The Brooklyn Rules

bastards and that the only reasons he ever let niggers on his teams was because the sheeny Jew bankers demanded it. But he saved the coup de grace for after Connell's third free drink. That was when Mike explained how O'Malley hated his own people worst of all.

'Pete, may I call you Pete?' He didn't wait for an answer. 'Mr. O'Malley called you all a bunch of stupid micks, donkeys that couldn't think your way out of a potato patch. Said the Irish who'd come over after the famine were the dregs of the race, the very worst kind of shanty scum imaginable.'

Connell seemed almost in shock. He laid his head down across his folded arms.

'It's okay, Pete,' Mike comforted, placing a hand on Connell's shoulder. 'Let's get you another. Patrick, another, please. '

The barman brought over the drinks. When Muldoon returned to the bar, Mike suggested to his new friend that he compose a letter to the Dodgers' owner.

'You'll speak for all of us, Pete,' he whispered, 'and on my honor, I will hand deliver it to Mr. O'Malley.'

'Hey nut job!' Connell yelled at the Professor. 'Gimme your fucking pen or I'll snap your geek neck like a fucking toothpick!'

The nervous little man ran out the door, but not before dropping his pen next to Mike's empty beer glass. Mike unfurled a bar napkin and began to write as Connell dictated. Muldoon tried listening in, but couldn't make out a word. Ten minutes later, Mike stood up and placed the napkin in his back pocket.

'Goodnight, Pete. I'm sorry to have been the bearer of bad news.'

'Yeah, sure. You jus' remember t'do wha' you promised with tha' note,' Connell slurred.

'I do not think so, Pete. I don't think you meant what you had me write down. In a day or two, you might feel differently.'

'Gimme tha' fuckin' letta, kike, or I'll finish wha' those Nazis couldn't!'

Mike shrugged his shoulders. Dutifully, he handed the folded napkin to Pete Connell, who made a show of balling it up and shoving it into his jacket pocket.

'Now gedthefugouttahere!'

On his way out, Mike slipped Muldoon a further five bucks and told him to keep Pete's drinks coming.

'You're a better man than me, Mike.'

'He is very very depressed, Patrick. Tonight, I guess, we are all in mourning,' he said. 'I too am a little schickered or I would stay and watch Pete. He is in such a bad way. Good night, my friend.'

Two hours later, Pete Connell stumbled out of Muldoon's into the moonless night. Using walls, fences, parked cars to keep upright, he made his way home. He was way too drunk to notice either the cold rain or the man across the street who shadowed his every step and turn. When Connell slipped into a narrow alley between his building and the subway trestle, his shadow closed ground.

'Who'zzzz there?' Pete slurred.

'It is just me, Pete, your new friend.'

'Wha'?'

That word formed Pete Connell's mouth into the perfect shape to receive the barrel of Michael Duke's Luger. Connell froze. That pleased Mike very much, but not quite so much as his timing.

'Do you not recognize this pistol?' Mike taunted. 'You remember, you took it off a dead Wermacht captain at Omaha Beach. You tell that story with such conviction to every new patron who comes into Muldoon's, surely the police will not question it. That's what the note in your pocket will say.'

Connell's eyes got wide with fear and sudden comprehension.

'That's right, buddy, not your drunken ravings about killing O'Malley. A suicide note.'

As the subway rumbled by, Mike blew Connell's brain out the back of his head with the Luger he had taken off an SS captain at Bergen-Belsen. Michael had slit the Nazi's throat as the Allies approached and urinated on him as he bled to death. What was that old saying about dancing with the devil? You don't change the devil. The devil changes you.

But he did not urinate on Connell's body. Instead he placed the dead man's right hand around the Luger's handle and let both fall back to earth. Then he replaced the note in the dead man's pocket with the one he had composed as he waited for Connell to leave the bar. After calmly checking that things were just right, Michael Duke walked home to his apartment. There he peeled off his gloves and clothing, throwing them down the incinerator chute. After his shower, Mike stood silent vigil in his son's room, watching the little boy toss and turn in his crib until the sun came up.

At about the same time, the cops were rolling over Pete Connell's stiff body and reading the suicide note taken from his pocket. It was a rambling diatribe. The poor man couldn't bear the thought of the Dodgers moving out of Brooklyn. He didn't want to spend his days missing his beloved team and obsessed with thoughts of killing O'Malley. It was just easier, the note said, to end his own life. When news of the Dodgers' pending move broke later that morning, the detectives understood completely. They felt the same way. All of Brooklyn did. That day, Mike Duke was the only happy man in all the borough.

Requiem for Jack

It had been years since Pete Parson had moved south and they'd turned Pooty's Bar and the space above into money sponges in the shape of lofts. Tribeca, once a bohemian refuge, had long since been declared an artist-free zone by the City of New York, the last starving painter tarred, feathered, and exiled to Williamsburg during the end days of the last millennium. The neighborhood was scrubbed and bleached of real character so that now it was sprayed on the streets in the dark and chipped into the bricks by Mexican day laborers for a hundred bucks cash and lunch.

But still I came to look at where Pooty's had been. I'd walked over from the Brooklyn store, across the bridge, down Chambers Street and up Hudson. The whole time with the book in my hand. Book indeed. I couldn't remember the last time I'd read a book or even held one that didn't have something to do with wine or the business. I tried counting back the years to when Sarah was a little girl and Katy and I would read her to bed. Sarah, a woman now, self-contained, moved away, a veterinarian, her curls gone to light brown with only traces of little girl red peeking out at her dad at Hanukkah.

So here I was, bent paperback in hand, standing outside a building that had since forgotten me or what itself had been. I tried seeing it, superimposing my memory of it over what stood in its place. Failed at it. Works better in movies than in a man's life, that. Things gone are gone. There's a deep truth there. Fuck me if I could find it. I made to step away.

'Grow up here?'

'What?'

'Jaysus, the way you were staring at the place … You looked like a man thought he saw his lost love.'

Definitely Irish, I thought. He was thin as a wire, but not erect. There was a sway to him, more a blade of grass than a man, a weary blade of grass. No, a twisted root, I think. You see them at craft fairs sometimes, bush roots shaped remotely like a man that the artist has cajoled into a more striking resemblance. The summer breeze off the Hudson whipped his hair into a gray swirl. He had a hollow, lined face that had once been a calling card. There are all sorts of lines on all sorts of faces, but these were hard lines, etched lines, sharp under a microscope. These were not lines of slow, smooth erosion. Life had used a knife on him.

'Smoke?' He offered up a green pack of cigarettes the likes of which I'd never seen.

I waved him off. He put the pack close to his crooked lips and the unfiltered nail seemed almost to jump into his mouth. Next out of his pocket was a heavy silver lighter, the kind my dad used when I was a kid.

'Ya mind, fella?' He positioned me to block the wind.

Christ, the damned cigarette emitted more pungent fumes than a city bus. He slipped the lighter back into his suit pocket. It was a cheap blue suit, someone else's cheap blue suit, a quick pick off the discount rack at a retro store. Salvation Army more likely. Still, ill-fitting as it was, it seemed right on him, even as it clashed with his highly polished and expensive brown shoes.