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his “You’re welcome” before the kid could even say the words.
    While the servicemen cooked up their dope, the old acquaintances chatted, Frank asking Willie, “How’s Nate? You see him lately?”
    â€œHell, I see him all the time. The dude is here, there and everywhere.”
    â€œThat right?”
    â€œOh, yeah. He’s in good shape. Great shape. Got himself his own club now.”
    â€œOh. He
is
doing good, then. Where, Saigon?”
    Willie shook his head. “Bangkok. That’s where all the serious R & R goes down.”
    The other GI, who Frank didn’t know, said, “I don’t suppose Nate’ll
ever
come home. Not till the rest of us do, anyway. Maybe not even then.”
    As the GIs prepared to shoot up, Frank offered some advice. “Better boot it a couple times, fellas. These cops keep cutting it, selling it, cutting it. . . .”
    â€œI don’t mean no offense, my brother,” Willie said, as he shot the stuff into a vein, “ ’cause the price is right and all that. But since I got home? I find the shit over here is . . . shit. But the shit in Nam? It is way, way, way, way, way. . . .”
    But Willie didn’t finish, nodding off before he could.
    Still, Willie may have been the one with the needle, but Frank got the point.
    Good shit in Vietnam.
    He would file that away, like he filed away all information, for when it would come in handy.
    And it would.
    Within his circle, in his private life and for that matter his business dealings, Frank Lucas considered himself a moral man.
    Matters of right and wrong, in any larger sense—social or religious—were defined by the world he’d been born into, a white man’s world. Dope being sold to black people was a reality that wasn’t going anywhere; better another black man be in charge. Killing people who needed killing was strictly business—those yellow people getting killed over in Vietnam by boys both black and white made less sense to Frank than removing a business rival or a personal threat by violence.
    Frank hadn’t invented the world where money ruled, but if he was going to live in it, by God, he was going to have at least his share. The kind of money he wanted to make in legitimate business would have meant Wall Street, if you called that legitimate. And he knew he couldn’t get a fucking janitor job on Wall Street.
    As far as Frank was concerned, white men had sent him down the criminal road, had given him no choice, really, not since that day when he was six and the Ku Klux Klan came to his family’s shack and killed his cousin, Obadiah.
    Obie had been twelve and had committed the crime of looking at a white girl funny—“reckless eyeballing,” they called it down South. Five rednecksgrabbed his cousin, tied the terrified Obie up and shoved a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head apart. Right there on the front porch, Frank watching through the window.
    With Obadiah gone, Frank was the oldest child and, needing to put food on the table, he became a prodigy of crime, at first stealing chickens and pigs, soon graduating to mugging drunks with a rock outside the local whorehouse, there in La Grange, North Carolina. By the time he was the age Obie’d been, when that shotgun blew his head away, Frank was on a chain gang in Tennessee. At fourteen he was shacked up with a lady bootlegger in Kentucky. At sixteen he decided to try going straight, took a trucking job, but sleeping with the owner’s daughter led to his dismissal. Well, what really led to his dismissal was hitting the owner, a beer-belly bruiser called Big Bill, alongside the head with a piece of pipe. When Big Bill didn’t pay up the hundred bucks Frank was owed, the young man took four hundred instead and set the front office on fire.
    His mother had advised him to hightail, which he had, to New York, where he’d found his way from Penn Station to