"What"d Weiss have against Douggie?"

"He had plenty," Vinnie said. ""Cause Douggie wouldn"t do it. He was a stand-up guy, and he wouldn"t do it."

"Wouldn"t do what?"

"Drop for Chester Link," Vinnie answered. "Douggie was supposed to go down in five. But he wouldn"t do it. So Weiss came up with this match. Between me and Douggie. Said I had to teach Douggie a lesson. Said if I didn"t ..." He glanced down at his hands. "... I wouldn"t fight no more." He shrugged. "Anyway, I wasn"t supposed to lose that fight with Douggie. I was supposed to win it. Win it good. Make Douggie go down hard." He hesitated a moment, every dark thing in him darkening a shade. "Permanent."

I felt a chill. "Permanent," I repeated.

"So Weiss"s fighters could see what would happen to them if he told them to take a dive and they didn"t."

"So it wasn"t a fix," I said, getting it now. "That fight between you and Douggie. It was never a fix."

Vinnie shook his head.

The last words dropped from my mouth like a b.l.o.o.d.y mouthpiece. "It was a hit."

Vinnie nodded softly. "I couldn"t do it, though," he said. "You don"t kill a guy for doing the right thing."

I saw Douggie Burns"s glove lift slowly, hang in the air, then drift forward, soft and easy, barely a punch at all, then Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock, hit the mat like a sack of sand.

The hydraulic doors opened before I could get out another word.

"I get off here," Vinnie said as he labored to his feet.

I touched his arm, thinking of all the times I"d done less n.o.bly, avoided the punishment, known the right thing to do, but lacked whatever Irish Vinnie had that made him do it, too.

"You"re a stand-up guy, Vinnie," I said.

He smiled softly, then turned and scissored his way through the herd of strap-hangers until he reached the door. He never glanced back at me, but only continued down the short flight of stairs and out into the night, where he stood for a moment, upright in the elements. The bus slogged forward again, and I craned my neck for a final glimpse of Irish Vinnie Teague as it pulled away. He stood on the corner, drawing the tattered scarf more tightly around his throat. Then he turned and lumbered up the avenue toward the pink neon of Smith"s Bar, a throng of snowflakes rushing toward him suddenly, bright and sparkling, fluttering all around, like a crowd of cheering angels in the dark, corrupted air.

THE LESSON.

OF THE SEASON.

A Christmas Story It was the final minutes of the final day before Christmas, and Veronica Cross wanted only to pa.s.s these last moments sitting silently behind the register, her attention fixed on the book that rested in her lap. She had worked at the Mysterious Bookshop for almost ten years, but only on Sat.u.r.days, when the owner was at his house in Connecticut, and the store"s full-time employees were scattered about various apartments throughout the city. Her job was simply to buzz customers into the store, answer whatever questions they asked, take their money, bag their purchases, then buzz them back out onto 56th Street. Almost no intellectual energy was required on Veronica"s part, and the small financial supplement her salary added to her "real job" as a freelance copy editor made it possible for her to buy books from other stores, along with an occasional dinner out, or perhaps a discount ticket to a Broadway show.

The dinner and show might be enjoyed along or with one of her friends, someone like herself, who read good books and could articulately discuss them. As for romance, she"d more or less given up on that. Most men were little boys, needy and selfish, and none had ever struck her as worth the effort it took to dress up and preen and put on a happy face when she well knew that after the first few minutes she"d want only to hail a cab, return home, crawl into bed and open a book.

As for dress, she opted for modest elegance, long solid-colored skirts and dark-hued blouses for the most part, though black jeans with an accompanying black turtleneck sweater were not beyond her. Physically, she was tall, lithesome, and incontestably attractive, but for all that, she preferred to blend into whatever woodwork surrounded her. That other people chased distant stars, felt imperial urges, sought fame, or at least notoriety, all of that was a mystery to Veronica because she wished only to be left alone with her books.

She glanced at the clock at the rear of the room, then at her watch to verify the clock"s correctness. Both sentenced her to fifteen more minutes of minding the store, and given the heavy snow that had begun to fall outside, she thought it quite likely that she might be able to pa.s.s those final moments lost in her book, the store silent all around her, with nothing but the soft tick, tick of the clock to remind her that she was part of an all too human world.

