“It’s Sunday. The Phils are on.”

“And you wouldn’t want to miss that.”

“What are you doing here anyways?”

“I wanted to see how you are. And maybe also to ask a few questions. Like why you owe that old witch Kalakos a favor.”

He turned away. “None of your business.”

“It is now, since she’s using it to rope me deeper into her son’s cesspool. You’re going to have to tell me sometime before I get submerged. But not now. Now I have to share a pitcher with Big Ralph and Little Joey.”

“Be careful.”

“Oh, I think I can handle a pair of sweet old guys like that.”

“They’re not that old, and they’re not that sweet.”

I looked at the still-open front door and the Yellow Cab waiting outside for me.

“When they were boys, they roamed the neighborhood like wolves,” said my father. “They beat some kid to near death with a baseball bat.”

“You got me into this.”

“I made a mistake.”

“I don’t think they’d let me ditch them now, do you? Besides, I have a question they might be able to answer.”

“Like what?”

“Like who the hell knew enough to make those two old crooks an offer.”

“So we saw on the TV you’re representing that Charlie Kalakos,” said Joey Pride, the froth of a beer on his upper lip.

We were sitting in the back booth in the Hollywood Tavern, just down the road from my father’s house. There was a half-filled pitcher of beer between us, rough-hewn glass mugs, a bowl of little pretzels. I took a handful of pretzels from the basket on the table, shook them like dice, popped one into my mouth. “Yes, I do.”

“And there was something about some painting by some dead guy that was stolen from some museum,” said Joey.

“Yes, there was.”

“So we was just wondering” – he glanced at Ralph – “the way guys, they wonder about things, what this Charlie was planning to do with the painting?”

“Give it back,” I said.

“Give it back, huh?” said Joey. “Aw, that’s nice. Isn’t that nice, Ralph?”

Ralph nodded, his huge face devoid of any appreciation of Charlie’s selfless gesture. “Nice,” said Ralph.

“It’s an underrated virtue, don’t you think?” said Joey Pride. “Everyone wants to be tough or ruthless, everyone wants to be king of the world, don’t they? But nice is, well, nice. And that Charlie is a hell of a nice guy.”

“You guys know Charlie?” I said with unbridled disingenuousness.

“Who, Charlie Kalakos?” said Joey. “Sure we know Charlie. We grew up with the boy. Little Charlie, nice Charlie, dumb-ass Charlie Kalakos, trying to rip off his oldest and dearest friends.”

“What do you mean by rip off?”

“Well, that painting, it don’t just belong to Charlie, now, does it?”

“You’re right. Legally, it still belongs to the museum.”

“But we’re not talking legally here, are we, Victor? Legally is only for when lawyers and cops gather around to sniff each other’s butts, like dogs at the hydrant. We’re talking now about what’s right. And what’s right is that those that did the job with Charlie all those years ago, they should get their fair share.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But that’s going to be hard to work out, because Charlie refuses to talk about the heist and who was involved in it with him.”

“See what I told you, Ralph? The boy wants to keep it all to himself.”

“So it appears,” said Ralph.

“It’s not that simple,” I said. “There’s a federal prosecutor very keen on finding out who else was involved with Charlie in that robbery thirty years ago. She wants Charlie to spill to her all the details, and he’s refusing.”

“There’s a fed still hunting them what pulled that job?” said Ralph. “That don’t make no sense.”

“You’re right, it doesn’t, since the statute of limitations has already run. But still, she’s hunting. I thought she was simply looking for the painting, but it’s not that. She’s got some other reason to be looking hard into that robbery.”

The two men glanced at each other as if they knew exactly what Jenna Hathaway was looking for. Interesting.

“I want you boys to understand that Charlie, by keeping his mouth shut, is not trying to stiff his fellow thieves, he’s trying to protect them.”

“Protect them out of their money,” said Ralph morosely.

I leaned forward, looked first at one and then the other. “Let’s cut to the chase. Them is you, right?”

Joey gave the bar a quick scan before leaning forward and lowering his voice. “Them is us.”

“Damn, I knew it,” I said. “It must have been a hell of a thing to be in on that.”

“Greatest thing we ever done,” said Joey, and from the self-satisfied smirks that slipped onto his and Ralph’s faces, I knew they were bursting to talk about it.

“But I’m confused, guys. I heard it was pulled by a bunch of professionals.”

“That’s what we wanted them to think,” said Joey.

“But it was just us,” said Ralph.

“So how did five guys from the neighborhood fall into the biggest heist in the city’s history?”

Joey picked up his beer, downed it, poured himself another mugful from the pitcher. He glanced at Ralph, Ralph nodded back.

“You can’t tell nobody.”

“I’m a lawyer, Joey. If you can’t trust a lawyer, who can you trust?”

“Like everything else in the city,” said Joey, “it started in a bar.”

THERE THEY were the four of them, sitting in a bar, Joey Pride told me, not this bar but one just like it. Ralph, with his hands still black from the metal at the shop. And Hugo Farr, splatters of concrete on the legs of his jeans and work boots, something haunted and thirsty in his eyes. And Charlie Kalakos, whining away about his mother. And Joey Pride, on his second pitcher already when the others came in, just starting to feel the sweetness of oblivion that he fled to every evening after running his shift in the cab. They were no longer youths, they were at that stage in life when things should be happening. But things for them had stalled.

There’s a line that you pass, Joey told me, it’s hard to see, a bit blurry, but there for sure. On one side of the line, all the dreams in your life are still possible. On the other side they’ve become fantasies you only pretend to believe, because having nothing to believe is too close to death. Fool’s dreams, Joey called them, sad little lies. There’s that line, and the four of them, they had blown past that line years before, never looking back.

Ralph was then bending metal for Karlov, that Russian son of a bitch. What he wanted was his own shop, nothing much, not Standard Press Steel or anything, just something of his own. But Ralph was a fool for love, there was always a pair of tits to throw his money at, and the dream of his own shop, being his own boss, was now as empty as his bank account.

Same with Hugo, who was always talking about college and business school. Wanted to be a mogul. He had started at Temple but took a semester off when his dad got sick. Thought he’d earn some cash to help his mother before getting back to it, but for some reason he never got back to it. He ended up working construction, laying cement, taking the up-front payoff and drinking beer late into the night to forget where he wasn’t headed.

All Charlie wanted was to get away from that mother of his, to find a girl and buy a house and live a life on his own. That was his fool’s dream, a pallid little thing, but to Charlie it was such a grand idea it was painful for him to even imagine it. So at nights he sat with the rest of them and drank and watched the years tick, tick away.

Truth was, Joey was the sanest of them all, and he was the one officially certified as crazy. He was sent away twice. Once for stealing a car and then a few years later when they found him wandering the streets in a daze with a gun and a huge wooden cross, spouting off about Jimi Hendrix being crucified for our sins. He had always loved cars, wanted to build hot rods and race along the boulevards, but when they finally released him from the state mental hospital high up on that suburban hill, the only work he could find was driving a cab. A short-term job to get him back on his feet, but the term was already longer than the one he had served in prison, and the time felt just as dead.