Only Child

I’d been gone for years. Dead and gone, the whisper-stream said. But that stream always carries more than one current.

Just past midnight, I slipped back over the border, moving downwind out of the darkness. Because Hollywood’s got one part right—the dirty, scheming, heartless bitch never does sleep.

Especially now.

The alley behind Mama’s restaurant was as immune to time as the chamber of a pharaoh’s vault. A pair of dull-orange oil drums stood sentinel. I nosed the Subaru’s dechromed black snout carefully into the opening between them, over to an empty patch of oil-stained asphalt. On the filthy wall above it, a square of pure-white paint. Inside the square, Chinese characters, in perfect, fluted-edge calligraphy. It was signed with the chop of Max the Silent, the Chinatown equivalent of a skull-and-crossbones on an unmarked bottle.

I slid the Subaru against the wall, not bothering to lock it. Directly across from my spot was a rust-colored steel door with no handle. I slapped my hand against it three times, hard, and stepped back, slitting my eyes against what I knew was coming.

The door opened outwards. A sudden spray of grimy yellow kilowatts framed me in place. A man’s shape, backlit, blocked my way. I slowly moved my hands away from my body, keeping them down.

The man said something in Cantonese. I didn’t move, letting him study me. The door closed in my face.

I heard them moving in behind me, but I didn’t change position. Felt their hands going over me. Didn’t react. The door opened again; no lights, this time.

As I stepped inside, I saw a man in a white restaurant apron standing to my left. He had a meat cleaver in his right hand, his left hand locked over the wrist. On the other side of the kitchen, two more men. One of them sighted down the barrel of a pistol, as if I were a piece of land he was surveying. The other flexed his hands to show me he wouldn’t need anything else.

I heard the door shut behind me.

The men watching me were professionals, about as nervous as a yoga class on Xanax. More waiting. Not a problem for me; it’s what I do best.

“You come home?” I heard her voice before I saw her.

“Yeah, Mama.”

“Good!” she snapped, stepping out of the darkness. “You eat now, okay?”

My booth was the last one toward the back, closest to the bank of pay phones. It had the same look as my parking spot. Like it had been waiting for me to show.

I slid in. Mama stood with her arms folded. I hadn’t heard her yell anything out to the kitchen, but I knew what she was waiting for.

The guy who hadn’t needed weapons came to the booth, carrying a heavy white tureen in one hand—thumb on top, no napkin between him and the heat. He lowered the tureen gently to the table, underscoring the message he’d given me earlier.

Mama sat and took the top off in the same smooth motion, releasing a cloud of steam. No tea ceremony for her; she ladled out a small bowl of the hot-and-sour soup as quick as they ever had on the chow line back in prison. I took a sip, knowing better than to wait for her.

My sinuses unblocked as I felt the familiar taste slam home.

“Perfect,” I told her.

“Everything same,” Mama said, finally helping herself to a bowl.

I was on my fourth bowl—three is the house minimum—when Max materialized.

He stood there, looking down at me. Measuring.

“I’m all right,” I signed to him.

He cocked his head.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said aloud.

He bowed slightly, folding one scarred, horn-ridged hand over the fist he made of the other.

Mama gestured her order for him to sit and have soup. Max moved in next to her, never taking his eyes off me. He used two hands to show a tree springing up from the ground, then pointed where the roots would be, his straight-line eyebrows raised in a question.

I nodded, slowly. Yeah. This wasn’t a visit. I was back to stay.

It was too late to reach out for the rest of my family. Not because they’d be asleep; the middle of the night was when they worked.

I gave the Subaru’s keys to Mama. One of the gunmen had brought my duffel bag inside. Max shouldered it, and we hit the alleys.

The faint wash from the streetlights didn’t penetrate much past the alley’s mouth.

There were three of them. Too murky to pick out details, but they stanced young. I saw a glint of metal.

Max slipped the shoulder strap of the duffel and handed it to me. I pulled a hammerless .38 from its side pocket. A use-it-and-lose-it piece Mama had added to my take-out order. Dull blued steel, the butt wrapped in black electrical tape.

The three figures separated. Max moved to his left, I went to my right.

It was so quiet I could hear a rat doing what rats do.

We kept coming.

When we got close enough for them to see Max, they stopped liking the odds.

It was only a few more blocks to the building where Max lived. We went in the side door, climbed one flight up to his temple.

His wife, Immaculata, was waiting at the top. She held a finger to her lips, meant for me.

“Flower is asleep,” she said softly.

“Okay,” I whispered back.

“Oh, Burke,” she said. “We never knew if you were—”

“I’m fine, Mac.”

“My husband wanted to go and be there with you. But Mama said you were—”

“It wouldn’t have been the play. And it doesn’t matter now, girl. It’s done.”

“You are back for good?” she asked, echoing Max.

“Yeah. I don’t know if this is the place for me, Mac. But I found out for sure there isn’t any other one.”

“Can you manage all right down here? Just for tonight? As soon as we tell Flower, you can—”

She stopped in response to Max’s thumb touching the back of her hand. Max can’t hear, but he reads vibrations like forty-point type.

“I already know, Mom!” Flower said, bursting into the room and running to me. I started to bend to scoop her up, but the little baby I had known from her first days on earth was a teenager now. She wrapped her arms around me, burying her head in my chest. “Burke, Burke...” she cried, hanging on to me like I was going to run out on her.

Mac told Flower I’d come a long way, and needed to sleep. Flower smiled sweetly and ignored her, demanding to know everything I’d done since I’d been gone, and who I’d done it with.

I fobbed her off with generalities, catching the caution lights in her mother’s eyes.

“The last time I saw you was when you were so...” The girl’s voice trailed away.

“I’m all right now, Flower. Just like I was before.”

“You don’t...look the same. Not at all.”

“Hey! I paid good money for all that plastic surgery. What? You don’t think I nailed the Robert Redford look?”

“Oh, Burke.” She giggled.

“I didn’t lose anything important,” I said gently. “You understand?”

“I remember what happened,” Flower said, as if reciting a lesson. “You were shot. You almost...died. They had to fix you. And so your face isn’t the same, that’s all. You look so much better than when you were here...before.”

“Yeah. The doctors said I’d get better-looking every day. Money-back guaranteed.”

“Mom! Make Burke be serious,” she appealed to Immaculata.

“This is Burke, child. Your uncle that you missed so dearly. You know he is never serious.”

The girl gave her mother a look much older than her years.

By the time I’d finished answering all Flower’s questions, light was breaking through the high industrial windows. “I know!” she called to her mother, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek before she ran off to get ready for school.

Max gestured as if playing the bongos, looking from side to side. Telling me the word was going out.

I lay back on the futon. Closed my eyes, waiting for the drift-down. Wondering when I’d feel strong enough to face my hometown in daylight.

“What I tell you, girl?” the small, handsome black man crowed. “Sweet-potato pie; the roots never lie. Didn’t I say it? Rhymed the poem—Schoolboy’s coming home.”

“Yes, Prof,” Michelle said. A wicked grin played below her loving eyes. “That’s what you said, all right. Every single day since he’s been gone.”

“My father—” Clarence stepped in to defend the Prof.

“Oh, honey, please,” Michelle cut him off at the knees. “Everybody knows the Prof can foretell the future and all that, okay? He was just a little out in front on this one.”

We were in Mama’s, at the round table in the corner. The one that permanently sported a fly-specked “Reserved for Party” sign. I never knew why Mama bothered—no tourist ever tried the food twice, and no local would risk it once.

“Give it up, pup,” the Prof said, his hand flashing to my shirt pocket, just like old times. “Huh!” he grunted, coming up empty. “Where’s your smokes, dope?”

“I don’t puff for real, anymore,” I told him. “Just use them as props.”

“Your ticker? From when they...”

His voice trailed away. Clarence bowed his head, as if the man he called his father had blasphemed in front of a priest.

“It’s okay,” I told them all. “My heart’s fine and”—looking around, to make sure they all got it—“I don’t do flashbacks. It’s just that, ever since it happened, cigarettes don’t taste the same.”

“Not even after...?”

“No, Michelle.” I laughed.

“It’s your call, Paul,” the Prof said, reluctantly extracting one of his own hoarded smokes and firing it up.

It took a long time to satisfy them all. Michelle was the worst. Little sisters always are. I must have told them a dozen times that I was okay. Just wanted to come home.

“What I don’t know is how things...are,” I said.

“At first, the drums really hummed,” the Prof said. “But, last few months, anyway, the wire’s been quiet.”

“And the people who started it...?” Michelle anted up.

“Gone,” I said, watching her arched eyebrows so I could avoid her eyes. “All gone.” The Prof and Clarence had been around at the beginning, Michelle for the middle, but none of them at the end. “If there’s any trouble here, it’s only from the cops. They may still be looking for me.”

“You had a right to walk out of the hospital, mahn,” Clarence said indignantly. “It is not as if this was a jailbreak.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking it through. “But I’m not supposed to be missing, right? I’m supposed to be dead.”

“Yes,” Mama put in. “Bone hand.”

“That was slick,” the Prof acknowledged. “I would have never thought that dinosaur roller had it in him.”

He meant Morales, the pit-bull cop who had hated me since forever. But he’d owed me, too. And he was the kind of man who couldn’t sleep with his books unbalanced. After I’d split, he’d come around to the restaurant, told Mama he needed a surface where I would have left a print. Next thing anyone hears, somebody finds a human hand in a Dumpster. Not the flesh, just the bones. And, right next to it, a pistol. With my thumbprint on the grip.

NYPD put the pieces together. Decided it was payback for a Russian gangster who had been blown away in his own restaurant. The Russian had arranged a transfer—cash for a kidnapped kid—and for me to be the middleman. That’s when I’d been shot. And when Pansy, my blood-loyal Neapolitan mastiff, had been killed trying to protect me.

Like everyone else who lives down here, my rep depends on who you talk to. And how you ask. But the whisper-stream always carries this piece of truth: Burke’s religion is revenge. If you took someone of mine, I was going to take you. Send you over, or go there myself, trying.

So the cops had made me for Dmitri’s killer. And they read the Dumpster’s contents for how that had all played out in the end.

They were half right.

I’m listed as deceased in all the Law’s computers now. Not a fugitive. Not a parole violator. No warrants, no APBs. Maybe the first time in my life the State that had raised me didn’t want me for anything.

But my prints hadn’t changed, and we all knew how that worked. I might look golden today, but it would all turn a sickly green in a heartbeat if I got myself into custody.

Nobody would ever be able to ask Morales. When the remote-controlled planes took down the World Trade Center, he was one of the first cops to charge the flaming ruins. If I know Morales, he wasn’t looking to do any rescue work. He never made it out.

“So who am I going to be?” I asked my family.

Into the silence, Mama replied, “Still be you.”

“I don’t get it,” I told her.

“If family alive, never die, okay?”

“Sure, in spirit, Mama. But I’m talking about—”

“Spirit? Not spirit. Not die,” she spat fiercely, her ancient eyes challenging anyone to disagree.

“You saying Schoolboy be Burke, with a new face, Mama?” the Prof asked her.

“No, no,” she snapped. “People owe money, okay? Why pay? Burke gone. Who come to collect? Nobody. Right?” she asked, looking around the table for confirmation. “Nobody collect?”

“Not me or Clarence,” the Prof said.

Max shook his head, agreeing.

“You certainly don’t think I went into the thug business?” Michelle tossed off.

“Sure!” Mama said triumphantly. “But people come here, okay? Come with money. Say, ‘This for Burke,’ leave with me. Maybe think dead, but not sure, okay?”

“Who came?” I asked her.

“Plenty people,” she said, dismissively. “Anyway, see you, now, not know, okay? You not look like, but talk like, okay? You know what Burke knows. Maybe you his brother. Cousin. So—same name. Maybe still you, new face. What difference? Nobody ever know. Not for sure, never know.”

“Makes sense to me,” I said, then handed it off. “Prof?”

“Could be,” the little man said, not arguing with Mama, but not deferring to her, either. “Only one way we gonna see.”

It was after rush hour by the time we split up. Michelle said she had to get some sleep. The Prof and Clarence exchanged conspiratorial looks, said something about putting the finishing touches on a crib they’d found for me. I went out through the back door into the alley. A beige Honda Accord sedan stood there, idling. I got into the front seat. Max slipped into the back.

“Burke!” the young man at the wheel almost shouted. Before I could answer, he calmed himself, asked, “It is you, right?”

“It’s me, Terry,” I said. “Damned if I didn’t have trouble recognizing you, too.”

“I’m a man now,” he said. He’d been a boy when I pulled him away from a kiddie pimp in Times Square, way back before Mickey Mouse took over the territory. He reached his hand behind him for Max to slap, then folded his palm into a fist, tapping it twice over his heart.

Terry pulled slowly out of the alley, heading for the FDR. “This ride’s okay, right? I knew you wouldn’t want anything flashy.”

“It’s great,” I assured him. “You got paper? A license?”

He gave me the look kids give to adults who should be in detox.

I’d been this way a thousand times. FDR to the Triborough to Bruckner Boulevard to Hunts Point Avenue. Past the endless ribbon of dull-gray blight that passes for residential housing, and into the badlands.

The kid slipped the Honda into a break in the fence that surrounded a huge junkyard. The opening was invisible unless you were right on top of it. And if you ever wandered that close, you’d see why the proprietor hadn’t bothered with a “Beware of the Dog” sign. The pack formed before Terry shut down the engine.

