Invasion of Privacy

that pedestrian deaths dropped from over thirty to just eleven in four years.”
    “Impressive.”
    “Impressive? What, are you kidding me? That eleven was something like forty percent of the total motor-vehicle fatalities in the entire city for the year. Which puts us just behind New York . Can you imagine that? We’re killing our pedestrians at almost the same rate as the Big Apple.”
    “Mo, I’m not sure your figures support—”
    “Plus, after that drop to ‘only’ eleven, the toll jumped back near twenty last year. I’m telling you, John, it’s like open season out there.” Mo laughed silently. “The kind of thing Freddie would’ve liked to hear.”
    “I don’t get you, Mo. ”
    He looked up at me, waving the cigar impatiently. “Freddie was an undertaker, didn’t you know that?”
    “I guess not.”
    “He had some great experiences in that line of work too, more than you’d think. I remember a couple of times I had to cover the funerals of people laid out at his home— pols mostly, hacks all—and Freddie’d take me aside, ask with that undertaker’s dirge if I could use them in one of my columns.”
    “Use what, Mo?”
    “His experiences, what do you think? You got to pay closer attention, John.”
    “Sorry, Mo. ”
    “I mean, it’s like you’re losing the whole thread of the conversation here.”
    “Won’t happen again.”
    Mo shuffled through the mess on his desk till he came up with a war-memorial lighter the size of a softball. He flicked it three times, no results. Then he examined it more closely, the thing no more than six inches from his eyes. “Bastards!”
    “What’s the matter, Mo?”
    “The ASNs. They stole my wick again.”
    “The who?”
    “Not ‘who,’ John, ‘what.’ My wick, the little thing in there, lets the flame come out. What college did you go to, anyway?”
    “Holy Cross, Mo. But—”
    “And you don’t know what a wick is? The priests didn’t have candles in the chapels there and all?”
    “They had candles. What I meant was, who are the ‘Ay-
    Ess-Ens’?”
    “The initials, of course. The Anti-Smoking Nazis.”
    “First I’ve heard of them, Mo. ”
    “They steamrolled some kind of ‘secondhand smoke’ policy through the powers that be, and now we’re supposed to go outside every time we want to light up.”
    “That’s becoming pretty typical of—”
    “Only I won’t go along with it, so they sneak in here and steal my wick.” He hefted the lighter for me to appreciate. “You have any idea how hard it is to replace one, an antique like this is?”
    “None.”
    Mo shook his head. “And to think my favorite was the one about this paper.”
    “Your favorite?”
    He fixed me with a baleful eye. “My favorite of the experiences that Freddie told me about in his funeral home.”
    “Oh.”
    “You gonna be all right now?”
    “Just a momentary lapse, Mo. ”
    “I hope so.” He put down the lighter and stuck the dead cigar back in his mouth. “Freddie had some great ones, like the time this lifelong rival of the decedent comes into the viewing room, walks up to the corpse, and spits in his face. Spits in it. Or this other time, a nickel-and-dime loanshark comes in, pays his respects to the surviving fam-%. then goes to the prayer rail. Only instead of kneeling down, the shark leans in and grabs the corpse by the lapels—grabs him, John—and starts banging the decedent’s head against the side of the coffin, yelling, ‘You deadbeat, where’s my five hundred? Where is it?’ ”
    I didn’t see where the newspaper fit in, but I wasn’t about to ask.
    Mo took a deep breath. “But my favorite, all time—all world —was this widow, comes up to Freddie straight from
    the hospital to make the arrangements for her husband, and she says to him, ‘Freddie, my Gerry spent every blessed night of his life sitting on one of our kitchen chairs, reading the ‘ Herald ’—it wasn’t the ‘Herald’ for all those years, John, but you get the picture—and Freddie says to her, ‘There, there,’ or something like that, and she says back, ‘No, Freddie, you don’t understand. That’s the way I want Gerry laid out, sitting on one of our chairs at the front of your viewing room here, his legs crossed and the Herald open in his hands.’ Freddie tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t budge, so he swallowed kind of hard and the next evening, there was Gerry, like any other night, in one of those chairs, upright and