XIII

BEFORE HE COULD tell me any more, I undid the work of the FOP card I’d flashed at him. I’d never said I was a cop, and there were times when I was willing to let someone retain that impression, but we were past the point where I felt comfortable sailing under the blue flag. I told him I was a former police officer now working privately, that I’d known Jack Ellery when we were boys together in the Bronx. “So you’re under no obligation to talk to me,” I said.

That last would have been just as true if I’d been the commissioner himself. And it was safe to say, because I could tell he was ready to talk. Eager, even.

First, though, he wanted me to come in and make myself comfortable. His apartment was the before version of Greg Stillman’s place in Carnegie Hill—before the exterior wall was taken down to the bare brick, before the floor was stripped and sanded and refinished, before the three small rooms were combined into one. Instead they remained coupled together like railroad cars. The door led into the little kitchen, with the living room at one end overlooking East Seventeenth Street, and the bedroom at the other. The furniture could have been gathered from thrift shops and the street, but the mismatched pieces didn’t clash enough to be labeled eclectic.

He took me to the living room and pointed me toward an upholstered chair. He was going to make himself a cup of tea, he said, and would that suit me? Or there was beer, if I’d prefer that. I said tea would be fine.

There were two posters on the wall, both from shows at the Whitney, both artists even I could recognize—Mark Rothko and Edward Hopper. I studied them in turn, and I was still going back and forth between them when he put a cup of tea on the table beside me. He said it was Earl Grey and I said that was fine. The posters, he said, belonged to a woman who’d lived with him for just about two years.

“Then out of the blue she decided she was a lesbian. I mean, she was no kid. Younger’n me, but well up in her thirties, you know? How can you get to be that old and all along you’re a lesbian and you haven’t got a clue? How does that happen?”

“I gather it happens a lot.”

“Does it happen to guys?”

“I think everything happens to everybody,” I said, “but it seems to happen more often with women.”

He thought about it, shrugged. “Well, she left the posters here,” he said. “ ‘I’m done with ’em, Mark. You don’t want ’em, toss ’em.’ Why would I do that? They look okay. I’m used to them. That tea okay?”

“It’s fine.”

“You ever bust your hand? Just about everything you do becomes complicated. I still can’t tie my shoes. Thank God for loafers, huh?”

“Where did it happen, Mark?”

“Right here. He called me on the phone, said he’s got something to tell me, can he come over? I tried to get him to tell me over the phone, because it’s like he’s from a past life, you know? And I don’t remember him or that life with a whole lot of affection, so I’d just as soon hear whatever he’s got to say and be done with him. But no, this has to be face-to-face. I tell him I’m busy and he says okay, pick a time that works, just about any time at all will work for him. And I’m this close to telling him fuck off, leave me alone, whatever it is I don’t want to hear about it. This close.”

“But you told him to come over.”

“There was something made me think he’d be harder to shake than a summer cold, and I’m better off seeing him and getting it over and done with. And after I got off the phone with him I’m thinking, Hey, we used to be friends, and just because I’m living a different life these days, and there’s probably no place in it for a guy like High-Low Jack, that doesn’t mean I can’t be civil to him.”

High-Low Jack.

“So he comes in, and there’s something different about him, some light in his eyes. Makes me a little uneasy. But it’s been years, you know? Come in, good to see you, take a load off, have a beer. Of course he wouldn’t have a beer. You know about that?”

“He’d stopped drinking,” I said.

“Said he was an alcoholic, which I could believe, the way he used to put it away. But then we all did back then, you know? We were kids, we partied hard, we got in trouble. Crazy shit. You grow up and it changes.” He considered. “Or you don’t and it doesn’t. Whatever. So okay, you don’t want a beer, how about a cup of tea? But he doesn’t want anything, he just wants to get down to business. To make things right, except there was another word he kept using.”

“Amends.”

