Grief Street

I simply employed good manners, which flummoxed poor Mr. Kowalski. You see that I’ve obtained my goal. In other words, I got what I was after. Now then, everything we’ll be discussing here in the ensuing days revolves around this elementary principle of courtesy in exchange for desire.”
    With no further interruption, the professor spoke for an-other hour.
    Privately, Kowalski snarled at Darcy, “I make conversation with you, Darcy, I try to be nice. But you turn on me. Like a rat. Maybe you don’t know, but we got a custom in the department for dealing with rat bastards. After that if the rat bastard don’t give in we got a process of elimination, let’s call it. You could ask a certain rat bastard out of Street Crimes, name of Hockaday.”
    Hockaday. Again, Darcy traveled back in time to the Hell's Kitchen of his youth, to the Saturday morning he took leave: him sitting up front in the mover’s truck, looking down at a sad sack kid from the old block standing beside his Irish mother with her russet hair going gray and old-lady stiff; the two of them, mother and son, staring and thirsty-eyed as the yellow Cirker van pulled away, taking forever with it young Harry Darcy.

Eight

    T wo men talk in a parlor of lush decay:
    Double windows flanking a broken stoop, shrouded inside with the remains of moth-pecked velvet. A spoonful of light strains into the room through grime-encrusted panes, a cinder black hole in the ceiling marks the spot where a chandelier banished shadows of another age. Cracked and fallen-away plaster moldings are trace evidence of a salon once ornate with cherubs and rosettas, oak clusters and braids of grape leaves. Crumbled walls lay bare wooden lathing supports beneath, like the exposed ribs of some partly consumed animal carcass.
    Outdoors, in the cool sun, a dented ice cream truck is parked in front of the house. One of the men inside—the older, elegant one wearing a satin robe over a waistcoat and kid gloves—turns back a scrap of drapery for a look at the musical truck, and its driver. A scratchy recording of “The Farmer in the Dell” attracts no buyers from a childless block. The driver sits, idle, slurping something red from an aqua blue plastic bowl. Indoors, the parlor is as close and darkly moist as the icebox in the truck; indoors, the air seems water-painted in shades of gray.
    “Fool,” sniffs the man in the waistcoat. He steps back from the window, crosses the room, joins his companion. I
    The men now sit before a useless fireplace—mantel collapsed, bricks fallen to powder ash in the hearth. They face each other in opposite antique divans covered in threadworn silk brocade. Between them: a mahogany table stained by rings of wet glasses, a half-gone fifth of Black Bush on the table, a silver box of perfumed cigarettes. They smoke, and drink their Irish whisky from scarred crystal.
    “I take it you’re completely decided?”
    “You take it right.”
    “Well, I suppose none of us goes on forever. Not you, not me... not them.”
    “Them two, they’re ripe for change. Here’s just the place they’ll believe is forever, the place where all their tomorrows belong.”
    “As I said, nothing is forever.”
    “That there’s a pseudo-conclusion, old man.”
    “Why?”
    “I got to spell it out? Okay. A leg of lamb is better than nothing. Nothing is better than heaven. Therefore, a leg of lamb is better than heaven. You buy that?”
    “Of course not.”
    “How come?”
    “The reasoning is fallacious.”
    “No, that don’t explain it.”
    “It don’t?” the elegant one says in a mocking way. “Then you’ll spell it out for me.”
    “Sure. It’s the word nothing, that’s your problem. People say it all the time, but it ain’t lucid.”
    “Good God, he says ain’t, yet presumes to speak on the efficacy of language.” The elegant one, thumb cinched in waistcoat, says, “Here now—you and I, man, we hail from the grandest land of speech. Show some respect and please drop the crudities.”
    “Fair play, if you’ll likewise drop the subject of God.”
    “Ho-ho, you don’t fancy hearing the Lord’s name!”
    “Another pseudo-conclusion. I’m not at all sure why I tolerate you. Perhaps it’s only that I’m amused by this play-wright conceit of yours, this lie of your soul.”
    '‘I’ve used the last of my life to write down the grieving truth. As well you know, since you’re guiding the tale to an audience.”
    “But for all your writing, do