His head moved side to side, kind of proud, or maybe it was just trying to stay on. “Well, you know how it is. I’m sure a lot of what the Broker gave us, all of us, came through those kinda channels. I can’t say more than half a dozen of the forty or so hits we’ve done over the years would be what I’d call, you know, mob hits. Mob related.”

He’d had enough Scotch to be pretty loose with his mouth. Our booth was over to one side-like I said before, isolated. The place had filled up a little, which I didn’t love, but the music was loud-more New Wave, The Romantics, “What I Like About You.” At the bar, two guys were side by side playing poker machines embedded in the counter, a little drunk and somewhat loud. So we really could talk freely.

Anyway, I knew what Jerry meant. The Broker himself had told me that superficially straight business types with even a tangential connection to the mob would go to somebody they knew in that left-handed domain and request help with a problem, and that problem would be shifted over to the Broker, and then to people like me. And Jerry and Varnos.

That’s how business partners and business rivals and wives and boyfriends of wives and girlfriends and all sorts of folks in the straight world wound up dead in various puzzling ways, accidental deaths, home invasions gone tragically awry, and so on. It could get fairly exotic.

Anyway, actual mob hits by any of Broker’s string rarely represented one Gotti going after another; that kind of action was kept in-house, soldier to soldier. When a guy like me was called in for a mob job, it was more likely one of those superficially straight business types getting removed. For non-payment, or tying off a crooked loose end, or whatever.

“Like this guy we’re here to do,” Jerry said. Way in the bag now. His speech was only slightly slurry, but his movements were strictly slow-motion. “He’s no mob guy. You know what he is? He’s a film director!”