly with one hand on the back of his chair. Danny Boy had to tell him to sit down a second time before he pulled the chair back and sat on it.

As he sat down, Crystal got to her feet. It must have been her cue. She smiled all around and threaded her way among the tables. Our waitress came over right away. I said I’d have more coffee, and the new arrival ordered a beer. They had six brands on hand and the waitress named them all. He looked irritated by the need to make a decision. “Red Stripe,” he said. “What’s that?” She told him it was Jamaican. “That’s fine,” he said. “Bring me one of those.”

Danny Boy introduced us, first names only. His was Brian. He put his forearms on the table and looked down at his hands, as if to make sure that his nails were clean. He was about thirty-two, with a lumpy round face that looked to have taken its share of punches over the years. His hair, a dark blond, was going thin in front.

You could see he’d done time. I can’t always tell, but some guys might as well be wearing a sign.

His beer came, and my coffee. He picked up the longneck bottle and read the label, frowning as he did so. Then, ignoring the glass the waitress had provided, he took a drink from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Jamaican,” he said. Danny Boy asked him how it was. “It’s all right,” he said. “All beer’s the same.” He put the bottle down and looked at me. “You’re looking for Motley,” he said.

“You know where he is?”

He nodded. “I seen him.”

“Where do you know him from?”

“Where else? The joint. We were both on E-block. Then he went in the hole for thirty days, and when he got out they switched him somewhere else.”

“Why did they put him in solitary?”

“A guy got killed.”

Danny Boy said, “That’s the punishment for murder? Thirty days’ solitary confinement?”

“They couldn’t prove it, they didn’t have no witnesses, but everybody knew who done it.” His eyes touched mine, then slid to the side. “I know who you are,” he said. “He used to talk about you.”

“I hope he said nice things.”

“Said he was going to kill you.”

“When did you get out, Brian?”

“Two years ago. Two years and a month.”

“What have you been doing since then?”

“This and that. You know.”

“Sure.”

“What I gotta do. I started usin’ again when I got outta the joint, but now I’m in a methadone program. I get day work out of the state employment, or I’ll turn a buck. You know how it is.”

“I know. When did you see Motley?”

“Must of been a month ago. Maybe a little more.”

“You talk to him?”

“What for? No. I seen him on the street. He was comin’ down the steps of this house. Then I seen him a few days later and he’s goin’ into the house. Same house.”

“And that was over a month ago?”

“Say a month.”

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“Sure I did. A couple of times, on the street in the neighborhood. Then I got the word, somebody’s lookin’ for the guy, so I hung around a little. Stood on the corner where I could keep an eye on the house. Had coffee next door to it so I could see who’s goin’ in and out. He’s still there.” He showed me a bashful smile. “I asked some questions, you know? There’s a broad he’s living with, it’s her apartment. I found out, you know, which apartment it is.”

“What’s the address?”

He shot a look at Danny Boy, who nodded. He took another pull from his bottle of Red Stripe. “He better not know where this came from.”

I didn’t say anything.

“All right,” he said. “Two eighty-eight East Twenty-fifth, that’s near the corner of Second. There’s a coffee shop on that corner serves you a good meal reasonable. Good Polish food.”

“Which apartment?”

“Fourth floor in the back. Name on the bell is Lepcourt. I don’t know if that’s the broad’s name or what.”

I wrote all this down, closed my notebook. I told Brian that I wouldn’t want Motley to know about our conversation.

He said, “No fuckin’ way, man. I ain’t talked to him since they switched him outta E-block. I ain’t gonna talk to him now.”

“You haven’t said a word to him?”

“What for? I seen him, you know, an’ I reckanized him right off. He’s got this funny-shaped head, kind of a long face. If you seen him once you’d never miss him. Me, I got a face your eyes’ll slide right over. He looked at me the other day, Motley, looked at me on the street. His eyes never even slowed down. He didn’t reckanize me.” Another shy smile. “A week from today you won’t reckanize me.”

He seemed proud of this. I looked at Danny Boy, who flashed two fingers at me. I got out my wallet and took out four $50 bills. I folded them, palmed them, and reached across the table to slip them into Brian’s hand. He took the money and dropped his hand into his lap, holding the money out of sight while he had a look at it. When he looked up the smile was back. “That’s decent,” he said. “That’s real decent.”

“One question.”

“Shoot.”

“Why rat him out?”

He looked at me. “Why not? We was never friends. A guy’s gotta turn a buck, you know that.”

“Sure.”

“Anyway,” he said, “he’s a real bad fucker. You know that, don’t you? Shit, you gotta know it.”

“I know it.”

“That woman he’s living with? I bet he kills her, man. Maybe he killed her already.”

“Why?”

“I guess he likes it or something. I heard him talkin’ about it one time. He said women didn’t last, they got used up quick. After a while you had to kill ’em and get a new one. I never forgot that, not just what he said but how he said it. You hear all kinds of shit, but I never heard nothing like that.” He took another pull on his beer and put the bottle down. “I gotta go,” he said. “I owe for the beer or are you taking care of that?”

“It’s taken care of,” Danny Boy said.

“I only drank half of it. It’s okay, though. Anybody wants the rest of it, feel free.” He got to his feet. “I hope you get him,” he said. “A guy like that don’t belong on the street.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“The thing is,” he said, “he don’t belong in the joint, either.”

 

I said, “What do you think?”

“What do I think, Matthew? I think he’s one of Nature’s noblemen. Generous, too. I don’t suppose you’d care to finish his bottle of beer.”

“Not just now.”

“I think I’ll stay with Stoly myself. What do I think? I don’t think he told you any lies. Your friend may not still be on Twenty-fifth Street, but it won’t be because Brian tipped him off.”

“I think he’s scared of him.”

“So do I.”

“But somebody else gave a very convincing performance of fear the other night, and then she led me right into a trap.” I ran down what had happened on Attorney Street. He thought about it while he refilled his glass.

“You walked right into it,” he said.

“I know.”

“This doesn’t have that kind of feel to it,” he said. “Then again, our Brian didn’t show up with character references. Still, you’ll want to exercise caution.”

“For a change.”

“Quite. If it’s not a setup, I don’t think he’ll sell you out. I don’t think he’d want to get that close to Motley.” He drank. “Besides, you paid him well.”

“A duece was more than he expected to get.”

“I know. There’s an advantage, I’ve found, in giving people more than they expect to get.”

That wasn’t a cue, but it reminded me. I opened my wallet in my lap and found a pair of hundreds. I passed them to him and he smiled.

“As Brian would say, that’s real decent. But there’s no need to pay me now. Why not wait until you find out if his information is valid? Because you don’t owe me anything if it’s not.”

“You hang on to it,” I suggested. “I can always ask for it back if it’s old news.”

“True, but—”

“And if it’s straight,” I said, “I might not be around to pay you. So you’d better take the money now.”

“I won’t dignify that with an answer,” he said.

“But you’ll keep the money.”

“I doubt I’ll keep it long. Crystal’s an expensive toy. Do you want to stay for another set, Matthew? If not, would you stop at the bar and tell the little darling it’s safe to return? And put your money away, I’ll pay for your coffee. My God, you’re as bad as Brian.”

“I only drank half of that last cup,” I told him. “It’s not bad for instant, though. You’re welcome to the rest of it.”

“That’s decent of you,” he said. “That’s real decent.”