When I got there, Joe Durkin was already holding down a corner table and working on a drink—vodka on the rocks, from the looks of it. I took in the room and listened to the hum of conversation at the bar, and I guess some of what I was feeling must have found its way to my face, because the first thing Joe asked me was if I was all right. I said I was fine, and why?

“Because you look like you saw a ghost,” he said.

“Be funny if I didn’t,” I said. “The room is full of them.”

“A little new for ghosts, isn’t it? How long have they been open, two years?”

“Closer to three.”

“Time flies,” he said, “whether you’re having fun or not. Jake’s Place, whoever Jake is. You got a history with him?”

“I don’t know who he is. I had a history with the place before it was his.”

“Jimmy Armstrong’s.”

“That’s right.”

“He died, didn’t he? Was that before or after 9/11?”

That’s our watershed; everything in our lives is before or after that date. “After,” I said, “by five or six months. He left the place to a nephew, who tried running it for a few months and then decided it wasn’t the life he wanted for himself. So I guess he sold it to Jake, whoever Jake is.”

“Whoever Jake is,” he said, “he puts a good meal on the table. You know what they’ve got here? You can get an Irish breakfast all day long.”

“What’s that, a cigarette and a six-pack?”

“Very funny. You must know what an Irish breakfast is, a sophisticated guy like yourself.”

I nodded. “It’s the cardiac special, right? Bacon and eggs and sausage.”

“And grilled tomato.”

“Ah, health food.”

“And black pudding,” he said, “which is hard to find. You know what you want? Because I’ll have the Irish breakfast.”

I told the waitress I’d have the same, and a cup of coffee. Joe said one vodka was enough, but she could bring him a beer. Something Irish, to go with the breakfast, but not Guinness. She suggested a Harp, and he said that would be fine.

I’ve known Joe for twenty years, though I don’t know that ours is an intimate friendship. He’s spent those years as a detective at Midtown North, working out of the old stationhouse on West Fifty-fourth Street, and we’d developed a working relationship over time. I went to him for favors, and returned them, sometimes in cash, sometimes in kind. Now and then he steered a client my way. There were times when our relations had been strained; my close friendship with a career criminal never sat well with him, while his attitude after one vodka too many didn’t make me relish his company. But we’d been around long enough to know how to make it work, overlooking what we didn’t like to look at and staying close but not too close.

Around the time our food arrived, he told me he’d put in his papers. I said he’d been threatening to do so for years, and he said he’d had everything filled out and ready to go a few years ago, and then the towers came down. “That was no time to retire,” he said. “Although guys did, and how could you blame ’em? They lost their heart for the job. Me, I’d already lost my heart for it. Shoveling shit against the tide, all we ever do. Right then, though, I managed to convince myself I was needed.”

“I can imagine.”

“So I stayed three years longer than I intended, and if I did anything useful in those three years I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, I’m done. Today’s what, Wednesday? A week from Friday’s my last day. So all I have to do now is figure out what the hell to do with the rest of my life.”

Which was why he’d asked me to meet him for dinner, in a room full of ghosts.

It had been over thirty years since I put in my papers and retired from the NYPD, and shortly thereafter I’d retired as well from my role as husband and father, and moved from a comfortable suburban house in Syosset to a monastic little room at the Hotel Northwestern. I didn’t spend much time in that room; Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon, around the corner on Ninth between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth, served as a combination of living room and office for me. I met clients there, I ate meals there, and what social life I had was centered there. I drank there, too, day in and day out, because that’s what I did back then.

I kept it up for as long as I could. Then I put the plug in the jug, as the old-timers say, and began spending my idle hours not at Jimmy’s joint but two blocks north of there, in the basement of St. Paul the Apostle. And in other church basements and storefronts, where I looked for something to put in the empty places alcohol used to fill.

Somewhere along the way, Jimmy lost his lease and moved half a block south and a long block west, to the corner of Fifty-seventh and Tenth. I’d kept my distance from the old place after I sobered up, and I avoided the new one for a while as well. It never did become a hangout, but Elaine and I would drop in for a meal from time to time. Jimmy always served good food, and the kitchen stayed open late, which made it a good choice after an evening at the theater or Lincoln Center.

