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dollar bill from his pants pocket and handed it across.
    â€˜Thank you, sir,’ Murch said. He saluted with the hand holding the dollar, climbed behind the wheel, and drove away. He was smiling as he made the right turn into 53rd Street; it wasn’t every day a man gave you a tip for stealing his car.
    It was rush hour, and several cabs had to be hustled out of their jocks before Murch reached Eleventh Avenue. Three times he got the supreme accolade: Cabbies in his wake opened their doors, put one foot on the pavement, stepped out, and shook ther fists.
    The West Side Highway was no good at this time of day, as Stan Murch well knew, but it was possible to make fairly good time if one drove under it, down along the docks. You had to be willing to go around trucks parked sideways every block or so, but that was all.
    The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel was hopeless, as usual, but at rush hour there just isn’t any sensible way to get to Brooklyn, so Murch waited it out, revving the engine in park and drumming his fingertips on the steering wheel to a stereo cassette of ‘Mantovani Swings Bartok for Sleepy Lovers’; these cassettes were very nice, particularly in a tunnel where the radio couldn’t pick up anything.
    On the other side, Murch paid the toll, angled across seven lanes of fist-shakers, and took an obscure exit marked ‘Local Streets’. While the rest of the world faced stop-and-go traffic on Flatbush and Prospect Expressway, Stan Murch angled down through neighborhoods that hadn’t seen a strange face since the Brooklyn Navy Yard closed, and in the general vicinity of Sheepshead Bay he stopped in front of a metal garage door in a long gray brick wall and honked three times. A small door beside the garage entrance carried a sign reading ‘J & L Novelties – Deliveries’. This door opened; a thin black man with a sweatband around his head leaned out, and Murch waved at him. The thin man nodded, disappeared, and a second later the metal door began to creak upward.
    Murch drove into a huge concrete room that looked much like a parking garage, with metal support pillars spaced all around it. A dozen or so cars were scattered around the walls, leaving most of the space empty. These were all in the process of being repainted. A used oil drum next to one pillar was half full of license plates, most of them from out-of-state. A dozen men, most of them black or Puerto Rican, were working on the cars; this was obviously an equal-opportunity employer. A battered plastic radio in a far corner raspingly played W.A.B.C., a local shlock-rock station.
    The thin black man with the sweatband motioned for Murch to leave the Imperial over against the wall to the right. Murch left it there, went through the glove compartment on the off chance, found nothing of interest, and walked back over toward the door. The thin man, who had shut the garage door again, grinned at Murch and said, ‘You sure do bring in a lot of cars.’
    â€˜The streets are full of them,’ Murch said. ‘Tell Mr. Marconi I’d appreciate the money in a hurry, okay?’
    â€˜What do you do with all your money?’
    â€˜I’m the sole support of my mother.’
    â€˜She isn’t back in the cab yet?’
    â€˜Still got the neck brace on,’ Murch said. ‘She could drive, but people generally don’t like a ride in a cab with a driver with a neck brace on. It’s a superstition, I guess.’
    â€˜How long’s she got to keep it on?’
    â€˜Till we settle out of court,’ Murch said. ‘Tell Mr. Marconi, will you?’
    â€˜Sure,’ the thin man said. ‘But, by the way, he isn’t Mr Marconi any more. He changed his name to March legally.’
    â€˜Oh, yeah? How come?’
    â€˜The Italian-American Defamation League made him do it.’
    â€˜Huh,’ Murch said. He rolled the new name on his lips: ‘Salvatore March. Doesn’t sound