Terry pulled a lever, and we drove into a sally port made out of two parallel walls of chain link. The dogs waited behind the inner wall, predator-patient, not even bothering to bark.

“Is Simba still...?” I said, not realizing how fearful I was of the answer until the question was out of my mouth. The reigning king of the junkyard had to be at least twenty years old. He should have gone to be with Dog a long time ago.

“Are you kidding?” Terry said.

We drove past the second gate. The kid hopped out to close it behind us. In seconds, the car was a big rock in a river of dogs, their voices blending into a single low snarl.

Terry waded back through the dogs, knocking some of them aside with his knees. They didn’t seem to mind. He had his hand on the car door when Simba made his entrance.

The monster was white around the muzzle now, but the others still gave him room. A bull-mastiff–shepherd cross, with one ear almost gone—probably a challenge from one of the younger males for pack leadership. He walked carefully. Not crippled, just conserving his energy. The next fight, that was Simba’s life.

“Simba!” I called to him out of my opened window. “Simba-witz, the Lion of Zion! You remember me, don’t you, boy? Old dogs like us, we don’t need to see to smell.”

The beast came closer. I dangled my hand out the window. Chum out of a shark cage, if Simba didn’t recognize me.

He sniffed experimentally, then gave a deep-throated growl of welcome.

“That’s my boy,” I said softly, scratching him behind his remaining ear.

The old warrior’s eyes were milky with age. A couple of teeth were missing. I wouldn’t have taken him on with a machine gun.

Max climbed out. He never went through any kind of greeting ceremony with the dogs. They never seemed to care.

Terry stashed the Honda, came back with the topless Jeep they use as a jitney. Max and I climbed on. After a moment’s hesitation, Simba jumped up there with us.

We rode through the moonscape, Terry piloting the Jeep around the hidden obstacles set up to slow down anyone visiting without permission. Compound fractures will do that.

“You drive like a pro,” I complimented him. “Your dad teach you?”

“Right!” he joked. “Mom said she’d murder him if he even tried. No, it was Clarence. And my license—it’s a hundred percent legit, Burke. I passed the test and everything.”

The clearing was under a canopy of twisted metal formed by stacks of smashed cars waiting for the crusher to finish them off. The cut-down oil drums were arranged in a neat horseshoe—empty chairs, awaiting guests. Terry braked gently; then vaulted easily off the Jeep to the ground. He disappeared somewhere behind the rubble, leaving Simba with me and Max.

I sat down on one of the drums. The junkyard was a graveyard, too. My Pansy was there, her body under a wreath of twisted rebar and razor wire. |Just her body, I said in my mind. I’m not a man who visits cemeteries—Pansy was always with me.

Belle’s body is there, too.

I see them, together. Waiting.

Sometimes, that comforts me. Sometimes, it makes me wish I could kill some people all over again.

Simba slowly came closer. Finally, the beast sat before me, his harsh old eyes holding me until he was sure I was paying attention.

“I know,” I told him. “Thanks.”

The Mole materialized from the gloom, wearing his standard dirt-colored jumpsuit. The Coke-bottle lenses of his glasses were prisms in the tricky light. He shambled forward, as awkward as a drunk.

“Mole,” I said, getting up.

He kept coming until he was only inches away, then stopped.

“So?” His madman’s eyes examined me, collecting data for his genius brain.

“I’m all right,” I told him.

“Is there a job?”

“No, Mole. I just came home.”

“To stay?”

“If I can pull it off.”

The Mole turned and greeted Max with a slight bow. Simba banged his noble, scarred head against the Mole’s leg. The lunatic absently patted his dog’s head, muttering something in their two-creature language.

“Everything’s different!” Terry said brightly. “You wouldn’t believe it, Burke. I’m in college. Mom has a new job. We’re all going to—”

“Nothing is different,” the Mole said mildly.

The kid looked at me, then slowly nodded agreement. Learning from his father, as always.

We spent a few hours down in the Mole’s bunker, catching up. Listening to Terry, mostly. The kid made sure to include Max in his narratives, using the street-signing we’d taught him. Max can read lips, but I’m never sure how much he gets, so I usually throw in a few gestures whenever I speak. The Mole never bothers; it’s not like most people understand what he says, anyway.

“You need a car?” the Mole finally asked me.

“I...guess. I came in with one, but it’s not exactly anonymous. A Subaru SVX.”

The Mole grunted something.

“I don’t know where it is now,” I told him. I looked at Max, and made the gesture for steering a car.

Max tapped the ground with his foot, then pointed down. So the Subaru was buried someplace safe. It had good paper on it, and it was registered to a fine set of bogus ID I’d been using on the other coast. I could sign it over in blank, give the paper to a driver, let him clout the car down in Florida, maybe. We couldn’t know if anyone was onto the ID, but if they were, the sale would place me a long way from home. And I could use the money.

“Which car did you take?” the Mole asked Terry.

“The Accord.”

“You want that one?” the Mole asked me. “In the City, nobody sees it.”

“Sure...” I told him. “That’d be great.”

The Mole gave me a look, but he didn’t say anything.

We walked back to where the Honda was hiding. Without the Jeep, it took maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. Terry never stopped talking. The Mole said about as much as Max did.

But before we took off, he leaned down to where I had the window open. “Nothing is different,” he said again. Like he wanted to make sure I got the message.

We took the back way home, over the Willis Avenue Bridge. It was late afternoon, the deep shadows already dancing with impatience to take over the streets. As we came up on the Houston Street exit off the Drive, Max reached over and tapped my wristwatch. He wasn’t asking me what time it was; he was saying we had a meet.

“What?” I mimed.

Max didn’t respond. But when we got to Chrystie Street, he pointed through the windshield—keep going straight. We weren’t headed for Chinatown, then. I stayed on Houston to the bitter end, then turned south down Varick Street. Max kept pointing me through the narrow maze of blocks that circled the Holland Tunnel like broken capillaries around a bruise.

We found a parking spot under a sign that said not to. I got out and followed Max down a garbage-filled alley. As we turned the corner, I saw a pair of center-joined doors, their frosted glass worn away enough to show a metal grate behind. On the glass, someone had painted ROOMS in once-red freehand.

Max made a “let’s go” gesture and opened the doors, pushing the grate aside with one hand. To the right was a long plank with a hinged center section. Behind it stood a wall of pigeonholes. Large number-tagged keys poked out of a few of the slots. A long-handled bolt cutter stood against the wall.

Behind the plank, there was a fat man in a wheelchair, wearing a green eyeshade out of a Fifties movie, only twisted around, hip-hop style. His eyes were the color of old dimes. Between rapid blinks, they scanned, recorded...and erased the tape.

I followed Max up an uncarpeted flight of stairs that was a little cleaner than the alley. On the next landing, a single low-watt bulb protruding from the wall revealed only the vague shapes of doors, all closed.

Max went up another flight, checked the area briefly, then kept climbing. I recognized the top floor by its skylight. Signs were splattered randomly over the walls—EPA, Health Department, Office of Building Management—warning of everything from exposed wiring to lead paint to asbestos contamination. NO ADMITTANCE! DANGER!

In case anyone still felt brave, there was a triptych of rat posters, the kind the Transit Authority slaps up in your better subway stations. Drawings of malevolent rodents, with a POISON!! notice above. Nice places, subway tunnels. If the vermin didn’t get you, what the City tried to kill them with would.

I warily eyed the cables dangling from the ceiling as we walked to the end of the hall. We came to a decrepit-looking wooden door, sagging on its hinges. Max pushed it open, stepped aside to usher me in, a faint smile on his usually flat face.

The Prof and Clarence were seated at what had once been a professional poker table—a green felt octagon, with round slots for ashtrays and drinking glasses at each station. They gave me an indifferent glance, as if I were a stranger who had just walked into a bar.

Max tugged at my sleeve and pointed for me to look around. Instead of the coffin-sized rooms you’d expect in a flophouse, the place was spacious enough to hold a corporate meeting—someone had taken a sledgehammer to the connecting walls. The windows were small and grimy, but an overhead skylight bathed the whole space in soft light.

Max gave me the tour. There was no kitchen, but someone had put in a little blue microwave, a chrome toaster, and a white enamel hotplate with two burners. Three stubby brown mini-fridges were stacked one on top of another.

At the very end of the corridor was what had once been the shared bathroom for the whole floor. Its walls had been punched out to incorporate the room next to it, and it now featured a coiled aluminum line that added a shower option to the good-sized white fiberglass tub. There was a skylight above that room, too.

Retracing our steps, Max pointed out the new layer of rubber flooring, a tasteful shade of black. Fresh drywall had been used to form a sleeping room, furnished with an army cot, a wooden chest of drawers, and four stand-up steel lockers.

“What you think, Schoolboy?” the Prof asked, coming up behind where I was standing.

“It’s beautiful,” I told him, meaning it.

“Yeah, bro. The Mole tricked it out slick.”

“The Mole?”

“See,” the little man chuckled to Clarence, “I told you Burke wouldn’t bust it.” He turned to me. “Don’t look like the Mole’s tracks, right?”

“Well...”

“That’s the point of the joint, son. Downstairs, it’s still an SRO. One step up from a chickenwire flophouse. A pound a night, cash in hand. Every night, or they padlock your room. The building’s marked—they’re gonna make fucking condos out of it or something. You know the way the City is now, bro. Ain’t no place motherfuckers won’t live, because there ain’t no room for all of them that wants to, right?”

“Even after the World Trade Center?”

“This is The Apple, son,” the Prof said, with the bitter pride only people born and raised here ever really get right—or understand. “They’d have to do a lot more than knock down some buildings and kill a bunch of folk.”

He held out his hand, palm up. I slapped it soft, no argument.

“So, anyway,” the little man went on, “they don’t tumble buildings no more, they rehab them. This here one, that’s what it’s waiting on. ’Course, with all the palms that got to be greased, it’ll be years before it ever actually happens.”

“And in the meantime...”

“Yeah. You lay in the cut. Right up here on the top floor. Off the books, complete. Far as the City know, this floor’s unfit for human occupancy. Nobody goes past the third.”

“The guy at the desk...?”

“You don’t need to worry about him, bro. The only thing Gateman’s got an eye out for is his PO.”

“What’d he go for?”

“He’s a shooter.”

“You mean, he was, right?”

“No, son. Gateman always worked right from that chair. Last time down, the jury hung on homicide. Gateman claimed the other guy was making his move. Self-defense. The other guy was strapped, but he never cleared leather. Gateman’s a cutie. Told the DA he had to sit anyway, might as well sit on The Rock until they tried him again. They have a staredown, and the DA blinked. Kept dropping the offer. When it got down to Man Two, Gateman took the lucky seven, did his half-plus.”

“He doesn’t work now?”

“Just behind that desk, son. But I pity the sucker who tries to stick up the place.”

If this was any city but New York, I might have raised an eyebrow at anyone holding up a flophouse. Here, I just nodded.

“Gateman, he’s on the hustle,” the Prof said. “He gets a free room and a little cash for managing the place. Picks up some extra fronting meets—there’s a big room behind that desk. Trading post; you see where I’m going.”

“He trade anything else?”

“Gateman’s good people,” the Prof assured me. “Time-tested. Two rides; never lied to glide. I did a stretch with him, back in the day. He gets a G a month from us. That’s his lifeline; he can count on it. And, anyway, you ain’t no fugitive now. No price on your head. What’s he going to get from diming you?”

“Does he know who I am?”

“Maybe.” The Prof shrugged. “Gateman’s not the kind to show what he know. But he for damn sure knows who Max is, understand? Besides, he don’t even have to see you come and go, you don’t want him to, honeyboy. I told you the Mole was on the job. Want to see?”

“Sure.”

The Prof walked over to what looked like a floor-to-ceiling closet built out into the room, walled on three sides. When he opened it, I saw a flat platform and a pair of thick cables.

“Used to be one of those dumbwaiters,” the Prof said proudly. “My man Mole gets his hands on it—you know what you got now? A private elevator, bro! You got to crouch a little, but it works like a charm.”

“Where does it go?” I asked, taking a closer look.

“Basement. Nothing down there but the furnace and the boiler. Door opens in, not out, okay? When you open it, looks like you’re facing a blank wall, but it’s really the back of a big Dumpster. Lever to your right. You pull it down, it unlocks the wheels. You just shove it away, step out, push it back, and you’re in the alley. A phantom. Even if someone sees you, they don’t believe it.”

“What if there’s someone waiting in the—?”

“Got you backed, Jack. The Mole hooked up one of those submarine things. You know what I’m talking about, right? You look in it, you see what’s happening outside. Works at night, too. Everything looks kind of greenish, but you can still see boss, hoss.”

“I stay up here three nights once, while we are getting it ready, mahn,” Clarence said. “Quiet as a graveyard.”

“Rats don’t make a sound, huh?” I said.

Max pointed to a big box in a far corner. It looked like a stage speaker for an industrial-music concert. The Mongolian pointed at his ears, raised his eyebrows, and jerked his head around as if he just heard something. He made a mound of his hand to imitate the huge hindquarters and tiny head of the Universal Rat. Then he shook his head as if the sound was painful, and made the rat scurry away.

I nodded at him. Sure. The Mole wouldn’t waste his time with traps or poison. Cats can handle mice, but they’ve got too much sense to mess with City-mutated rats. For those, what you need is a little terrier...and my family knew I wasn’t ready even to think about another dog.