Then it happened.

Someone buzzed.

Veronica glanced toward the door, recognized the mild, faintly hang-dog face she saw behind the gla.s.s, then pressed the buzzer and let him in.

His name was Harry Bentham, and he came to the store every Sat.u.r.day, though usually not during the final minutes of the day, and never during the final minutes of the final day before Christmas when a heavy snow was falling outside.

"Hi," Harry said quietly as he stepped into the shop.

"Hi," Veronica replied in a voice that was not without welcome, but which did nothing to encourage a more extended greeting.

Harry slapped the melting flakes of snow that had acc.u.mulated on the shoulders of his worn gray overcoat and stepped nearer to one of the shelves.

Veronica returned to her book, knowing exactly what she would see should she glance up again: Harry facing a shelf of paperback novels, his wiry gray hair blinking dully in the overhanging light, his rounded shoulders slumped, his posture no less slumped, so that he seemed perpetually to be collapsing, or if not that, then held up by invisible strings that were themselves stretched and frayed and in imminent danger of snapping.

But saddest of all, Veronica thought, was that Harry never bought a good book, and thus had yet to experience the actual thrill of literature, the way a fine pa.s.sage could lift you high above the teeming world, give you focus and a sense of proportion, allow a small life to expand.

In the years of Sat.u.r.days Veronica had spent behind the register, she"d come to divide humanity into those who read good books and those who read bad ones. As for Harry, he topped the list of readers who seemed to have no sense of what a book was for, that it could pull you deeper into life, direct your concentration toward things that really mattered, give voice to longing, prepare you for death. At no time during the ten years of her stewardship had Harry ever bought a hardback book. In fact, he had rarely even risen to the level of literature that had at least been briefly housed between hard covers. No, Harry was not only a reader of bad books, he was a reader of paperback originals, a reader of work so entirely without merit, so utterly devoid of any enduring quality of style or story or idea, that even the work"s publisher had opted to present it in a form doomed to vanish at the first approach of mold.

"Uh ..." Harry said tentatively. "Veronica?"

Veronica looked up from her book.

"You don"t have the new Bruno Klem, do you?"

Bruno Klem was the author of a decidedly lowbrow series of paperback originals known to its few aficionados as "The Crime Beat Chronicles." From the garish covers, the novels appeared to take place in a neon lit city of strip clubs and after hours bars in which he-man detective Franklin Lord battled the dastardly minions of Oslo Sinestre, the series" arch villain.

"It hasn"t come in yet," Veronica said. She offered a quick smile, then returned her attention to The Measure of Man, a book which was, according to the jacket copy, "a beautifully written and philosophically astute meditation on the moral complexity of human life as seen through the eyes of a defrocked Venezuelan priest."

She turned the page. "We live in the echo of our pain," she read silently.

She glanced up from the book and watched Harry"s back, the way his right hand lifted tentatively toward a particular book, then drew away and sank into the pocket of his frayed coat. He was no doubt preparing to make a selection, and she found herself hoping that something would seize him suddenly, direct his attention to the neighboring shelf where he might find a work of actual merit, one that would enlarge his appreciation of what a book can do, how it can draw you down to previously unplumbed depths of understanding.

But Harry remained in place, and so Veronica returned her attention to the book.

We live in the echo of our pain.

She pondered the phrase and for some reason, impossible to fathom, found herself seated near her father"s hospital bed, the old man stretched out on his back, tubes running here and there, an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose so that he looked like an astronaut carefully strapped in for the outward voyage.

