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habit. His father, a journeyman welterweight called Irish Johnny Kelly, had prepared for his only child’s birth by getting falling-down drunk. When the doctor handed over his newborn son, Johnny dropped him. Norbert knew the family, and that much was a matter of record. For the rest, he had developed a theory.
    Norbert considered it likely that, after sliding headfirst through his father’s slack grasp, the infant Kelly landed on the part of the brain that believes it knows what’s going on and is always talking, talking, trying to get control of things—the part that most people listen to when they think they’re thinking.This normally dominant chatter center could have been damaged by the fall, so the other, quieter part of the brain that is constantly in communication with the rest of the body—guiding it down the street, recording details it does not see, causing the hair on the back of its neck to rise for no apparent reason, flinching at a muzzle flash—that part could have assumed the functions of the conscious mind. This, in Norbert’s estimation, might explain why Kelly spent so much time in the state of concentrated attention that precedes thought and so little in thought itself.
    Certainly helpful in escaping the knives of enraged transvestite hookers (the story related in detail to Norbert over Bloody Marys), but of little use when dealing in any nonphysical way with those of his own kind. For Kelly, there were moments when the human universe was a distant galaxy.
    What fascinated Norbert was how his friend had compensated. Shunned as a young man for his strangeness and ignored by both his parents, Kelly found solace and companionship in his father’s pulp magazines and trashy novels. From Hammett he’d learned to present himself with unflinching directness. Chandler taught him how to crack wise while doing so. Cain presented sex as a sadomasochistic rite preferably enacted with distant relatives in abandoned churches. Spillane didn’t teach him much of anything but gave him an ideal of womanhood, the beat-up dame. Further study of these masters provided Kelly with a store of scenarios—the jealous husband, the rebellious son, the too-greedy boss, the crooked official, the weak man brought down by his own vices—a thin array of archetypes for almost any human situation. A few empty years— echoing his playground isolation—on the police force in Bayonne had taught him how to maintain and operate a sidearm and keep his shoes shined. By then he’d grown into a light heavyweight version of Irish Johnny in his prime—cat-quick and possessed of a thunderous right. His education was complete.
    The results, to Norbert’s continual surprise, were viable. Kelly was a private detective by trade and had managed for more than a decade—by means of his unthinking courage, physical genius, and limited repertoire of canned responses—not to starve.
    This raised an interesting possibility: Could it be that Kelly succeeded because most people’s problems truly did conform to a few hoary stereotypes? If the husband was off the reservation, the official corrupted by his power, the wife murderously at the end of her rope, Kelly knew exactly what to say and do, chapter and verse. Was it possible that people, in all their twisted, self-absorbed dramas, were no more complicated than that?
    Norbert respected Kelly—no, loved him—because he had cobbled a persona out of ill-fitting parts and, through his own indefatigable will, was making the ramshackle contraption work. If only, he mused, trundling more shellfish from the cooler, the man weren’t so dense. If only he didn’t act like such a jerk.
    But even that had its good side. No one ever overestimated him. And, like the blade of Norbert’s shucking knife, the leading edge of Kelly’s physical intensity had no thickness. It slid again and again through the tightest interstices of tough situations, drawing the rest of him with it.
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