Don Pajamas had echasethalassanesia, which was the belief he was lost at sea. It was a rare disorder. So rare, in fact, that most people in Little Aleppo thought he was making it up. He’d have his spells and steal a boat from Boone’s Docks and pilot it into the middle of the harbor and then he’d just kinda sit there making friends with random equipment that was onboard. The owners never got mad: Don wouldn’t leave the harbor, so they could keep an eye on him, and when they needed their boats back, they would pretend to rescue him and everything would be back to normal until the next time. The Abnormal Psychology Department at Harper College had noticed that Don blocked out the sight of the outgoing fishing vessels and the docking freighters, but some local smart-asses (none of whom were affiliated with any institution of higher learning) had also noticed that Don steered his boat out of the way of any oncoming traffic. Numerous letters about the case were sent to Oliver Sacks, but he never responded.

And the stealing. The local smart-asses always pointed to the stealing as a sign that Don Pajamas only pretended to be lost at sea. He had enough money to buy his own boat, but if he had his own boat, then someone could sabotage it, or plant a bomb on it, and there were plenty who would. Crime bosses accumulate as many enemies as they kill. But if his rivals didn’t know which boat he was going out on, then he was safe. It was like how dictators would sleep at a different house every night, but brinier. There were always snipers, but sniping was frowned upon by the criminals of Little Aleppo. What was the point in paying off the cops if you were going to pull some shit they couldn’t protect you on? You wanted someone gone, you beat them to death and placed them in the driver’s seat of a crashed car. Or held ’em down and gave ’em an overdose. Don’t forget tossed off a building: it’s a classic for a reason. Something the cops can write down SUICIDE for in the little box that asks for Cause Of Death that wasn’t too laughable. Putting a fist-sized hole in a guy’s skull half-a-mile off the coast would draw too much heat, and that would start a gang war and no one wanted another gang war. No one made money during a gang war, and if we’re not making money, then why are we doing all this? That’s what The Friend would always say, anyways.

Don Pajamas hated The Friend. He hated his tiny suits and his narrow little feet and the way he lit everyone’s cigarettes for them. The gentleman. Such a fucking gentleman. Don knew him from the old days. The McGlory days.

There were 12 of them, all short and stubby and if you lined them up in age order you could watch the hairline recede and the bald spot on the crown grow until they finally met, but most had never seen all dozen in the same place at the same time. You didn’t want to. Generally, it meant something terrible was going to happen. Billy was in charge. Patrick was older, and Conor was better with figures, and Kevin and Evan (the twins) were far better at violence. But Billy understood people; he knew how to twist them against each other, and themselves, and how to read their lies. Watch the hands, Billy thought. Most people only lie with their faces. They forget about their hands. Billy understood people, and virtually every criminal in Little Aleppo was a person, so he was in charge. Most days, he was at the Irving Club. The rest fanned out. Aidan ran the Salt Wharf from his office inside the Customs House. On paper, he was just a clerk, but he had the biggest office in the building. The casinos and the backroom games and any sidewalk dice tournament that got too large belonged to Peter and Paul. Whores and thieves answered to Matthew, Mark , Luke, and John. (Those last six names belonged to the six youngest boys; Ma and Pa McGlory had grown tired of having the “What should we call him?” conversation.) Sean was the Police Chief. The McGlorys had Little Aleppo under control.

And then one day in 1945, they didn’t anymore.

There had been Gang Wars before–the McGlorys always came out on top–but this was not that. Little Aleppo looked away from the page for a moment, and the book was changed out under them. Smoothly. Sharply. Not one thing had blown up! (Except for Alouette Hall over at Harper College, but that was a regular occurrence over there, and completely incidental to the underworld machinations.) Overcoated dickweeds with tommy guns did not run rampant through taverns and playgrounds. It would have been a magic trick, had any of the brothers ever reappeared.

