‘Be careful,’ Joe said.

I put the. 38 Police Special in my belt. The night street was as hot as it had been at noon. Pete Vitanza’s list gave Olsen’s address as on Nineteenth Street, not far from Packy’s. I assumed that Swede would have gone home to clean off the garbage. Not that I felt the need for revenge. As far as I was concerned, Swede Olsen could go his way unchastised by me. I would be glad to never run into the Swede, or Norwegian, again. The gun was just for show. If it came to a fight, the odds were still all on his side. But if I was going on I had to talk to Swede sooner or later, and I could not let him think he had scared me, even if he had. That’s bad business and bad living.

It’s not so important to win a fight, but it is important to not let the other man win. I wanted Swede to get the idea that I’d get up each time he knocked me down. The fight wouldn’t end. That’s the best way to make a man stop knocking you down — make him know that it won’t get him what he wants. And I wanted him to know that I knew who had jumped me. I’m supposed to be a detective, and it might worry him to think that I knew my work.

The building was not too bad, and not too good. The usual six-storey old-law tenement with the fire escape in front. There were worse on the block, and there were better. It had been worked on some, but it had not exactly been renovated. In the white-tiled vestibule I studied the doorbells and mailboxes. I got a kind of surprise. The Olsens lived on the top floor, which is the cheap floor in a six-storey walkup. But from the look of the mailboxes they had the whole floor. That made their place the best apartment in the building, or at least the biggest. In this building, unrenovated, there were four to six apartments on each floor. The Olsens had a whole floor. Olsen had his name on all four mailboxes of the top floor. It meant that there was money around somewhere. It made them look like pretty fair-sized fish in a small and shabby pond.