I’d been to the service, at a funeral parlor on West Forty-fourth, where someone played a favorite song of his. It was “Last Call,” by Dave Van Ronk, and I’d first heard it when Billie Keegan played it for me after a long night of whiskey. I’d made him play the song over and over. Keegan worked for Jimmy back then, tending bar on weekday evenings; he’d long since moved out to California. And Van Ronk, who wrote the song and sang it a capella, had died a month or so before Jimmy, and so I’d sat there listening to one dead man sing a song to another dead man.

A week or two later they had a wake for Jimmy at the bar, and I went to that and didn’t stay long. Some people showed up I hadn’t seen for years, and it was good to see them, but it was a relief to get out of there and go home. One night in the summer, after the lease had been sold, they closed things out by letting everybody drink free. Several different people told me to be sure and show up, and I didn’t even have to think about it. I stayed home and watched the Yankees game.

And here I was, in a roomful of ghosts. Manny Karesh was one of them. I’d known him in the old days on Ninth Avenue, and he’d never moved out of the neighborhood. He dropped in at Jimmy’s just about every day, to drink one or two beers and chat up the nurses. He was at the wake, of course, and he’d have been there for the final night, but I don’t know if he made it. He told me at the wake that he didn’t have much time left. They’d offered him chemotherapy, he said, but they didn’t hold out much hope that it would do any good, so he couldn’t see any reason to subject himself to it. He died sometime that summer, not too long after the bar closed, but I didn’t hear about it until the fall. So that’s one funeral I missed, but these days there’s always another funeral to go to. They’re like buses. If you miss one, there’ll be another coming your way in a few minutes.

“I’m fifty-eight,” Joe said. “That’s plenty old enough to retire, but too young to be retired, you know what I mean?”

“You know what you’re going to do?”

“What I’m not gonna do,” he said, “is buy a little house in fucking Florida. I don’t fish, I don’t play golf, and I got this County Waterford skin, I can get a sunburn from a desk lamp.”

“I don’t think you’d like Florida.”

“No kidding. I could stay here and live on my pension, but I’d go nuts without something to do. I’d spend all my time in bars, which is no good, or I’d stay home and drink, which is worse. This is the best, this black pudding. There aren’t many places you can get it. I suppose the old Irish neighborhoods, Woodside, Fordham Road, but who’s got the time to chase out there?”

“Well, now that you’re retired.”

“Yeah, I can spend a day looking for black pudding.”

“You wouldn’t have to go that far,” I said. “Any bodega can sell you all you want.”

“You’re kidding. Black pudding?”

“They call it morcilla, but it’s the same thing.”

“What is it, Puerto Rican? I bet it’s spicier.”

“Spicier than Irish cuisine? Gee, do you suppose that’s possible? But it’s pretty much the same thing. You can call it morcilla or black pudding, but either way you’ve got sausage made from pig’s blood.”

“Jesus!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Do you fucking mind? I’m eating.”

“You didn’t know what it was?”

“Of course I know, but that doesn’t mean I want to fucking dwell on it.” He drank some beer, put the glass down, shook his head. “Some of the guys wind up working private security. Not at the rent-a-cop level, but higher up. Guy I knew put his papers in ten years ago, went to work overseeing security at the stock exchange. Regular hours, and better money than he ever made on the job. Now he’s retired from that, and he’s got two pensions, plus his Social Security. And he’s down in Florida, playing golf and fishing.”

“You interested in something like that?”

“Florida? I already said…oh, the private security thing. Well, see, I carried a gold shield for a lot of years. I was a detective, and the job he had, it’s more administrative. I could do it, but I don’t know that I’d love it. Probably a fair amount of chickenshit involved, too.” He picked up his empty glass, looked at it, put it down again. Without looking at me he said, “I was thinking about a private ticket.”

I’d seen this coming.

“To do it right,” I said, “you have to be a businessman, keeping records and filing reports and networking in order to get cases. That’s if you’re in business for yourself, but the other way, going to work for one of the big agencies, you’re mostly doing boring work for short money, and doing it without a badge. I don’t think it would suit you.”

