I pointed to my watch, spread my hands again. "Why now?" I wanted to know.

Max tapped his heart twice with a balled fist, nodding his head "yes." Then he rubbed his fingers together to make the sign for "money," moving his hands back and forth with blinding speed. He was a warrior, not a merchant.

Fuck! I threw up my hands in total disgust. Max watched my face, his own immobile as stone. I used my hands to shape the one-kilo packages of dope in the air, laid them end to end until Max got the idea. We had a whole pile of heroin between us. Then I rubbed my first two fingers and thumb together the way he had before. Money, right? Then I separated my hands, and crossed them in front of my chest, opening them as I did so. Exchanging one for the other. "How?" I wanted to know.

Max smiled his smile: just a thin line of white between his flat lips. He bowed to the Mole and the Prof, then to me. He made the same signs for the dope as I had, and followed it with a gesture that meant throwing something away. Okay, we disposed of the dope-maybe threw it in the river. And then?

Max pointed to the blueprints, nodding his head "yes." We'd make the meet in the tunnel like the Mole wanted, only we wouldn't have any dope with us. I spread my hands wide for him again-how would we get out of there with the money? Max bowed, stepped back out of the circle of light cast by the candle, and vanished. It was dead silent in Mama's basement. I watched the candle burn down, along with my hopes of making a respectable score for the first time in my life.

"Hey, Burke," called the Prof, "when Max comes back, I want you to say something to him for me, okay?"

"Yeah?" I asked him, too depressed to give a damn.

"Yeah. You know how to make the sign for 'chump'?"

The Prof was good at this. Plenty of times he'd cheer us all up on the yard when nothing was happening. It didn't even bring a smile this time.

It got darker and darker in the basement, so quiet I could hear water dripping off in the distance. All of a sudden, the Prof shot straight into the air as if he'd been hoisted by an invisible crane. "Put me down, fool!" he barked, his short legs dangling helplessly. Max stepped into the tiny circle of light, holding the Prof by his jacket in one hand. He opened the hand and the Prof unceremoniously dropped to the floor. I pulled a fresh candle from my pocket and lit up. The shadows flickered on the walls and the darkness moved back another few feet. Now I understood.

"You get it, Mole?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Prof?"

"Yeah. We meet them in the tunnel, Mole kills the lights, and Max does his thing, right?"

"Right."

Max bowed to each of us, waiting for recognition of his superior problem-solving ability. The Prof was right-he was a chump.

"It's no good," I told them. "It'll take too long. If Max jumps them all in the tunnel, we'll be running for our lives, okay? And even if we get away with it, they'll never stop looking for us. It doesn't play, okay? It's not what we planned."

"You mean it's not what you planned, man," countered the Prof. "We took the shot to score a lot. Max don't want to give them the dope, and you don't want to rough off the money. That leaves us with what?"

That's when I got my brilliant idea that saved me twenty years in the joint. "Mole, you said the stuff was near pure, right?" He didn't answer-the Mole doesn't say anything twice. "Okay, how do you know?"

"Test," said the Mole.

"Test?"

"Heroin is morphine-based. You add something to it, it turns a certain color, you know it's good."

"Mole," I asked him, trying to keep the hope out of my voice, "can you make it turn the right color even if it isn't real dope?"

The Mole went into one of his trances-lost in thought. We all kept quiet, like people do around a volcano that might go off. Finally he said, "There would have to be some of the morphine-base-or else they would have to pick the right bag to test."

"How far down could you cut in and still make it pass the test?"

"I don't know…" said the Mole, his voice trailing off. He pulled out a pencil as stubby and greasy as he was, and starting scribbling formulas on the side of the blueprints, lost to the world.

Finally, he looked up. "How will they pick a bag to test?"

"Who knows?" I told him, looking over at the Prof, who nodded in agreement.

"Two bags of pure," said the Mole, "six bags cut deep. The rest no morphine-base at all. Okay?"

"Okay!" I told him. The Prof's grin split the darkness. And then there was Max. But before he could say anything, I took a deck of cards out of my pocket, held it up for him to see, and motioned for him to come close with the others. I dealt out forty cards, one for each bag of dope. Then I separated the cards into four stacks, shoving one in front of each of the others, and keeping one in front of me. I reached over and took the stack away from Max, held it up before his eyes, made a motion like I was spitting on the cards, and tossed them into the darkness of the cellar. I did the same thing with the Mole's share. And then with the Prof's. From my stack, I slowly counted off two cards, then six more-the amount the Mole said he needed to work the scam. And I threw my other two cards away too. I looked at Max, caught his eyes, then took six cards from my little remaining stack and tore them into small pieces. I threw away the big pieces, leaving only scraps behind-and two untouched cards.

There was a long count. Then Max slowly nodded, and we had a deal.

I WAS only on the phone for a few minutes with the wiseguys. Two hundred thousand in cash in exchange for forty kilos of their product. And I told them where and when. The gangster who answered the phone listened patiently-I could feel his desire for my death coming over the wire, but he kept his voice quiet. Sure, sure…whatever we wanted, no problems…very reasonable.

The meet was for five-fifteen on a Thursday evening. Maximum rush-hour mess, so they'd think we planned to lose them in the crowds after we made the switch. We got there just after eleven the night before, set up camp, and started to do what we all did best-wait.

We waited at the apex of the tunnels. The wiseguys would have to come from the east, and they'd have people planted in the tunnel from the west. Plenty of room to do whatever they planned. All we needed was a few minutes to get lost, and I had something with me that would take care of that. I didn't care if they sent Godzilla down the tubes after us-we had it wired.

It was five-fifteen on the dot when Max snapped his fingers and pointed to the east. I couldn't see anything at first, but then I glimpsed a faint beam of light moving slowly in our direction-from the west, where they weren't supposed to come from. And then I heard footsteps, lots of footsteps, coming from the right direction. The Mole put his satchel on the ground, one hand inside. The Prof thumbed back the hammers on my sawed-off, and I fingered the baseball-shaped piece of metal in my jacket pocket. It was going down.

And then the wheels came off. "This is the police!" came a voice on a bullhorn. "You men are surrounded. Drop your weapons and walk toward the sound of my voice with your hands in the air!"

The miserable fucking maggots! Why take a chance of dealing with renegades when they could get their dope back and hand their cop pals some major felony arrests at the same time?

I had to stall them, get time to think.

"How do I know you're the cops?" I shouted back down into the tunnel.

"This is Captain Johnson, N.Y.P.D., pal. Precinct Number One. You are under arrest, you got it? You got two minutes-I don't see hands in the air, I'm going to see blood on the ground."