“Oh, shit, it sounds ignorant and bigoted but I can’t help it. This used to be a white city and now there’s days when I feel like I’m the only white man left in it.”

The silence stretched. Then he said, “They smoke on the subway now. You ever notice?”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Never used to happen. A guy might murder both his parents with a fire axe but he wouldn’t dare light up a cigarette on the subway. Now you got middle-class people lighting their cigarettes, puffing away. Just in the last few months. You know how it started?”

“How?”

“Remember about a year ago? A guy was smoking on the PATH train and a PATH cop asked him to put it out, and the guy drew a gun and shot the cop dead? Remember?”

“I remember.”

“That’s what started it. You read about that and whoever you are, a cop or a private citizen, you’re not in a rush to tell the guy across the aisle to put out his fucking cigarette. So a few people light up and nobody does anything about it, and more people do it, and who’s gonna give a shit about smoking in the subway when it’s a waste of time to report a major crime like burglary? Stop enforcing a law and people stop respecting it.” He frowned. “But think about that PATH cop. You like that for a way to die? Ask a guy to put out a cigarette and bang, you’re dead.”

I found myself telling him about Rudenko’s mother, dead of a bomb blast because her friend had brought home the wrong television set. And so we traded horror stories. He told of a social worker, lured onto a tenement roof, raped repeatedly and thrown off the building to her death. I recalled something I’d read about a fourteen-year-old shot by another boy the same age, both of them strangers to each other, the killer insisted that his victim had laughed at him. Durkin told me about some child-abuse cases that had ended in death, and about a man who had smothered his girlfriend’s infant daughter because he was sick of paying for a baby-sitter everytime the two of them went to the movies. I mentioned the woman in Gravesend, dead of a shotgun blast while she hung clothes in her closet. There was an air of Can You Top This? to our dialogue.

He said, “The mayor thinks he’s got the answer. The death penalty. Bring back the big black chair.”

“Think it’ll happen?”