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chances.’
    â€˜You mean that no matter what I say, you’re bound to do it sooner or later.’
    â€˜That’s right.’
    There was a fight on in the ring, but we didn’t watch it. We were watching each other. Dr Cooper rubbed his hand around his chin. ‘I’d like to be there when it happens. And I could find twenty other guys in half an hour who’d back you up.’
    â€˜I don’t want anybody around.’
    He looked at me worried. ‘You don’t expect to use brass knuckles or a roll of nickels or something like that, do you?’
    â€˜No. But I don’t want anybody around.’ He didn’t understand if he was around when it happened I would have to get him too. And I didn’t want to do that.
    He shook his head and laughed. ‘George, I think you’re crazy, but you’re a man after my own heart. As a matter of fact, if you can do the job in style, I know three guys in the racket who’ll give you jobs tomorrow.’
    I said, ‘Then where is he now?’
    â€˜If things haven’t changed in ten years, he’s probably over at Tuffy’s, hoisting a couple. You’ll never get him alone there, but you can tail him when he goes out until you get him where you want him.’
    He said it so much like my thoughts that it sounded like an echo coming back to me. I said, ‘Where would he go after Tuffy’s?’
    â€˜Well, his story is in, but he might want to do a column on the fight. That means he’d head back to the Press. ’
    â€˜Does he go home after that?’ I wanted to ask was he married or maybe living with some people, so I would know how everything stood, but I was afraid it wouldn’t sound right.
    Dr Cooper said, ‘Hell, nothing may be the way I told it. The best bet is to start at Tuffy’s and tag along.’
    â€˜Where’s Tuffy’s?’
    He said, ‘Right across the street, from the Garden,’ and then, when I started to push my way out, he grabbed his coat and hat and came right after me. He said, ‘I hope you don’t mind my going part of the way, George. You’re making an old dream of mine come true, and I owe you a drink for that.’
    I wished he hadn’t done that. Because the more he followed me, the more he was getting into trouble, and he was so nice it was crazy to think about killing him. I mean, he was a professor and all that, but he cursed like anybody else, and he was being friendly like Flanagan was sometime.
    And here he was getting more and more into trouble, and I couldn’t even tell him about it. Because the big thing was to kill Al Judge, and that might spoil it.

Chapter Nine
    I KNEW about the guy who ran Tuffy’s. His name was Tuffy Walsh, and ten, twenty years ago he was one of the best fighters around. He was only a little guy but he had plenty of heart and he wasn’t afraid of anybody. He even had a fight with the heavyweight champ and he would have licked him but he didn’t have enough weight. I knew all this because only a couple of months back there was a big piece in the Press about him, and all the old-timers in my father’s bar started to argue about it.
    The piece said that Tuffy Walsh was all fed up with fighting and drinking and stuff like that and he was writing poetry. It must have been good poetry too, because they were making a book out of it and there was even one of the poems in the Press . It told how things looked in the Wintertime when there was snow all over the ground, and it sounded all right to me. A lot of guys think poetry is dumb, but I don’t. There’s a couple of poems in Rudyard Kipling that are all right, and once I tried to write one but it didn’t come out good. So I knew Tuffy Walsh was plenty smart if he could write good poems like the one in the Press .
    But some of the guys started laughing and said Tuffy Walsh must be punchy from all the fights he had, and that got old