“Well, brother? This work for you?”

I scanned their faces, seeing what I’d crossed the country to see again.

“It’s the best place I ever had in my life,” I said.

I took my time settling in. Trying it on, adjusting the fit. Did a lot of dry runs through the basement: in and out, always at night. Slowly, I got familiar with the place, admiring the little touches they had added to protect me, like the acoustic tile on the walls. And the three cellular phones, all set to the same cloned number, each with a separate charging holster, so that one was always live. The electricity was bridged from Gateman’s own unit, and it powered the space heaters just fine when I tested them.

No A/C; wall units would have given away the game from the outside, and central air was impossible. But the venting was superb, so the fans were able to whisper the summer days down to comfortable.

I kept the anonymous pistol Mama had given me on a little shelf in the elevator shaft. One flick of my hand and it would drop to the basement, well out of reach of any search warrant.

Each room had a large plastic disk on one of the walls. Any weight on the stairs would make the disks glow flash-fire red, bright enough to wake you out of a deep sleep.

In a room off the entrance, I found they had hooked me up with a big-screen TV. And a piece of Gateman’s cable package. He was a high roller in that department—I even got HBO and Showtime.

That’s when it first hit me. My old office was too small to ever have friends over—say, to watch a fight on TV together. It was barely large enough for me and Pansy, and...and then I understood why my people had set up my new place the way they had.

“Calls come in,” Mama said. “All time, always.”

“Business?”

“Maybe sometimes,” she said, shrugging to emphasize the “maybe” part.

“What do you think?” I asked Michelle.

“I think maybe Mr. Burke could have an assistant,” she purred.

“You?”

“Me? Honey, I am no man’s ‘assistant.’ I was talking about you.”

“Sure, bro,” the Prof counseled. “Take the handoff and hit the line. You got to get back to work.”

I don’t know how the woman stumbled across my phone number...the one that rings in a Chinese laundry in Brooklyn and forwards to the pay phones behind my booth. That number’s been part of the graffiti in certain back alleys for so long that most of the people who call it can’t remember where they got it.

Michelle and I met her in a diner, somewhere around the Elmhurst–Rego Park border in Queens. She looked like a woman in her late thirties who’d kept herself pretty well...or like a teenager with most of her nerve endings deep-fried. If she had a problem with me and Michelle both being the “screeners” for the busy Mr. Burke, she didn’t say. Maybe because she was even busier amping out her story.

“Nola—that’s my genetic mother but I don’t call her ‘Mother’ because she’s not a mother because mothers don’t lie to their own children about critical things like she did, like she always did, from the very beginning—Nola, she told me that my father was a one-night stand, you know, like in a movie or something,” she said in one breath. The edges of her speech splintered with stress fractures. “Very romantic. He was a poet or something; I don’t remember. I don’t remember lies. That takes a lot of work. You try it yourself, if you don’t believe me. Forgetting something, that’s hard. Trying makes you remember. But I finally got it. I don’t remember what she said he was. My father. She said she never knew his name, but one day she saw his picture in the paper. He was killed in a car accident, or something. I think that’s what she said, anyway. I don’t remember. Because it was all a lie, so I don’t remember it.”

I felt Michelle’s long fingernail pressing into my knee, telling me to sit still. She was a lot more interested in the end of the story than I was.

“She isn’t as smart as she thinks, Nola,” the woman went on. “And I’m not as stupid as she thinks I am, either. I investigated her. She never thought of that. She thought I’d investigate him. But how could I do that, when I didn’t know anything about him? Except lies. And I can’t remember lies.

“I found my birth certificate. Her name, the Nola name, it was on it. But his wasn’t the same name she told me. It wasn’t the same name she said was my name, my last name, not Nola’s, the name from my father, the way you get your name from your father.

“After that, it was easy. So easy. I love the Internet. You can find out anything on the Internet. You can find the truth. The total truth. It’s always there. And nobody can erase it or lie about it or change it. Once it’s on the Internet, it’s forever. Like the runes. I searched. I used search engines. They have them, just for that. And I found her.”

I lit a cigarette. Took one drag, then placed it in the notch of a clear glass ashtray with a green logo in its base. The smoke drifted up between us. I let my eyes go into it, a patience trick.

“She was raped,” the woman said, a sneer in her voice. “That’s what she, Nola, what she told everyone, anyway. That’s where I came from. From a rape. She said. She, Nola, said it when I confronted her. It was a confrontation, like you see on television, like they tell you to do to the person who hurt you. I read that. I read that in a number of books. You have to confront them. Make them take responsibility. That’s what I did. And not with a letter, like they say to do if you can’t face them, or if they’re dead, but I could, so that’s what I did. I went right to her.

“‘You lied,’ that’s what I told her. And you know what she did? She admitted it. Like it was something she was proud of. She said she never told me my father was a rapist because she didn’t want me to think I came from anything bad. She, Nola, could have had an abortion, she said. But she doesn’t believe in abortion, she said. So she went away and changed her name and had me, the baby. That was after the trial. After the man was convicted.”

My cigarette had burnt itself out. I wondered when she was going to.

“What do you want Mr. Burke to do?” I asked her, earning myself another puncture wound from Michelle.

“He’s innocent,” the woman said. I knew what was coming then. And it turned each vertebra of my spine into a separate ice cube. “I found him,” she said, reverence throbbing through her voice. “We correspond. I’m on his approved list. Not everyone can be on that list. He had to get permission. And I visit him, too. He’s in Clinton; do you know where that is?”

“Yes,” I said, keeping to the professional neutrality of the hostage negotiator. “It’s a prison. Way upstate, near the Canadian border.”

“That’s right. That’s true, what you said. He’s up there. All the way up there, for something someone else did. For what someone else did to him.”

I was getting a headache. Even if the guy she was talking about had gone down for Rape One, and the judge had maxed him, he wouldn’t still be Inside so many years later. Not in New York, where the politicians think only drug-dealing and cop-killing should lock you down for the count.

“I don’t understand,” I said gently. “If he’d been convicted back in—”

“No, no, no, no,” she cut me off. “He was in another place. A much nicer place. In Gouverneur. That’s far upstate, too. But it’s better. He was in a dormitory, not a cell. And he could have more visits, and packages, and everything. But he got stabbed. By an Italian. A Mafia man, I think. It was for no reason. He almost died. But the man who stabbed him, he told a story, and they believed it. So they moved the man Nola said was my...They moved him. For his own protection, is what they said.”

“I’m still not following you,” I said. “When was he first incarcerated?”

“Incarcerated? When my mother, Nola is what she says her name is, when my mother made up the story. That’s when.”

“But that was before you were even born, right? And he’s still locked up?”

“He...You don’t understand. The prosecutor, she was a crazy woman. A savage person. She got them to sentence him as a Persistent Violent Felony Offender,” she said, articulating the words proudly, like a child who had just memorized her alphabet.

“This was in Queens, then?” I asked.

“Yes! Right here in Queens. In the courthouse in Jamaica. I have the whole transcript. That prosecutor, she told the judge my father was a dangerous beast, and he needed to be in a cage for the rest of his life.”

Wolfe, I thought to myself. The former chief of City-Wide Special Victims, she was a blooded-in veteran of the trench warfare academics call sex-crimes prosecution.

Wolfe had been hated by Legal Aid and black-robed collaborators alike. She’d taken on all comers for years, never stepping off, fighting harder when she was surrounded. She tried all the “bad victim” cases everyone else ducked—hookers, mentally ill, retarded, elderly, little kids—risking the high conviction rate so sacred to prosecutors with political ambitions.

And then she was taken down by a party-hack whore who spent so much time on his knees that the ass he kissed had become his panoramic world-view.

After that, Wolfe went outlaw, spearheading the best info-trafficking crew in the City.

Wolfe, who I always loved from the moment I truly knew her. Who told me once, “You and me, it’s never going to be.” Who I once had something with I’d never had before. A second chance. And, being me, I blew it.

No matter how long you’re gone, some kinds of pain are always patient enough to wait for you.

“I know who you’re talking about,” is all I said. “But I still can’t figure out what you want Mr. Burke to do.”

“My father was the victim of a false allegation,” the woman said. “It was all a lie. They were all liars, all those women. But only Nola, my mother, she says, even Nola she says, she was the only one who was brazen enough to tell the lies in court. It was not the truth, so it was a lie. My mother, this Nola, made it all up. Because she was a slut and a whore. She didn’t want to admit what she was, so she said she was raped. Like the Scottsboro Boys. Just like that. It was on the Internet. Those girls were never raped. But they knew if they pointed a finger at black boys they would be heroes, not whores.

“That’s what happened with my mother, Nola, the way she says it, Nola. The big hero. For testifying. Such a brave liar she was. So what I want, I want...DNA,” she said, in that breathless, dramatic tone people reserve for something holy.

“You’re talking a lot of money,” I said, trying to stem the flow.

“Money?” she sneered, almost cackling with scorn. “There’ll be plenty of money. I talked to a producer. And she said that we’d all be there, on national TV. They can do a remote, so my father could be on TV, too, from prison.”

“A producer...?”

“My agent is handling it all,” she said loftily. “He says a book is a sure thing, and maybe even a movie. And if Mr. Burke can get me the test, he’d be on camera, too. You know what publicity like that could be worth?”

About as much as my picture on a post-office wall, I thought, but I made encouraging noises at the woman, wanting her to finish so Michelle and I could vanish from her life.

“I want a complete DNA test,” she said. “Of everyone involved. Me, Nola, my mother she says, and the innocent man, my father. See”—she bent forward to compel me with the brilliance of her plan—“my father’s lawyers have all given up. The...rape kit, I think they call it, it’s not around anymore. So, normally, there wouldn’t be anything anyone could do. But Nola, my mother she says, says my father raped her. And that’s how I was born. You see the beauty of it?

“Will you tell Mr. Burke for me? I know he always defends the innocent,” she whispered, confirming that she was a dozen shock treatments past deranged.

“Sometimes, I’m ashamed that God is a woman,” Michelle said on the drive back. “I don’t like sick jokes.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Nice logic, huh? If this guy’s DNA doesn’t match up, so what? Means he’s not her father, that’s all. Doesn’t say anything about him not being a rapist. Only thing it means is that the mother had sex with someone somewhere around the time the rape occurred. Probably after, is what I’m guessing.”

“Why?”

“Lots of kids are born at eight months, not nine. Technically preemies, but they have good size and weight. The mother probably did the math herself, figured it had to be the rapist who made her pregnant.”

“Or maybe just a little before, and the guy had used a condom, so the mother thought she couldn’t...?”

“Sure. But there’s no way the rapist knew her, not even slightly. Otherwise the maggot would have gone for a consent defense, guaranteed. This wasn’t a homicide. The victim lived, and she ID’ed him in court. There was probably a ton of other evidence, too. Remember what she said about ‘all those women’? You don’t get a Persistent Violent jacket without a load of priors. Ten to one, he was a serial rapist. Probably only took it to trial because Wolfe wouldn’t offer him anything off the life-top, so what did he have to lose?

“You’ll notice she never said a word about blood evidence being used to convict him. Experienced freak like that, maybe he used a condom. That woman is stone-lunar. To her, this is all some kind of weirdo paternity suit.”

“Ugh!”

“You know what’s worse, girl? There was no reason for the mother to lie. Who’d want to make up a story like that? That freak’s her bio-father, all right.”

“How could a TV producer not see she’s a...?”

“Knowing isn’t caring, honey. Talk shows are going through what skin mags did years ago.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Playboy set the standard, right? Upscale, classy, lots of features...and all the posed pussy anyone could want. Anything successful gets imitated, but instead of trying to outclass the leader, most of the others went downmarket. The more Playboy carved out the niche at the top, the deeper in the sewer they went, see? That’s where the competition is now, who can go the lowest. Same with TV. The target’s not the penthouse; it’s the basement. Did you hear her voice when she said ‘national TV,’ girl? Same way some people say ‘Our Lord Jesus.’ There’s no traveling freak shows anymore—cable brings them right into your home.”

“Burke,” she said, leaning toward me, “you’re not going to take her money, are you?”

“She hasn’t got any,” I told her, placating both our gods.

I never asked the Prof or the Mole what the stuff they’d set up for me cost, any more than I would ask Max if I owed him rent. I’d left everything behind when I disappeared. I didn’t know what they’d sold, what they’d destroyed, and what was still around. But I knew how to find out.

“Where do I stand?” I asked Mama.

“With who, stand?”

“With money, Mama.”

“Oh. Plenty money here for you.”

“Mama, a straight answer, okay? You’re the bank, not the Welfare Department. I’m not coming around and asking for money that’s not mine. Just tell me what’s left, in cash, after everything.”

“Why so important?”

“I have to know when I need to go back to work.”

She regarded me balefully for a solid minute. Then she said, “Soon,” her face as smooth and hard as glazed ceramic.

It took another couple of hours to pry the balance sheet out of her. I was down to about sixty grand. I took ten to walk around with, asked Mama to dispose of the Subaru for whatever she could get for it, and went looking for work.

You can’t do the kind of work I do without a lot of preparation. There’s all kinds of people who steal, from the stupid slugs who think 7-Elevens turn into ATMs after midnight to the slicksters who can buy themselves a presidential pardon when things get dicey. Me, I’ve got my own ways. And my own flock to fleece.

