I was some detective. I was drinking all the Coca-Cola in Manhattan and I couldn't find a G.o.dd.a.m.ned pimp. My teeth would rot before I got hold of the son of a b.i.t.c.h.

There was a jukebox, and one record ended and another began, something by Sinatra, and it triggered something, made some mental connection for me. I left my c.o.ke on the bar and caught a cab going downtown on Columbus Avenue. I got off at the corner of Seventy-second Street and walked half a block west to Poogan's Pub. The clientele was a little less Superspade and a little more Young G.o.dfather but I wasn't really looking for Chance anyway. I was looking for Danny Boy Bell.

He wasn't there. The bartender said, 'Danny Boy? He was in earlier. Try the Top Knot, that's just across Columbus. He's there when he's not here.'

And he was there, all right, on a bar stool all the way at the back. I hadn't seen him in years but he was no mean trick to recognize. He hadn't grown and he wasn't any darker.

Danny Boy's parents were both dark-skinned blacks. He had their features but not their color. He was an albino, as unpigmented as a white mouse. He was quite slender and very short. He claimed to be five two but I've always figured he was lying by an inch and a half or so.

He was wearing a three-piece banker's-stripe suit and the first white shirt I'd seen in a long time. His tie showed muted red and black stripes. His black shoes were highly polished. I don't think I've ever seen him without a suit and tie, or with scuffed shoes.

He said, 'Matt Scudder. By G.o.d, if you wait long enough everybody turns up.'

'How are you, Danny?'

'Older. It's been years. You're less than a mile away and when's the last time we saw each other? It has been, if you'll excuse the expression, a c.o.o.n's age.'

'You haven't changed much.'

He studied me for a moment. 'Neither have you,' he said, but his voice lacked conviction. It was a surprisingly normal voice to issue from such an unusual person, of medium depth, unaccented. You expected him to sound like Johnny in the old Philip Morris commercials.

He said, 'You were just in the neighborhood? Or you came looking for me?'

'I tried Poogan's first. They told me you might be here.'

'I'm flattered. Purely a social visit, of course.'

'Not exactly.'

'Why don't we take a table? We can talk of old times and dead friends. And whatever mission brought you here.'

The bars Danny Boy favored kept a bottle of Russian vodka in the freezer. That was what he drank and he liked it ice-cold but without any ice cubes rattling around in his gla.s.s and diluting his drink. We settled in at a booth in the back and a speedy little waitress brought his drink of choice and c.o.ke for me. Danny Boy lowered his eyes to my gla.s.s, then raised them to my face.

'I've been cutting back some,' I said.

'Makes good sense.'

'I guess.'

'Moderation,' he said. 'I tell you, Matt, those old Greeks knew it all. Moderation.'

He drank half his drink. He was good for perhaps eight like it in the course of a day. Call it a quart a day, all in a body that couldn't go more than a hundred pounds, and I'd never seen him show the effects. He never staggered, never slurred his words, just kept on keeping on.

So? What did that have to do with me?

I sipped my c.o.ke.

We sat there and told each other stories. Danny Boy's business, if he had one, was information. Everything you told him got filed away in his mind, and by putting bits of data together and moving them around he brought in enough dollars to keep his shoes shined and his gla.s.s full. He would bring people together, taking a slice of their action for his troubles. His own hands stayed clean while he held a limited partnership in a lot of short-term enterprises, most of them faintly illicit. When I was on the force he'd been one of my best sources, an unpaid snitch who took his recompense in information.

He said, 'You remember Lou Rudenko? Louie the Hat, they call him,' I said I did. 'You hear about his mother?'

'What about her?'

'Nice old Ukrainian lady, still lived in the old neighborhood on East Ninth or Tenth, wherever it was. Been a widow for years. Must have been seventy, maybe closer to eighty. Lou's got to be what, fifty?'

'Maybe.'

'Doesn't matter. Point is this nice little old lady has a gentleman friend, a widower the same age as she is. He's over there a couple nights a week and she cooks Ukrainian food for him and maybe they go to a movie if they can find one that doesn't have people f.u.c.king all over the screen. Anyway, he comes over one afternoon, he's all excited, he found a television set on the street. Somebody put it out for the garbage. He says people are crazy, they throw perfectly good things away, and he's handy at fixing things and her own set's on the fritz and this one's a color set and twice the size of hers and maybe he can fix it for her.'

'And?'

'And he plugs it in and turns it on to see what happens, and what happens is it blows up. He loses an arm and an eye and Mrs. Rudenko, she's right in front of it when it goes, she's killed instantly.'

'What was it, a bomb?'

'You got it. You saw the story in the paper?'

'I must have missed it.'

'Well, it was five, six months ago. What they worked out was somebody rigged the set with a bomb and had it delivered to somebody else. Maybe it was a mob thing and maybe it wasn't, because all the old man knew was what block he picked the set up on, and what does that tell you? Thing is, whoever received the set was suspicious enough to put it right out with the garbage, and it wound up killing Mrs. Rudenko. I saw Lou and it was a funny thing because he didn't know who to get mad at. "It's this f.u.c.king city," he told me. "It's this G.o.dd.a.m.n f.u.c.king city." But what sense does that make? You live in the middle of Kansas and a tornado comes and picks your house up and spreads it over Nebraska. That's an act of G.o.d, right?'

'That's what they say.'

'In Kansas G.o.d uses tornadoes. In New York he uses gaffed television sets. Whoever you are, G.o.d or anybody else, you work with the materials at hand. You want another c.o.ke?'

'Not right now.'

'What can I do for you?'

'I'm looking for a pimp.'

'Diogenes was looking for an honest man. You have more of a field to choose from.'

'I'm looking for a particular pimp.'

'They're all particular. Some of them are downright finicky. Has he got a name?'

'Chance.'

'Oh, sure,' Danny Boy said. 'I know Chance.'

'You know how I can get in touch with him?'

He frowned, picked up his empty gla.s.s, put it down. 'He doesn't hang out anywhere,' he said.

'That's what I keep hearing.'

'It's the truth. I think a man should have a home base. I'm always here or at Poogan's. You're at Jimmy Armstrong's, or at least you were the last I heard.'