“What?”
“What’s he drink? Not Maker’s Mark.”
“Scotch. Johnnie Walker, I think it was. Why?”
“Get the brand right,” he said, “and send him a bottle a day for the next year or two. As long as it takes.”
“As long as what takes?”
“As long as it takes for him to become an alcoholic. Then he can join that club of yours, and he can climb up those famous steps, and when he writes out his confession we can fall on him like a ton of bricks.”
“How’ll we know?”
“You can be his rabbi, except that’s not what you call it.”
“His sponsor.”
“Right on the tip of my tongue. His sponsor. You can be his sponsor, and you can rat him out. But a sponsor wouldn’t do that, would he?”
“It’s not part of the job description.”
“I was afraid of that. Well, in that case I’m out of ideas. Of course we could put a wire on you, but that wouldn’t work, would it?”
“He’d never say anything we could use.”
“No, and even if he did it might not be admissible. You know he’ll lawyer up the minute he gets pulled in for anything, and if he’s hooked into the Jersey City machine he’ll know what lawyer to call. Well, he got away with two murders for what, a dozen years? He’s about to get away with two or three more. Can you live with that?”
“I guess I’ll have to.”
“And so will I. When you’re on the job a few years you find out you can live with almost anything.” His eyes narrowed. “But you resigned, didn’t you? Had a gold shield and gave it back. So I guess you found something you couldn’t live with.”
“But it wasn’t the job,” I said. “I’d have told you it was at the time. That’s what I thought. There’s an element in a lot of stories you hear in AA, it’s called a geographical solution. Guy moves to California because New York is the problem. Then he moves to Alaska because California’s the problem. But he’s the problem himself, and wherever he goes, there he is.”
“So you were the problem.” He thought about it. “Well, now you’re Even Steven’s problem, aren’t you? And we know how he solves his problems, and geography hasn’t got a lot to do with it. How are we gonna keep you alive?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself.”
“I can’t even offer you police protection at this stage, and that’d be a joke anyway, wouldn’t it? We assign some cops to guard you, and they do, and nothing happens, and we reassign them, and you’re right where you are now, because he’s smart and he’s patient. He can wait as long as he needs to. You have a gun?”
“No.”
“If you had, you know, an unregistered weapon—”
“I don’t.”
“Well, if you should happen to get your hands on one, it might not be a bad idea to carry it. As a matter of fact…”
His voice trailed off. I looked at him, raised my eyebrows in anticipation.
“I want to keep this hypothetical, not that anybody but the two of us is gonna hear it. If someone’s out to kill me, and I know it, and I also know there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, well, then there’s one thing I
“I’d thought of that myself.”
“One thing you ought to know,” he said, looking off to the side, “is if something happened to our friend, and if they were looking at you in connection with it, I wouldn’t have any recollection of this conversation. In fact I wouldn’t remember any of the conversations we had.” His eyes met mine. “Just something for you to think about,” he said.
I didn’t have a gun, registered or not. Acquiring one didn’t strike me as the most challenging task in the world, and I thought about it, but it wasn’t something I wanted to do.
After the meeting, after an hour at the Flame, after some private time with Jim, I was back in my room with my thoughts for company. He was out there somewhere, and if his thoughts weren’t of me, well, in a day or a week or a month they would be.
I was a problem for him. And I knew what solution he’d look for. When your only tool is a hammer, they say, then every problem looks like a nail.
I lay there in the darkness and wondered if I was afraid. I decided I was, but not of dying, not exactly. If I’d died a year ago, if I’d died drunk, that would have been as awful an ending as my life could have had. But I’d stayed sober for a year, and if I didn’t feel like celebrating, that didn’t mean I didn’t cherish the accomplishment. And if I died now, well, nobody could take that away from me. Cold comfort, I suppose, but better than no comfort at all.
What I was afraid of, I realized, was that there was something I could do about this, and that I wouldn’t be able to figure it out.
When I woke up the sun was shining and someone was playing the radio in the room next to mine. I couldn’t make out the words, but the announcer’s enthusiasm came through all the same. I showered and shaved and got dressed, and somewhere along the way my neighbor turned off his radio. The sun was still shining. I decided it wasn’t a bad day, and that I knew how to spend it.
I wanted breakfast, but first I found Vann Steffens’s card and dialed his number. I was surprised when he answered; I’d expected to get a machine and leave a message. He said hello, and I said, “You probably know who
