"You never said that before."
"No."
"When you and I got married," she said, "I told you something. Do you remember what it was?"
"I was just thinking about it the other day. You said it didn't have to change anything."
"Because we were already committed to each other, so how could a piece of paper change things? And you were already respectable."
"Maybe that's the wrong word. Maybe I was looking for the license to make me more legitimate, more a part of the establishment."
"And did it?"
"That's the thing," I said. "It didn't. You know, I lost most of my illusions about the system during my years as a cop. They say working in a meat-packing plant ruins your appetite for sausage, and something similar happens on the job. You're essentially taught to break the rules. I learned to cut corners, learned to stand up in court and lie under oath. I also took bribes and robbed the dead, but that was something else, that was more about the erosion of my own morals. It may have been job-related, but it didn't arise directly out of how I'd learned to regard the system.
"Then I put in my papers and quit," I went on, "and you know about that. It was abrupt, one day I was a cop and one day I wasn't, but in another sense it was a more gradual process. I was still a cop at heart. All I lacked was a badge and a paycheck. I still saw the world the same way. I knew guys working in houses all over the five boroughs, and I pulled strings and called in favors when I was working my own cases. Or I bought favors, paying cops for information as if they were my snitches."
"I remember."
"Well, the years went by," I said, "and everybody I knew died or retired. Joe Durkin's my only real friend on the job, and I never even knew him back then. I'd been working private for years before he and I got acquainted. And now he's always talking about retiring himself, and one of these days he'll do it."
"Suppose it had been him instead of Wister asking you questions tonight."
"Would I have told the same lies? Probably. I don't see what else I could have done. I might have been a little less comfortable lying to Joe, and he might have sensed I was holding out. As far as that goes, Wister may have sensed as much himself."
"It's complicated, isn't it?"
"Very. It's hard to know what I am. 'My name is Matt and I'm an alcoholic.' I've said that so many times I'm beginning to believe it, but beyond that point it gets a little fuzzy. For years I've been cutting corners and making my own rules. I learned how on the job and I never learned how not to. I've deliberately subverted the law, and now and then I've taken it into my own hands. I've played judge and jury. Sometimes I guess I've played God."
"You always had a reason."
"Everybody can always find a reason. The point is I've done illegal acts, and I've worked for and with criminals, but I've never thought of myself as a criminal."
"Well, of course not. You're not a criminal."
"I'm not sure what I am. I tell myself I try to do what's right, but I don't know how I make that determination. The phrase that comes to mind is 'moral compass,' but I'm not sure I know exactly what a moral compass is, or if I have one."
"Of course you do, honey. But the needle keeps spinning around, doesn't it?"
"The only rule I've got to live by," I said, "is 'Don't drink and go to meetings.' Jim says if I do that much everything else'll work out the way it's supposed to."
"So you do and it does."
"Oh, it works out. That's another thing he told me, things always work out. And God's will always gets done. That's how you find out God's will. You wait and see what happens."
"You've quoted that line before."
"I've always liked it," I said. "I guess it was God's will for Jim to die tonight, and for me to live. Otherwise it wouldn't have happened, right?"
"Right."
"Sometimes," I said, "it's hard to figure out what God has in mind. Sometimes you have to wonder if He's paying attention."
We talked for a long time. Ages ago, in another lifetime, when she was a hooker and I was a cop married to somebody else, part of what drew me to her was that she was so easy to talk to. In a sense I suppose that was part of the job description in her chosen field. A call girl, after all, ought to put men at ease. But it seemed to go beyond that for us. I sensed that I could be entirely myself in her presence, that it was me she liked, not the man I pretended to be, not the man I thought the world wanted me to be.
Maybe that, too, was part of the job description.
I drank coffee and she sipped her herb tea and I talked about Jim. I told stories from early sobriety, before she and I had found each other again after having been out of touch for years. "At first I figured he was a nice enough fellow," I told her, "but I wished to God he would leave me alone, because I knew I wasn't going to stay sober and he was just one more person to disappoint. Then I started to look forward to seeing him at meetings. As far as I was concerned he was Mister AA himself, the voice of sobriety. As a matter of fact he came into the program less than two years before I did. I was in my first ninety days when I heard him speak on his second anniversary. I look back now, and what's two years? A person with two years is just beginning to clear the cobwebs out of his head. So he was actually pretty new himself, but from my perspective he was dry enough to be a fire hazard."
"What would he tell you now?"
"What would he tell me? He'll never tell me anything again."
"But if he could."
I sighed. "'Don't drink. And go to meetings.'"
"Do you want to go to a meeting now?"
"It's too late for the midnight meeting on Houston Street. They've got another one at two a.m., but that's too late for me. So no, I don't want to go, but I don't want to drink, either, so I guess it evens out."
"What else would he tell you?"
"I can't read his mind."
"No, but you can use your imagination. What would he say?"
Grudgingly I said, "'Get on with your life.'"
"And?"
"And what?"
"And are you going to?"
"Get on with my life? I don't really have a choice, do I? But it's not that easy."
"Why not?"
"I told those two bozos the other night that I was done working for Ballou, and I told Mick the same thing. And that was that."
"But?"
"But I must have known it wasn't going to be that easy," I said, "or I wouldn't have gone straight to Jovine's for a shoulder rig. I told myself if I stayed away from Mick and kept close to home they'd find it easy to forget about me. But obviously they'd already made a decision to kill me, and tonight was the first chance they got, and they took it." I frowned. "It shouldn't change anything. Oh, I'm raging inside over Jim's death. Most of my anger's at myself for getting him killed, but- "
"You didn't get him killed."
"I put him in harm's way. Blame or no blame, that's hard to argue with. He was killed because someone mistook him for me, and that happened because I met him for dinner. And because I'd given someone cause to want me dead."
