the world at all? I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ. So this guy’s running, but he doesn’t see me, and I cut over in front of him and lay this fucker out. I mean, I grab him as he runs by and slam him into a wall and kick him in the face and all of the sudden, I’m down on my hands and knees just wailing on this guy. I can’t stop. I’m pounding his face into the pavement. I’m about to kill him. Then, I feel these two guys grab me and drag me off him. And they keep dragging me right over to the curb and they throw me in the back of this limo.”
Hank laughed and finished the scotch. “I swear to God. One second I’m pounding on this guy in the middle of Times Square, and the next I’m sitting in the back of this limo with this old guy smoking a cigar and telling me that the world has gone to hell and you can’t trust anyone anymore and that it was good to see a citizen sticking up for the rights of others and he asks me if he can buy me a drink.
“I’ve still got adrenaline pumping through me, but I say sure. So twenty minutes later I’m sitting in this little bar with this old guy. He’s asking me what I do, and I wasn’t really doing anything at the time. I tell him I’m a student, although I’d graduated a year before, and I was just drifting from job to job trying to figure things out. You know the routine.
“And then the old guy starts asking me why I was beating the guy up. And I really didn’t have a good answer. It just seemed like the right thing to do. The old guy says he agrees with me, that it was the right thing to do. He tells me he happened to be watching from the car, saw the whole thing. He said he was impressed by my immediate reaction, almost like a reflex, and he told me that when he saw me he knew there really was justice in the world. He said he could see that I possessed an innate and immediate sense of the true moral code, as he called it.
“I remember I said something to him like, well, it was a drug transaction, so it’s not like these were great people to start off with. And I’ll never forget it, he leaned into me and pointed a finger at me and said, ‘Son, that’s where you’re wrong. These two guys, they’d made a business arrangement, and then the one guy tried to pull a fast one. That’s wrong. It doesn’t matter what the business arrangement was about. You make a deal, you stick to the deal. That’s what’s wrong with our society. The law, what’s the law? Where does it come from? I’ll tell you where.’ This is what the old guy says to me. He says, ‘I’ll tell you where. It’s not out there, it’s not from outside. It’s not the government. It’s not the courts. It’s right here.’ And he points to his chest like this and says, ‘We are the law. Each of us. That’s the essence of democracy. That’s what makes this country great. Each of us is responsible for our own actions because this is a free country. And the price we pay for freedom is responsibility.’”
Janie shook her head, processing it all, and then said, “That’s bizarre. Who was this old guy anyway? Did you ever find that out?”
“Yeah, his name was Luciano Fazioli. Hard as nails old Italian guy.” Hank caught himself about to say more. He looked down at his empty glass, as if blaming it for something. Then he added, “He made millions running pawn shops all over the city.”
Janie said, “Sounds like an old man with some interesting ideas about the way things work.” She thought about it for a second, and then added, “Most people wouldn’t say two drug dealers owed a moral obligation to each other because they live in a democratic society. Especially when that society makes the very thing they’re doing illegal.”
Hank shook his head slightly and said, “He meant democracy in the sense of a social contract. We can all be a party to many social contracts. The obligations two drug dealers owe each other are no different from the obligations two Masons owe each other, or two members of the