We got four people facedown on the floor. Pigeyes did his usual raging, sticking his service revolver in their ears and saying various terrible things until somebody whimpered or literally s.h.i.t their trousers, then he turned his attention to a little card table in the corner of the living room which was covered with money, I mean a lot, lying there in heaps like it was just paper. Pigeyes had radioed for the narcs to come help us with the arrest, but without skipping a beat he counted out two piles of bills, three or four grand each, and handed me one. I took it but handed the money back in the car, after Narcotics had shown up.

'What's this?' he asked.

'I'm goin to law school.' I'd been accepted by then. 'So?'

'So I shouldn't be doin this s.h.i.t.'

'Hey, get real.' He read me out then. He beat me up with the truth. Did I think the narc guys wouldn't take a nibble out of this? What were we supposed to do, leave it in a nice pile so that the s.h.i.tface beaners could have it all back when Judge Nowinski decided we weren't in hot pursuit? Were we gonna wait around and hope that the mopes in the Forfeiture Unit actually took some time off from the golf course to try to get a writ, in which case the cash'd get lost in the clerk's office or maybe in some judge's chambers? Did I think the beaners were gonna say something? Every one of them didn't know nothin, man. They were wet and waitin for a trip across the river. 'Or do you just want to be able to go tell Momma?' he asked.

'Hey, give me a break.' We'd sort of been down this pa.s.s before. What he did, he did, I figured, he wasn't the only one and he made some effort not to involve me. Now he wanted me aboard. 'You do what you wanna, I'll do what I wanna. I got a rest-of-my-life to think about. That's all.'

He sat there watching me, a nasty-looking fellow normally, with a sullen face going to jowls and those little whiteless eyes, his expression now slackened and mistrustful. This was what they call a delicate situation. Like being with the Yakuza. You got to cut off a finger to prove you're in. What was he up to? I think, in retrospect, he had a point to make, that before I departed for the world I ought to know that there's no judging, that everybody has their moments. So I brought the money home and showed it to my wife and, after leaving it in my sock drawer for three weeks, gave it to my sister for St Bridget's. Yeah, Elaine, that's where it came from, it wasn't, like I said, a stationhouse collection. I got a note back from the eighth-grade cla.s.s president which I've kept for all these years, a pointless thing to do, since I wasn't going to tell anyone the real story, inasmuch as I was a policeman who was supposed to arrest Pigeyes's unlawful a.s.s right on the spot, not sing 'Que Sera, Sera', or make a charitable donation of what was, in law, money I'd stolen.

Two months later I started law school and a few weeks after that I was Form 6o'd to Financial. Pigeyes threw a nice bash when I left. Everything for the best.

The police, any city you go to, are kind of a sneak fraternity. The Force. Close-knit. Trust each other first and most and n.o.body very much. There are lots of reasons, maybe the most important being that no one really likes the police. Who should? All these types looking sidewise and waiting for you to slip. I was a cop myself, but when I see a black-and-white just sitting on the corner, the first thing I think is, Why's this b.a.s.t.a.r.d got his eye on me?

Also, cops are really by themselves. This retinue of lawyers, prosecutors, judges, wardens, that whole world of rules, they're as far away as Pago Pago when you're in that bas.e.m.e.nt looking for the robbery suspect Mrs Washington saw running. You go through the bas.e.m.e.nt door and wait there on the threshold, come out five minutes later shaking your head in disappointment, just can't find him, that whole crew, lawyers, wardens, so on and so forth, they have n.o.body to chew on. It's only you - not just your life on the line, but you're the only reason this guy is going to get caught. There's no system. That's why it's so easy to whack the mouthy b.a.s.t.a.r.d when he's cuffed in the back of the black-and-white and is still talking about your mother or the violation of his const.i.tutional f.u.c.king rights, never mind the seventy-seven-year-old guy he just hit in the head with a paving stone the better to steal his T-check. Because it was only you. And he's yours. And only other cops really understand that.

Which is how come, even forgetting everything else -that you're a sneak fraternity, that n.o.body likes you -even forgetting all that, coppers don't do it to coppers. When you're there, when it's only you, you do your best. And if some days you're not up to your best, then you're no worse than anybody else, are you? Tomorrow you can try again. Who's to judge? You start that game, I saw you be bad, s.h.i.t, it's the whole Force tellin tales.

