I got the loot out a porthole, and Joe dragged me off the pier and got help. The only charge the company could have made was trespassing. They made no charge. You see, my father was once a New York cop. I had friends on the force. Or, to be accurate, my mother had friends on the force. She had a lot of friends.

The cops forgot the robbery. I’ve got no record. The natives did not forget. It wasn’t our only robbery in those days, just the one we were almost caught at. The neighbourhood knew it all. I lost my arm. The rest was inevitable: Danny the Pirate. They remember that in Chelsea. That’s fine with me. It takes off some of the cop-taint. It makes the natives sometimes overlook the fact that I’ve lived away so much, that I say things that show I’ve read books. It gets me friends I need on occasion. The natives remember the seventeen-year-old pirate, and the police forget. I like it both ways.

‘A cop gets killed, that figures,’ Packy Wilson said to the bar in general. ‘It’s the robbin’ and not killin’ that’s wrong.’

‘A junkie maybe,’ Joe suggested. ‘He could sell the gun for a fix. Maybe use it for a show of power.’

‘Could be,’ Packy said. ‘For a fix a junkie tries anything.’

‘A junkie trembles when he sees a cop on a movie screen,’ I said. ‘Never a junkie.’

I could not see an addict attacking a policeman in uniform on his own beat in broad daylight. But then I did not see anyone attacking a cop under those conditions.

About then the night regulars began to come into the bar, and Packy had a cash register to mother. Joe had to begin to work in earnest. First things come first in Chelsea, as they do in the rest of the world for that matter, and there was money to be made.