He had died eight years before, when Veronica had been twenty-one years old, living in her Park Slope apartment-Manhattan being far too expensive-and eking out the same modest living in the same poorly paid trade she still practiced. She"d sat with him each night during the final days of his life, done what she"d thought required of an only child, the daughter of a divorced father who"d outlived not only her mother, but the two wives he"d later married and divorced, so that by the time of his final illness, there"d been no one who felt the slightest obligation toward him, save Veronica. He had been a wealthy real estate agent until suddenly, at the first onset of middle age, he"d gone completely nuts, sold the agency, and begun spending money hand over fist or losing vast quant.i.ties of it in cruelly expensive divorce settlements. Year by year his fortune had dwindled, until the last of it had vanished by the time Veronica had graduated from high school, selected an Ivy League college, applied, been accepted, then learned to her shock and dismay that her father had even squandered the money he had previously set aside for her education, spending every penny of it on high-roller gambling trips to Las Vegas, extravagant parties at the Pierre, wining and dining an army of fortune-seeking bimbos, and finally on a yacht he"d anch.o.r.ed briefly off Fire Island, then sold at a huge loss to an oil man from Houston. The yacht had been the old man"s last costly a.s.set, and he"d used the proceeds of its sale on such stylish perishables as watches and hand-tailored suits, all of which he had later palmed off to various Second Avenue consignment shops, after which, with truly nothing left, he had sunk into absolute penury.

As a result, Veronica had been forced to waitress during the day and at night attend cla.s.ses at Hunter College, from which she had finally graduated, but with a diploma that could not compete with the Ivy League educated and equally striking coeds who thronged about the great publishing houses of New York. Thus, she had been relegated to the decidedly unglamorous world of freelance editors, living from ma.n.u.script to ma.n.u.script, and thus from hand to mouth, a condition to which she had adapted quite well. In recent years, she had even concluded that hers was a superior position since she didn"t have to kiss anyone"s a.s.s and could, with few exceptions, select the t.i.tles she wished to edit and avoid the utter trash that salaried employees could not.

We live in the echo of our pain.

She turned the phrase over in her mind, and wondered why it had returned her to her father"s bedside during his bleak final days, the smelly hospital ward in which she"d sat night after night, and which she had only left after he"d released his last breath. It was miraculous, really, the way a few words could summon you back to past experiences, illuminate the shadowy corridors of that backward journey, allow it to resonate within you. Such was the true value of literature, she decided, that it gave life a resounding echo.

"You don"t read Bruno Klem?"

Veronica glanced up to see Harry Bentham staring at her, his face barely visible behind the huge black plastic frame of his gla.s.ses.

"No, I don"t."

Harry nodded slowly and turned back to the shelves, moving his face closer to the individual paperback spines, intently focused on each one, as far as Veronica could tell, as if he were searching for the answer to life among the volumes he found there.

But what answer could you possibly expect to find among the paperback originals, Veronica wondered. Where in any of those inferior volumes could pain"s echo rise from the page and in that rising address the great mystery of how we came to be the one we are, how we should proceed, what we should seek in the brevity of our days, and what forgo? In a room filled with mysteries, this seemed the deepest of them all, one Veronica now determined to have answered at least as far as Harry Bentham could answer it.

She closed The Measure of Man and sat back, pressing her spine against the wall behind her. "I have a question," she said.

Harry turned, clearly surprised that she had addressed him.

"Why do you read Bruno Klem?"

Harry"s thick, eerily purplish lips parted mutely.

"Every Sat.u.r.day you come in here and buy five or six books," Veronica added. "Always Bruno Klem, or something like it. So, my question is, what do you get out of it? I"d really like to know."

Harry blinked slowly, removed his gla.s.ses, wiped them with a handkerchief drawn from his back pocket, and returned them to his face. "They"re like a scotch to me," he said.

"A scotch?"

"You know, like when you come home at the end of a bad day, and maybe your wife is waiting for you, and she gives you a scotch."

Veronica knew that Harry Bentham had never been married, that no one waited for him with a drink in hand at the end of the day, but that was not the point.

"A book is a scotch?" she asked. "What does that mean?" She shook her head in exasperation. "Let me try a different direction. When did you start reading?"

"During the war," Harry said.

Judging by Harry"s age, Veronica guessed that he meant the Vietnam War, but the precise military conflict to which he had referred was in no sense the issue. "When you were young then?" she asked.

"During the war," Harry repeated.

"Because you were bored?"

"No."

"Why then?"

Harry shrugged silently. He seemed reluctant to go on.

Veronica, however, was in no mood to take silence for an answer.

"Why then?" she repeated.

"We came in from a patrol," Harry answered. "Went to our tents. There was a book on one of the cots."