Shift scene: Two years later I'm coming out of Const.i.tutional Law II, here's two Feebies, real types, drawls and polyester suits and white shoes, who want to talk to me -did I work with Gino Dimonte, la-di-da, a few warm-up pitches, then the hard stuff - was I on a dope bust three years ago April? I do the arithmetic real fast. One of the dopers has finally gotten cracked federally rather than stateside and has found some Ivy League A USA happy to cut him a few months in summer camp if he'll talk about Kindle coppers with their hands on dirty money, and the doper naturally doesn't give him everybody he has on the pad who he might need again, he gives him Pigeyes, who used self-help. I know all this at once, I see just where they're going, and I'm like Yeah, okay, yeah, I think I remember that one, oh yeah, that one, there was money on the table.' A bubble in the brain. What am I thinking? It was the weirdest G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing. Five seconds in the law school hallway and I've changed my freaking life. There was not a cop who heard about this - and believe me, they all heard about it before the ink was dry on the 302s, the FBI agents' reports - who didn't think I'd done it because I felt with law school I was now a cut above. Coppers are very sensitive about cla.s.s and have always got it on the brain, they just can't get over the fact that they make forty grand to keep the world safe for millionaires, eat a bullet for Daddy Warbucks, who'll use your corpse to wipe his shoes. But it wasn't that, I wasn't trying to make new friends, and in point of fact, I never much liked snitches. And it wasn't my sterling character for the truth. Who am I kidding? I've fibbed for worse reasons than to help a pal. It's just that, at that moment, I was standing there in the law school, with its wainscoted walls, and something came over me, that thing going back to when I was a kid when I'd realize I didn't belong, that feeling that the world was objects. That's where I was, I guess, the smarta.s.s fourth-grader looking at his life as Something in This Picture Does Not Fit and always thinking the Something was me.

Anyway, I got about three-quarters through the story when it hit me like a bolt that this would not work out. The agents had come on with the usual street immunity, just be straight and you're okay, you won't even get lint on your new suit, but I realized suddenly that the feds were not my only problem. I would have to explain this to Bar Admissions and Discipline, to BAD, and they were pretty tough on the new recruits. Immunity. Felonies. Breach of trust. I was not going to make a good impression with this story of stolen dope money in my sock drawer. So the tale ended with me and Pigeyes in the car and me telling him to inventory my end and his end too, handing the money back so he could turn it all in to the evidence room.

Things sort of went in natural sequence after that. I testified in the grand jury, just what I'd said in my statement to the agents, nothing more. The last six months I was a policeman, I was a.s.signed behind a file cabinet, I didn't get near the street, and even the khaki crew, the unsworn personnel, would spit in my coffee when I turned my back. Then Pigeyes got indicted and I went to court and testified against him. He had paid about thirty grand to Sandy Stern, who a few years ago I would have described as a Jew defense lawyer, and Sandy made it look like the government did not have much of a case. They had a couple of the s.h.i.tb.u.m dopers who had to admit they'd had their faces planted on the floor; a narcotics officer's inventory of two grand in cash on the table when the beaners said there had been forty; and they had me. Of course, I was up there only sort of telling the truth, with my old pal Pigeyes giving me the death look, and something uneasy came to the surface, like bones bubbling up in tar. Stern asked if I was jealous of Pigeyes, felt he was a better cop than me, and I said yes to that, and I agreed that I never checked with Evidence to see what Pigeyes had inventoried. I allowed as how there were beaners who didn't know one Anglo cop from another, and I even said yes when Stern asked if Yours Truly was in fact the only police officer who admitted having received money removed from that table. The AUSA got this look like he needed Preparation H and the jury came back not guilty in two hours. When I walked out of the courtroom I had really lit the scoreboard: I don't think there was a soul there, not the judge, not even the toothless buffs out in the peanut gallery, who didn't think I was lower than pond slime. Nora, never one to miss a point of vulnerability, put it nicely: 'So, Mack, now do you think you got what you want?'

