Well, really, he did understand. What he could not do was condone it. He put this very gun to his head and blew his brains out; that had been last year. And I carried the gun with me to make sure I never forgot that. I wouldn’t hesitate to use it, but I wouldn’t use it carelessly. It was the only conscience I had.

I was still not above taking a little honest graft-you didn’t take a job this dirty and this dangerous for the piddling paycheck alone.

But I owed it to Papa not to abuse the policeman’s power. That’s what he hated about us: billy-club-swinging, trigger-happy bastards is what we were, to that old communist.

Maybe Papa would be up there watching this afternoon, when I did something worthwhile, did the kind of thing a cop is supposed to do. Righted a wrong like Nick Carter or Sherlock Holmes in the books I read as a kid. Restored a missing child to his distraught parents. Papa would like that, up in heaven. Only Papa didn’t believe in heaven and neither did I.

“Not so close,” I cautioned the cabbie. “Keep two or three cars behind.”

He nodded and backed off. We were on Lake Shore Drive, following the Checker Cab up the Gold Coast-aristocratic brownstone mansions hobnobbing with modern high-rise apartments, fronting an unimpressed, choppy white-and-gray Lake Michigan. One of these days I had to look into finding a flat in this neighborhood-hell, they started at a mere three-hundred-fifty a month.

The Checker pulled off at Irving Park and so did we, moving into an area that had once been an exclusive section of town itself, before the money moved north. Which was a boon for criminals-a whole gang, particularly one on the lam, could move into one of these sprawling six-room numbers, and live a life of ease, with the nightlife of Uptown nearby. If I had a crook’s money, I might move in here myself.