“Neither would the reports and the record keeping. But you didn’t do all that.”

“Well, I was never very good at doing things by the book,” I said. “I worked for years without a license, and when I finally got one I didn’t hang on to it very long.”

“I remember. You got by okay without it.”

“I guess. It was hand to mouth sometimes.”

“Well, I got that pension. It’s a cushion.”

“True.”

“What I was thinking…”

And what he was thinking, of course, was that the two of us could work together. I had the experience on the private side, and he’d be bringing much fresher contacts within the department. I let him pitch the idea, and when he’d run through it I told him he was a few years too late.

“I’m pretty much retired,” I said. “Not formally, because there’s no need. But I don’t go looking for business, and the phone doesn’t ring very often, and when it does I usually find a reason to turn down whatever’s on offer. Do that a few times and people quit calling, and that’s okay with me. I don’t need the dough. I’ve got Social Security, plus a small monthly check from the city, and we’ve got the income from some rental property Elaine owns, plus the profits from her shop.”

“Art and antiques,” he said. “I pass it all the time, I never see anyone go in or out. Does she make any money there?”

“She’s got a good eye, and a head for business. The rent’s no bargain, and there are months she comes up short, but now and then she spots something for ten bucks at a thrift shop and sells it for a few thousand. She could probably do the same thing on eBay and save the rent, but she likes having the shop, which is why she opened it in the first place. And whenever I get tired of long walks and ESPN, I can take a turn behind the counter.”

“Oh, you do that?”

“Now and then.”

“You know enough about the business?”

“I know how to ring a sale and how to process a credit card transaction. I know when to tell them to come back and see the proprietor. I know how to tell when someone’s contemplating shoplifting or robbery, and how to discourage them. I can usually tell when somebody’s trying to sell me stolen goods. That’s about as much as I need to know to hold down the job.”

“I guess you don’t need a partner in the gumshoe business.”

“No, but if you’d asked me five years ago…”

Five years ago the answer would still have been no, but I’d have had to find a different way to phrase it.

We ordered coffee, and he sat back and ran his eyes around the room. I sensed in him a mixture of disappointment and relief, which was about what I’d feel in his circumstances. And I felt some of it myself. The last thing I wanted was a partner, but there’s something about that sort of offer that makes one want to accept it. You think it’s a cure for loneliness. A lot of ill-advised partnerships start that way, and more than a few bad marriages.

The coffee came, and we talked about other things. The crime rate was still going down, and neither of us could figure out why. “There’s this moron in the state legislature,” he said, “who claims credit for it, because he helped push the death penalty through. It’s hard to figure that one out, given that the only time anybody gets a lethal injection in New York State is when he buys a bag of smack laced with rat poison. There’s guys upstate on Death Row, but they’ll die of old age before they get the needle.”

“You figure it’s a deterrent?”

“I figure it’s a pretty good deterrent against doing it again. To tell you the truth, I don’t think anybody really gives a shit if it’s a deterrent. There’s some guys that you’re just happier not having them breathe the same air as the rest of us. People who just ought to be dead. Terrorists, mass murderers. Serial killers. Fucking perverts who kill children. You can tell me they’re sick people, they were abused as children themselves, di dah di dah di dah, and I won’t disagree with you, but the truth is I don’t care. Let ’em be dead. I’m happier when they’re dead.”

“You’re not going to get an argument from me.”

“There’s one set to go a week from Friday. Not here, nobody gets it in this fucking state. In Virginia, that son of a bitch who killed the three little boys. Four, five years ago it was. I forget his name.”

“I know who you mean.”

“The one argument I’ll even listen to is suppose you execute an innocent man. And I guess it does happen. This guy, though. You remember the case? Open and shut.”

“So I understand.”

“He fucked these kids,” he said, “and he tortured them, and he kept souvenirs, and the cops had enough physical evidence to convict him a hundred times over. A week from Friday he gets the needle. I put in my last day on the job, and I go home and pour myself a drink, and somewhere down in Virginia that cocksucker gets a hot shot. You know what? It’s better than a gold watch, far as I’m concerned.”