Did I? There were a few strange turns, I admit. One of the strangest was that BAD publicly embraced me. They thought ratting out your friend was a mark of character and gave me a job, since I'd demonstrated such fidelity to the rules of upstanding conduct in another calling. As for Pigeyes, he was ruined. For the jury it's always opening night, but the cops had all seen Stern's act before and they didn't need a trial to know that Pigeyes was dirty. All his buddies in the department, and there are a million, they'll do him favors day to day, get him twice as much for uniform allowance, but as far as going higher, he smelled bad, to the bra.s.s he was wearing lead boots. He's been on his unhappy trail down the hill ever since, getting the kind of discipline they practice out of Rome, sending the pederast priest to dwell at a convent. Pigeyes's punishment is Financial Crimes. Personally, I'd always liked the intricacy of Financial, the fact that there was more to investigating a case than finding the perp's girlfriend and sitting on her house until he came by for a cha-cha, but for Pigeyes, a proof mark will never take the place of drawing his gun.

From what I hear he has a sad life now. These days the rare dope bust he horns in on, he's picking powder off the table, not money. Behind his back, guys call him G-Nose or Snowman, and it's not cause he likes winter weather. He was always a copper's copper, full of twitches and complexes, sort of hated everyone, so there never was a Mrs Pig, just the usual copperbar girls and chickies on the edge of trouble who thought it was a good idea to give a cop a screw. He did not have much. Until now. Now he had me.

D. Pigeyes and I Renew Acquaintances 'Didn't I tell you this guy was gonna turn up? Didn't I f.u.c.king tell you?' Pigeyes was so happy, gloating like some c.o.c.k who'd gotten every hen in the coop, that I thought he was going to fall over and give himself a hug. I had, I admit, some glum thoughts about my partners who had set me off blind on a path that led straight to my life's greatest enemy - even counting my former wife - a man who, judging by his comments, was clearly expecting me.

'Refresh me,' he said, 'memory serves, this ain't you.' He was holding the credit card.

'I'm sorry, Officer?'

'Detective, s.h.i.tface.'

'Detective s.h.i.tface, I'm sorry.' Personally, I didn't believe I'd done it. But there you have it. Chasing Bert and teasing myself with the notion of another life, I was becoming a new man. By the door, the younger cop in lizard, in his long hairdo with shiny sidewalls, grimaced and turned a full pirouette. I was looking for it. But he didn't know the history. If Pigeyes kicked the bejesus out of me, he could never fit a story good enough. He stared at me with those little black eyes without any visible whites, while this reality crowded in on both of us. Then he extended one finger, thick as a stake, and gave me his own unique look, a laser right to the heart. 'Not again,' he said.

Trilby spoke up at that point, a pudgy black man of middle years, sitting behind his desk. He and his sidekick out front had done a nice job of setting me up. The coppers obviously had been here long ago looking for Kam and had left instructions to get in touch if anybody connected with him ever reappeared. While I was on hold, Trilby was probably on the line with Pigeyes, who gleefully thanked whatever idol he worshipped as soon as he heard my name. To this point, Trilby had watched our exchange out of one eye, face sort of averted, so he could claim he hadn't seen it, if anything bad happened. Now he stuck up his courage to ask who I was.

'A drunk,' said Pigeyes.

It's always strange how that shot can reach me. 'I'm a lawyer, Mr Trilby.'

'Quiet,' said Pigeyes. He wasn't that tall, probably lying when he said he was five ten, but he was built like your freezer, no neck, no waist, a lot of slack flesh on a real solid structure. His anger gave him a kind of aura, an impression of heat. You knew he was there. He was dressed in a sport jacket and a knit shirt, beneath which his undershirt showed. He was wearing cowboy boots.

His partner could see he was hot and edged past him; Gino sunk back toward the door. With the second cop, we started again.

'Dewey Phelan.' He pulled his badge from his pocket and we actually shook hands. Good cop, bad cop. Mutt and Jeff. f.u.c.k, I invented this game, but still I was relieved to be talking to skinny young Dewey here, maybe he's twenty-three, with pale skin, a lumped-up complexion like custard, and that greasy black hair falling into his eyes.

'Now the question, Mr Malloy, you understand what it is, is we kind of think you were trying to go into a hotel room that isn't yours. See? So maybe you could explain that.' Dewey wasn't really great at this yet. He shifted between feet like a five-year-old who had to go tinkle. Pigeyes was back near the door, arm on a filing cabinet, just taking this in with a sour expression.

Im looking for a partner of mine, Officer.' Better the truth. There was only so much I could bluff, and right now everything was concentrated on looking chipper.

'Uh-huh,' said Dewey. He nodded and tried to think of what to ask next. 'Your partner, what's his name? What kind of partner is he?'

I spelled Kamin. Dewey wrote in his little pocket spiral, which he rested on his thigh.

