My best boldface names. They both worked for Azar. Frankie Nickels was New York’s premier talent and Kong was top tech support. Frankie had the drop on me, but I heard the nickels shift in his pocket overhead. That was his signature device: leaving nickels at the site of the job. As a kid Frankie would shoplift some big-ticket item and leave a pair of nickels behind so he could tell the cops, “Hey, I wasn’t stealing! I was buying on deep discount!” Juvie humor. Anyway, when I heard the change overhead I was all over the button. I didn’t even have to look up. There was brief hand-to-hand (hand-to-paw, really: after getting punched in the mouth I assumed a strategic defensive posture, which to the untrained observer would look much like closing my eyes and curling up into a ball while Pinky got himself a mouthful of pant leg that delayed Frankie’s getaway long enough for the back-up to surround the building). He fled and ended up falling from the roof and breaking his spine. Kong was apprehended two blocks away, in the van, and cut a deal with the DA, who then convicted and sentenced Frankie Nickels in record time. Two days later Kong goes into a public restroom alone and comes out minus his hands, courtesy of Jimmy the Hat. Normally Jimmy uses his knives to remove a portion of a victim’s head—he “takes off your hat.” That’s his modus. In this case, however, taking only Kong’s hands was not a mercy. He wanted to advertise the message: this is what happens to you when you roll over on Azar.

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I was an English major because a) I liked sitting around in dark rooms by myself and b) I craved the stories of other people. My thesis was on Dickens; I couldn’t stop reading about him because all his stories are, one way or another, about the lifesaving power of family. If I couldn’t have my own family, I thought, I can at least have Oliver, Nicholas, Pip, Little Nell. Senior year I even won a Fulbright to study “the role of family and forgiveness in Indian literature,” but I turned it down because I also got offered a job as a uni at the Larco Museum in Lima, a well-known feeder program for pulses. Still, I regret not taking the Fulbright sometimes. Like right this very second, for example.

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