“Right, amends. I don’t think I ever heard anybody use that word outside of the context of, you know, an amendment to the Constitution. Amends. You know what he did? You know what this was all about?”

“Something about a burglary,” I said. “He sold something to you and stole it back again, something along those lines.”

He was silent for a moment, thinking about it. Then he said, “What I was, I was a receiver. I never went away for it, I never even got arrested for it. You needed to sell something, I’d buy it for cash. You were looking to buy something, if I had it you’d be getting a bargain. But cash, no receipts, and don’t ask where it came from. Like, you know, stolen goods.”

“Not usually a young man’s business.”

“Well, I had someone to teach me the ropes. You ever know a man named Selig Wolf? My uncle, my mother’s younger brother. Uncle Selig had a new car every year, always dressed nice, money in his pocket. Used to slip me a couple of bucks whenever he saw me. ‘Here, Marky, you don’t want to walk around with empty pockets.’ I’m out of school, I’m drifting from one dead-end job to another, and I team up with Jack and we do a snatch-and-grab at this credit jeweler’s on Queens Boulevard. Now what do we do with this shit we stole? So I take it to Uncle Selig, and first he gives me hell, and then he gives me a decent price for what I brought him, and finally he gives me advice. ‘Marky, you can kick in doors or hold people up, and have empty pockets most of the time, and sooner or later you get shot or do time, and what kind of life is that for my sister’s boy?’ Or I could buy and sell, the way he did, and he sat me down and showed me how.”

“And that’s what you did.”

“And that’s what I did, and I was no genius, but I did all right at it. I had this three-bedroom river-view apartment on Haven Avenue up in Washington Heights, and two of the bedrooms were my store. And the word got around. Next time I run into Jack, I tell him I’m in a different part of the business. So a couple of times he brings me stuff, and I take it off his hands. And another time he shows up, and have I got a nice fur? Because there’s a girl who let him know that’s what she wants. It happens I do, and he buys it from me.

“And then I come home one night, I’ve been out celebrating one thing or another, and I’m cleaned out. No damage to the locks, so I always figured somebody had copies of my keys. And I was right, because when he was making his whatchacallit, his fucking amends, he told me right off. He swiped a set of my keys, had copies made, then got my keys back where I kept them. And waited until he knew I was out, and came back with a partner, and cleaned me out. Even knew where I kept my cash.”

“And you suspected Jack?”

“I had a feeling. A couple of names came to mind, and he was on the top of the list. I went to him, not to confront him but just to see, you know? And he was full of plans, what I got to do to get the stuff back. There’s this saying about junkies, that first they steal your wallet and then they help you look for it. It was like that with him. He stole my wallet, and now he was helping me look for it.”

“So you were out a lot of money.”

“I was out of the business, man, and for a while there I was out of town, because I’d just bought a ton of jewelry and financed the deal by borrowing money from the shies. They don’t know from excuses. ‘Sorry for your troubles, it’s a hell of a world, and by the way you owe us money.’ And it’s not like I can call my insurance agent, put in a claim. Everything’s gone and I’m on the hook for it.” He shook his head at the memory. “Uncle Selig helped me work it out. Pointed me in another direction, said I was good with numbers, had me learn bookkeeping. Been doing it ever since. A couple of clients, I keep two sets of books for them, and if that ever came to light I could probably get in trouble. But aside from that I’ve been completely legit for years.”

“So Jack showed up—”

“And copped to what he’d done. ‘You were my friend and I stole from you.’ And this rage came over me. Like, not just how could you do such a thing, but how can you stand here and tell me about it? And smile while you do it?”

“So you hit him?”

“ ‘Mark, tell me what I can do to make it right with you.’ I said I ought to punch his lights out. ‘Mark, go ahead, if that’s what you want.’ And he stands in front of me with his face hanging out, like he’s fucking daring me to throw a punch at him. You ever hit anybody in the face?”

“Not recently.”