I never target citizens. They’re easy, but they squawk. Before the damn Internet, I had a lovely business built up, regularly selling everything from nonexistent kiddie porn to mercenary “credentials.” The horde of humans who bought from me couldn’t go to the Better Business Bureau when their merchandise never arrived in the mail.

I also dealt in hard goods, middle-manning low-level arms deals, usually suctioning a little from both sides in the process. But with the breakup of the Soviet Union, there was too much ordnance floating around. By the time I left, even the congenital defectives who commanded five-moron militias were demanding surface-to-air missiles.

I gave it a lot of thought, remembering the formula I memorized during my first bit Inside—the less time you spend on planning, the more time you should plan on doing.

When I first went down, a common scam was for a prisoner to get hold of one of the lonely-hearts magazines and write to a whole list of dopes. Admitting “she’d” been a bad girl, but now all she wanted was a good man. Between the losers with handjob habits who asked for letters about lesbian sex behind bars, and the deep-dish dimwits who sent money for the “correspondence courses” their little darlings needed to take to please the parole board, you could make a nice living.

It got so bad that suckers were showing up at the gates, demanding a visit with their soon-to-be-released sweethearts. That’s when they would discover that the “D. Jones #C-77-448109” they’d been sending money orders to was in there all right...but the first name was Demetrius, not Darlene.

Eventually, the authorities got wise. Now they stamp outgoing envelopes with bold notices that the letters inside are from a “Correctional Institution for Men.”

Every move has a counter, and it’s never been real difficult to defeat the great minds who cage humans for a living. The letters started going out to the marks from an outside PO box. Little Darlene’s in solitary, and she can’t get mail “direct” anymore. But, don’t worry, Darlene’s sister (who’s also real cute, but only sixteen, so she shouldn’t be getting too involved with a grown man and all) can handle the forwarding. Fortunately, her name’s Désirée, so “D. Jones” would work just as well on the money orders.

And then there’s the poor tormented transsexual, who describes her absolute horror at being locked up in a men’s prison. She has to stay in close confinement twenty-four/seven, or she’d be set upon instantly by rabid packs of rapists. All she has to sustain herself are the chump’s love letters, the money he sends for things like shampoo—so expensive in a men’s prison, you know—and the knowledge that, the minute she’s paroled, she could finish the sex-change surgery she’d already started before she’d been arrested (which is why she already had such nice big breasts). And they’d live happily ever after.

But that scam plays different today. Now it’s a beautiful teenager prowling the chat rooms, crying out in her desperate need to get away from her horrible home life...until a “connection” is made and her shined-on knight sends her the money for a bus ticket. And some decent clothes, maybe some luggage...you know.

It’ll be a long wait at that depot.

But I don’t like working in public. And, anyway, that ground’s already been strip-mined down to the bare rock.

As long as there’s contraband, there’s money to be made. Sometimes, you traffic in things—like no-tax Southern cigarettes or no-questions-asked shipments of computer chips. Sometimes, the product’s a lot less tangible. Like jail-phone relay systems. No matter what the level of security a prisoner’s held in, he’ll have the right to call somebody, even if it’s only his lawyer, and only collect. With three-way calling, it’s no trick to put a gangster in direct touch with the people waiting for his orders. The guards can open mail, but there’s way too much volume for them to monitor all the outgoing calls. More gangland hits get ordered from jail now than from outside. All you need is a live person to play switchman, and decent timing.

A nice hustle...but not for me. Too close to home.

Drugs have ruined the game for a lot of us good thieves. Dope fiends are the illegal immigrants of crime—a cheap, undocumented labor force that will take any job, even the dangerous ones, for garbage money. Years ago, we’d hijacked a load of H and tried to sell it back to the mob. But when I mentioned that caper to the Prof this time, he sneered it away.

“Not much chance of finding a decent-sized shipment you could take off with anything less than an army, not today. And when it gets down to the street dealers we could jack, it’s not worth it. You can’t deal with these punks. The drug boys, all they know is rock and Glock, honeyboy. You steal from a professional, he knows he’s got to buy his stuff back—cost of doing business. These boys out there now, they’re all mad violent. They’d load up their nines and come looking to hose you down, give you a kiss for the diss, see?”

I did. And started making new lists.

What I found out was...I’d been away too long. I sniffed around the edges where I used to do work. Sent word through third parties to people who dealt in stuff I used to move, checked the usual drops....

But no matter where I looked, the arteries were all clogged with amateurs.

There’s no new crimes, only new criminals. And I didn’t know any of them.

Oh, sure, there were little jobs I could pull. Minor stings where I wouldn’t need an active crew, just a little help with front. Low-risk, low-return.

That’s all I wanted to do, once. Live small. Stay off the radar. I could never be a citizen, but I didn’t want to be a convict again, either.

Thing is, only citizens have 401(k)s. When I was coming up, I’d always hear the crime guys I admired talking about the “retirement score.” That one big job they could live off forever.

When you’re young, that kind of thing’s just another convict fantasy. One of the Big Three—money, sex, and revenge.

When you’ve put on some mileage, when you’ve been some places and done some things, you realize that the Big Three is down to One. Money. That key works all of the locks.

And by the time you get old enough, close enough to that time when any trip back Inside amounts to a life sentence, you know what “blood money” really means. This is an ugly country to be poor in. Worse if you’re sick. And if you’re old, you can ratchet that up a few notches more.

I knew all that. I was schooled by the best. I’d been putting money aside from every score almost since I started. But when I had to disappear, most of it got eaten up during the hunt. And I didn’t have another twenty years to rebuild my stake.

When I was a young man, rep was all a lot of us had. Heart. We tattooed it on our souls, a prayer never to be forgotten. Paying with our lives for the sacramental wine poured into an “X” on callous City concrete by those who had watched us go. Whenever his brothers pooled their cash for a bottle of T-bird, the man who had proved his heart in battle always got the first taste.

I’d lost that need for a two-minute tombstone a long time ago. The reason I’d rather go out quick than rot to death on Welfare hasn’t got anything to do with pride. Some pain is easier to manage, that’s all.

This isn’t Willie Sutton’s world anymore. Banks aren’t where the money is—at least, not money you can get at in a quick-hit robbery. Casinos and racetracks have tons of untraceable cash. But there’s no way to ease it out, and it would take a military assault to take it by force. Kidnappings always come unglued at the exchange. Blackmail’s hit-or-miss; mostly miss. Jewelry’s easier, but it has to pass through too many hands before it turns into cash, and each one cuts a slice off the loaf.

The whisper-stream is always vibrating with rumors of open contracts. A Central American druglord is offering millions for any crew that can break him out of a federal pen. A collector is offering more than that for a certain painting under museum guard. Some shadowy zillionaire has a huge bounty out on whoever the hate-flavor of the moment is.

There’s always enough shreds of truth clinging to stories like that to make some retardate act on faith. Ask James Earl Ray.

The surest proof that Ray acted alone is that nobody ever ratted him out. Ask the church bombers. Or McVeigh.

But I wouldn’t go there. I’ve been to that school. Paid what the tuition cost.

So I knew who to ask.

“Snakeheads,” Mama said.

“Is there really that much in it?” I asked her.

“Always money. Just not...” she said, snapping her fingers to say “immediately.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Snakeheads like farmer with cows, okay? Cow meat worth not much; cow milk, very good. Get all over again, every day, understand?”

“The people they bring over, they pay off their debts by working? Takes a long time, but the money keeps coming in...?”

“Yes. Small payment, each week. But many make payment, so plenty money, see?”

“Sure. But where do we come in?”

“To snakeheads, people...cargo, okay?”

“But it isn’t cargo you can hijack, Mama. What could we do with—?”

“Plenty...what you call ‘societies,’ here. In America. They, how you say, sponsor people.”

“Pay their way over?”

“Yes. Like ticket.”

“Why?”

“Many reasons. Some good, some not so good.”

If you’re ever fool enough to let Mama know anything she says isn’t crystal-clear, she gets offended. It’s okay if you don’t get it, so long as it’s not her fault.

Only silence works. So I just ate a little more of my fried rice with roast pork and scallions. The minute Mama’s satisfied you don’t want an explanation, she always explains.

“Sometimes, family, okay? Relatives. Sometimes, just want to buy girl, like for wife.”

“They wouldn’t need to smuggle anyone in for that. Seems like half the women in Russia under thirty are registered with some broker. It’s a big business now.”

“Not like for...American wife,” Mama said, venom-voiced. “Not like for...marry. To use. You understand.”

That wasn’t a question.

“And war,” she went on. “In Vietnam. Plenty brothers, sons, fathers...never come home. Not dead, maybe. Nobody know for sure.”

“MIAs?”

“Maybe,” Mama shrugged. “Nobody know for sure,” she said again, as if I’d missed it the first time. “Always rumors. People in the camps, they hear. If you say you know where American soldiers still in Vietnam, then, maybe, people sponsor, bring you here, so you say where soldiers still kept, see?”

“What camps are you talking about, Mama?”

“Always camps,” she said, no expression on her face. “Always fighting. So—always refugees. Cambodia, Laos, Burma. On Thai border, plenty place to hear whispers.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I heard about some of those hustles. I guess, if you had one of your own go MIA, you’d listen to anyone who claimed to have seen him, pay to bring him over.” I thought of Robert Garwood, a Marine who had spent fourteen years in Vietnam. He was either a POW or a collaborator, depending on whose story you bought. The smart money had it that he’d originally been grabbed by the VC, then changed sides while in captivity.

Years after the U.S. pullout, he came back, and the military put him on trial. Found him guilty of collaboration, but not desertion. Maybe because they’d never listed him as a deserter, even after returning POWs reported that he’d gone over.

One of those stories you never know the truth of, I guess. But for those who want to believe that some of the American soldiers listed as MIA are still alive, Garwood’s tales of “live sightings” are precious gospel. To those folks, Garwood couldn’t have been a collaborator; he had to have been a prisoner. Because, if he lied about one thing, then...

“Other societies, too,” Mama said. “Chinese. Not want coolies. Want doctors. Scientists. Computer people. Pay very good money.”

Is she talking about the Taiwan government? “But if they already—”

“No, no. Same deal. Societies never trust snakeheads. Nobody trust snakeheads. Same deal. Must see before payments start. Only payments bigger, see?”

“But why should they pay us?”

“They pay everybody,” Mama said, explaining natural law. “Pay for paper, like green card. Pay lawyers. Pay, how you say, political people. Always pay, what difference? Pay whoever has cargo, okay? Pay snakeheads maybe hundred dollar a week. Forever, pay that. But pay you ten thousand. One time, all done, see? Everybody happy.”

“But even at...How many could the snakeheads possibly bring over at one time?”

“Two, three hundred.”

“In one boat?”

“Sure. Not nice, but...”

“It might be nice for us,” I finished.

When I was a kid, I’d leaped from roof to roof across narrow alleys all the time. Never gave it a thought. Played chicken, my head on the subway tracks, facing another kid as poisoned with pride as I was. Death train coming, first one to jump back loses. Charged right at a boy from a rival club, even though he was holding a zip gun and all I had was a heavy length of chain. The zip misfired—most of them did—but the chain worked fine.

I even tried Russian roulette once, with an old revolver one of the guys brought down to the damp, ratty basement we called a clubhouse. We all took a turn, but I was the rep-crazy fool who went first.

I wasn’t faking then. Checking out didn’t scare me. It was the one sure way to guarantee that the...people who had hurt me would never get their hands on me again. Damaged kids learn quick: death trumps pain. That’s why some serial killers and some suicides are brothers—they were raised by the same parents.

Later, I learned. I learned to be scared. And I learned how to do a lot of damage. That’s when I stopped trying to run from the people who always hurt me. I wanted to get close to them then. Close enough to stop the pain.

But even back when I was one of those “don’t mind dying” young guns, deep water at night terrified me. I remember once when a whole caravan of kids from the City followed the lead car out to some beach on Long Island. It was summer. Hot and muggy. Howie, the guy who’d organized the whole thing, he told us that this Jones Beach was a ton better than Coney Island. No boardwalk, no rides, no hot-dog stands. Best of all, no crowds. Nothing to do but drink some wine, pass around the maryjane, and fuck. Like we owned the place.

Of course, that’s not the picture he painted for the girls. They thought they were visiting some special spot only rich people got to use...the kind of rich people who would actually pay attention to the BEACH CLOSED AT MIDNIGHT signs.

I was as up for the trip as anyone. But the night ocean was so monstrously deep, only your imagination could fill it. The minute you went in, it had you—you were surrounded by things you couldn’t even name, much less fight. The girl I was with, she waded in until the water got to her waist, then she just sort of lay down on her stomach and paddled around. I was too welded to my image to not go along with her, but I called it off as soon as I could.

On the blanket later, after we’d finished, I was lying on my back, finishing a joint. I should have been blissed out. My rep got me on that blanket that night. With my gang, with that girl. I was a man in all the ways we measured such things in my world. I knew how it worked.

But when I closed my eyes, I could feel that hungry black water moving. It...reduced me. I was a child in my mind. Back in that foster home they had sentenced me to. And every time the tide lapped up on the beach, searching, I felt the fingers probing under my covers, again.

That was a lifetime ago. Now I was standing on an outcropping of rock, overlooking the spot where Mama said the snakeheads made their landings, Max at my side. The ocean was calm as a storybook pond, preening in its finest Atlantic-gray coat.