Monopolies breed resentment. Upwards and laterally. Guy on top of you is keeping you down, and keeping you from getting ahead of the guy next to you. But a monopoly’s gotta be killed all at once–a coup, basically–or it’ll surge back on top of you and teach you unpleasant meanings of the phrase “captive market.” Takes a special kind of fellow to marshall all those scuffling parties together, get ’em all pointing the right way. Natural-born politician, that sort of fellow. Gotta really understand people. The Friend understood people. Be your own boss, he told the pimps and dealers and thieves. The union should run the Salt Wharf, he told the union rep. No fun taking orders from some guy in a nightclub, he commiserated with the cops, and besides: none of you are ever gonna be chief, huh? Figure a business owner can hire his own bouncers, he told the guys who ran the gambling parlors. Who you need protection from?

So on August 10th, 1945, everyone woke up hungover and there were no more McGlorys. This gave pause. The criminals, business interests, and cops that had betrayed the brothers were not working in tandem. All expected that their assassination would be the only one, and that there would be a normal sort of Gang War, a reasonable and escalating kind of deal, but they woke up and there no more McGlorys–the war was over–and everyone became rather respectful of The Friend, and greatly desirous to return his friendship.

Life went on. More importantly, business continued. Never miss a chance to let a man give you his money, The Friend counseled. He had tons of sayings like that. If he was one of those East Coast show-offs, he would have self-published a book of aphorisms, but he was a Little Aleppo criminal and so knew that the very worst thing a villain could ever be was famous. The Friend remembered this kid he knew in the 60’s, lent him some money and found him some laboratory equipment, one of those hippies. No one could tell The Friend why they were called hippies, since they weren’t hip at all. Tommy Amici was hip, and Dino was hip. These kids weren’t hip. They smelled. Anyway, he lent the kid some money and it came back in triplicate; he was thrilled , but the next thing he knew the kid was on the cover of magazines and people were writing songs about him. That was it for that friendship. No money in being the best-known drug dealer in the country.

Can a man not gamble? And if a man is not permitted to gamble, then why on earth did we make all these dice? The Friend believed that a man who was not free to wager was not free at all. Existence! Existence is a wager, he’d say. So how can a bet be wrong? It’s not if you’re betting on New York’s tables. Go and put your chips down on Wall Street, and no one looks askance. But in a backroom casino on Saffer Street in Little Aleppo? Call the feds. Or Vegas. Drive a few hours south and now your bet’s legal. Well, that wasn’t fair to people without cars, or who just didn’t want to go. Shouldn’t they be permitted to indulge in a game of chance at the Ambergris Room down by the Salt Wharf? (The whaling industry in Little Aleppo was far larger than most modern inhabitants like to admit.)

And what of drugging and whoring? Was a man not entitled to drug, and whore? And to drug whores, if he paid extra? Or to smuggling ivory? To medium-scale art forgery? To elaborate Medicare scams involving fictitious blood banks?

And even if a man is not entitled to these pursuits, has society any way of stopping him? It was a failure to understand people, The Friend thought. Men were gonna do as much wrong as they did right, and if the government did not want to tax those activities, then he would. Wasn’t like the cops and the criminals and the legitimate businesses and the Town Fathers had different agendas, anyway. They all wanted the neighborhood to run smoothly, and just a little bit moreso than yesterday. In public, they had to fight, so someone needed to facilitate. He’d make a call. So far, he had found few knots so Gordian a phone call couldn’t slice them. Occasionally–beyond occasionally; let’s say “rarely”–someone would disappear. Go to visit the McGlory Brothers, in the local parlance. Never any shooting, stabbing, any of that movie crap. Never any evidence. Just: poof.

Don Pajamas stole a 28-foot cabin cruiser, blue on the hull and white everywhere else. It was an orthodontist’s boat called the Brace For Weather that the orthodontist’s wife detested, but planned on demanding in the divorce. There was a stuffed giraffe in the cabin. He named it Falstaff, and argued with it about philosophy. Fucked it a couple times, too, but not without tenderness. He told Falstaff so many things, like about the mirror The Friend had that you could just sort of push people into. It was like half of a magic trick. He always meant to ask The Friend about it, but it didn’t seem like something friends discussed.

“Some things are personal,” he said to Falstaff, who was a stuffed giraffe. They bobbed up and down in the harbor, lost at sea, and they gossiped about the stars until they fell asleep in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.