'False personation,' said Pigeyes. Back at the filing cabinets he gestured at the credit card which Dewey was now holding. Pigeyes was going to charge me with the crime of pretending to be someone else.' I had forgotten up to now that the state claimed any interest in who I was or wanted to be.

I looked to Dewey almost as if he were a friend. 'You know, Gino and me,' I said, 'there's some history. But you can explain this to him. It's not false personation when you use somebody's name with their permission. That credit card belongs to Kamin. See?'

Dewey didn't. 'You got this card from him, is that what you're saying? From Kamin?' He looked back to Pigeyes for a second, maybe to check how he was doing. I had the sense, though, I had told them something. There was a little of that light-bulb look in both faces. Bert was Kam, or vice versa. They hadn't known that. 'It's Kamin's card?' Dewey asked. 'Right.'

'And he gave it to you?'

'It's Kamin's card, I came here to look for him, as far as I know it's Kamin's hotel room. I'm sure he'll tell you I had his permission.'

'Well, we'll have to ask him.'

'Natch,' I said.

'So what's his address?'

I'd raised him one too many. I saw that, but not quick enough. Sooner or later, when Bert didn't answer their phone calls, they'd turn up at his place. And the s.h.i.t would fly when they opened the refrigerator. I tried momentarily to figure how many days it would be until we got to that point and what would happen then.

Dewey, in the meantime, had written down Bert's address and stepped away to chew things over with Pigeyes. Dewey, no doubt, was telling Gino they didn't have any real good reason to hold me and Pigeyes was saying, Like h.e.l.l, he had me in sweatpants using someone else's name. But even Pigeyes would realize that, given our colorful past, if he pinched me and it didn't hold up, the civil suit I'd file for retaliatory arrest would lead to his immediate retirement.

All in all, I was beginning to figure I'd come out okay, when I heard Gino say, 'I'm gonna get her.' He was back in a blink with the sweet-looking student who'd been at the front desk. I imagined he wanted to review my antics out there with the card, see if maybe she'd give him some handhold on me he had missed. I was wrong.

'This isn't the guy, right?' he asked her.

This office was small and getting crowded, five of us now and most of the s.p.a.ce to begin with occupied by Trilby's desk, which was clean but for pictures of his children, all grown, and his wife. There was a U pennant on the paneled walls and a clock. The girl looked around.

'No, of course not,' she said.

'Describe him.'

'Well, for one thing he was black.' 'Who's that?' I asked.

Dewey gave me a warning look, a minute shake of the head: Don't interrupt. Pigeyes told the girl to go on.

'Late twenties, I'd say. Twenty-seven. Kind of receding hair. Athletic build. Nice-looking,' she added, and shrugged, maybe by way of apology for the frank observations of a white girl.

'And how many times have you seen him?'

'Six times. Seven. He's been here a lot.'

I spoke up again. 'What is this, a show up? What'd I do supposedly, steal this guy's wallet?' I was guessing now, earnest if confused.

'Hey, dude,' said Dewey. 'I think it's time for you to be quiet.'

'You're questioning me, you're talking about someone in my presence. Come on, I want to know who.'

'Oh my G.o.d, can you believe this guy?' Pigeyes turned away and bit his knuckle.

'Hey, so tell him,' said Dewey. He hitched a slight shoulder. What was it to them? Gino eventually caught the drift. A glimmer struck home.

'Here, fine,' said Pigeyes, 'knock yourself out.' He moved his hammy paw toward the girl. 'Tell Mr Malloy here who we been talking about.'

The girl did not get any of this. She shrugged, farm-plain, a little thick in her white blouse.

'Mr Roberts,' she said. 'Kam Roberts.' 'Your pal.' Across the room, Pigeyes's hard little eyes glowed like agates. 'So now tell us something smart.'

VII. WHERE I LIVE.

The house in which Nora Goggins and I made our married life was a little square thing, brick with vinyl siding and black shutters, three bedrooms, in a sort of middle-of-the-middle suburb called Nearing. Nora always said we could afford more, but I didn't want it; we had a summer place out on Lake Fowler and that was plunge enough for me. There were so many extraneous expenses - the Beemer, my suits and hers, the frigging clubs. I suppose, in retrospect, it means something that our home wasn't much. Ivy clings to the bricks, plantings that went in when we bought and now have vines thick as tree branches which are beginning to develop bark and sinister tendrils that have found the cracks in the mortar and are gradually pulling the entire place down. When I got the kid, I got the house. Nora cashed out. Nearing will never be glamorous and Nora knows a thing or two about value anyway.