"I could argue with you, but I won't."
"Good. As I was saying, most of my anger's with myself. But there's some left over for the shooter, and for whoever sicced him on me."
"Two different people?"
"Two minimum. Somebody made the decision, either the slugger with the slicked-down hair or the guy who gave him his orders. Somebody else staked out our building and followed me from here to the Chinese restaurant. He could have been the slugger or his chum- they'd both recognize me without trouble- or there could have been a third person, someone who wouldn't have to worry that I might recognize him."
"If so, maybe he doubled as the shooter."
"Maybe, but I'd bet against it. I think he followed me to the restaurant, then posted himself across the street, making a quick call on his cell phone..."
"I guess they've all got cell phones these days."
"Everybody but you and me, it seems like. Even Mick's got one, if you can believe that. He used it the other night to call ahead to the farm and say we were on our way."
"'Leave a light burning, and a shovel on the back steps.'"
"The tail calls the shooter, who gets in his car and hurries to the scene. They meet on the street and the tail points to the Lucky Panda. 'Red shirt, tan jacket, Gap khakis, sneakers,' he says. 'You can't miss him.'
"Then he gets behind the wheel, unless there's already a driver in addition to the shooter. Whoever's doing the driving puts the car someplace handy and keeps the motor running, and the shooter goes in with a gun and comes out without it, and he jumps in the car and they're gone."
"And a man's dead," she said.
"And a man's dead."
"It could have been you."
"It was supposed to be me."
"But God had other ideas."
That was one way to look at it. I said, "Two men on Ninth Avenue the night before last. A third who ordered the hit. A fourth man to trail me to the Lucky Panda, and a fifth to walk in and pull the trigger. And maybe a sixth man to drive the car." I looked at her. "That's a lot of people to get even with."
"Is that what you want to do?"
"You can't help wanting to," I said. "The urge is pretty basic, and I suppose it's instinctive, even cellular. 'They did it to us, we're gonna do it to them.' Look at human history."
"Look at Bosnia," she said.
"But it's five or six people, as I said, and I don't even know who they are. And I can't make myself believe Jim's spirit is crying out for vengeance. If there's a part of you that survives, I'm inclined to believe it's not the part that takes things personally. Didn't you ask what Jim would tell me now? Well, what he wouldn't tell me is to get out there and kill one for the Gipper."
"No, that doesn't sound like Jim."
"I hate the idea of sitting back and letting them get away with it," I said, "but I'm not sure anybody ever really gets away with anything, and I think I've largely outgrown the notion that the world can't get along without my help."
"It's a pretty common delusion," she said, "and the more religious a person is, the more he'll subscribe to it. If there's one thing the fundamentalists of the world have in common it's the conviction that God's work won't get done unless they pitch in and do it. Their God's all-powerful, but He's screwed unless they help Him out."
I drank some coffee. I said, "It's not my job to punish them. I'm not appointing myself judge and jury, and I'm not volunteering for the firing squad, either. I told them I was off the case, and I told Mick the same thing, and Jim's death doesn't change that. I still want to walk away from it."
"Thank God for that."
"But there's a problem. See, I don't think I can."
"Why not?"
"I walked away from it two nights ago," I said, "and it didn't do me any good. Their response was to send somebody to kill me. As far as they were concerned I was still on the case. Or maybe they didn't care. On or off, I was the son of a. bitch who kicked their asses, and maybe that's all you have to do around here to get Madame Defarge to knit your name in the shawl. Because one way or another I got my name on the Death List, and Jim's dying isn't going to get me off it."
"So even if you don't do a thing..."
"I'm still marked for death. By now they probably know they killed the wrong guy, and if not they'll know by morning. I may be inclined to think of Jim as having died for my sins, but that won't make them accept his death as a substitute for mine."
"Your name's still in the shawl."
"I'm afraid so."
She looked at me. "So? What do we do?"
What we tried to do was make love, but that didn't really work, so we just held each other. I told a few stories about Jim, some she'd heard before, others that were new to her. A couple of them were funny, and we laughed.
She said, "I probably shouldn't say this, but it's rattling around in my head and making me crazy. I'm terribly sorry for what happened to Jim. I'm sorry for him and I'm sorry for Beverly, and of course I'm sorry for you.
"But sorry isn't all I feel. I'm glad it was him and not you."
I didn't say anything.
"It's something I find myself thinking all the time," she said. "It's what the voice in my head says every time I read the obituaries, and sometimes I think that's why I read the obituaries. So I can say 'Better her than me' whenever some dame my age dies of breast cancer. 'Better him than Matt' when some poor guy drops dead on the golf course. 'Better them than us' whenever there's an earthquake or a flood or a plague or a plane crash. Whoever they were, whatever happened to them, better them than us."
"It's a pretty natural response."
"But for a change it really resonates, doesn't it? Because it was pretty much a case of one or the other. If Jim went to the bathroom and you stayed at the table..."
"It might have turned out differently. I'd have been facing the door when he walked in. And I had a gun."
"And would you have gone for it in time?"
If I'd looked up when the door opened, I'd have seen a stranger, a black man who looked not at all like the pair of white guys who jumped me. And that's if I looked up. I might well have been engrossed in the menu, or reading Jim's magazine.
"Maybe," I said. "But probably not."
"So better him than you is what I say. My heart aches for Beverly, it makes me sick to think of what she's going through right now, but better her than me. These aren't noble sentiments, are they?"
"I don't suppose they are."
"But God knows they're heartfelt And you have to feel the same way, baby. Because you can tell yourself it should have been you there slumped in your own blood, but it wasn't you and in your heart you're glad of it. I'm right, aren't I?"