There’s a table next to the bed, with a phone on it. He sits on the edge of the bed, reaches for the phone, but we get the sense that he can’t think of anybody to call.

  —You weren’t supposed to let me read this. ‘Don’t show it to anybody, not even Elaine.’

  —I’d say it depends who’s doing the supposing. My own supposition is that I’m the one who’s writing this, and I get to decide who reads it. How on earth could I write about you and not show you what I’d written? You read the whole thing?

  —No, duh, just the sentences with my name in them. Of course I read the whole thing.

  —It’s pretty much all stuff you already knew. But I thought . . .

  —Excuse me, but like hell it is. How come you never told me you had a brother?

  —I don’t have a brother. Where did you get that from?

  —Where indeed, and just who are you gaslighting here? All these years, and I never knew a thing about Joseph Jeremiah Scudder, and . . .

  —Oh, Jesus. You said I never told you I had a brother, and I got this image of a living brother my own age, and I never had one, and it didn’t occur to me that you meant . . .

  —Your baby brother.

  —I never mentioned him?

  —Never.

  —Are you sure?

  —I’d remember. One of the first things I ever told you about myself was I was an only child, and you said so were you. And more than once over the years we’ve commented on the fact that neither of us ever had any brothers or sisters, and now that we’ve both reached the age where everybody starts forgetting everything, you suddenly remember your brother Joe.

  —I never think of him.

  —You never think of him? Honey, you sit down to write about your life and you mention him on the first page.

  —I guess something triggered it. Looking back at those first years, which is something I don’t do often. I swear I never decided not to tell you about him, because the thought never came up. Look, didn’t you say that your parents tried to have more children?

  —Yes, and they might have, if they could have figured out a way to accomplish it without touching each other.

  —Didn’t you tell me your mother had a miscarriage?

  —That was before I was born. I never got the details, I don’t know what month she was in, but I don’t think she was very far along. She lost the baby, and then two years later she got pregnant again, and that turned out to be me. And she never got pregnant again, although the implication was that they forced themselves to try.

  —And you mentioned it to me, but only in passing, because it wasn’t that big a deal to you.

  —Well, why should it be? The baby she lost, if they even knew what it was, a boy or a girl, I can tell you nobody bothered to mention it to me. Your brother was born and lived a few days and had a name and everything.

  —All I can say is I never think of him. I never saw him, I never knew him, and he never had a chance to make much of an impression.

  —And your mother was never the same, and your father was never the same, and if you think none of this had any impact upon little Mattie . . .

  —Maybe. Huh.

  —What?

  —‘Don’t show it to anybody, not even Elaine.’ I’m beginning to think the sonofabitch knew what he was talking about.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  —You really think Anita was having an affair?

  —I got that impression. There was this couple lived down the block from us.

  —In Syosset?

  —Uh-huh. We were over there once on a Sunday, he liked to put on an apron and grill hotdogs. Except they weren’t hotdogs, he was from Wisconsin and the sausages had a special name. Bratwurst, that’s what he called them. ‘Come on over for some beer and brats.’ At first I thought he was talking about his kids.

  —And you think Anita took a liking to his bratwurst?

  —You had to say that, didn’t you?

  —Pretty much, yeah. Seriously, what did you do? Use your magical cop intuition?

  —She spoke admiringly of him, and said it was a shame his wife let herself go the way she did. And then she stopped talking about him, and that struck me.

  —The dog that didn’t bark in the nighttime?

  —Something like that, but I shrugged it off. What I told myself was that I’d only had the thought because I wanted it to be true.

  —Why would you want . . .Oh, sauce for the goose?

  —Maybe. If she’s got something on the side, I don’t have to feel guilty about how I’m living my life. But I didn’t really dwell on it, and then we were going through a bad patch . . .

  —You and Anita.

  —. . . and she more or less said she was seeing somebody. I don’t remember how she put it, but the implication was clear. I could have picked up on it, and I think that’s what she wanted me to do.

  —But you didn’t.

  —No. She must have known I got the message loud and clear, but I didn’t do anything with it, and it never came up again. I suppose I thought about it from time to time, and there must have been moments when I entertained the wistful fantasy of the two of them running off together, but I don’t think there was ever much chance of that. You can take the girl out of St. Athanasius, etc.

  —Who was he, do you happen to know? Not Herr Bratwurst, Saint Whatchamacallit.

  —Athanasius. No idea. So yes, I’m reasonably certain she had an affair, although I don’t think it was the kind that would put Antony and Cleopatra in the shade. But whatever it was, it was over half a century ago, and so was our marriage, and the woman’s been dead for twenty years.

  —Can it really be that long?

  —I think it’s more like twenty-two, and don’t ask me where the time goes. When I went to her funeral, that must have been the first time in ages that I thought about her adventure with the bratwurst guy.

  —You thought about it at her funeral?

  —You think about everything at funerals. That’s why people go to them.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  —Lee Konitz.

