He works his way up to it by flashing, or maybe just rubbing against a girl. You know, in the subway, elevator, c.r.a.p like that.

Then what?

Then he ... gets violent.

How violent?

So far, a.s.sault. But pretty bad ones. The last time, the girl nearly died. He got seven years.

Ever used a gun?

No.

A sip of Glenfiddich.

Then he's not our man.

At 93rd and Amsterdam, the rain sweeps in waves down the tavern window, Paulie Cerrello watching Jack Plato step out of the cab, taking a sip from his gla.s.s as Plato comes through the door, slapping water from his leather jacket.

f.u.c.king storm. Jesus.

So? Gorsh?

I showed him everything. The whole deal.

And?

He ain't in, Paulie. He's scared of the slammer.

Paulie knocks back the drink, unhappy with the scheme of things, some old geezer scared of the slammer, the whole deal a bust.

So what now, Paulie? You want I should get another guy?

A shake of the head.

No, I got another problem.

He nods for one more shot.

You know my wife, right?

The rain sees no way out, no right decision, nothing that can slow the encroaching vise. It falls on bad judgment and poor choice and the clenched fists of things half thought through. At Park and 104th, it slaps against a closing window, water on the ledge dripping down onto the bare floor.

s.h.i.t.

Leaves it.

Phone.

Yeah?

Charlie, it's me. Lennie.

This f.u.c.king storm flooded my G.o.dd.a.m.n apartment. Water all over the f.u.c.king floor.

Listen, Charlie. I need to borrow some cash. You know, from the guy you ... from him.

A hard laugh.

You barely got away with your thumbs last time, Lennie.

But I made good, that's all that matters, right?

How much?

Twenty-five.

Charlie thinks. Old accounts. Too many of them. Past due. Lots of heavy leaning ahead. And if the leaning doesn't work, and somebody skips? His neck in a noose already.

So what about it, Charlie?

Not a hard decision.

No.

The rain sees last options, called bluffs, final scores, silenced bells, snuffed candles, books abruptly closed. At Broadway and 110th, the windshield wipers screech as they toss it from the gla.s.s.

Listen to that, will ya?

Yeah, what a piece of s.h.i.t.

A f.u.c.king BMW, and s.h.i.t wipers like that.

Might as well be a G.o.dd.a.m.n Saturn.

The box shifts slightly on Luis's lap.

I think it's taking a c.r.a.p, Angelo.

So?

So? What if it c.r.a.ps through the box?

It won't c.r.a.p through the box.

Okay, so it don't. What we gonna do?

I'm thinking.

You been thinking since we left the Village.

So what's your idea, Luis? And don't say cops, because we ain't showing up at no cop-house with a f.u.c.king stolen car and a baby we don't know whose it is.

A leftward glance, toward a looming spire.

A church. Maybe a church.

The rain falls on quick solutions, available means, a way out that relieves the burden. It falls on homeless shelters and SROs and into the creaky, precariously hanging drains of old cathedrals.

At 112th and Broadway, a blast of wind hits as the bus' hydraulic doors open.

Eddie Gorsh rises.

Good luck with the garden.

A smile back at the kid.

Thanks.

I got a daughter, too.

Then take care of her, and maybe she'll take care of you.

Out onto the rain-pelted sidewalk, head down, toward the building, Edna waiting for him there, relieved to have him back, the years they have left, a road he's determined to keep straight. This, he knows, will make Rebecca happy, and that is all he's after now.

The rain moves on, northward toward the Bronx, leaving behind new beginnings, things learned, lessons applied. At 116th and Broadway, Jamie Rourke steps out into the million, million drops, thinking of Tracey and his daughter, how he shouldn't have said what he said, made her mad, determined to call her now, tell her how everything is going to be okay, how it's going to be the three of them against the world, a family.

The rain falls on lost hopes and futile resolutions, redemptions grasped too late, fanciful solutions. At 116th and Broadway, it falls on Barney Siegelman as he steps out of a taxi, convinced now that his son-in-law is a crook, news he has to break to his wife, his daughter, the whole sorry scheme of things unmasked. He rushes toward the front of his building, feels the rushing tide up the sidewalk to Our Lady of Silence, where a cardboard box lies beneath a ruptured drain, a torrent gushing from its cracked mouth, filling the box with water, then over its sodden sides and down the concrete stairs, flooding the sidewalk with the stream that splashes around Siegelman's newly polished shoes. He shakes his head again. Tomorrow he'll have to have them shined all over again. He peers toward the church, the stairs, the shattered drain pipe, the overflowing box beneath it. Disgusting, he thinks, the way people leave their trash.

THE FIX.

from Murder on the Ropes It could have happened anytime, on any of my daily commutes on the Crosstown 42. Every day I took it at eight in the morning, rode it over to my office on Forty-second and Lex, then back again in the evening, when I'd get off at Port Authority and walk one block uptown to my place on Forty-third.

It could have happened anytime, but it was a cold January evening, a deep winter darkness already shrouding the city at six P.M. Worse still, a heavy snow was coming down, blanketing the streets and snarling crosstown traffic, particularly on Forty-second Street, where the Jersey commuters raced for a spot in the Lincoln Tunnel, clotting the grid's blue veins as they rushed for the river like rabbits from burning woods.

I should tell you my name, because when I finish with the story, you'll want to know it, want to check it out, see if I'm really who I say I am, really heard what I say I did that night on the Crosstown 42.