It didn’t fool me.

Max tapped my shoulder, made a gesture of turning a steering wheel, then spread his arms wide. I nodded. Yeah, they’d need some big trucks. Even if they packed them tighter than a hooker’s skirt, two, three hundred head would take up a lot of space.

Mama had explained that the snakeheads didn’t operate like their counterparts south of the border. Mexicans coming across paid once, and they paid in front. So the coyotes didn’t care if their customers suffocated in the back of one of the rigs, or baked to death hoofing it across open desert. But snakeheads needed their cargo alive if they wanted to collect—no point bringing them all the way across the ocean, only to lose some at the end.

We’d already solved one part of the puzzle. The land we were standing on was private property. A desolate stretch without any real beach. I’d expected a fence. Or, maybe, dogs. But it was deserted. Part of the camouflage? No matter, we still had to figure on an armed escort any night they were due to make a drop.

Max made the first two fingers of his right hand into a swimming gesture, moving slowly toward his left, which he held flat and perpendicular. The swimming fingers crashed into the left palm, and burst into fragments. The Mongol shook his head “No.” Then he put his hands in the original position, but had the swimming fingers stop and tread water, while the left clumped into a smaller ship, heading out.

Sure. No way to bring the cargo ship right onto the shore—they’d have to go out with motor launches, bring a few in at a time. A big operation. Bigger every time we took a closer look.

Max tapped the first two fingers of his left hand with his right index finger, one at a time. Did it again. Then spread his right hand wide, tapped each finger and his thumb. I nodded glumly. Two and two was coming out five, all right.

“Everything like I say, yes?” Mama put it to me.

“It looks that way,” I hedged.

“But...?” Michelle asked.

“Fat lady in the circus ain’t got as much ‘but’ as there is in this mess,” the Prof said sourly. “There’s money there, sure. But there’s money in Fort Knox, too.”

“My father is right,” Clarence said. “Even if we had enough men—”

“Men?” Michelle asked, sweetly.

“Personnel,” I stepped in quick, before it escalated. “And it’s not just numbers, it’s logistics. They’ve got a stash house somewhere. Got to be pretty close by. We’d need one, too.”

“Maybe...scatter. Right away. Soon as they come off boat.” Mama.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “No way they’re all going to the same place. Not in the end. I can’t see them running a convoy of trucks out of there, then splitting up and going in all different directions. Their best play would be to keep them all in the same place, parcel them out a few at a time. The troopers won’t be stopping every car with a couple of Chinese in it.”

“That’s true,” the Prof said. “It ain’t like running niggers through New Jersey.”

Michelle raised her perfectly arched eyebrows. Caught my return look in time.

“If they were all in the same place...” the Mole finally spoke.

“All of the cargo, sure, Mole. But not all of the snakeheads.”

“So?” he asked, mildly, eyes calm behind the Coke-bottle lenses.

“Ah,” Mama said, approving.

The Prof nodded. We all knew what one of the Mole’s little gas globes could do in an enclosed space.

“But when they...the smugglers...when they came to, they would know it was no accident,” Clarence said.

“They wouldn’t know where to start looking,” Michelle said thoughtfully.

“Yeah, they would,” I told them. “The buyers. And they’d look hard. Nobody ever takes a hijacking lying down. It could bounce right back on us.”

“Not decide now,” Mama said. “Look for place first, okay?”

Max’s nod was almost imperceptible.

“Mama’s got her own in this,” the Prof said. It was much later that same night. We were in my place, deciding.

“Max thinks so, too,” I agreed.

“What is wrong with that, mahn?” Clarence wanted to know. “Plenty of times, Burke, you have your own in things we do, is that not true?”

“Yeah. It is. And I’m not saying anything’s wrong with it. But you see where it’s going, right?”

“I do not,” Clarence said, his West Indian accent even more pronounced through the formal style he always adopted when he felt the need for distance.

“One sure fact in every jack,” the Prof said softly. “There’s always the chance some people ain’t coming home from the dance.”

“I know,” Clarence said, waiting.

“Only there’s no ‘chance’ in this one,” I finished it up. “Even if we could locate the barn where they’ve got the cargo stashed, they’d have guards all around. What’re we going to use on them, tranquilizer darts?”

“Max could...”

“Max could ninja one or two, sure. But the Mole’s no stealth-meister, Clarence. He’d need time and access to set up his stuff. And what if there’s more guards posted inside? Or if they have dogs? This whole thing, it’s nothing but a damn jailbreak. And if the wheels come off, there isn’t a single hostage worth taking.”

The young man went quiet. We joined him, waiting.

Finally, he said, “So the only way is to...?”

“Leave them there,” I told him. “All of them. Not gassed, not tied up. Permanent.”

“That is insane, mahn.”

“It is,” I agreed. “And Mama’s not. So I say we take a look.”

First thing, we needed a local base. A place where any of us could come and go without attracting the spotlight. You can buy some privacy just by living in certain areas. But that also buys you regular police patrols, maybe even some private security force thrown in. And, worse, the kind of neighbors who act neighborly.

Gated communities and trailer parks share the same secrets. Humans hurt their babies everywhere. Beat their wives, violate their daughters, sell their sons. But we wanted an area where people worried about the DEA, not the IRS.

Michelle rented us a house in a little village nestled between two other towns, one white and one black. I didn’t know much about Long Island, but I’d done enough business with assorted racist groups from out there so that I wasn’t surprised by the clear division.

Max and I made the drive out in my new ride. I’d taken the Honda back to the Mole. Told him it just wouldn’t work for what I needed it for. And that was true. What I didn’t tell him was that a few weeks of driving that mobile appliance was squeezing the sap out of my tree.

I got the new car for eleven hundred bucks. One grand was the finger’s fee for the sweet spot he’d scoped out—an underground parking garage in a small apartment building on the East Side. Room for only about three dozen cars, most of those belonging to tenants. The open rental slots were always full by nine. By ten, ten-thirty every day, the NO VACANCY sign would be out. And the lone attendant would be having his coffee and a buttered roll, faithfully delivered by the Korean kid from the nearby deli. The extra hundred was for the kid’s college fund.

By noon, the attendant would come around, probably figuring he’d just dozed off for an hour or so, big deal. I’m sure the cops hadn’t arrived until the owner of the brand-new Porsche 911 Turbo came to pick up his car that evening. And started screaming.

By then, the Porsche was all pieced out. And I was driving my barter, a l969 Plymouth two-door post that had gone through half a dozen life changes since it rolled off the assembly line as a Roadrunner. Its last owner obviously had been in the long-haul contraband business. The beast’s undercarriage was a combination of an independent-rear-suspension unit pirated from a Viper, and subframe connectors with heavy gussets to stiffen the unibody...and let it survive a pretty good hit, too. Huge disks with four-piston calipers all around, steel-braided lines. The cavernous trunk had plenty of room, despite housing a fuel cell and the battery, but I didn’t find the nitrous bottle I’d expected.

Maybe that was because a 440 wedge, hogged out to 528 cubes, sat under the flat, no-info hood. I’d balked when Lymon first told me it was a crate motor, but he’d jumped all over my objections, taking it personally. Lymon’s a car guy first; thieving’s just his hobby.

“That motor ain’t from the Mopar factory, man,” he said, contempt cutting through his Appalachian twang. “Al deKay himself built this one.” I knew who he meant—a legendary Brooklyn street-racer, rumored to have switched coasts. “You got yourself an MSD ignition and a brand-new EFI under there,” he preached. “Nascar radiator plus twin electric fans, oil and tranny coolers—this sucker couldn’t overheat in the Lincoln Tunnel in rush hour. In July. Reliable? Brother, we’re running an OEM exhaust system, H-piped, through a pair of old Caddy mufflers. Costs you a pack of ponies, but it’s as quiet as a stocker with those hydraulic lifters. This piece, boy, you don’t need to even know a good wrench—you want, you could fucking weld the hood shut.”

It was tall-geared, running a 3.07 rear end—which Lymon proudly gushed was “full cryo” while I pretended I knew what he was talking about—and a reworked Torqueflite off a column shifter. Oil-pressure and water-temp gauges had been installed in the dash slot that formerly housed the pitiful little factory tach. The replacement tach, one of those old black-faced jobs, was screw-clamped to the steering column, with a slash of bright-orange nail polish at the 6000 shift point.

The bucket seats had an armrest between them that you could pull up to sit three across in a pinch. What you couldn’t see was the chromemoly tubing that ran from the rocker sills through the B-pillars right up under the headliner to form a rollover hoop.

The windows had a tint that looked like Windex hadn’t touched the glass for years. The outside lamps of the quad headlights had been converted to xenon high-lows, like switching a cigarette lighter for a blowtorch. The inside units were actually aircraft landing lights, but you’d have to be close enough to notice the nonserrated clear glass with the telltale dot in the center to tell.

No power windows, no air conditioning. The radio was the original AM/FM. If I wanted tape or CD, I’d have to bring a portable with me when I rode.

From the outside, it looked like different things to different people. To a rodder, it would look like a restoration project—the beginning of the project, with the Roadrunner’s trademark “meep-meep” horn more hope than promise. To anyone else, it looked like a typical white-trash junker, just fast enough to outrun the tow truck. Steel wheels, sixteen-inchers all around, shod in Dunlop run-flats, with dog-dish hubcaps on three of them. Rusted-out rocker panels. A dented grille hid the cold-air ducting on either side of the radiator. Steering wheel wrapped in several layers of padded white tape. The front end was all primer, the rear the original red, since gone anemic. The left tailpipe was trimmed so that it looked like a replacement mill—probably a tired 318—was providing the power.

It looked right at home on the patch of dirt that would have been the front lawn if the house we’d rented had been in a better neighborhood.

Michelle hung around long enough to fully express her utter and total unhappiness with the dump. Nobody was dumb enough to point out that she’d been the one who rented it. She worked her cell phone, harassing the Mole unmercifully until he agreed to drive out and pick her up. I love my sister, but it wasn’t the first time I’d been glad to see her wave goodbye.

Max and I went back to our life-sentence card game as if we’d never been interrupted by my disappearance. He was into me for a good six figures, but that didn’t faze him—he’d been down more than a quarter-million years ago, when he caught one of those mythical lucky streaks even the most degenerate gambler never dares to dream of. Once he felt it lock in, the Mongol kept me in my seat for hour after hour, afraid of offending the gods by changing anything. When the run finally had played itself out, he was damn near even. But it didn’t take him long to get back under the gun, especially after I’d taught him casino as a break from gin. Max with gambling is like me with women—love’s not the same as skill.

He even dragged out the score sheets he always carries around like a religious medal. We had long since agreed to settle up when we met on the other side, and Max figures a running tab guarantees, no matter how long I’m gone, we’ll be together again someday.

Today’s game was part of the proof.

Nights, we rode. Me driving, Max charting. We knew what we were looking for—a place big enough to store a couple hundred humans. Remote enough so there would be no casual traffic, and close enough to the drop point to make it a quick trip. We found what we wanted easy enough. Only thing was, we found it a dozen times in the first few tries.

Back at the house, I held my hands apart, then slowly brought them together, looking a question at Max. He shrugged, no closer than I was to any factors we could use to narrow down the search.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told the Prof and Clarence. “It doesn’t matter where they mean to keep their stash. I know how it could be worked now. Only thing is...it’s not for us.”

“Need too many guns?” the Prof asked.

“Too many uniforms,” I said.

“Let’s hear it run, son.”

“Like you said already, it’s military-scale. But it’s still a hijacking. And the best way to work one of those is to have the drivers take a little taste themselves.”

“Pay them off?” asked the man who’d taught me that trick.

“The opposite,” I told them. “The way to make it work is to have INS—or what they think is INS, anyway—roll up and take them all down. So it’s a bust, right? We take possession of the cargo, and the snakeheads are all in custody.”

“Here comes the mordida, right, Schoolboy?”

“Sure. We let the snakeheads bribe their way free. The negotiations take a few hours, maybe.... That works easy enough; they’re not going to have that much cash on them, so they’d have to persuade us that they’re good for it. Meanwhile, the cargo’s on the move. We cut the snakeheads loose, what are they going to do? Go tell their bosses...what? Good way to get themselves killed. They’re likely to stay here in America, go underground.

“Ever since nine eleven, INS isn’t exactly concentrating on Chinese. But whatever their choices, they’re bad ones. Main thing is, we get the cargo, nobody gets hurt...and nobody’s going to talk.”

“Except...?”

“Except that we’d need fifty men. Maybe more. All uniformed, full arms, and communication gear. Marked vehicles, the whole works. We’d have to pull a dozen jobs just to put the financing together. And even if we were bankrolled, we couldn’t find that many rat-proof professionals still working.”

“Mama had to know that, going in.”

“Amen, brother. I don’t get it any more than you do.”

“I do not like to say this....” Clarence hesitated, looking around the circle for approval. We all gave it to him, silently. He nodded his head, as if registering the vote, then went on: “We would need many men to capture them. But, in the dark, by surprise, we would not need so many to...”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “The way I laid it out, there’s nothing left to show anything happened. We leave a bunch of bodies lying around, we turn a no-case into a feast for the federales.”

“That clue is true,” the Prof agreed, putting into words what we all thought—Mama would draw the line at stupidity a lot quicker than she would at murder.

