The bars Danny Boy favored kept a bottle of Russian vodka in the freezer. That was what he drank and he liked it ice-cold but without any ice cubes rattling around in his glass and diluting his drink. We settled in at a booth in the back and a speedy little waitress brought his drink of choice and Coke for me. Danny Boy lowered his eyes to my glass, then raised them to my face.

“I’ve been cutting back some,” I said.

“Makes good sense.”

“I guess.”

“Moderation,” he said. “I tell you, Matt, those old Greeks knew it all. Moderation.”

He drank half his drink. He was good for perhaps eight like it in the course of a day. Call it a quart a day, all in a body that couldn’t go more than a hundred pounds, and I’d never seen him show the effects. He never staggered, never slurred his words, just kept on keeping on.

So? What did that have to do with me?

I sipped my Coke.

We sat there and told each other stories. Danny Boy’s business, if he had one, was information. Everything you told him got filed away in his mind, and by putting bits of data together and moving them around he brought in enough dollars to keep his shoes shined and his glass full. He would bring people together, taking a slice of their action for his troubles. His own hands stayed clean while he held a limited partnership in a lot of short-term enterprises, most of them faintly illicit. When I was on the force he’d been one of my best sources, an unpaid snitch who took his recompense in information.

He said, “You remember Lou Rudenko? Louie the Hat, they call him,” I said I did. “You hear about his mother?”

“What about her?”

“Nice old Ukrainian lady, still lived in the old neighborhood on East Ninth or Tenth, wherever it was. Been a widow for years. Must have been seventy, maybe closer to eighty. Lou’s got to be what, fifty?”

“Maybe.”

“Doesn’t matter. Point is this nice little old lady has a gentleman friend, a widower the same age as she is. He’s over there a couple nights a week and she cooks Ukrainian food for him and maybe they go to a movie if they can find one that doesn’t have people fucking all over the screen. Anyway, he comes over one afternoon, he’s all excited, he found a television set on the street. Somebody put it out for the garbage. He says people are crazy, they throw perfectly good things away, and he’s handy at fixing things and her own set’s on the fritz and this one’s a color set and twice the size of hers and maybe he can fix it for her.”

“And?”