Switch by William Bayer

careful lest he get banged up.
    They lingered over tea, talking casually. It was hard for him to believe they had met only the morning before. The crumbs of their fortune cookies and the little paper strips lay before them on the table. Finally they got up, Janek paid, and then they walked the teeming streets, looking into grocery stores, sniffing sharp aromas, gazing up at laundry drying on fire escapes, hearing strange utterances chirped from windows by old Chinese women with straight-cut hair.
    When they finally crossed Canal Street they found themselves in another world; they had crossed the demarcation line to Little Italy. He led her past his car to a coffeehouse he liked, across the street from a Sicilian clam bar where Mafia gangsters hung out and, occasionally, were shot.
    They had drunk many cups of Chinese tea; now they sipped Italian coffee. But this was more than an ethnic change; there was a different atmosphere between them now. The walk had loosened him. He had intended to be a listener, but now he found himself talking rapidly, telling her about his adventures when he was a young police officer and Al DiMona was watching over him, of chases and gangland slayings and the code of silence on Mulberry Street which the police could never break. And as he poured himself out, he saw a look of entrancement on her face.
    "Take me there, Janek ," she said.
    "Where?" What had he been talking about?
    "To the shop. I want to see your father's shop."
    He had been talking about his childhood on Lafayette Street, his father's shop and the apartment above where his family had lived.
    It was only a few blocks away. No reason not to take her there. He passed the place often, sometimes drove out of his way just to pass it after work, but he had never showed it to anyone, not even to Sarah, and he had been married to her for eighteen years.
    "All right. It isn't much, you know."
    She nodded, took his arm. They walked there, stood across the street, looked at the storefront where his father had worked visible to passersby, repairing broken accordions, the trade he'd brought with him from Prague. It was an olive-oil store now, and the apartment above, on the second floor, looked uninhabited. Perhaps it was now a storeroom. Janek pointed to the window on the left.
    "I used to stand there Saturday mornings studying the street. My father was the best accordion repairman in the city then, and the old street accordionists would come to him from all the boroughs and New Jersey too. There was an old man with a decrepit instrument that was always falling apart, and every Saturday I'd watch him from that window as he limped across the street with his little monkey on his shoulder to have the old battered thing repaired. When I saw him I'd go downstairs and stand beside my father, waiting for the moment when the old man would set the monkey on the workbench and beckon me to shake its hand. I hated to do it. That paw was gnarled and scabrous. And, of course, I could have stayed upstairs, but something always drew me down. Perhaps I felt that old man's need. His one accomplishment, you see, was that he had trained the animal to do that simple trick. It made children happy, he thought. It made him happy if I shook the paw and smiled."
    She was photographing him. He hadn't noticed when he was talking, but when he finished and turned to her he saw she had her camera to her eye. It made him feel good, her shooting him. Her clicking shutter gave rhythm to his memories. He turned, started to say something, and then as his eyes met her lens she shot him again. And then she brought her camera down. She told him she'd shot out the roll.
    He wondered what she'd seen, what she'd caught. A middle-aged detective reminiscing, or something else? The love he was feeling toward her now—he wondered if she'd caught that too.
    "Will the pictures come out?" he asked. "Not much light here. It's pretty dim."
    "The lens is fast and the film's high-speed. They'll