Max stood up, went into the kitchen. He came back with a box of toothpicks. In ten minutes, he had a whole scene constructed on the table. He looked up, made sure he had everyone’s attention, then showed us where we’d gone wrong, his fingers drawing it as clear as a blueprint. We watched the trucks line up near the shoreline. Saw the ocean-goer sit offshore, the smaller boats go out to it to vacuum off the cargo. The cargo got offloaded, and the trucks went to the warehouse. Max tapped my wristwatch, ran his finger around the dial a couple of times to show the passage of time. Then one of the trucks pulled out of the warehouse, loaded. He put himself behind the wheel, driving. Pointed next to him, shook his head “No.” Then he pointed at Clarence, touched under his left armpit, and shook his head “No” again.

Sure, he was right. Each of the cargo-haulers would be alone. And unarmed. A thin smile spread across the Prof’s lips.

Max’s toothpick truck motored along. He quick-built a little roadblock, spread his hands in a “Why not?” gesture.

I bowed my head just enough to let Max know he was a genius. The bow wasn’t just out of respect—slapping five with Max was a high-risk move. “Max has got it,” I said aloud. “There’s a ton of ways to stop a single truck. Hell, a flat tire would do it. Taking down one driver...we could do that in broad daylight. And what’s he going to do after we’re gone, call the cops?”

“We couldn’t keep dialing that number,” the Prof said, deliberate-voiced. “It’d be a one-shot. And we’d need some kind of watch on the plant, to know when the right one was leaving.” He took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “You think that’s what Mama wants? All this planning and scanning just to kick one of them loose?”

“She’s done it before,” I reminded him. “And that’s her style, too, swooping in from the wings. But, even for Mama, this is extreme sideways.”

“So...?” the Prof tossed out.

“We ask her,” I said.

The Prof rode with me on the drive back. When we got to the on-ramp for the LIE, I nailed the Plymouth, gobbling ground for the sheer hell of it. We were over eighty in a slow eye-blink, the tach laughing and loafing around three grand. I backed it off, listening to the restrictive mufflers mute the throb of the torque-monster.

“Like your old ride never died, Schoolboy,” the Prof said approvingly.

“Faster, actually. Corners a lot better, too.”

“But it don’t feel the same, right?”

I thought about it for a minute, avoiding where he was going, the only father I’d ever known.

“No,” I finally said. “It’s sweet, but...”

“...but it ain’t got no holes punched in the trunk,” he said, pinning me. I looked at my right hand. At the tiny heart tattooed between the last two knuckles, hollow and blue. My old Plymouth had the trunk all fixed up for her, complete with the air holes the Prof was talking about. Many’s the time I popped the trunk from inside the car so that Pansy could be a surprise guest at a party people planned for me.

The last time I’d done that was the last time for her. She’d gone out the way she wanted, taking one of the enemy with her.

I always see her. On the screen inside my head. A flash of dark gray against the black night, charging across that stretch of waste ground, hell-bound for the man who’d shot me. Dropping him as he tried to run. Rearing up, a chunk of the shooter’s throat in her mouth. Taking fire from the others who’d been in on the ambush. Going down. Getting up again. When they closed in to finish me off, I could still see her...trying. It was the last thing I saw before I went someplace else.

I had come back. Pansy hadn’t.

“You evened it up, honeyboy,” the Prof said softly.

“Doesn’t bring her back,” I told him, through clenched teeth.

“Go on Oprah, fool. That lame game ain’t for folks like us.”

Truth.

I breathed through my nose, centering myself.

It wasn’t even midnight when I dropped the Prof off. Way too early to meet with Mama. I headed back to my place, figuring on killing a few hours.

If Gateman saw me come in, you couldn’t tell it from his eyes; they stayed as neutral as cancer.

I poured myself a beer mug full of ice water from the fridge. New York City tap water is as clean as any of that glacier-grown crap they sell in fancy little bottles. Tastes better, too.

I fired up the TV, kicked back, and watched some of the races from the Meadowlands on cable. Reminded myself I would need to find a new bookie—if there was one guy on earth who’d know my voice on the phone, it was old Maurice.

Later, on the drive over to Mama’s, I found CBS-FM, Don K. Reed’s Doo-Wop Shop. Caught The Heartbeats’ “Crazy for You” from the top. Street-corner perfect.

That was another thing I’d missed about New York—radio stations where Dion was a first name.

I drove past Mama’s, slow and careful. The white-dragon tapestry was in the window, barely visible behind smeared-streaked glass that had collected more fingerprints than a crime lab. All clear. If the dragon had been red, I would have kept on going. And if it had been blue, I’d have known exactly what the problem was.

Mama’s a patriot. Same as we all are. The country we’re loyal to is the only one we vote in. And it’s never much bigger than wherever we stand.

I parked the Plymouth in the alley without a second thought. Pulling out the ashtray toggles an on/off switch wired into the distributor; if it’s not in the right position, the engine will crank but never catch.

And for that one spot, I had even better security. The driver’s door was now a replica of the alley wall—a white square against the dull-gray primer, with Max the Silent’s chop in gem-cut black inside. You’d think this would blow the whole anonymous deal, but you see quasi-Chinese ideograms on everything today, from clothes to skin. They usually don’t mean anything, but people who read comics for the ancient wisdom think they look cool.

There’s a tattoo artist Mama knows in a basement off Mott Street. He always has a vast display of the symbols for customer viewing. They pick the one they like, and Hop Sing or Wo Fat or whatever he feels like calling himself that day makes up a story about what it stands for: Truth, Justice, Integrity, Honor, Power, whatever. Mama says there are hundreds of different symbols for “sucker” in Chinese, and this guy knows them all.

The men on the door did their job, like always. But they hadn’t bothered with the threat displays since that first time.

Mama was at the front, by her register, staying close to the only altar she truly worshipped at. And making sure any stray customers who wandered in got the message that they didn’t want to eat there. She and the tureen of soup arrived at my booth at the same time.

“Damn! This is extra good tonight, Mama. You put something different in it?”

“Always something different,” she said. “Not good last time?”

“No,” I said, laboring. “It was superb the last time. It is never less than superb. This time, it was even superior to your usual standard, that’s all.”

“Huh! So—want more, yes?”

The soup was so hot it burned my mouth. My big mouth.

I was deep into my meal of braised beef and bok choy when Mama dropped it on me. “While you...gone, people still call, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Not like, all right, okay. Okay, like, you understand, okay?”

“Okay.”

Her eyes were black olives. I took the double-barreled scrutiny; looked back, blandly.

“Sometime, people owe money, want to pay. Sometime, want time to pay, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Sometime,” she went on, ignoring me, “want work done, okay?”

“Yeah. What did you tell them?”

“Mr. Burke not here, okay? You call back, okay?” she parroted in her best Chinese-laundry voice.

“You had a long time to be saying that.”

“So sorry,” she said, in the same voice. “You maybe try again, okay?”

“I get it. But most of the people I deal with, they’d want whatever they wanted right then.”

“Too bad, so sad,” Mama said, her voice a perfect imitation of her granddaughter Flower. “Oh well.”

“So, after a while, the whispers die down. And people stop calling. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“New people, stop call. Old people, not same. You understand?”

I nodded to tell her I did. Sure. Made perfect sense. My name had been in the street a long time. Someone coming up on it for the first time, if they needed what I was known for, they’d give a call, take a shot. If they kept getting sloughed by Mama, they’d give it up, go elsewhere. But old customers, they’d keep trying.

Like old enemies.

“Sometime, big job,” Mama said.

I nodded again, not questioning how she could tell all that from a few words whispered into a pay phone—Mama could smell a dollar bill in a slaughterhouse.

“So! Big job, old customer, get different story, okay?”

“What story?”

“Story like I tell you before, okay? Burke not here. Long time. Not in country. Special thing. But somebody else do job.”

“Who’d you send them to?” I asked, frankly curious.

“No, no. Not send away. Tell to wait. Can’t wait? So, okay, I not know anything about Burke business. But now job come in, you do; like say before, okay?”

“You mean, be my own...brother, or whatever?”

“Not look so much like you,” she talked through what I was saying. A train on tracks, rolling. “Little bit, maybe. But same voice. Just like talk to Burke, talk to brother.”

“All that for what, Mama?”

“Money,” she said, black eyes glowing like a Geiger counter near a rich vein. “Big, big money.”

“The snakeheads?”

“Not now,” she said. “Snakeheads all the time come. This business, come only once, okay?”

Three nights after my meeting with Mama, I nudged the Plymouth through the still-thick Manhattan traffic, taking my time. This was a quicker contact than I’d expected. When Mama told me who was playing, I’d been sure they’d use foot soldiers to screen me before going face-to-face.

The upper roadway of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge took me past the luxo highrises on my right as I crossed the river, into another country.

I found the adult-video store wedged into a concrete triangle under the bridge extension on the other side, just before where Queens Boulevard starts its long run through the borough. The store’s back was crammed up against a no-star hotel. A long-abandoned gas station made up the third leg of the triangle.

They’d told me I could leave my car at the gas station, but I didn’t like that option much. I turned left, up Skillman Avenue, and motored along, watchful. When I saw the white rag dangling from the door handle of an old brown Buick sedan, I flicked the lever into neutral and blipped the throttle.

It was as if the Plymouth’s deep-chested snarl had knocked on the Buick’s door. I caught a brief glimpse of Asian faces, at least four of them. I pulled up a few lengths, made a U-turn, and waited as the Buick maneuvered out of its spot. Soon as it left, I parallel-parked into the space they’d vacated. I settled in carefully, cranking the wheel full-lock to make sure I could blast straight out if it came to that. I wasn’t worried about the decrepit station wagon parked in front of me—it would stay there until the boys in the Chinatown war wagon came back to collect it sometime tomorrow.

I still had a forty-five-minute cushion, so I did a last-minute check to make sure I had everything I needed for the meet. Which was nothing.

Then I took a walk. Up Skillman to Thirty-sixth Street, then a right to Queens Boulevard, across from the old Aviation High School. I glanced at my watch. Still early. I strolled back down toward the triangle, relaxed.

And thinking about Mama. “It don’t take no crystal ball, son,” the Prof had concluded. “Mama don’t want the whole pot. She must have got word, her one chip ain’t making this trip.”

Maybe. And maybe all the money this meet promised made it worth her while to wait.

At least I was done with trekking out to Long Island all the damn time.

The porno shop was fortified as if some sleazy alchemist inside had turned gash into gold. Gun-turret windows in a slab-faced cinderblock front, the flatness broken only by a pale-blue door behind a set of bars that wouldn’t have looked out of place in San Quentin. Red neon, twisted into the usual promises, glowed reptile-cold.

A pair of cross-angled cameras in weatherproof boxes were mounted at the top of the door, as subtle as a handgun pressed against your temple. I pushed the buzzer, waited, my back to the street.

The door was opened by a tall, skinny guy with a hollow-cheeked face. The forehead above the orange sunglasses he wore was an acne graveyard. In the sullen light from overhead, his crooked teeth looked like an ad for nicotine.

I stared into his mirrored lenses until he stepped aside.

The interior decorator’s palette had been limited to gray and yellow. A few old posters on the walls, some half-empty video racks, one wall of limp magazines. Not a DVD in sight. No private booths, no lingerie shows. The joint was as erotic as a used condom floating on an oil slick.

The cadaverous-looking guy went back to whatever he’d been doing. I browsed through the racks, playing the role. Ignoring the two other men in the place, but not before I absorbed that they were both wearing the latest in Sopranos-chic.

Time passed. No new customers. I didn’t look at my watch. I’d gotten there on time, and I was working flat-rate.

Finally, they glided up, one on my left, the other somewhere behind me. I kept my focus on the greasy pictures, letting the sense impressions flood in. Textures and colors. Sharp tang of too much cologne. They never touched me, just air-cushion-herded me toward the back of the store.

Nothing too fancy in the back, just a long rack on rollers, with a door behind it. A door with no knob. A hand came into my field of vision. Two-knuckle rap. A panel slid up in the door, revealing a Plexiglas window. Maybe fifteen seconds passed. The panel slid down. The door opened. I stepped inside.

The only thing in sight was a flight of stairs, going down. “Uh-huh,” a voice behind me said.

At the bottom of the stairs, a man in a white lab coat pointed at a long bare workbench. I walked over there.

One of the men stepped close. He was a muscular guy, a couple of inches shorter than me, with longish, heavily gelled black hair. He made eye contact: communicating, not challenging. I opened the channel, waited for his next move.

He held one finger to his lips, making sure I got it. Then he unbuttoned the overtailored jacket to his onyx suit, carefully took it off, and draped it on the workbench. I took off my own jacket with a little less ceremony, placed it on the bench the same way he’d done.

By the time we finished, we were facing each other in our shorts and socks. Without his shoes, he was much shorter than he’d been before. His body was nicely cut and defined, but I had better scars.

The guy in the white lab coat started working on my clothes with some kind of wand.

The guy facing me held his finger to his lips again. I didn’t change expression.

It didn’t take long.

Then we got dressed.

The next door was much more elaborate; no way you would see it unless you knew it was there. It looked as if the stone wall of the basement had just retracted into itself. I followed the guy in the onyx jacket into a long, narrow room with a low ceiling. Each of the three walls I could see had a separate door, undisguised. In the far corner, two men were seated in padded armchairs. A third chair stood empty, facing them. I walked over until I was standing in front of the empty chair.

