I bought our next round. Any compunctions he had about having a pimp’s money pay for his booze seemed to have been dissolved by the same alcohol that had given rise to them. He was visibly drunk now, but only if you knew where to look. The eyes had a glaze on them, and there was a matching glaze on his whole manner. He was holding up his end of a typical alcoholic conversation, wherein two drunks take polite turns talking aloud to their own selves.

I wouldn’t have noticed this if I’d been matching him drink for drink. But I was sober, and as the booze got to him I felt the gulf widening between us.

I tried to keep the conversation on the subject of Kim Dakkinen but it wouldn’t stay there. He wanted to talk about everything that was wrong with New York.

“You know what it is,” he said, leaning forward, lowering his voice, as if we weren’t the only two customers in the bar by now, just us and the bartender. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s niggers.”

I didn’t say anything.

“And spics. The blacks and the Hispanics.”

I said something about black and Puerto Rican cops. He rode right over it. “Listen, don’t tell me,” he said. “I got a guy I been partnered with a lot, Larry Haynes his name is, maybe you know him—“ I didn’t “—and he’s as good as they come. I’d trust the man with my life. Shit, I have trusted him with my life. He’s black as coal and I never met a better man in or out of the department. But that’s got nothing to do with what I’m talking about.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Look,” he said, “you ever ride the subway?”

“When I have to.”

“Well, shit, nobody rides it by choice. It’s the whole city in a nutshell, the equipment breaks down all the time, the cars are filthy with spray paint and they stink of piss and the transit cops can’t make a dent in the crime down there, but what I’m talking about, shit, I get on a subway and I look around and you know where I am? I’m in a fucking foreign country.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean everybody’s black or Spanish. Or oriental, we got all these new Chinese immigrants coming in, plus there’s the Koreans. Now the Koreans are perfect citizens, they open up all these great vegetable markets all over the city, they work twenty hours a day and send their kids to college, but it’s all part of something.”

“Part of what?”