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Harper’s shirt pocket.
    ‘We’ll have you stay in a hotel near here,’ he said. ‘Should get some rest, eh? Long day for you, Sonny . . . long old day for you. . .’
    And then his voice faded, and maybe it was exhaustion, or the sake, or perhaps nothing more than the tidal wave of emotion that seemed to sweep over him and carry him away.
    Later he couldn’t even remember leaving the restaurant.

SEVEN
    Ben Marcus: simple name, simple man. Ancestors were Polish Jews, perhaps even further back they were people who came out of the Carpathians with names built from too many consonants and too few vowels. Ben Marcus’s grandfather on his mother’s side, hard-edged bastard, all angles and corners – he came to ‘Hamereeca’ with a vision of something that was a world apart from what he found. Man makes shoes in Lodz; comes to the States and dies of emphysema after eleven years of clearing storm drains and sewage junctions for the New York Metropolitan Sanitation Department at one dollar eighty-five cents an hour.
    Ben Marcus’s father made different decisions; wouldn’t bow to The Man, so he figured the angles and sidelines, made a handful of dollars on the racetracks, bought himself into a warehouse crew ferrying liquor during Volstead. Volstead was repealed in ’33; Marcus Senior ran lines in silk stockings and cigarettes, and a protection gig for bookies’ runners, and everything went fine and dandy until May of ’55 when he was shot in the throat by a man called Fraschetti, a man with psoriasis and bad teeth. Ben Marcus was ten years old when he buried his father, celebrated his twelfth birthday in a South Brooklyn Juvy, and by the time he was twenty-seven he’d done nine years all told between Fulton Correctional, Sing Sing and Altona. Then he got smart. He got other people to do the wet-work and running. Benjamin Marcus, hard head like a clenched fist, collection of features that seemed to argue about who owned center stage, kind of man who stated the obvious and everyone agreed such a thing was a very new idea. Crew he ran was a mixed bag of stealers and blood-letters. People like Sol Neumann, Raymond Dietz, Albert Reiff. Neumann was the right hand, the one who translated the nods and frowns into words and actions. Marcus would say,‘That thing Sol . . . that thing with the Williamsburg fuck-up. I don’t think we should leave that behind without an example being made.’ Neumann would say, ‘I’ll take care of it Ben, I’ll take care of it,’ and three, maybe four days later, New York’s finest would find some poor bastard hanging from a fire escape back of a derelict building, his tongue cut out perhaps, his balls in his overcoat pocket. But it was business, always business; never personal with such people. Such people never got close enough to anyone to consider anything personal.
    Monday, 15 December, Ben Marcus sat in a wicker-backed colonial chair in a smoke-filled room. The window behind him overlooked La Guardia Place and Bleecker. Sol Neumann sat to his right, and ahead of him a man called Henry Kossoff who carried a bruised and beaten look about him, as if he’d been tied tight, hands and feet, and dragged across rocky unforgiving ground. Kossoff was saying something, something about ‘The asshole didn’t show Ben . . . McCaffrey didn’t fucking show.’
    Marcus sighed and shook his head. He glanced towards Neumann. Neumann kept his gaze fixed on Kossoff.
    ‘Maybe he got himself fucked up,’ Kossoff said. ‘These guys . . . hell these blacks are running their own gangs. They’ve got a different view of things. They shoot people they don’t even know. Maybe he was into something and got himself into trouble,’ and there was something in his tone that suggested he hoped to hell that was the case. There was also something that said he knew it wasn’t.
    ‘He did a runner, Henry, plain and simple,’ Neumann said. ‘It’s not your fault . . . don’t sweat it.’ He turned slightly