“Stay out of the Kitchen,” he supplied. “When I was growing up here, the Westies pretty much ran the place. They weren’t terribly efficient, like the Italian mob, but they were colorful and bloodthirsty enough to make up for it. There was a man two doors down the street from me who disappeared, and they never did find the body. Except one of his hands turned up in somebody’s freezer on Fifty-third Street and Eleventh Avenue. They wanted to be able to put his fingerprints on things long after he was dead and gone.”

“Would that work?”

“With luck,” he said, “we’ll never know. The Westies are mostly gone now, and the tenement apartments they lived in are all tarted up, with stockbrokers and lawyers renting them now. Which are you?”

“Me?”

“A stockbroker? Or a lawyer?”

She grinned. “Neither one, I’m afraid. I’m an actress.”

“Even better.”

“Which means I take a class twice a week,” she said, “and run around to open casting calls and auditions.”

“And wait tables?”

“I did some of that in the Cities. I suppose I’ll have to do it again here, when I start to run out of money.”

“The Cities?”

“The Twin Cities. Minneapolis and St. Paul.”

“That’s where you’re from?”

They talked about where she was from, and along the way he told her his name was Jim. She was Jennifer, she told him. He related another story about the neighborhood — he was really a pretty good storyteller — and by then her Rob Roy was gone and so was his Jameson. “Let me get us another round,” he said, “and then why don’t we take our drinks to a table? We’ll be more comfortable, and it’ll be quieter.”

He was talking about the neighborhood.

“Irish, of course,” he said, “but that was only part of it. You had blocks that were pretty much solid Italian, and there were Poles and other Eastern Europeans. A lot of French, too, working at the restaurants in the theater district. You had everything, really. The UN’s across town on the East River, but you had your own General Assembly here in the Kitchen. Fifty-seventh Street was a dividing line; north of that was San Juan Hill, and you had a lot of blacks living there. It was an interesting place to grow up, if you got to grow up, but no sweet young thing from Minnesota would want to move here.”