Nora is a Real Estate Lady, you've seen them before, suburban gals dressed to kill at lunch. She could not stand it at home. She limped to the finish line with Lyle, got him into high school, but I could tell that she had done a calculation on some scratch paper somewhere and figured what percentage of her brain cells were dying every day. Even drunk, I sensed a wild, unhappy thing in her that was not going to be tamed. I remember seeing her once; she was in the garden. She had a different homebound pa.s.sion each year and that summer it was vegetables. All the green things abounded: the cornstalks with their broad leaves like graceful hands, the jungle density of the peas, the ferny tops of asparagus spread like lace. She stood in our tiny suburban back yard with Lyle at her knee and looked toward the distance, a mind full of lonely visions like Columbus, who saw round when everybody else saw flat.

Eventually she tore off into the land of open houses, showings, new on the market, with a ruthless glee, lit up like a rocket - she loved it, being back in the grown-up world. She was like twenty-one again - regrettably in all ways. When I figured out something was doing, a year or two along, I was more or less immobilized. I was no longer drinking, so I'd sit at home with painful fantasies, thinking about the guys relocating from Kansas City who got something special off Nora's own Welcome Wagon. She was pointing out the features of her inner sanctum and I, the former sot who'd done more wandering than a minstrel, was at home conducting a perverse and private romance with Mary Fivefingers. Isn't that the worst part of s.e.x, that we think about it? Guys especially. You know how that goes, we don't have babies so we only have one way to prove the point. 'You gettin any?' It's like asking a fat person if they've had a chance to eat. I swear, I was depressed for days after my last physical, when the doctor asked, in the modern way, if I was s.e.xually active and I had to answer no. But then, I digress.

In her roaming, Nora was joined by her manager, a gal named Jill Horwich with whom she was always having a drink or sneaking off to a convention. Jill was like a good number of the Real Estate Ladies, divorced, the main support of a pa.s.sel of kids, and I figured she liked s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around because it was low-stress, some tomcat in a bar better than a fellow making himself a fixture in the kitchen, one more mouth to feed. Nora somehow seemed impressed by Jill's way of life.

But it was hardly news that Nora was adventurous. Soon after I met her, on date number two, it was Nora Goggins who gave me my first b.l.o.w. .j.o.b. I still count the moment when she peeled back my zipper and greeted John Peter eye to eye, taking hold with the confidence of some nightclub vocalist grabbing the mike, as among the most exciting instants of my life. It was not a boy's thrill I'm talking about either. I knew I'd found a rare one, somebody braver than I was, a trait that I found irresistible, especially in a Catholic girl. I figured this was someone to follow through the jungle, who'd show no fear of the wild creatures and had the inner strength to clear a path of her own. Instead, it meant that she was a person of strong opinions who would feel thwarted by our life. She picked on me, told me regularly how I failed her emotionally, and apparently conceived of secret yearnings that I could never satisfy.

The noise I made coming in tonight brought the Loathsome Child in person bouncing off the staircase, rubbing his eyes, shirtless but wearing his jeans, looking as if he had been foraged on by some roaming beast. He is a scrofulous creature, frankly, my size but still not well developed, with a few errant hairs that crop up along his breastbone amid the acne. His peculiar haircut, which looks like a golf green cut onto an overgrown hillside, was disheveled. We ended up together at the kitchen table, both of us making a meal on Cheerios.

'Tough night?'

He made a vaguely affirmative sound. His hand was across his face and he rested his arm on the cereal box as if it was the only thing keeping him from collapse. He had put a shirt on by now, some chic rayon chemise I'm sure I paid for. The red stripe on it, I decided, was not design but ketchup.

'What time did you get home?'

'One.'

He meant afternoon, not morning. I checked the clock: 7:48 p.m. Lyle was just rising. He pretty much lives backward. He and his pals consider it uncool to get started anytime this side of midnight. Nora, of course, attributes Lyle's libertine existence to the poor example his drunken father set when he was growing up.

'You should try reading St Augustine. He has much cautionary advice about a life of excess.'

'Oh, shut up, Dad.'

