stood on platforms and spoke into loud, muffled mikes, extolling the desirability of viewing In Person the Fattest Boy In The World, the Smallest Living Man In The World, the Strangest Teenage Women In The World (one of whom had no face, thanks to the radiation color TVs emit) and a woman who before your very eyes turned into a gorilla, and no doubt was the only one of her kind In The World, and other men, not all of them skinny in black tee-shirts but many of them needing baths, coaxed passersby into throwing balls and throwing money away (sometimes literally, in the dime/quarter/dollar toss) in pursuit of prizes of no discernible worth, including stuffed animals of indeterminate species and cigarette lighters with the American flag on them.

The mark was a guy running a game tent, a red canvas cubby-hole where you threw baseballs at milk bottles. You could win anything from a tiny stuffed skunk to a pink stuffed dog the size of a Volkswagen. Odds are you’d win the skunk.

The guy was short, fat and dark, Jewish maybe, or Italian. Could be either one, if he was a mob guy hiding out, which I figured him to be.

Understand, I was never told why this or any mark was getting hit, other than somebody wanted them hit bad enough to pay good money. Much of what I did for Broker was tied to the mob but only in that clients were often referred through mob sources; relatively little of what I or any of us did for Broker was directly Family-related. They had their own people to do that kind of thing, and only in special instances would it prove useful to them to bring in somebody outside, like me…

However sometimes it was pretty obvious a hit was a Family contract, and this time was one of them: the way the guy looked, not just his ethnic look but his vaguely urban speech and his almost polished manner-none of it fit the carny image. Not that everybody connected with the carnival was some kind of lowlife or deadbeat: not at all. But the professional carny men have a look to them, as does the summer help, the kids (including pretty college girls, some of whom work game tents, others of whom work as strippers) who do the carny number as a money-making lark. A guy like our short, fat, dark, somewhat well-bred mark sticks out like a nun at a nightclub.