Well, it's Jack. Jack Burke. I work as a photographer for Cosmic Advertising, my camera usually focused on a bottle of perfume or a plate of spaghetti. But in the old days, I was a street photographer for the News, shooting mostly fires and water main breaks, the sort of pictures that end up on page 8. I had a front page in '74, though, a woman clinging with one hand to a fire escape in Harlem, her baby dangling from the other hand like a sack of potatoes. I snapped the b.u.t.ton just as she let go, caught them both in the first instant of their fall. That picture had a heart, and sometimes, as I sat at my desk trying to decide which picture would best tempt a kid to buy a soda, I yearned to feel that heart again, to do or hear or see something that would work like electric paddles to shock me back to my old life.

Back in those days, working the streets, I'd known the Apple down to the core, the juke joints and after-hours dives. I was the guy you'd see at the end of the bar, the one in a rumpled suit, with a gray hat on the stool beside him. It was my seed time, and I'd loved every minute of it. For almost five years not a night had gone by when I hadn't fallen in love with it all over again, the night and the city, the Bleecker Street jazz clubs at three a.m. when the smoke is thick and the riffs look easy, and the tab grows like a rose beside your gla.s.s.

Then Jack Burke married an NYU coed named Rikki whose thick lips and perfect a.s.s had worked like a Mickey Finn on his brain. There were lots of flowers and a twelve-piece band. After that the blushing bride seemed to have another kid about every four days. Jack took an agency job to pay for private schools, and that was the end of rosy tabs. Then Jack's wife hitched a ride on some other guy's star and left him with a bill that gave Bloomingdale's a b.o.n.e.r. The place on Eighty-fifth went back to the helpful folks at Emigrant Savings, and Jack found a crib on West Forty-third. Thus the short version of how I ended up riding the Crosstown 42 on that snowy January night in the Year of Our Lord 2000.

The deepest blues, they say, are the ones you don't feel, the ones that numb you, so that your old best self simply fades away, and you are left staring out the window, trying to remember the last time you leaped with joy, laughed until you cried, stood in the rain and just let it pour down. Maybe I'd reached that point when I got on the Crosstown 42 that night. And yet, I wasn't so dead that the sight of him didn't spark something, didn't remind me of the old days and of how much I missed them.

And the part I missed the most was the fights.

I'll tell you why. Because all the old saws about boxing are true. There's no room for ambiguity in the ring. You know who the winners and the losers are. There, in that little square, under the big light, two guys put it all on the line, face each other without lawyers or tax attorneys. They stare at each other without speaking. They are stripped even of words. Boxers don't call each other names. They don't wave their arms and posture. They don't yell, Hey, f.u.c.k you, you f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you want a piece of me, huh, well, come and get it, you f.u.c.king douche bag ... while they're walking backward, glancing around, praying for a cop. Boxers don't file suit or turn you in to the IRS. They don't subscribe to dirty magazines in your name and have them mailed to your house. They don't plant rumors about drugs or how maybe you're a queer. Boxers don't come at you from behind some piece of paper a guy you never saw before hands you as you step out your front door. Boxers don't drop letters in the suggestion box or complain to your boss that you don't have what it takes anymore. Boxers don't approach at a slant. Boxers stride to the center of the ring, raise their hands, and fight. That was what I'd always loved about them, that they were nothing like the rest of us.

Even so, I hadn't seen a match in the Garden or anywhere else for more than twenty years when I got on the Crosstown 42 that night, and the whole feel of the ring, the noise and the smoke, had by then drifted into a place within me I didn't visit anymore. I couldn't remember the last time I'd read a boxing story in the paper or so much as glanced at Ring magazine. As a matter of fact, that very night I'd plucked a Newsweek from the rack instead, then tramped onto the bus, planning to pick up a little moo shoo pork when I got off, then trudge home to read about this East Hampton obstetrician who'd given some Jamaican bedpan jockey five large to shoot his wife.

Then, out of the blue, I saw him.

He was crouched in the back corner of the bus, his face turned toward the gla.s.s, peering out at the street, though he didn't seem to be watching anything in particular. His eyes had that look you've all seen. Nothing going on, precious little coming out. A dead, dull stare.

His clothes were so shabby that if I hadn't noticed the profile, the gnarled ear and flattened nose, I might have mistaken him for a pile of dirty laundry. Everything was torn, ragged, the scarf around his neck riddled with holes, bare fingers nosing through dark blue gloves. It was the kind of shabbiness that carries its own odor, and which urban pioneers inevitably a.s.sociate with madness and loose bowels. Which, on this bus packed to the gills, explained the empty seat beside him.

I might have kept my distance, might have stared at him a while, remembering my old days by remembering his, then discreetly stepped off the bus at my appointed stop, put the whole business out of my mind until I returned to work the next morning, met Max Groom in the men's room and said, Hey, Max, guess who was on the Crosstown 42 last night? Who? Vinnie Teague, that's who. Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock. Mother of G.o.d, he's still alive? Well, in a manner of speaking.

And that might have been the end of it.

But it wasn't.

You know why? Because, in a manner of speaking, I was also still alive. And what do the living owe each other, tell me this, if not to hear each other's stories?

So I muscled through the crowd, elbowing my way toward the rear of the bus while Irish Vinnie continued to stare out into the fruitless night, his face even more motionless when looked upon close up, his eyes as still as billiard b.a.l.l.s in an empty parlor.

The good news? No smell. Which left the question, Is he nuts?

Language is a sure test for sanity, so I said, "Hey there."

Nothing.

"Hey." This time with a small tap of my finger on his ragged shoulder.

Still nothing, so I upped the ante. "Vinnie?"

A small light came on in the dull, dead eyes.

"Vinnie Teague?"

Something flickered, but distantly, cheerlessly, like a candle in an orphanage window.

"It's you, right? Vinnie Teague?"

The pile of laundry rustled, and the dull, dead eyes drifted over to me.

Silence, but a nod.

"I'm Jack Burke. You wouldn't know me, but years ago I saw you at the Garden."