Not that I investigate much that is big or dangerous. Some industrial work and some divorces. Armed-guard jobs, and subpoenas for bread and butter. But mostly the personal problems of small people who want to apply a little pressure on someone but don’t want the police. It’s not work I especially like, but a man must eat, and it’s work I know how to do. (Most men work at what they happened to learn how to do, not at what they wish they had learned how to do.) I’m my own boss, and I don’t have to wear a white shirt or get up early. The work has one big drawback as far as Chelsea is concerned — it makes me a cop. In Chelsea that means something. It means that the only real friends I have are my woman Marty and Joe Harris. And even Joe doesn’t tell me all.

‘Who mugs The Man in broad daylight just for a gun?’ Joe said.

Joe was right, of course. To get a handgun isn’t exactly as easy as picking fruit off a tree in this country, not even in Chelsea, but there are a hundred easier ways than mugging a cop. No, Stettin’s mugging was all wrong.

‘Maybe just a fast buck?’ I said.

‘Come on, Pirate,’ Joe said. ‘Not even the new breed of punk strong-arms a cop for his loose change.’

‘Pirate’ Joe still calls me sometimes. The old nicknames stick even when a man has been away from his past as much as I have. I must know ten girls who are now six feet tall, fat, or forty, but who are still called ‘Bunny’ or ‘Puppy’. Danny the Pirate. That was the name I got a long time ago when I lost my arm. I tell a lot of stories about how I lost the arm. Exciting stories if you buy me a beer. It’s the left arm. I’m right-handed. There is some good in everything if you look at it right.

The truth is that I lost the arm when Joe and I were looting a ship. We were seventeen then. It was a dark night, and I fell into a hold. The arm broke in so many places they had to take it off just below the shoulder. Maybe if I had been rich I’d still have two arms. The city hospital didn’t have the doctors or the time to take a chance on my life. That doesn’t make me bitter. They saved my life. Fifty years earlier there wouldn’t have been a hospital for me to be saved in. Everything is relative.