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fable, I’ve never heard one.”
    “Irish I am,” I answered. “I would steal from you, but I would never lie.”
    “Tell me why you became a cop, Irish.”
    “I can never say for sure. But I like to imagine that a cop, if he’s good, is somebody who wants to make some sense of the world.”
    “Oh, then it’s true what they say about Detective Neil Hockaday; you’re not an easy man.”
    “What is an easy man?”
    “He’s somebody who wouldn’t think twice about trying to make sense of things because he already knows that if the world made any sense at all, it would be the men riding sidesaddle.”
    I laughed for what seemed a long time, and it felt good. “Can there be any Irish in Ruby Flagg?”
    “It could happen,” she said.
    Ruby fixed me with her chocolate eyes. Then she folded her hands again, long fingers with clear, polished nails touched the tiny cleft in her chin.
    I thought about the champagne on ice at home.
    And I almost forgot about Charlie and Celia, almost.

    This is happening so soon. Sooner than I ever expected!
    Oh, but it was a good one, hey? And brother, did she have it coming—the rotten! Didn't she, didn’t she?
    I got to get ready!
    My paints, my canvasses... my camera.
    Where in holy hell’d she put them?
    Holy hell! That’s rich, ain’t it?
    Oh God, I wished I seen it for myself.
    Ho, ho, what a sight that must of been. Ain’t that right? Damn straight!
    The rotten... !
    Well, there you are. She went and got herself blind-sided late in the game, boy. That’s it. Can you beat it?
    D’you suppose she ever once figured the sweet irony? I mean, after a lifetime of craps—and mostly on the house side of the table—the dice went and turned against her. Hah!
    She had her streak, sure. I give her that.
    But every streak comes to an end. This I have observed many times.
    And nobody beats the odds. Not even those that make them.

FIVE

    Either I am the world’s most dedicated cop, or I am the world’s most ungrateful fool. These I figured to be my choices on the morning I woke up with company for a change, yet with a head running almost entirely to thoughts of collaring Charlie Furman, the desperate Picasso.
    There beside me in my ordinarily lonesome bed was the still-slumbering Ruby Flagg, her smooth bare shoulders rising and falling as she breathed. I touched her warm skin and felt sorry for her, and for all the other unfortunate women who have to go falling for New York cops.
    I had first laid eyes on Ruby Flagg at that party in Soho. That night, I experienced a minor philosophical miracle; it hit me all of a sudden how it was the human race had managed to survive itself. Because—as cynical as I can get about life in general and women in particular, given a marriage that so far as it ran was a triumph of habit over hate—I was just plain knocked loopy by the sight of her. Ruby Flagg and her kind and pretty face, her soft, slim shape, those devastating legs, those eyes.
    That was one night two weeks ago in a crowded room, leading to last night in my small apartment and the elemental time we made of it. Just the two of us.
    Back at the restaurant, during the last bites of sweet-potato pie, she had said to me, “The way you’re looking at me, buster, you’d better mean it.”
    I said I meant it. She said she wanted to see where I lived. Then there was I, sitting in my green-fringed chair from the Salvation Army that looks as if it might have been cast out of some long-ago whorehouse parlor, and her on the couch by the window slipping off her shoes, she said, “Tell me the story of your life, Hock.”
    I said, “It’s long and mostly untrue.”
    “I’ll learn it, by-and-by.”
    And then we drank the Perrier-Jouet, all of it. I played a treasured LP on the stereo, ballads by the late Leslie Hutchinson, including my favorite rendition of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Also I entertained Ruby with a confession of my detective work since the Soho affair, how I