“I don’t remember.”

“Poor little bastard. When’s the funeral?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re going, aren’t you?”

“No. I don’t really know the family that well. I’m sending flowers.”

He looked at me with as long a face as a round-faced guy could muster. “You oughta go. He was working for you when he got it.”

“I’d be intruding. I’d be out of place.”

“You should do kaddish for the kid, Nate.”

A mourner’s prayer.

“Jesus Christ, Barney, I’m no Jew. I haven’t been in a synagogue more than half a dozen times in my life, and then it was social occasions.”

“Maybe you don’t consider yourself a Jew, with that Irish mug of yours your ma bequeathed you…but you’re gonna have a rude awakening one of these days, boyo.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s plenty of people you’re just another ‘kike’ to, believe you me.”

I sipped the beer. “Nudge me when you get to the point.”

“You owe this kid kaddish, Nate.”

“Hell, doesn’t that go on for months? I don’t know the lingo. And if you think I’m putting on some fuckin’ beanie and…”

There was a tap on my shoulder. Buddy Gold, the bartender, an ex-pug, leaned in to say, “You got a call.”

I went behind the bar to use the phone. It was Sergeant Lou Sapperstein at Central HQ in the Loop; Lou had been my boss on the pickpocket detail. I’d called him this morning with a request.

“Tubbo’s coppers made their raid this morning, around nine,” Lou said. Sapperstein was a hardnosed, balding cop of about forty-five and one of the few friends I had left on the PD.

“And?”

“And the union hall was empty, ’cept for a bartender. Pribyl and his partner Bert Gray took a whole squad up there, but Rooney and his boys had flew the coop.”

“Fuck. Somebody tipped them.”

“Are you surprised?”

“Yeah. Surprised I expected the cops to play it straight for a change. You wouldn’t have the address of that union, by any chance?”