“You’re Burke,” the man to my left said. He was Italian, mid-thirties, darkly handsome, saved from pretty only by a nose that hadn’t been perfectly set the last time it had been broken.

I just nodded. It hadn’t been a question.

“I’m Giovanni,” he said. “And this is Felix.”

The man to my right was Latino, maybe a decade older than the Italian. Or maybe a generation; it was hard to tell much in that light. He was lighter-skinned than the Italian, with the face of royalty. Ruthless royalty.

“Sorry about all the...precautions,” the Italian said. “You understand.”

I nodded again.

“Sit down, please,” the Latino said.

I caught the briefest flicker in the eyes of the Italian. He wasn’t a man who liked being one-upped, not even when it came to class and courtesy. He made a tiny gesture with his right hand. A man came forward, put a fresh pack of cigarettes—same brand as the half-empty pack I’d carried in with me—and a heavy gold lighter on the low table in front of me. A large amber glass ashtray was sitting there, sparkling clean.

“You’ll get all your stuff back when you leave,” the Italian said. “You want a watch to wear in the meantime?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“I heard a lot about you,” he said. “From a lot of people. For a long time.”

“About my brother, you mean.”

“Your brother, yeah. But the Chinese lady, she said you were the same.”

“Like how?”

“Like you could do the same stuff. The exact same stuff. Dealing with you, it would be just like dealing with him. Is that right?”

“Exactly right.”

“I have heard much about you as well,” the Latino said, offering his hand for me to shake.

I gave him a light-pressure grip. He turned his palm up, holding my hand a second longer than he had to. Long enough to verify the tattoo. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said. “To lose one so close to you...”

“Thank you,” I said, my eyes empty. Is he playing it straight, buying the “Burke’s brother” thing? Or being cute...telling me he knows about Pansy?

“Reason you’re here is,” the Italian said, “me and Felix, we’ve got a problem. A problem for both of us, maybe. Or maybe not. That’s where you come in.”

“I’ll tell you where I don’t come in,” I said. “That’s between the two of you.”

The Latino smiled. “We do not want you to take sides, señor. We want your...advice. Your counsel. And, perhaps, your skills.”

“Why me?” I asked them both.

“You’ll see,” the Italian said. “You’re a natural for it. And you’re getting five large just to listen—like we agreed, right?”

They spent the next half hour marking turf, asking me if I knew so-and-so, if I’d been Inside when such-and-such went down, like that. As they talked, their two crews drifted away from our corner. One of them watched a ball game on TV, with the sound turned way down. A few started to play cards. A couple just stared into the middle distance.

“What I’m going to tell you, it’s nothing illegal,” the Italian said. “I’m the victim, not the perp. But it’s not nothing I’d want anyone to hear about....”

“You say that to say what?” I challenged him. I wasn’t any more impatient than their crews were. But you let a man warn you too many times, he starts to think he has good reasons for doing it.

“We have decided to trust Mr. Burke, yes?” the Latino said. “That was our agreement. Mr. Burke is a businessman. He has a reputation. He knows the value of things.”

That last was a nice touch, telling me I better know the cost of things, too.

“I’m sorry,” the Italian said. “It’s just that this whole thing may sound...weird, right?”

The Latino nodded gravely, but stayed silent.

“I got a...position, okay?” the Italian said. “I’m not the boss, but I’m a boss. I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I?”

“No.”

“‘No’ because you can work it out, or ‘no’ because you been looking at charts?”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to be hostile. And, it’s true, you bought my time. But you keep tossing these shots at me, and I don’t get it. What am I supposed to say now? No, I’m not an undercover? No, I didn’t get your ranking off some OC chart?”

He took a deep breath through his nose. Let it out, slow. “Sorry,” he said again; a reflex, not an apology. “I’ve been over some rocky ground. All twists and tricks. It’s hard to trust.”

“I didn’t come to you,” I reminded him.

“Yeah. I know.” He took another deep breath. Looked over at the Latino. “Fuck it. All right. Me and Felix, we’ve got a business relationship. A good one, for both of us. But it’s the kind of thing that some people wouldn’t understand. You following me?”

“Sure. Want me to spell it out?”

“A little. Just so we can be sure you—”

“You’re like a salesman,” I said, as casual as if I was giving directions back to Manhattan. “The boss gives you a territory. He says, You got the franchise; now go out there and make us all some money. Your franchise, say it’s for vacuum cleaners. And a lot of other stuff. But not for TV sets. Those, you got no license to sell.

“Now, there’s a lot of money in TV sets, but the boss doesn’t make TV sets, and he doesn’t trust the people who do. So they’re off limits. But you got a crew to take care of. If you don’t give them a chance to earn, they get...unreliable. So what you do, you find yourself a good solid manufacturer of TV sets. And you sell a few of them. Carefully, and only to the right people. This is good for you, good for your crew. Hell, it’d be good for everyone if your boss would just green-light it. But he’s not going to do that, and you know it.”

Giovanni looked bored. Except for his eyes.

“Meanwhile,” I went on, “you’ve got a regular payroll to meet, a big nut to crack. Much bigger than the boss knows. You’ve got to keep those wheels oiled. Another problem you’ve got, you’ve been one of the top salesmen, on the books. And the way you manage that, you sweeten all the deals on vacuum cleaners. Say the boss expects a hundred a month. But you, you’re handing him ten more. Keep him happy. But what that means is you’ve got to move a few more of those TV sets to make up the deficit.

“Now, maybe, probably, in fact, the boss knows you’re into TV sets. He’s got his rules, but so long as you’re earning that strong, and he gets his taste, he might not be so heavy into enforcement. Some bosses, they’re like bitches; you know what I’m saying? ‘Bring me that money, honey. Buy me presents. Get me stuff. Take me places. But don’t tell me where you get it all, that’s not my problem.’ Then, when you get popped for something, they go, ‘Ohmygod, I had no idea!’ That sound about right?”

“Like you were listening in,” the Italian said.

“A big boss is always a politician,” the Latino said, trying to smooth over his partner’s habit of playing picador. “This is the same in my business, too. A politician wants things done, but he doesn’t want to touch the work with his own hands.”

I nodded the way you do when you hear great wisdom, marking what the Latin was really telling me—he wasn’t the boss in his organization, either.

“How can I help you?” I asked them.

The two men exchanged looks at the outer edge of my vision. I leaned forward, opened the pack of cigarettes they’d brought me, fired one up with the gold lighter. I took a deep drag, then put the cigarette in the ashtray, stared at the smoke, waiting.

“This gets complicated,” the Italian said.

I watched the smoke. The trick is to look into it, never through it.

“You got any idea how dirty the feds play, sometimes?” the Italian asked.

“There’s all kinds of feds,” I told him. “Vietnam was the feds. Waco and Ruby Ridge, that was the feds. So was COINTELPRO.”

“What’s that last one?”

“Political,” the Latin answered for me.

“This isn’t that,” the Italian said.

“Political?”

“What it is, it’s personal.”

“I don’t know any feds,” I said, to head him off in case he was talking about solving his problems with a bribe. I’ve got no moral problem with being a bagman, but I’d never trust strangers at either end.

The Italian did the thing with his breath again. The Latin lit a cigarette of his own, apparently used to it.

“You know the best way to flip a man?” he asked me.

“Depends on the man,” I said. “And where his handle is.”

“Right. But it’s not true that everybody’s got one. Gotti took the ride alone. And he never said word fucking one.”

“Uh-huh,” I agreed. “Everybody talks Old School, but only a few walk it when the weather turns bad.”

“Remember the first of the super-rats?” he asked me, like a kid testing a newcomer’s knowledge with a soft lob down the middle of the plate.

“Valachi?”

“Joe Valachi. He blew the covers off our thing major, back in the day. You know what turned him?”

“Same thing Henry Hill said turned him. Barbosa, Pesnick, plenty of others, too.”

“‘Said’ is right. But Valachi, see, they thought he was going to roll over. So they put out a contract on him. And they missed. They didn’t clip him, so now what’s he going to do?”

“What he did.”

“Yeah. You ever wonder how they got the idea that Valachi had gone rotten?”

“Who knows? Maybe some old man got paranoid. Or maybe they figured, He’s doing forever, and you never know. So, what the hell, let’s eliminate the possibility.”

“What happened,” the Italian said, his voice almost religious with conviction, “is that the feds planted that word. It’s perfect. You hear you’re on the spot, what’re you going to do? Sit down with the boss, ask him, ‘Hey, you got a hit out on me?’ You got no place to run, because you been around the same people all your life and that’s all you know. You know how easy it is to get someone done in prison. The only safe harbor is to make a deal with the feds. And since you got so much to trade...”

“Maybe so,” I said.

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I wasn’t there. You know where I was once? In a war. That war’s been over for a while. Guess which side gets to say who was in the right?”

“Verdad,” the Latin said. “Same as in my country.”

“This isn’t fucking history,” the Italian said, his voice tight as piano wire. “This is right now. Today. Look at how the feds use the super-maxes. Pelican Bay, they lock you down for being a gang member. Then they tell you, right to your face, you’re staying there until you get out of the car, all right? Only thing is, you do it, you have to prove it. And how do you do that? The only way they accept is, you turn rat. Give some people up.” He stopped talking, closed his eyes so hard the corners crinkled. The way you do if you don’t know the technique to fight a headache. “So, if they want to kill a man, all they have to do is fucking put him back in population, am I right?”

“Yes,” I said, waiting.

The Italian did his breathing thing again. I ground out my cigarette, stayed patient.

“There’s a new twist on that game,” he finally said. “The way this one works, you put word out that someone’s already cooperating.”

“When he’s not?”

“When he’s not; right.”

“What’s the gain for them? Getting someone whacked?”

“No. They don’t want the guy whacked. What they want is for the rumor they planted to be true. To become true, see?”

“What you’re talking about, it’s too delicate. Valachi was a gift, dropped in their laps. They could never be sure a hit would miss.”

“Exactly! But what if the guy got a warning first?”

“A warning not to rat? That doesn’t make any sense. The way you’re laying it out, the cops would already know he’s not.”

“It would make sense if the warning came from...people who weren’t sure, maybe. But worried...”

“You’ve lost me now,” I said, telling the truth.

I caught the glance between them again. Went back to waiting.

“Fuck it,” the Italian said again. Not angry, resigned. “I got a daughter. By a...girl I knew when I was a kid. It was an outside-the-tribe thing, you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“The girl, when she told me, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t ask anybody, either. I offered her money to get rid of it, but she wouldn’t. I even didn’t feel right about that myself. Abortion—by the church, that’s murder. I was just getting some traction then. I wasn’t made or anything, but I was on my way; sure thing. What was I going to tell my people? What was my mother going to say? ‘Oh, my Giovanni don’t live here no more. He’s over in the Village, married to a moolingiane. I got a beautiful granddaughter, too. Sweetest little half-breed you ever saw.’ That was all the choice I had.

“The girl, she wasn’t some whore I had on the side. She was...a very pure person. I was the first man she’d ever been with. I had...feelings for her, for real.

“But if I went with her, that was the end of everything. I’d end up like one of those robots from my old neighborhood. Ride the subway to work every day. Hope you get on with the union; be like every good paisan with a steady jay-oh-bee. Keep some tomatoes out back, some pigeons on the roof, maybe. Play some bocce, get a weekend in Atlantic City once in a while. Once a year, two weeks in Florida; do some fishing or whatever. Always making payments on something. What’s all that? Just putting in time until they get old enough to go down to Florida for good. Get fucking buried there.

“I told her I could get money. I mean, even then, I was doing good. I had a new Camaro, my own place...but no way I was having my name on the birth certificate.

“She didn’t get mad. Didn’t even cry or anything. But she told me she wasn’t getting rid of the kid. And if she had to go on Welfare, they’d make her tell who the father was, and she wasn’t going to act like some tramp, pretend she didn’t know. She had an aunt she could go live with. Her aunt could watch the baby while she went to work.

“She wasn’t jacking me up for money, just telling me the way things were. If I’d thought it was a shakedown, I would have...I don’t know what I would have done. It doesn’t matter. What I did was, I pulled a job. Down in Jersey, with two cousins of mine. I didn’t keep a dime for myself—I gave her my whole share of the take.”

He looked at me. I looked back, as unreadable as rain.

“I never saw her again,” he said. “But I know she had a little girl. Every once in a while, I’d get a letter. Not a written one, just an envelope with pictures in it, some little notes on the back. Pictures of the girl. Her name was Vonni. After me, I guess.

“I got other stuff. Report cards, copies of letters from her school...I know what you’re thinking, but this wasn’t nothing like blackmail. Sure, I sent money. I figured the pictures was her way of telling me that kids need things. Like...a school picture, okay? That maybe meant the kid needed stuff for school, you see what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” I said, just to let him know I was listening.

“They lived out on the Island. Got her own house. I...helped her with that. Money, I mean. But Hazel, the mother, she always worked. She never went near the Welfare,” he said, completely unaware of the pride in his voice.

“And the girl, she wasn’t into anything. Not in her whole life. She was an honor student. Going to college. I mean, not some dream, okay? She was already accepted. To SUNY. That’s a very good school,” he said solemnly.

He stopped and did his breathing thing again.

The Latin lit another smoke, tilted his pack toward me. I accepted.