“First time for me. Oh, kids on a playground, you know. I gave somebody a bloody nose once, got one myself a time or two. Nine, ten years old. Never since then, until I hit Jack.”

His face darkened at the memory. “He just stood there,” he said. “Maybe took a half step back but that’s all. I split his lip and there was a little trickle of blood, but it didn’t stop the crazy bastard from smiling. I asked him if that was what he wanted, words to that effect, and he said I could keep going. ‘All you want, Mark. Whatever it takes to make it right.’

“And I fucking lost it. I hauled off and hit him again, and he kept standing there and I kept swinging. I don’t know how many times I hit him.” He looked at his bandaged hand. “Each time with the right hand. Three, four, five times? I don’t know. I beat the shit out of my hand but I never felt a thing at the time. Later on, Jesus, whole other story.”

He stopped, and I might have spoken if I could have thought of something to say. I heard a clock ticking. I hadn’t noticed it before.

He said, “The last time I hit him he came close to falling down. His knees buckled anyway. I looked at him and there was something different in his face, and all I could think was he looked like Jesus Christ. I’m Jewish, so what the hell do I know about Jesus? Crazy what goes through your mind.

“And he looks at me with these fucking Jesus eyes and says, ‘Mark, I’m sorry.’ Just that. And his face is all bloody and I’m thinking, Shit, what am I doing? What have I done? And I just—this is hard to talk about.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I just started crying, okay? And then we’re both crying, and we’re standing in the middle of the room hugging each other like brothers and crying like fucking babies. And I can’t stand to look at him and see what I’ve done to him, because his face is a mess. It probably looked worse later, with swelling and discoloration and all. But it was pretty bad then.

“He wouldn’t let me take him to the hospital. Insisted he’d be all right, and he’d take care of it himself. And he wanted to know how much it had cost me, what he’d done. How much money I was out, so he could start reimbursing me, so many dollars a month, whatever he could afford for as long as it took. I told him he didn’t owe me anything, it was all money I never should have had in the first place. And if I hadn’t lost it I’d have had no reason to get out of the business, and eventually I’d have gone away for it, which happened a couple of times to Uncle Selig, who was smarter and better at it than I’d ever be. So you could say he did me a favor, which is something I never thought of before then and probably never would have, if I hadn’t just spent ten minutes smashing my hand against this man’s face.

“Did I mention he wouldn’t let me take him to the hospital? A couple of hours later I went myself, walked over to Cabrini and had my hand looked at. It took that long before I realized how badly I’d hurt myself. I didn’t tell Jack, for fear that he’d decide he owed me another amends. I didn’t figure either of us could stand another amends.”

“You saw him again?”

“No. He called once, I think it was the next day or the day after. Just making sure everything was okay, and I was positive I didn’t want any of the money back. I never heard from him again, and then I found out he was dead. Shot to death, I think it was.”

“That’s right.”

He nodded to himself. “When I had the business uptown,” he said, “I owned a gun. It came to me as part of a deal, and I kept it because a person in that line of work needs protection, right? It disappeared in the burglary along with everything else. I never had a gun in my hands before or since. Never fired one in my life.”

I started to say something but he held up the unbandaged hand to stop me. “If,” he said. “If I’d still had that gun, or any gun, when Jack came in with his amends, I wouldn’t have thought twice. Pick it up, point it, pull the trigger. I guess that’s what somebody else did.”

“It was at his apartment.”

“Jack’s apartment?”

“Someone came to his place,” I said, “and brought a gun along. He was shot twice at close range, once in the forehead and once in the mouth.”

“I didn’t know that. It sounds cold.”

“And purposeful,” I said. “ ‘You talk too much.’ ”

“Maybe.” He looked at me with Bambi’s big soft eyes. “He was just trying to make things right with everybody, and it doesn’t make any more sense to me now than it did then. What’s done is done, you know? Leave the past alone. But the point is he was trying to accomplish something, and all it did was get him killed.”