Maybe if there were just a trace of humor in this I wouldn't have been so hot to smack him. As it was, I had to contain myself with the thought that if I hit him he would tell his mother, who'd tell her lawyer, who'd tell the judge. If I believed they'd take the kid away I'd have knocked him cold, but it would only end in more restraining orders and restrictions on me.

According to that splendid education I received out at the U, it was Rousseau who began in Western culture the worship of the child, innocent and perfect in nature. Anyone who has raised a human from scratch knows this is a lie. Children are savages - egocentric little brutes who by the age of three master every form of human misconduct, including violence, fraud, and bribery, in order to get what they want. The one who lived in my house never improved. Last fall it turned out that the community college, for which I'd dutifully given him a tuition check at the beginning of each quarter, did not have the b.a.s.t.a.r.d registered. A month ago I took him out to dinner and caught him trying to pocket the waitress's tip.

About three times a week I threaten to throw him out, but his mother has told him the divorce decree provides that I will support him until he's twenty-one - Brushy and I had a.s.sumed that meant paying for college - and Nora, who thinks the boy needs understanding, especially since she doesn't have to provide much, would doubtless find this an occasion for yet another principled disagreement and probably seek an order requiring Lyle and me to get some counseling - another five hundred bucks a month. Thus, the thought often stabs me with the ugly starkness of a rusty knife: I am afraid of him now too.

Believe me, I am not as cheerful as I sound.

Rising for another bowl of cereal, my son asked where I had been.

'I was dealing with uncomfortable aspects of my past,' I told him.

'Like Mom, you mean?' He thought he was funny.

'I ran into a cop I used to know. Over at U Inn.'

'Really?' Lyle thinks it's neat that I was a policeman, but he couldn't pa.s.s up the opportunity for role reversal. 'You aren't in trouble are you, Dad?'

'If I ever need to be bailed out, chum, I know where I can find an expert.' I gave him a meaningful look, which sent Lyle at once across the kitchen.

It had killed Pigeyes to let me go. He and Dewey had talked it over for about fifteen minutes and apparently decided that they had better check out my story about Bert. Gino gave me back the credit card and told me to hold on to it because I'd hear from him soon. It didn't sound like he'd be bringing a bouquet.

Slurping up my dinner now, I wished I hadn't been so hasty with Bert's name. The problem, slowly dawning on me, was that when Pigeyes and Dewey open Bert's refrigerator, the next stop would be G & G. They'd want to know everything about Kamin. At that point - probably within the next week - it would be hard to keep the missing money out of our answers. And once this was a police matter, everybody would be posturing. Even if Krzysinski kept his cool now when Jake gave him the lowdown, there'd be no hush-hush after the cops arrived, no diplomatic solutions. It'd be sayonara, G & G. I needed to get going.

Still, the news that there is a living breathing human named Kam Roberts has left me feeling like an astronomer who just discovered that there's a second planet in our orbit, also called Earth. If he wasn't Bert - and Bert wasn't twenty-seven, black, or losing his hair when I last saw him twelve days ago - then why is Kam Roberts using Bert's name upside down and getting his mail at Bert's house?

I'd been carrying the note that Lena had copied off Infomode in my shirt pocket. I studied it for a second and in total desperation even showed it to Lyle. I told him it seemed like Bert had written it.

'That dude? One who took us to a couple Trappers games? Got to be sports with him, man.'

'Thank you, Sherlock. What sport in particular? Safecracking?'

Lyle was blank. I might as well have asked him about Buddhism. The kid had left a pack of cigarettes on the table and I took one as a garnish.

'Hey.' He pointed. 'Buy your own.'

'I'm saving you,' I said. 'I'm conserving your health and future.'

The kid didn't think I was funny. He never did. If I start counting the endeavors in this life at which I have failed, I'll burn out the batteries on this thing. But somehow Lyle and I stand on our own plateau. When I was an active drunkard, there were moments while I was crocked that my love for this child would come over me with breathtaking intensity. It was always the same image, this chubby two-year-old running to beat all h.e.l.l, his laughter free as a waterfall and sweeter than music, and I loved him so dearly, with such heartsore tenderness, that I'd sit over my highball gla.s.s shameless at my tears. These were the most intimate moments I had with my kid, this kind of imaginary contact while he was fast asleep and I was in some barroom half a dozen miles from home. Practically speaking, I did him little good. Near as I can figure, that makes me the same as three-quarters of the dads I know who just sort of phone it in as fathers. But somewhere along the line Lyle recognized my vulnerability, that when it comes to him I am wholly paralysed by regret. Call it what you like, getting even or being nuts together, we both know that him pushing my b.u.t.tons and me refusing to jump has the same screwed-up emotional dynamic as, say, ritual torture or some family form of S and M. Lyle by his behavior berates me, while I cry out by suffering this punishment that I love, if not him, then something he alone represents.

