Grief Street

hearing.”
    “Like a confession—that’s the problem. I’m thinking all this, I’m saying all this, but I get no absolution.”
    “You should see a priest.”
    “Maybe. If I should ever go to church again. Meanwhile, there’s something I want to know. You ever hold it against me I gave you twenty that day you went easy on me?”
    I could have said no, but that would have been a truth from a forgotten yesterday. Today when I saw Harry Darcy for the first time in all these years, I felt an irresistible resentment. This time I’d give it to you good enough to save my own ass, that’s for sure, Fat Buns.
    I told Harry Darcy today’s truth.
    He took it well, then told me what he had to say.
    “What I called your house about, it’s something this Sergeant Joe Kowalski said to me. I hear this creep’s the cop answer to Brother Earl.”
    “Something like that.”
    “Anyhow, Kowalski’s got it out for you. It’s way beyond wreathing.” Darcy squeezed a last drag out of his Pall Mall and then dropped it into the coffee cup ashtray, where it sizzled out in something wet and brown like the roast beef brown thing I had eaten with Slattery. He lit up another one. “This guy’s getting up his balls to cancel you out, Hockaday. I seen it before with violence freaks, of which there’s plenty of specimens around me every day. They talk violent, they breathe violent, they’d eat violent if they could. Kowalski, he’s become a big fan of ultimate fighting. You know what that is? Forget it, you don’t want to know. Anyways, I’m telling you—he’s coming to get you. You understand? He told me himself, flat out.”
    “What did he say exactly?”
    “He says, quote unquote, If the rat bastard don’t give in we got a process of elimination, let’s call it.”
    “I’m going to need you one day soon, Harry.”
    “For what?”
    “It’s not enough your casually telling me like this about Kowalski’s threat.”
    “Doesn’t seem so casual to me. There’s the code with screws, too. You don’t rat.”
    “I don’t care what anybody calls it. You’ll have to testify downtown, Harry—at an Internal Affairs hearing. That’s how we put away a creep like Kowalski.”
    “Jeez, I don’t know.”
    “There’s something in it for you, Harry. Unofficial, but it’s something.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Absolution, let’s call it. Can I count on you?”
    “Yeah, I guess so.”
    “All right then, no hard feelings about that day.”
    It was not hard to forgive the likes of Harry Darcy, for
    I, too, have been a slow learner in my time. It was touching to behold him in the painful throes of discovering a big, rude fact of life: in prison it hardly matters who occupies the cells. There was poor Fat Buns Darcy where I have spent some time: all grown up and jeering at himself for being the late-blooming type, trying to figure out what it means to be a man while he still has the time and energy, trying to slip off his clown clothes, trying to figure his way out of being a prisoner in charge of a prison full of prisoners.
    But in the case of the next guy on my list of people to see—try as I might, I could not feel so charitably.

Nineteen

    B y the time he got me from Rikers Island back over to Manhattan and then to Hell’s Kitchen where he had started out so early in the morning, the rookie Baize was feeling very put upon for all his troubles of driving and waiting. Also he had a savage headache from fighting crosstown holiday traffic against a setting sun so piercing bright I could see it shining through his thumb on the steering wheel.
    “This goddamn assignment—they can shove it,” he complained. “I’m a cop, you know.”
    “Here’s five hundred bucks’ worth of advice,” I offered. “Don’t be whining around anybody else.”
    “I got the right to beef.”
    “The point is, a cop doesn’t have to tell another cop that he’s a cop.”
    “Well,” he whined again, missing the point again, “I sure didn’t join the department to wind up being a taxi driver.”
    “Good for you, kid. I don’t like taking cabs myself.”
    “How come?”
    “When I know the driver’s story—and I always do, they never fail to talk at me—suddenly I'd rather walk.”
    But when it comes to snitches, I thought to myself, the opposite is generally true: a man full of troubles is an attractive stool pigeon; his information is as reliable as his motives are dark.
    In New York, there are two types of confidential