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under the flap. When it came out, something came out with it, a long strip of reflected light from the streetlamp on the corner. And then the briefcase was falling and the other arm was curling up and around to encircle Sid’s neck.
    He fumbled at the lid of the cigar box, but it slipped from his grip. The box struck the sidewalk, tipping open and dumping out the Luger and the extra magazine. By then he was being spun on his heel, spun and pulled back against the long hard length of the young man’s body. Something tugged at the front of his waistcoat; something that encountered no resistance from the wool or the cotton shirt beneath or the under-shirt beneath that and pulled a string of fire from his pelvis to his collarbone. A warm wetness spilled down his leg like urine. Then something broke, a string inside him, and he felt himself folding to the sidewalk like a coat sliding off a hanger in his shop. He never felt the sidewalk.

chapter five
    C ANAL SAID, “WHICH ONE tonight?”
    “I don’t know,” Zagreb said. “You pick.”
    “I picked last time.”
    “So you’re in practice.”
    McReary said, “I’ll pick.”
    Canal laughed. “Forget it. You’ll pick the Ladybug because you got a hard-on for that tall barmaid.”
    “What’s wrong with that?”
    Burke said, “Give it up, Tim. Dames like that wipe their asses with guys like you.”
    McReary tried on a leer. It made him look like Mortimer Snerd. “Sounds pretty good.”
    “Jesus H. Christ.” Canal relit his cigar, a lost cause once the glowing ash reached that part of the wrapping saturated with saliva. “Let’s hit Rumrunner’s.”
    Rumrunner’s occupied a former Michigan Stove Company warehouse at the end of one of the narrow streets that led to the Detroit River. It had been a blind pig during Prohibition. Boats loaded with Canadian whiskey had delivered their cargoes through a door located under the dock, bricked up long since. The front entrance retained its ornamental iron grill-work, designed to slow down raiders while personnel inside hid incriminating liquor paraphernalia. Double-tiered tables had allowed patrons to keep their drinks out of sight from the windows, and now proved convenient to provide a dry surface on top for euchre. Then as now, such features were cosmetic, intended merely to pique the customers’ love of the forbidden; in fact, most of the overhead had gone to the Prohibition Squad to discourage interruptions. Since Repeal, the establishment had become one of the many beer gardens along Jefferson, dispensing Aires and Fox DeLuxe beer, nickel bags of potato chips and pretzels, and steaming plates of bratwurst and sauerkraut to the city’s largely German population. Here, polka was king, swing merely the prime minister, and few denounced the Nazis for their nationality, rather for their friendship with Hirohito.
    Patriotism was in evidence, however. Various colorful posters, inspirational (PRODUCTION IS AMERICA’S ANSWER, SAVE FREEDOM OF SPEECH—BUY WAR BONDS), recruitment (I WANT YOU FOR THE U.S. ARMY, IT’S A WOMAN’S WAR TOO—JOIN THE WAVES), and admonitory (LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS, SOMEONE TALKED!) decorated the brick walls just below the canopy of tobacco smoke, and snapshots of various area soldiers, sailors, and airmen in uniform shingled a bulletin board near the blackboard menu. But most of the adornment was nostalgic: framed front pages from defunct tabloids shrieking of gangland massacres, blowup photos of men in cloth caps and fedoras unloading crates of whiskey from the trunks of touring cars, snapshots of rum-running boats, sleek and speedy. Twelve years of Depression followed by six months of rationing had restored the romance to the excesses of the Roaring Twenties.
    The place was filling up, but not with the kind of crowd that had come there in the dry time to drink to lawlessness and the rebellious American way, or in the hard times that came after, to float away their unpaid bills on a stream of