“Not anymore.”
“No, now you’re with an old friend, and so am I.” He started to look for the waitress, then saw I already had a drink. He hadn’t done anything with his Stoli but pour it and look at it, and now he raised it and said, “Old friends.” I raised my own glass and sipped my soda water, and he drank half of his vodka.
He asked what had brought me, and I said I had a little time to kill, and he laughed and said we’d kill it together.
“But I was going to get here sooner or later anyway,” I said, and showed him a copy of Ray’s drawing.
“You showed me the other night,” he said. “At Mother’s. Wait a minute. Is this the same guy?”
“No, a different one entirely.”
“That’s what I was thinking, although I can’t say I have the other chap’s features engraved on my heart. This one looks menacing.”
“Part of that may be the sensibilities of the person who told the artist what to draw. This is the man who murdered a woman in the Village the night before last.”
“All over the TV,” he said. “Give me a minute and I’ll tell you her name.”
I supplied it myself, along with the fact that she’d been Elaine’s best friend, and Elaine had sold him the murder weapon. With Danny Boy, you could give him the first sentence and he had the whole page; what he said was, “I hope you put her on a plane.”
“It might come to that. I don’t know.” I detailed the security precautions we were taking, and that I was going to pick up a gun for her. He asked if she’d know what to do with it, and I said there wasn’t too much you had to know to shoot someone at close range.
He said, “All my life, all the players and hard cases I’ve known, I’ve never once fired a gun, Matthew. I’m trying to think if I ever even had one in my hand. You know, I don’t think I did.”
“Well, you’re still a young man, Danny.”
“That’s what the Yellow Peril tells me. Jodie, you met her the other night. ‘Danny, you are so amazing!’ For a man my age, she means. And as long as they keep making those little blue pills, I can go on amazing her.”
“Science is wonderful.”
“Yeah.”
Something made me ask about his health. It had been more than five years, and he hadn’t had a recurrence. So he was out of the woods, wasn’t he?
“Out of the woods? Matthew, you can’t even see a tree from where I’m sitting.”
“That’s great.”
“I beat colon cancer. That’s a funny expression, don’t you think? Like I got in the ring with it and kicked the shit out of it. Cancer of the colon, off its feet and down for the count. I didn’t have much to do with it, to tell you the truth. They cut me up and stitched me back together and filled me full of chemicals, and when they quit I was alive and the cancer wasn’t. ‘I beat colon cancer.’ It’s like saying you beat a slot machine, when all you did was pick the right time to drop your quarter in it.”
“The point is you’re okay.”
“That’s the good news,” he said, and waited for me to ask what the bad news was. But I’d heard too much bad news lately to seek it out.
When I didn’t ask he told me.
“Prostate cancer,” he said, “and there’s good news there, too, because I’ve got a low Gleason score. Gleason, all I could think of was The Honeymooners. A low Gleason means it’s slow-growing. I can treat it and risk impotence and incontinence, or I can live with it and, according to the doctor, almost certainly die of something else before the prostate cancer can get me. ‘If you keep on drinking like you do,’ he said, and I swear he was smiling while he said it, ‘your liver’s likely to give out long before your prostate can kill you.’ Guess what I had as soon as I got out of his office.”
“A glass of Stoli.”
“As a matter of fact it was Absolut, but you’ve got the right idea. Doctor’s orders, the way I look at it. Let me tell you something, put this in perspective, before you start feeling sorry for me. It’s a complete fucking miracle I’ve lived this long. When I was born the obstetrician told my parents I would probably die within the week. Then I wasn’t supposed to survive childhood. ‘Give him all the love you can now,’ the pediatrician told them, ‘because you’re not going to have him long. The Lord’s likely to want him back.’ That was great for me, because they took me home and spoiled me rotten. And the Lord evidently took a good long look at me and decided he didn’t want me all that much.”
“Well, you can’t really blame him, can you?”
“I don’t blame anybody,” he said, “for anything. I’ve had a good life, and I figure everything past the first week of it’s been a bonus. I listen to music whenever I want, and I drink as much as I want, and I get all the pussy I want, and when little Jodie gets sick of me I’ll find somebody else, because there’s always one there to be found. So don’t feel sorry for me.”
I told him I wouldn’t dream of it.
When I got down to Grogan’s, Mick said I’d just missed him by a few minutes. “We were busy earlier,” he said. “Busy enough for me to join Con behind the wood. I don’t mind it. It’s honest work, pouring an honest drink.”
Most of what he did wouldn’t fit most people’s definition of honest work. A few years back, when the loosely allied Irish mob the press called the Westies was in full force, Mick Ballou led a faction of it, and led it with brutal efficiency. He was a career criminal and he had become my best friend, and Joe Durkin wasn’t the only man who found this puzzling. I didn’t really understand it myself.
“It’s thinned out some,” he said, “though it’s always busier than it used to be. The afternoons are still slow. That’s the nicest time in a bar, I’d say, when your only customers are men who want to sit quietly with a drink. Or late at night, when there’s no one there at all but two old friends talking the night away.”