“The name’s Jack,” Charlie said. “Frankie, you got this obsession my name’s Charlie. You know damn well it’s Jack.”

“The hell,” Frankie said. “Same thing, isn’t it?”

Hilda said, “Pleasure to meetcha, Bernie. You an insurance man like everybody else?”

“He’s no fucking dentist,” Frankie said.

“I’m a burglar,” said six or seven Cutty Rockses.

“A what?”

“A cat burglar.”

“That a fact,” said someone. Jack or Charlie, I suppose. Perhaps it was Dennis.

“What do you do with them?” Hilda wanted to know.

“Do with what?”

“The cats.”

“He holds ’em for ransom.”

“There any money in it?”

“Jesus, lookit who’s askin’ if there’s any money in pussy.”

“Oh, you’re terrible,” said Hilda, clearly delighted. “You’re an awful man.”

“No, seriously,” Charlie/Jack said. “What do you do, Bernie?”

“I’m in investments,” I said.

“Terrific.”

“Thank God my ex was an accountant,” Hilda said. “I never thought I’d hear myself saying that and just listen to me. But you never have to worry about an accountant killing you.”

“I don’t know,” Dennis said. “My experience is they nickel and dime you to death.”

“But they don’t stab you.”

“You’re better off with a stabbing. Get the damn thing over and done with. People look at a parking garage, all they see is that money coming in every day. They don’t see the constant headaches. Those kids you gotta hire, they scrape a fender and you hear about it, believe me. Nobody appreciates the amount of mental strain in a parking garage.”

Hilda put a hand on his arm. “They think you got it easy,” she said, “but it’s not that easy, Dennis.”

“Damn right. And then they wonder why a man drinks. A business like mine and a wife like mine and they wonder why a man needs to unwind a little at the end of the day.”

“You’re a hell of a guy, Dennis.”

I excused myself to make a phone call, but by the time I got to the phone I couldn’t remember who I’d intended to call. I went to the men’s room instead. There were a lot of girls’ names and phone numbers written over the urinal but I didn’t notice Crystal ’s. I thought of dialing one of the numbers just to see what would happen. I decided it was not the sort of thought to which a sober man is given.

When I got back to the bar Charlie/Jack was ordering another round. “Almost forgot you,” he said to me. “Cutty on the rocks, right?”

“Er,” I said.

“Hey, Bernie,” Frankie said. “You okay? You look a little green around the gills.”

“It’s the olive oil.”

“Huh?”

“It’s nothing,” I said, and reached for my drink.

Chapter Eight

There were a lot of bars, a lot of conversations, a lot of people threading their separate ways in and out of my awareness. My awareness, come to think of it, was doing some threading of its own. I kept going in and out of gray stages, as if I were in a car driving through patches of fog.

Then all at once I was walking, and for the first time all night I was by myself. I’d finally lost Frankie, who’d been with me ever since the Recovery Room. I was walking, and there in front of me was Gramercy Park. I went over to the iron gate and held onto it. Not exactly for support, but it did seem like a good idea.

The park was empty, at least as much of it as I could see. I thought of picking the lock and letting myself in. I wasn’t carrying anything cumbersome like a pry bar, but I did have my usual ring of picks and probes and that was sufficient to get me inside, safe from dogs and strangers. I could stretch out on a nice comfortable green bench and close my eyes and count Cutties sailing over rocks, and in only a matter of time I’d be…what?

Under arrest, in all likelihood. They take a dim view of bums passing out in Gramercy Park. It’s frowned on.

I maintained my grip on the gate, which did seem to be swaying, although I knew it wasn’t. A jogger ran by-or a runner jogged by, or what you will. Perhaps he was the same one who’d run or jogged around the park while I’d been talking with Miss Whatserface. Taylor? Tyler? No matter. No matter whether it was the same jogger or not, either. What was it she’d said about jogging? “Nothing that appears so ridiculous can possibly be good for you.”

I thought about that, and thought too that I probably looked fairly ridiculous myself, clinging desperately to an iron gate as I was. And while I thought this the jogger circled round again, his canvas-clad feet tapping away at the concrete. Hadn’t taken him long to circle the park, had it? Or was it a different jogger? Or had something bizarre happened to my sense of time?

I watched him jog away. “Carry on,” I said, aloud or otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll never know. “Just so you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”

Then I was in a cab, and I must have given the driver my address because the next thing I knew we were waiting for a traffic light on West End Avenue a block below my apartment. “This is good enough,” I told the driver. “I’ll walk the rest of the way. I can use the fresh air.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll bet you can.”

I paid him and tipped him and watched him drive away, and all the while I was sorting through my brain, trying to think of a snappy retort. I finally decided the best thing would be to yell, “Oh, yeah?” but I told myself he was already several blocks distant and was thus unlikely to be suitably impressed. I filled my lungs several times with reasonably fresh air and walked a block north.

I felt lousy, full of booze I hadn’t wanted in the first place, my brain numb and my body shaky and my spirit sagging. But I was homing in on my own turf and there’s a comfort in getting back home, even when home is an overpriced couple of rooms designed to give you a good case of the lonelies. Here, at least, I knew where I was. I could stand on the corner of Seventy-first and West End and look around and see things I recognized.

I recognized the coffee shop on the corner, for instance. I recognized the oafish Great Dane and the willowy young man who was walking or being walked by the beast. Across the street I recognized my neighbor Mrs. Hesch, the inescapable cigarette smoldering in the corner of her mouth, as she passed the doorman with a sandwich from the deli and a Daily News from the stand on Seventy-second Street. And I recognized the doorman, Crazy Felix, who tried so hard all his life to live up to the twin standards of his maroon uniform and his outsized mustache. And in earnest conversation with Felix I recognized Ray Kirschmann, a poor but dishonest cop whose path has crossed mine on so many occasions. And near the building’s entrance I recognized a young couple who seemed to be stoned on Panamanian grass twenty hours out of twenty-four. And diagonally across the street-

Wait a minute!

I looked again at Ray Kirschmann. It was him, all right, good old Ray, and what on earth was he doing in my lobby, talking to my doorman?

A lot of cobwebs began to clear from my mind. I didn’t get struck sober but it certainly felt as though that was what had happened. I stood still for a moment, trying to figure out what was going on, and then I realized I could worry about that sort of thing when I had the time. Which I didn’t just now.

I moved back across the sidewalk to the shelter of shadows, glanced back to make sure Ray hadn’t taken notice of me, started to walk east on Seventy-first, keeping close to the buildings all the while, glanced back again a few times to see if there were any other cops around, reminded myself that this business of glancing back all the time simply gave me the appearance of a suspicious character, and what with looking back in spite of this realization, ultimately stepped smack into a souvenir left on the pavement by the galumphing Great Dane or another of his ilk. I said a four-letter word, a precise description indeed of that in which I had stepped. I wiped my foot and walked onward to Broadway, and a cab came along and I hailed it.