"What kind of book?"

"A little paperback," Harry said. He nodded toward the wall of paperback originals that rose behind him. "Bruno Klem." He shrugged again, his shoulders rising and falling ponderously. "The sergeant saw me moping around. He tossed me the book. "Here," he said, "it"ll take your mind off it.""

"Off what?" Veronica asked.

"The patrol," Harry answered. "It was a bad patrol."

"Bad in what way?"

Harry drew in a long breath, one that trembled slightly. "We were all around this old man. Asking him questions. He was shaking his head no, he didn"t know anything. We kept yelling and he kept shaking his head, you know?"

Veronica imagined the scene, Harry in his raw youth, small and bespectacled, his round shoulders slumped beneath the weight of whatever soldiers carry, canteens and ammo belts and some kind of rifle. He"d probably been the company geek, slow and ineffectual, a burden to the others. More than anything she imagined him naive and innocent, a kid who"d stumbled into the army the way he might have stumbled into a job at the nearest shoe store and kept it for fifty years.

"It was really hot, and we"d lost some guys," Harry continued. "And the old man just kept shaking his head and saying he didn"t know where the others were, the VC, I mean, the ones who"d killed, you know, some of us."

Now she saw him in a tight circle of other soldiers, all of them wet with sweat, covered in jungle debris, Harry the smallest, the least involved in the interrogation of the old man, wanting only to get away, find a little shade, take a listless snooze.

"Anyway, I started getting mad, you know?"

She could not imagine Harry Bentham mad any more than she could imagine him smart or pa.s.sionate or good in bed. He was part of the great gray herd, a reader of trash, solitary, a flat-liner, J. Alfred Prufrock anesthetized upon a table.

"Mad?" she asked. "You?"

He seemed hardly to hear her, his eyes now distant but oddly charged, a strange, unsettling gleam replacing his usual dull stare.

"Something takes you," he said quietly. "It comes and it takes you."

She could feel a wave of heat coming from him, fierce and violent, as if from a raging furnace.

"Takes you," he repeated, almost to himself. "And you"re gone."

He jerked his right hand from the pocket of his overcoat and formed it into a fleshy pistol, the index finger as its barrel.

"And so I yelled at him, and he kept saying no, and it was so hot, and I started yelling louder because we"d lost all these guys and so ..." The index finger curled into a trigger finger and Harry"s hand jerked. "So ... I-" He stopped, thought for a moment, then added, "The other guys said it could happen to anybody. War and all. But it was murder. You can"t deny it. It was murder, pure and simple."

He sank his hand deep into the pocket of his overcoat, and his voice lowered and its pace slowed to a melancholy crawl. "You think you"re one thing, then suddenly, you"re something else." He closed his eyes slowly, then opened them again. "Anyway, when I got back to camp, the sergeant tossed me this book and said it would take my mind off of it." A small, mournful smile played on his lips and his eyes glistened. "We all have things we want to forget, don"t we?"

Suddenly, Veronica was with her father again, sitting in a chair, staring at him coldly, listening as his breath swept raggedly in and out until suddenly his eyes opened, and in a struggling tone, he called her name.

"Don"t we?" Harry asked.

She saw herself rise and walk to the side of his bed, his eyes barely open, his lips moving frantically, repeating her name, Veronica, Veronica. She saw in his eyes a strangely desperate pleading, and felt that he was perhaps asking her forgiveness for the hardship to which his reckless self-indulgence had sentenced him. She started to answer him, soothe him, tell him that she loved him, that all was forgiven. But suddenly she considered the wasted fortune, the gray rooms of night school, her long days at a greasy diner, the cramped Brooklyn apartment, and a jolt of consuming anger shot through her, hot and jangling as a vicious electrical charge.

"Things that we did, that ... you know ..."

Now she was staring at the old man sullenly, coldly watching as his eyes closed and his lips parted breathlessly, her hand rising all the while, rising as if drawn into the air by a vast malignant power, furious, demented by rage, rising and rising, until it finally stopped, held an instant, then swept down in blistering fury, and in the echoing horror of the moment, she realized that she had slapped her dead father"s face.

"... things ... we can"t take back."