ACT I

The rain in New York don't wash anything clean. It just makes the dirt wetter. I learned that early, back when I was driving a cab out of necessity instead of choice. Now I drive for Victor Asher, and the necessity hasn't changed, only the choice has.

Victor's office was on Mulberry Street, second floor above a Chinese restaurant that smelled like garlic and old money. He'd come into possession of a pawn shop six months before I started working for him, and in that time he'd turned it into something I couldn't quite figure out. Officially it was a pawn shop. Unofficially it was the place you went when you needed information and didn't want the police to know you'd been anywhere.

The first time I met Victor, he was sitting in a booth at the diner across the street, eating pie like a man who hadn't a care in the world. I was parked outside because the guy who owned the building had told me to keep the engine running. Victor looked up when I walked in, studied me the way a jeweler studies a diamond, and said, "You're Snake, right? You drive alright."

That was it. No hello, no questions. Just: you drive alright. And something about the way he said it made me feel like he knew things about me that I hadn't told anyone. Maybe he did.

ACT II

Victor had a gift. That's the only word for it. If a man came into the shop with a watch and said his father had left it to him, Victor would look at the watch and say, "Your father was a gambler, but he was proud. He kept this to show people he wasn't one." And it was always true.

He knew things. That was the real business. People came to him with problems, and Victor would give them information—about their enemies, about opportunities, about the things that mattered most. He charged well, and he never asked questions.

The two families were the big game. Moretti ran the north side, from Little Italy up through Harlem. Kavanagh controlled the docks and most of the waterfront. They'd been at each other's throats since before the war, and Victor found this enormously profitable.

I started noticing patterns. Every time Victor fed information to Moretti, something bad happened to a Kavanagh associate. Every time he told Kavanagh something, a Moretti shipment went missing. He wasn't just playing them against each other. He was dismantling them.

One night, after the third such incident in a month, I sat in the car outside his apartment and thought about what I was watching. Victor was building something, I could feel it. But I couldn't tell if he was building it for himself or around me.

ACT III

The shooting happened on a Tuesday. I was driving, and Victor was in the back seat—unusual, he usually rode in front—and we passed a car on Elizabeth Street with two men inside who were not having a good day. I didn't stop. Victor didn't say anything. But I knew, even then, that one of those men was innocent. He was driving the car, sure, but he wasn't the target. The target was the passenger, a Kavanagh enforcer named Ricky. The driver was just a kid, maybe nineteen, named after his uncle who'd never done anything to Victor in his life.

I pulled over at a red light on Grand Street and turned around in my seat. "Victor."

"Yeah, Snake."

"How many more?"

He looked at me for a long time. The streetlights painted stripes across his face. "People make choices, Snake. I just give them the information to make better ones."

"That kid made a choice too. To drive a car."

Victor was quiet for a while. When he spoke again, his voice was different. Not colder, exactly. More precise, like he'd filed something down. "You think I like this? You think I sit here and enjoy it? I'm balancing the board, Snake. There are people in this city who would eat us alive if we didn't keep them fighting each other."

I didn't answer. I put the car in gear and drove.

ACT IV

I quit a week later. I told Victor I was done. He didn't argue. He just nodded and said, "You'll call if you need anything." And I knew he meant it, which made it worse.

I haven't called. I'm driving cabs again, same as before. But sometimes, when I pick up a fare from Mulberry Street and smell that garlic and old money through the window, I think about Victor sitting in that booth eating pie, knowing everything about everyone, building his little kingdom out of other people's secrets.

The rain keeps falling. It doesn't wash anything clean. It just makes the dirt wetter, and you learn to live with that.

Last week I heard that Victor Asher disappeared. No body, no note, no explanation. Just an empty shop on Mulberry Street and a Chinese restaurant downstairs that keeps cooking like nothing happened.

I drive the night shift now. It suits me better. In the dark, you can pretend you're the one doing the watching instead of the watched.