A Long Line of Dead Men

In the front room Gruliow gave me my drink, cleared off a chair for me, and sat on the sofa with his long legs out in front of him. "Matthew Scudder," he said. "When I heard your name the other day, it wasn't entirely unfamiliar to me. Actually, I'm surprised our paths haven't crossed over the years."

"As a matter of fact," I said, "they have."

"Oh? Don't tell me I had you on the stand. I've always said I never forget a hostile witness."

"I was never called to testify in any of your cases. But I've seen you in the Criminal Courts Building and a couple of restaurants in the area, Ronzini's on Reade Street and a little French place on Park Row that's not there anymore. I don't remember the name."

"Neither do I, but I know the place you mean."

"And years ago," I said, "you were at the next table at an after-hours way the hell west on Fifty-second Street."

"Oh, for God's sake," he said. "One flight up over an Irish experimental theater, with burned-out buildings on either side and a rubble-strewn lot across the street."

"That's the one."

"Three brothers ran it," he remembered. "What the hell were their names? I want to say Morrison, but that's not right."

"Morrissey."

"Morrissey! They were wild men, red beards halfway down their chests and cold blue eyes hinting at sudden death. According to rumor, they were tied in with the IRA."

"That was what everybody said."

"Morrissey's. I haven't so much as thought about the place in years. I don't think I went there more than two or three times all told. And I imagine I was always fairly well lit by the time I got there."

"Well, there was a time when I was there a lot," I said, "and everybody was fairly well lit by the time he got there. People behaved themselves, the brothers saw to that, but you'd never have looked around and thought you were at a Methodist lawn party."

"That must have been twenty years ago."

"Close to it."

"Were you still on the police force?"

"No, but I wasn't long off it. I moved into the neighborhood and drank at the local ginmills, most of them long gone now. On the nights when they were ready to quit before I was, there was always Morrissey's."

"There was something very liberating about a drink after hours," he said. "Lord, I drank more in those days than I do now. Nowadays an extra drink makes me sleepy. Back then it was fuel, I could run all day and night on it."

"Is that where you learned to drink Irish?"

He shook his head. "You know the old formula for success? 'Dress British, think Yiddish?' Well, it spoils the rhyme, but I'd add 'drink Irish' and 'eat Italian' to that, and I learned both of those principles right here in the Village. I learned to drink Irish at the White Horse and the Lion's Head and right across the street from here at the Blue Mill. Did you ever get to know the Blue Mill when you were at the Sixth?"

I nodded. "Food wasn't great."

"No, terrible. Vegetables out of cans, and dented cans at that, but you could get a steak for half what it cost most places and if you had a sharp knife you could even manage to cut it." He laughed. "It was a hell of a good place to sit around with friends and drink until closing time. Now it's calling itself the Grange, and the food's much better, and you can't drop in for a quiet drink because you can't hear yourself think in there. The customers are all my wife's age or younger, and Christ they're a noisy bunch."

"They seem to like the noise," I said.

"It must do something for them," he said, "but I've never been able to figure out what. All it does for me is give me a headache."

"I'm the same way."

"Listen to us," he said. "We're a couple of old farts. You're a lot younger than I am. You're fifty-five, right?"

"I guess it stands out all over me."

He looked me in the eye. "I made it my business to learn a little about you," he said. "That can't come as a surprise to you. I imagine you did the same."

"Your credit rating's good," I said.

"Well, that's a load off my mind."

"And you're sixty-four."

"I mentioned that a few minutes ago, didn't I? Not that it comes under the heading of closely held information." He leaned back, one arm extended along the back of the sofa. "I was the second-oldest member of the club of thirty-one. Not counting Homer, that is. That's Homer Champney, he's the man who founded our chapter."

"So I understand."

"I was thirty-two then, working for Legal Aid, thinking about joining the Village Independent Democrats and trying to make a place for myself in politics. Trouble was I found the reform Democrats even more odious than the regulars. The old clubhouse hacks were full of crap, but at least they knew it. The reformers were always such sanctimonious little shits. Who knows, if I could have learned to put up with them I might have turned out to be Ed Koch."

"There's a thought."

"Frank DiGiulio was about ten months older than me. I barely knew him but I liked him. Face off an old Roman coin. He died, you know."

"Last September."

"I saw the obit in the Times. That's the first page I read these days."