My father once hit my mother. I was young, no more than seven or eight, and she had started a small fire in the kitchen while she was frying some pork chops for his dinner. There was a phone call for her, and she left the kitchen to take it. A friend’s son had won a scholarship to some big university, a particular cause for celebration as her husband had died suddenly some years before, and she had struggled to bring up their three children in the years that followed. My mother stayed on the phone just a little too long. The oil in the pan began to hiss and smoke, and the flames from the gas ring rose higher. A dish towel began to smolder, and suddenly there was smoke pouring from the kitchen. My father got there just in time to stop the curtains from igniting, and used a damp cloth to smother the oil in the pan, burning his hand slightly in the process. By that point my mother had abandoned her call, and I followed her into the kitchen, where my father was running cold water over his hand.

“Oh no,” she said. “I was just-”

And my father hit her. He was frightened and angry. He didn’t hit her hard. It was an open-handed slap, and he tried to pull the blow as he realized what he was doing, but it was too late. He struck her on the cheek, and she staggered slightly, then touched her hand gently to her skin, as though to confirm to herself that she had been hit. I looked at my father, and the blood was already leaving his face. I thought he was about to fall over, for he seemed to teeter on his feet.

“Lord, I’m sorry,” he said.

He tried to go to her, but she pushed him away. She couldn’t look at him. In all their years together, he had never once laid a hand upon her in anger. He rarely even raised his voice to her. Now the man she knew as her husband was suddenly gone, and a stranger revealed in his place. At that moment, the world was no longer the place that she had once thought it to be. It was alien, and dangerous, and her vulnerability was exposed to her.

Looking back, I don’t know if she ever truly forgave him. I don’t believe that she did, for I don’t think that any woman can ever really forgive a man who raises his hand to her, especially not one whom she loves and trusts. The love suffers a little, but the trust suffers more, and somewhere, deep inside herself, she will always be wary of another strike. The next time, she tells herself, I will leave him. I will never let myself be hit again. Mostly, though, they stay. In my father’s case, there would never be a next time, but my mother was not to know that, and nothing he could ever do in the years that followed would ever convince her otherwise.

And as strangers passed by, dwarfed by the immensity of the buildings around them, I thought: What have they done to this city?

Walter tapped the tabletop with his finger.

“You still with us?” he asked.

“I was just reminiscing.”

“Getting nostalgic?”

“Only for our order. By the time it arrives, inflation will have kicked in.”

Somewhere in the distance I could see our waitress idly spinning a mint on the counter.

“We should have made her commit to a price before she left,” said Walter. “Heads up, they’re here.”

Two men weaved through the tables, making their way toward us. Both wore casual jackets, one with a tie, one without. The taller of the two men was probably nudging six-two, while the smaller was about my height. Short of having blue lights strapped to their heads and Crown Vic-shaped shoes, they couldn’t have screamed “Cops!” any louder. Not that it mattered in this place: a few years back, two guys fresh off the boat from Puerto Rico-literally, as they hadn’t been in the city more than a day or two-tried to take down the diner, home to cops since time immemorial, at around midnight, armed with a hammer and a carving knife. They got as far as “This is a-” before they were looking down the barrels of about thirty assorted weapons. A framed front page from the Post now hung on the wall behind the register. It showed a photograph of the two geniuses, below the block headline DUMB AND DUMBER.

Walter rose to shake hands with the two detectives, and I did the same as he introduced me. The tall one was named Mackey, the short one was Dunne. Anybody hoping to use them as proof that the Irish still dominated the NYPD was likely to be confused by the fact that Dunne was black and Mackey looked Asian, although they pretty much made the case that the Celts could charm the pants off just about any race.

“How you doin?” Dunne said to me as he sat down. I could see that he was sizing me up. I hadn’t met him before, but like most of his kind who had been around for longer than a few years he knew my history. He’d probably heard the stories as well. I didn’t care if he believed them or not, as long as it didn’t get in the way of what we were trying to do.

Mackey seemed more interested in the waitress than he was in me. I wished him luck. If she treated her suitors like she treated her customers, then Mackey would be a very old and very frustrated man by the time he got anywhere with this woman.

“Nice pins,” he said admiringly. “What’s she like from the front?”

“Can’t remember,” said Walter. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen her face.”

Mackey and Dunne were part of the NYPD’s Vice Division, and had been for the past five years. The city spent $23 million each year on prostitution control, but “control” was the operative term. Prostitution wasn’t going to disappear, no matter how much money the city threw at the problem, and so it was a matter of prioritizing. Mackey and Dunne worked with the Sexual Exploitation of Children Squad, which worked all five boroughs, tackling child porn, prostitution, and child sex rings. They had their work cut out: 325,000 children were subjected to sexual exploitation every year, of whom over half were runaways or kids who had been thrown out of their homes by their parents or guardians. New York acted like a magnet for them. There were over five thousand children working as prostitutes in the city at any time, and no shortage of men willing to pay for them. The squad used young-looking female cops, some, incredibly, capable of passing for thirteen or fourteen, to lure “chickenhawks,” as pedophile johns liked to term themselves. Most, if caught patronizing, would avoid jail time if they had no previous history, but at least they would be mandated to register as sex offenders and could then be monitored for the rest of their lives.

The pimps were harder to catch, and their methods were becoming more sophisticated. Some of the pimps had gang affiliations, which made them even more dangerous to both the girls and the cops. Then there were those who were actively engaged in trafficking young girls across state lines. In January 2000, a sixteen-year-old Vermont girl named Christal Jones was found smothered in an apartment on Zerega Avenue in Hunts Point, one of a number of Vermont girls lured to New York in an apparently well-organized Burlington-to-the-Bronx sex ring. With deaths like Christal’s, suddenly $23 million didn’t seem like nearly enough.

Mackey and Dunne were over on the East Side to talk to the cadets about their work, but it appeared to have done little for their confidence in the future of the force.

“All these kids want to do is catch terrorists,” said Dunne. “They had their way, this city would be bought and sold ten times over while they were interrogating Muslims about their diet.”

Our waitress returned from far-off places, bearing coffee and bagels.

“Sorry, boys,” she said. “I got distracted.”

Mackey saw an opening and rushed to take advantage of it.

“What happened, gorgeous, you catch sight of yourself in a mirror?”

The waitress, whose name was Mylene, whatever kind of name that was, favored him with the same look she might have given a mosquito that had the temerity to land on her during the height of the West Nile virus scare.