  —What about him?

  —The alto player the night we met. It wasn’t Lou Donaldson, it was Lee Konitz.

  —I’ll take your word for it.

  —And the club was the Half Note.

  —Of blessed memory. Didn’t I say as much?

  —You just said Hudson Street.

  —Whatever. You’re sure it wasn’t Lou Donaldson?

  —Positive. It was Lee Konitz.

  —Who died a couple of years ago, if I remember correctly, though whether he died before or after Lou Donaldson I’d be hard-pressed to say.

  —Lou Donaldson’s still alive. He’ll be 96 on the first of November, and it’s only been a couple of years since he retired. Don’t look at me like that. You really think you’re the only one who knows about Google?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  —I never saw that apartment. I knew you had a place but I don’t think I knew where it was. On West Twenty-fourth Street?

  —Just west of Ninth Avenue.

  —But you thought you’d be better off in a hotel?

  —I don’t know what I thought, and I’m not sure you could call it thinking. I’d have something running around in my mind, and I’d go act on it. The idea came to me, and the next thing I knew I was down at Charles Street, putting in my papers and handing in my shield.

  —Your famous gold shield. You threw it down on the desk.

  —No, that’s how they’d show it in the movie that thank God we’ll never get to see. I handed it to Eddie and he handed it back and we did that little dance, like two guys on Forty-seventh Street who keep selling each other the same diamond, and eventually I walked out of there without it. I didn’t turn in my gun because they already had it.

  —Since the . . .

  —Since the shooting, right. I never did go back on duty, so I never saw the gun again.

  —I’m glad of that. The idea of you holed up with a bottle and a gun . . .

  —I don’t remember any suicidal ideation. A lot of things crossed my mind around then, but eating a gun wasn’t one of them.

  —Even so. When a man’s having a breakdown, and . . .

  —Is that what I was having?

  —I don’t know if they’d call it that now. A mental health episode?

  —Whatever. The most self-destructive thing I did, besides flooding my liver with more alcohol than it knew what to do with, was give my keys back to my landlord. Who gives away a rent-controlled apartment?

  It’s hard to understand why I gave the keys back to the landlord. I owed a few months’ rent by then, but he wasn’t pressing me, and I could have written a check for it readily enough. Then, when I finally made the break with Anita, I wouldn’t have had to look for a hotel room.

  That would have been the way to go, if I’d known what I was doing or where I was going. But I’d come to know I was done being a cop before I realized that I was also done being a husband and father, and giving up the apartment was of a piece with giving back my badge and gun.

  Twenty-fourth Street had been a part of the job, an invaluable accessory as long as I was working out of the station house on Charles Street. But I was done there. I was going to be living full-time in Syosset, and what did I need with a crash pad in Chelsea?

  It took less than a month in Syosset for me to see that being a cop wasn’t the only part of my life that had run its course. There was a moment, while I was packing my two suitcases, that I thought of calling my landlord and finding out if he’d installed another tenant yet.

  I didn’t make the call. Part of it, I suppose, was a reluctance to feel like more of an idiot than usual, but along with that I had the sense that my circumstances called for a new start in a new part of town.

  My hotel room cost more than I’d been paying on Twenty-fourth Street, and provided me with considerably less than half the square footage. Instead of a private entrance, it came with an attended desk I had to walk past every time I came in or went out. Now and then I’d think about the apartment I’d given up, and wish I hadn’t—but not often, and not with any real regret. I’d made the right move.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  And I made the right move letting Elaine read what I’ve written, although it’s cost me a few days at the computer. There was no reason to say anything to her about the project, not early on, but as the words mounted up it began to feel as though I was withholding something from her, something increasingly substantial as one day’s work followed another’s.

  We talked at length about what I’d written—I’ve reproduced a portion of it here—and then she broke off in the middle of a sentence and said that was enough. “I don’t want to get in the way of what you’re doing,” she said.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  So here I am, back at it.

  One thing she’d commented on was my first partner, Vince Mahaffey. She’d never met him, of course, but he’d figured in a lot of the stories I told. She wanted to know whatever became of him, and if we’d stayed in touch.

  Of course we’d said we would. And of course we didn’t, not really. I switched station houses, from the Slope to the Village, and in the process I’d left Vince behind with my silver shield and my Robert Hall suits. Not consciously, not intentionally, but that’s what happened—and it was in the nature of things for it to happen.

  We were never friends. We were closer than friends, in many respects, but what bonded us was not the pleasure we took in one another’s company as much as the role we played in our lives on the job. We were partners, joined together in an enterprise that always threatened to be perilous, its perils by no means limited to the ever-present possibility that someone could start shooting at us. Either of us could at any moment be called upon to save the other’s life, and that’s a stronger bond than generally exists between two fellows who live on the same block and get together every Saturday for eighteen holes of golf.