With the cigarette I retreated and knocked around the living room. I had gone back to the health club to dress and to the office to pick up the file for Toots Nuccio's hearing tomorrow and I read at it a bit. Eventually I wandered upstairs, doing my nightly usual, trying to sneak up sidelong on sleep. Should I describe my bedroom, site of my night-time dictation? Hiroshima after the bomb. Books and newspapers and cigarette b.u.t.ts. Scattered highbrow journals and law reviews read in my brainier moods. A bra.s.s colonial lamp with a broken shade. Beside my cherry highboy, there is a rectangle of carpeting less faded than the rest, dimpled at each corner by the casters from Nora's dresser, one of the few pieces of furniture she took. With Lyle around, there is not much point in cleaning anywhere, and my little corner of the world now seems crushed and flattened on all sides.

Next to my bed is a dropcloth and a half-finished canvas on an easel, upon whose ledge sit many tubes of paint, thumbdented and fingerprinted with the bright pigments.

Artist at work. When I was eighteen, I was going to be Monet. As a child in my mother's house, as a victim of her shrill tirades, I took a certain comfort in concentrating on what did not change, on the permanence of a line and the silence of the page. I don't know how many times, in how many schoolrooms, I drew the people from the funnies, Batman, Superman, Dagwood. I was good too. Teachers praised my work, and nights when I was sitting around The Black Rose with my old man I'd amuse his cronies by faultlessly rendering a photo from the paper. 'Boy's great, Tim.' He took the usual bar-time pleasure from this, man among men, letting others boast about his son, but at home he would not cross my ma, who took a dim view of this vocation. 'Drawin flippin pictures,' she'd mutter whenever the subject was raised. It was not until I got a D in a drawing cla.s.s in my first year at the U that I began to see she had a point.

Here's the problem: I see well only in two dimensions. I don't know if it's depth perception or something in the brain. I envision the picture but not the figure it is drawn from. If counterfeiting were a legitimate profession, I would be its Pablo f.u.c.king Pica.s.so. I can reproduce anything on paper as if it were traced. But real life somehow defeats me. Foreshortened, distorted - it never comes out right. My career as an artist, I had realized shortly before I joined the Force, would be a sort of secondhand h.e.l.l in which I'd never do anything original. So I became a lawyer. Another of those jokes, though when I make it, my partners flinch.

At home, in private, I like to pretend. Normally, when I jolt awake at 3:00 a.m., it's not Wash's report or the Dictaphone that occupies me. Instead, I repaint Vermeer and imagine the thrill of being the man who so saucily transfigured reality. I am here often in the middle of the night, the light intense, the glare from the shiny art book page and the wet acrylics somehow dazzling, as I try to avoid thinking too much about the image that leapt up from the flames to wake me.

And what image is that? you ask. It's a man, actually. I see him stepping out of the blaze, and when I start awake, heart banging and mouth dry, I am looking for him, this guy who's got my number. He's around the corner, always behind me. Wearing a hat. Carrying a blade. In dreams sometimes I catch the gleam winking as he treads through the path of blue light from a streetlamp. This is an always thing, all my life, me and this guy, Mr Stranger Danger, as the coppers put it, the guy who's out there and gonna do you bad. He's the one that mothers warn their daughters to watch out for on a deserted street. He's the mugger in the park, the home invader who strikes at 3:00 a.m. I became a copper, maybe, because I thought I'd catch him, but it turns out he still gets the drop on me at night.

Jesus, what is it I have to be so scared of? Five years on the streets and still with all my fingers and toes, a job that I'm busy trying to make secure, and skills of one kind or another. But I am looking at the big 5-0, and the numbers still stir something in me, as if they were the caliber of a gun that is pointed at my head. It gets a body down. I lie here in the bed in which I screwed several thousand times a woman who I figure now never really cared much about what I was doing; I listen to the phlegmy report from the rotted m.u.f.fler of what I used to call my car and desolately hold to the departing sounds of that roaming creature who was once a tender child. What is there to be so scared of, Elaine, except this, my one and only life?