“Mind if I come along?”

“Wouldn’t be appropriate, Heller.”

“The kid worked for me. He got killed working for me.”

“No. We’ll handle it. Go home! Get some sleep.”

“I’ll go home,” I said.

A chill breeze was whispering.

“But the sleep part,” I said, “that I can’t promise you.”

The next afternoon I was having a beer in a booth in the bar next to the deli below my office. Formerly a blind pig-a speakeasy that looked shuttered from the street (even now, you entered through the deli)-it was a business investment of fighter Barney Ross, as was reflected by the framed boxing photos decorating the dark, smoky little joint.

I grew up with Barney on the West Side. Since my family hadn’t practiced Judaism in several generations, I was shabbes goy for Barney’s very Orthodox folks, a kid doing chores and errands for them from Friday sundown through Saturday.

But we didn’t become really good friends, Barney and me, till we worked Maxwell Street as pullers-teenage street barkers who literally pulled customers into stores for bargains they had no interest in.

Barney, a roughneck made good, was a real Chicago success story. He owned this entire building, and my office-which, with its Murphy bed, was also my residence-was space he traded me for keeping an eye on the place.come alongas his nightwatchman, unless a paying job like Goldblatt’s came along to take precedence. The lightweight champion of the world was having a beer, too, in that back booth; he wore a cheerful blue and white sportshirt and a dour expression.

“I’m sorry about your young pal,” Barney said.

“He wasn’t a ‘pal,’ really. Just an acquaintance.”

“I don’t know that Douglas Park crowd myself. But to think of a kid, on his twenty-first birthday…” His mildly battered bulldog countenance looked woeful. “He have a girl?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s her name?”