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dishwasher in some shithole all your life.”
    And then Darnel was in the car, poised to jump out. The man drove them out of the neighborhood, up Atlantic Avenue, and then pulled over on a deserted side street. He made it clear that he knew quite a bit about Darnel, about his membership in the gang, about his juvie record: shoplifting, grand theft auto, possession of a homemade zip gun. (Ingredients: a piece of wood for the handle, a section of car aerial for the barrel, a strong rubber band. That sounded playful, except the thing could fire a .22 bullet. They came in very handy in rumbles with Red Hook’s white street gangs.)
    “I’ve got a project for you,” the man had said. “We’ve got somebody over in Red Hook who needs to be taught a little lesson.” He didn’t explain who the we was, but—judging by the man’s stylish car, his two-tone shirt, his heavy Italian accent—Darnel knew enough not to ask. But he did have one question. “Why don’t you get one of your own people to deal with this?”
    The man had not answered—he just reached into his back pocket and took out an envelope. “This is all the explanation you’re gonna need.”
    Still wary, Darnel looked inside. Ten crisp fifty-dollar bills. And this was back in the sixties, when that had seemed like a fantastic amount of money for a young colored man. Hell, for anyone …
    “What you want me to do?” he said.
    “We just want you to shake a couple of kids up.”
    Jack, hearing the story decades later, had been frustrated by Darnel’s vagueness. If he was going to reopen this case, he would need some definite ground for charges.
    But then, according to the tale, the stranger had taken things a step further. He reached out, opened the glove compartment, and handed over a switchblade. “This might come in handy.”
    Now Jack stood on the corner where the schooling had been done, although he still had no idea what the lesson was supposed to have been. He thought about Darnel Teague, the teenager, and Teague, the man. All of his life and career he had nursed fantasies of what he might do if he ever ran into his brother’s killer. One thing was sure: he had never imagined that he might just let the perp walk away, alive and scot-free.
    It was nice to think that criminal justice was cut-and-dried: you caught the bad guys and put them away. But the system was riddled with compromise. Vicious criminals were allowed to plea bargain every day or were turned into confidential informants and sent back out on the streets. The principle was simple: you did what you could to land the biggest fish. Jack’s choice had been equally clear: he could exact revenge on one lone ex-teenager, or he could let the man go in exchange for the information he was mulling over now.
    So he had let Darnel Teague walk out of his kitchen and back into the world. And now he ran his hand along his jaw, pondering. An Italian-American man, a black teenager. Brooklyn, 1965. Way back then, who would have dared to bridge the gap between the races? Who would have been bold—or crazy—enough?
    He walked quickly back to his car.
    “WHY DON’T YOU BRIGHTEN this place up a little?”
    Jack glanced around his old friend’s office. “Open the windows, get some overhead lighting. … It looks like Don Corleone’s den in here.”
    Larry Cosenza sat back in his massive leather armchair and shrugged. He was a handsome man, broad-shouldered, with a full head of bright white hair. “This is what people want. They think it means respect for the dead. You know how things are around here: it’s not about change.”
    They were sitting in the Cosenza Funeral Home, in the heart of Carroll Gardens. The neighboring areas were gentrifying rapidly, with sushi restaurants and French bistros pouring in, with a flood of young hipsters who couldn’t afford Manhattan rents, but the Gardens were a last remaining bastion of the old-school Italian ways. Out front, amidst dark perennial shrubs, cherubs