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boy is delirious.”
    “Guaranteed you’ll have the cash back tomorrow. Swear to God. By noon. Could be sooner.”
    “ ‘Could be sooner.’ Could be never, same as every other time I loaned you money like a real dope. No, Willi, and I mean it.”
    “Come on, Lois, I gotta get my baby outta jail.”
    “What?”
    “I hocked my camera.”
    “Willi, that’s how you make a living, you can’t just hock it every time you want to play poker.”
    “How’d you know it was poker?” He gives her a loose grin.
    “You’re impossible. And a lousy card player.”
    “Not true.”
    “You’re broke.”
    “True.” He pushes back his cuff, glances at his wrist-watch. “Honey, I really hate to banter and run, but it’s ten past eight. If I don’t get to the pawnshop by nine it’ll be closed. So can I have that money? I’ll try to stop back here later, okay?”
    “I don’t have thirty bucks.”
    “Lois, I need my camera. There’s gonna be a factory fire in Canarsie.”
    “Going to be?”
    “You know how it is with little birdies and such.”
    “Then go mooch off one of your little birdies.”
    “I know you can loan it to me.”
    Lois shakes her head. “And if I don’t get it back, what do I do Saturday morning when the rent man comes?”
    “You’ll have it, I promise. I can sell ten pictures of this stupid fire. It’s a toy factory, hon. With a teddy bear on the roof. Look, I’ll pay you back thirty- five bucks, just for your trouble.”
    “Leave, okay? Just go.”
    “Oh come on, don’t get mad. You mad?”
    “Leave, I said.”
    “You really not gonna let me have it?”
    “I can’t.”
    “Why, ’cause you don’t trust me?”
    Folding her arms below her breasts, she glowers at him across the kitchen table. “Right. I don’t trust you.”
    That sets him off. Abruptly Willi bends over and sweeps an arm across the surface of the table, flinging the sugar bowl, the milk pitcher, an ashtray, the coffeepot, its trivet, and both of their cups and saucers through the air to shatter, splash, chip, and bounce on the linoleum tile. The pages of Lois’s typewritten manuscript scatter, flutter around, skate in all directions.
    With her back pressed to the sink, Lois stands transfixed, pale, frightened. Excited.
    When he storms out, the door strikes the wall with such force that it bounces back and slams shut behind him.
    Half a minute later when he emerges through the iron-and-glass apartment-house doors, Lois—who flung up her bedroom window and is leaning halfway through it—shouts down at the top of her voice, “I don’t ever want to see you again, ever!”
    Willi doesn’t stop walking and he doesn’t turn around and he doesn’t look up, but he does sputter the razzberry.
    It’s Wednesday evening, the twelfth of June 1935.
    3
    Willi Berg grew up in cramped, dark, squalid apartments, always ones with dust-filmed windows, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Essex Street. Forsyth. Pike. Pelham. Division. He was the fifth of nine children (his parents actually produced twelve offspring, but—influenza, whooping cough, scarlet fever). Willi’s mother, the epitome of the buxom, wide-faced, irritable peasant who spoke the kind of Jewish broken English vaudeville comics loved to build skits around, was born in the United States, in Baltimore. It was Willi’s father who emigrated from a ghetto in central Europe, fleeing Russian-dominated Warsaw sometime in the mid-nineties.
    During Willi’s childhood, Papa worked what seemed dozens of jobs, sometimes as a pressman or cutter in the garment district, sometimes as a meat dresser at the East River stockyards; for a couple of years he worked as a laundryman in a commercial bathhouse. He made tile and paving bricks, sold carpets, sewed piecework, did construction (he mixed cement for the Woolworth Building), and one summer he lived away in Hartford assembling revolvers for Colt. The old man was a regular sweat-of-your-brow laborer. Without complaint, but