  I can recall only two meetings and a phone call after our partnership ended. The phone call was first, and when I placed it I must have been a month or so into my time at the Sixth. I was in Syosset, the boys were asleep, Anita was at a friend’s house, and I turned off the television set and picked up the phone. He sounded surprised to hear from me, and a little guarded at first, as if something I knew was now about to come back and bite him.

  But it didn’t take long before the edge went away. He updated me on some guys we both knew at the Seven-Eight, and I found something to say about whatever case I was working at the time, and we wished each other the best. And that was that.

  I was glad I’d called, but realized I was unlikely to dial that number again.

  Then an early case we’d had finally came up for trial, and both of us were called to testify. We each had separate briefings with an ADA, then both showed up at the courthouse on Schermerhorn Street. I was in a suit—I was always in a suit—and I was surprised to see Vince in his blue uniform.

  He was called first, and he’d barely gotten past stating his name and rank when the two opposing lawyers paused for a sidebar. Next thing anybody knew, they’d arranged a plea deal and the judge was dismissing the jury.

  Outside, I asked him if he had time for a drink. “Right around the corner,” he said, “if you don’t mind drinking in a room full of lawyers.”

  The place he took me to was dark and quiet, and we bought drinks at the bar and took them to a table. I observed that he’d reversed the usual order of things; back before we moved up to plainclothes, we’d always show up for court dates in suits, and today he’d left the suits in the closet and put on his old uniform for the court appearance.

  “But I guess it worked,” I said, “because all you had to do was state your name and swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, and that scared the sonofabitch into copping a plea.”

  He laughed, and picked up his drink, then put it down and said, “No, see, this is what I wear all the time these days.”

  “They put you back in uniform?”

  “At my request. My insistence, I should say, because the first thing they did was tell me what I wanted was irregular.”

  “Irregular?”

  “‘Highly irregular, Officer Mahaffey.’ Hey, why do I want to spend good money on suits? Plus it’s simpler this way. You put on the blue bag, you don’t have to figure out which tie goes with it.”

  “Okay.”

  He laughed. “That’s a polite way of saying I must be crazy, but not really. Moving up to plainclothes was a great opportunity, and one I’ve got you to thank for—”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No, it’s true, and we both know it’s true. And I started wearing suits and I got the job done, so I could have stayed where I was after you made it across the bridge. And in fact I did, and they partnered me up with a guy named Alfie Riordan, I don’t know if you knew him—”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “—but he was okay, we got along all right, but what I realized was I missed the uniform. I hadn’t known I missed it when it was you and me, but now I did. I like walking down the street, or just sitting over a cup of coffee, and everybody who looks at me knows they’re looking at a cop.”

  “You think a suit changes that?”

  “I guess I’ve got the look. All these years, but to tell you the truth I think I always looked the part. School I went to, there was always someone looking to steer you toward the priesthood, but with me they didn’t bother. They looked at me and knew where I’d wind up.”

  “Destiny,” I said.

  “Something like that. But kids, little kids, they only know you’re a cop when they see the uniform.” His face darkened. “Some of ’em, they get to be a certain age, you’re something to be afraid of. But the rest, and especially the younger ones, what they see is someone who’s there to protect them. That’s what they see, and it shows on their faces.” He shrugged. “And, you know. I guess I like that.”

  Afterward I wasn’t sure how to feel. The return to uniform felt like a step backward, a regression, but he seemed happier for it. I remember thinking that he was more content being what he’d always been than I was with my well-cut suits and my gold shield, but I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking along those lines.

  Truth to tell, I didn’t think often of my old partner.

  The next time he showed up was from a distance—in the paper, and on the local news. There was one of those investigations into police corruption that come up every few years, this one centered on Brooklyn, with the Seven-Eight one of four or five precincts in the spotlight. They’d set up a commission to investigate, headed up by a hungry young ADA fresh out of St. John’s law school, and you’d recognize his name; the publicity he stirred up ultimately got him all the way to the Governor’s Mansion in Albany, and he might have stayed there longer if he’d been able to keep his pants buttoned.

  The scandal that returned him to private life felt a lot like poetic justice, but it didn’t have anything to do with Vince Mahaffey, however satisfying he may have found it. Vince came under fire for two missteps—taking money from a probable drug dealer and giving false testimony in a criminal trial.

  He did what you do, he cooperated with the commission but not with enthusiasm, dragging his feet and implicating his fellow officers as little as possible. In return, they let him retire. He had his twenty in, and five or more years on top of that, and he got to put in his papers and collect his pension.

  But they took the badge and the gun, and he couldn’t wear his blue uniform anymore.

  While this was going on, I paid it as little attention as possible. I didn’t think I had anything to worry about myself, although I’d cut enough corners during my time at the Seven-Eight. I’d taken money, of course, and on occasion I’d stood up in court and sworn to tell the truth only to put a spin on it. But all of that was history, and it was Brooklyn history at that, and I was in Manhattan and I didn’t figure it would touch me. And it didn’t.