Free North River by Pete Hamill

what?”
    A pause. A smothering hand on the phone at the other end, a lowering of the voice.
    “He gave me some money,” Zimmerman said. “He gave the nuns money too.”
    “And what did you do, Jake?”
    “I told him to forget it. Then he told me if I didn’t take it, he’d have me killed.”
    Delaney chuckled. “The nuns too?”
    “That wouldn’t scare them. Aren’t they in, what do you goyim call it? A state of grace?”
    “Yeah, they die, they go straight to Heaven. If you see a nun driving a car, get off the street.”
    “Anyway, I don’t know what they did about the money. And I don’t want to know.”
    “Neither do I.”
    “Try to come in and talk him down. He says he wants to drive to Florida.”
    “I’ll call tomorrow. Thanks, Zim. For everything.”
    “Thank
you.
”
    Delaney hung up the telephone and sat for a few minutes, staring at a framed browning photograph of his father standing with John McGraw, before the war. In the days when his father was Big Jim and Delaney was Little Jim, even though he was two inches taller than Big Jim. At that time a lot of people received cash in envelopes, almost certainly including Big Jim. He placed the bills back in the envelope and opened the wall safe where he kept his passport, the deed to the house, his marriage license, along with morphine and other dangerous items. He laid the envelope on top of the small pile, then twirled the dial to lock the safe. He put out the lights and closed the doors and went quietly up the stairs. The only sound from the top floor was Rose’s light snoring. He went into his bedroom.
    In the darkness, wrapped in a cotton nightshirt, the covers pulled tight, Delaney listened to the hard rain and could not sleep. He wished he had someone to talk to. Someone who could listen while he discussed the money. He wished he could explain how torn he was, how he was trying to balance the sudden presence of the boy in his life with the ancient sense of corruption that he was feeling about those five thousand dollars. Big Jim wouldn’t think about it for a minute. He was Big Jim Delaney, district leader, ward heeler, and he knew how the world worked. He had never read Niccolò Machiavelli, but he had graduated from the University of Tammany Hall. He always said his favorite color was green, and not because he was Irish. Delaney’s mother would have placed the child and his future before the legal concerns, knowing in her chilly way that what was legal was often not the same as what was moral. New York had taught her that, and so had Ireland.
You must be daft,
he could hear her saying.
You’ve helped thousands of people for free, not taking a bloody dime, and here is a gift that will make a boy’s life more possible. Take it. It’s yours. God sent it to you.
With Eddie Corso’s money, he could have the house steam-heated, putting heat into the arctic top floor without the stench of burnt kerosene. He could pay for clothes for the boy, warm winter clothes, lighter things for the summer. He could buy a small used car and do even more house calls and perhaps help even more people. There’d be no need for the bicycle, except for exercise. He could deliver the endless New York casualties to the doors of the hospital. Then he remembered dimly a phrase from a high school religion class, something about an “elastic conscience,” and how its possession was the worst example of the sin of vanity. That’s me, Delaney thought, here in this monk’s bed. The man with the elastic conscience. . . . He wished he could pray, but all of that faith and belief and certainty had ended forever in the Argonne. After seeing true horror, no sane person could believe again in a benevolent God.
    He could see and hear Izzy the Atheist at the bar in Finnegan’s last summer, railing at all the big gods. Izzy, who was half Jewish, half Italian, full of sarcasm, his teeth yellow and framed by a biblical beard. “What kind of god tells a man to kill his son?