“Some sick fuck killed her,” the Italian said, his voice flat and hard, tiptoeing past emotion like a mouse around a cobra. “Stabbed her to pieces. For no reason, you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, going even flatter than he was.

“What it was, it was a warning. But not the kind my people use. You see what I’m saying?”

“The kind of warning Felix’s people might use,” I said, no longer mechanical.

“Yeah. But whoever did this, there’s one thing they never counted on.”

I kept quiet, waiting.

“If Felix was warning me, then someone must have warned Felix. You see what a mess this is? Someone tells Felix I already turned. I’m wearing a wire, maybe. Who would do that? If I got scared enough that my boss was going to find out what...what we were doing to make money...if I got scared and made a deal with the feds, Felix’s people wouldn’t care. Not unless I was going to bring them into it...”

“I understand.”

“You know what they never counted on? Me and Felix. That I’d go to Felix. And that I’d take his word when he told me he had nothing to do with...what...happened.”

“Did the cops ever ask you—?”

“I was never in it,” he said. “When I...heard, I...I called her. For the first time since we...She told me the cops said it was a sex maniac.”

Another breath. Close to a sigh.

“That was over a year ago,” he went on. “And nobody’s ever been popped for it.”

“And your boss...?”

“Hey, fuck my boss, all right? This isn’t about him. I’m a boss myself now. It’s about me. Me and Felix. About our thing. Somebody was trying to send a message, wreck what me and Felix have. Who else but the feds? They spook me into going over, they get everything, the dream RICO case.”

“It’s too subtle for them,” I said.

“Yeah? Who else would know about my...about her? It was so long ago. And I never told anybody. Not in my life. Not my mother. Not no priest. Not even...Nobody knew. There’s nothing to tie her to me. But the feds, they’ve got everything in the world in their computers....”

“I still can’t see the feds actually—”

“Not the feds. A fed. Someone who hates...us to death. Hates us that much that he’d want to see us kill each other.”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

He looked ice-picks at me for a few seconds, then held his finger under his nose, pinched one nostril, and snorted an imaginary line.

“You have a name?” I asked, eye-sweeping to include them both in the question.

“We do not have a name, but we have a way to the name...if there is one,” Felix said. “What we need is the truth of what happened. And only one man can tell us.”

“The killer,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And you want me to, what, exactly?”

“Here’s the deal,” Giovanni said, leaning forward, handcuffing my eyes. “I promised Hazel that I’d find out who did this. If it was some fucking skinner, that’s easy. I can fix that.” He paused, did his breath trick again. “But if it’s a game, if it’s someone trying to crush me and Felix, what we have, then I want whoever did it to talk.

“That’s not your problem, getting him to talk. What we want to do is hire you. Hire you to find whoever did it. We’ll take it from there.”

I lit another smoke, letting them see I was thinking over what they’d told me. And I was—hard, now that I knew the relationship between the two men. The one their bosses would never understand.

“It’s a long shot,” I finally told them.

“We want to play it,” Felix said, his eyes holding Giovanni’s the way his hands never could, in public.

Round Two was all business. Giovanni talking, me listening.

“That’s it,” he finally said, maybe twenty minutes later. “I’m empty.”

“Where are the pictures?”

“The...?”

“The photos. The ones the mother sent you over the years.”

“I burned them,” he said, as if daring me to make something of it.

“Couple of more things...”

“What?” he snapped, like I’d been asking him for favors all night.

I turned to Felix. “No offense, but you can see why I have to ask you. Did you know about this?”

“After she was—”

“No. Before. Did you know there even was a daughter?”

“He knew,” Giovanni said. “But there’s no way—”

“I’m not asking because I think your partner would betray you,” I said, sliding the words through his upraised hands like long-stemmed roses—quick, before he felt the thorns. “But you know how it works. Whatever one man knows, another man can—”

“No,” Felix cut me off. “What you say is true. But if an enemy, if anyone knew, they could only know from listening to Giovanni, not to me.”

“You mean, listening at the exact time he told you?”

“That is right. Only then. Because it was never said again, when we were together, by either of us. And, myself, it is as if I was never told.” His eyes were immortal with honor.

I moved my head a little, somewhere on the borderline between a nod and a bow. Accepting that, at the time Giovanni told him, neither man had been wearing a wire. And that it hadn’t been over the phone.

“There is such a thing as coincidence,” I told them. “But—say it’s not; who profits?”

“The feds.” Giovanni, saying his rosary.

“Or somebody in one of your crews,” I said, my eyes including the both of them.

Both of them shrugged. Too professional to dismiss such a possibility, but not going for it, either.

“I can’t go there,” I told them. “You understand, right? I’ve got to work backwards, from the killing. I’ll give you whatever I find, but if there’s any Machiavelli stuff going on in your outfits, it’s up to you two to sort it out.”

“Understood,” Felix said. He looked over at Giovanni. Something passed between them.

“Okay,” Giovanni said. “You got anything to tell me, you know how to do it.”

“I’m not making progress reports. And I won’t be coming back to you unless there’s something you can help me with.”

“Like what?”

“Like a phone call,” I told him. “A phone call to the mother. Tell her I’ll be around. Ask her if she’s willing to talk to me.”

“I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll do it tonight.”

“You knew?” I said to Mama. It only sounded like a question.

“Not what you say,” she replied. “Know something, sure. Big people, big money.”

“You knew the girl was from Long Island? That’s why you sent us out there to—”

“No. Girl, whole thing, big surprise. Snakehead thing different, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, remembering what I’d told Giovanni about coincidences. And not buying it any more than he had.

“She’s the only one for us,” the Prof said. “Girl sings the no-dime rhyme, all the time.”

We were in my place, making decisions. But I was having trouble with the one I didn’t have any choice about.

“And she already knows about you, bro,” the Prof hammered away. “You not going to spook her with this coming-back-from-the-dead horseshit.”

“Me and her, we’re not...”

“Don’t matter what’s between you, Schoolboy. Wolfe wouldn’t know how to fucking spell ‘rat,’ am I right?”

“Yeah,” I said, not arguing with proven truth. “But she might not want to help...get involved with anything I was doing.”

“This ain’t no marriage proposal, son,” the Prof jabbed me again, working the open cut mercilessly. “She’s just like us. Girl works for the money. And we got a budget. Fuck, off what they fronted, they expect us to have to pay for stuff. We got to shop, I say we start at the top.”

“AYW Enterprises,” the voice on the phone said, as warmly inviting as a “No Trespassing” sign.

“Hey, Mick,” I said. “You know my voice?”

“No.”

“Okay. How about I speak with Pepper, then?”

“Who?”

I breathed through my nose, reaching for calm. Said, “All right. Could I leave a number?”

“Go ahead,” the voice said. In his business, leaving a number without a name, as a message for a person who didn’t exist, was an everyday thing.

“Eh, what’s up, doc?” Pepper’s voice. One of her voices, anyway—she had dozens of them. I hadn’t heard the Bugs Bunny before, but it didn’t surprise me.

“I want to see her.”

“¿Por que?”

“Business.”

“Oy vay!”

“Pepper, come on. I’m serious. Stop playing around.”

“She’s very busy right now,” she said, in a bored clerk’s voice.

“Sure, I know.”

“Do better than ‘business,’” she told me, her voice dropping half an octave and thirty degrees.

“I’m working on something. And I need some—”

“Are you brain-damaged? Be specific, understand?”

“I’m trying to solve a crime.”

“Solve?”

“Solve, Pepper. For real.”

“For real and for who?”

“Not on the phone.”

“I can tell you this, right now. If this ‘crime’ is about someone taking something from someone else, and the someone else can’t go to the cops, you’re twisting in the wind, pal. She’s not going to—”

Pepper had a professional’s patience. She’d listen as long as it furthered the objective. I could feel her disengaging, said: “Listen to me. To what’s in my voice. This is the truth. The crime is a murder. The victim was a child. I’m back to being me. That’s what this is about, Pepper. I swear it.”

I listened to the silence until she finally said, “This number I called, it’s a cell, right?”

“Yes.”

“Leave it on,” she said. And hung up.

“Mrs. Greene?”

“Who is calling, please?”

“My name is Burke, ma’am. I believe you were told I would be...”

“Yes. Yes, I was,” she said. I could have been a magazine salesman for all the emotion in her voice.

“Can you tell me when it would be convenient for me to come by and—”

“Convenient?”

“My apologies, ma’am. A poor choice of words. If you can give me a time, any time at all, that would be acceptable to you, I would like to talk with you.”

“Here?”

“Or anyplace you wish, ma’am. And in any company you wish, as well.”

“Company?”

“If you would feel more comfortable not being alone when I—”

“Comfortable?”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry if I have offended you in any way,” I said softly, treading delicately. “I have a job to do, and I’m trying to do it as best I can. You could help, considerably. My only point, all I was saying, is that I will do anything in my power to...minimize whatever negatives you might associate with talking to me.”

“You’re from the City, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you know how to get here, where I live?”

“Yes, I do.”

“How long would it take you?”

“To be safe, a couple of hours.”

“Safe?”

“To be certain I was on time,” I said, beginning to catch the rhythm of her communication, sensing that any show of impatience on my part would be a lighted match to her gasoline.

“Can you be here by noon?”

“Absolutely,” I promised her. Easy enough—it was only nine in the morning. And I was already on the Island.

She hadn’t offered me directions, and I hadn’t asked. I had her address nailed. Not just from the street map—I’d driven past her house twice before I’d called. The town was in central Long Island, splayed across the Nassau-Suffolk border. All I knew about it before I drove through the first time was from checking the real-estate section of Newsday. And that hadn’t given me much of a fix on the area—houses ranged from just below six figures to several times that amount.

The commercial area was long and narrow. A single main street, with no depth to it, bisected by tracks from the LIRR commuter line. The little wooden depot was small and deeply weathered. Either nobody gave much of a damn, or some historical-preservation society wouldn’t let them touch it. I can never tell the difference. The parking lot was big enough for a couple of hundred cars, but only the area closest to the station was paved. At that hour of the morning, it was as full as it was going to get. Maybe thirty cars, each parked a polite distance from the next.

The north side of the strip looked like it had been there for quite a while. The street had a gentle curve to it, and the shops were small, with storefronts laid out in compliance with some quaintness code. A patisserie, a gourmet deli, a tea shoppe, an apothecary, couple of boutiques. Almost everything was two-story. Retail operations at street level, with a plain door between every few shops, probably for access to the second-floor apartments.

The south side of the strip was string-straight, not so much modern as sterile. It felt like an afterthought. Most of the frontage was all-glass, and the individual units were wider. It boasted a discount drugstore, a tanning salon, a SuperCuts, Baskin-Robbins, Carvel, and an OTB.

From end to end, little slot-size stores. Not a single supermarket, home-improvement warehouse, or chain bookstore—that size stuff would be in a mall, somewhere close by.

I was way early, so I found a spot at a meter and walked over to the Baskin-Robbins. Got myself a two-scoop cup of mango ice from a young woman with purple hair and a passé nose ring, and took it back to the Plymouth.

I killed half an hour playing with various approaches I could use. All I really knew about the girl’s mother was that I’d most likely not get a second chance with her. When I’d asked Giovanni, he’d just said, “I knew Hazel when we were kids. I could tell you what she was like then. But I don’t know her now.”

If I hadn’t scouted the area beforehand, I would have rented a car for the meeting. Something to go with my medium-gray summer-weight suit, white shirt, dark-blue tie, and scuffed black leather attaché case.

Her house was near the middle of a short, straight block. The yards were shallow in front, fairly deep in back, but cramped tight on the sides. The street wasn’t so wide that any neighbor with an interest would need a telescope.

I had to assume she’d had a lot of company back when they’d found her daughter’s body, and I wanted to look like I was more of the same, a year later. Not a cop. Some kind of civilian thief, like an insurance adjuster, or a lawyer.

I parked the Plymouth on the far side of a copse of trees that divided the houses from what looked like a Little League baseball field, a few blocks down from her address. Then I went for a walk.

If anyone wanted to follow me back to the car, they’d have to do it on foot, and it wasn’t exactly the kind of terrain a shadow would want to work. Every neighborhood has some wannabe cop twerp who listens to the police band on a scanner and likes “running the plates” of suspicious cars. But even if I got unlucky enough to stumble across one of those, the Plymouth would come up clean.

For that matter, so would I. Wayne B. Askew was a good citizen. The “B” was for “Burke,” that’s what his friends call him. An undistinguished sort of a guy. Self-employed all his life, now semi-retired. Still kept his hand in, dabbling in real estate. Never been arrested. No military service—that bad ticker, you know.

That’s an extra safety feature, a bad heart. I always carry one of those Medical Alert cards. Mine says Wayne had a quadruple bypass a couple of years ago, takes all kinds of medication for it. And, around my neck, I wear a plain steel necklace holding a small metal screw-cap cylinder. The cylinder is stamped with the serpent-curling-around-the-staff symbol, and the words: “Nitroglycerin. Change Pills Every 2–3 Weeks.” Inside the cylinder, I keep a half-dozen legit nitro pills. If I get busted, I know how to fake a heart attack. And when one of the cops reaches for the life-saving cylinder...

If that doesn’t look like the right play—maybe too many of them in on the arrest—I can always have the attack in the holding cell. When they call the cardiologist listed on the Medical Alert card, the phone rings in my lawyer’s office.

Wayne B. Askew will stand a lot of scrutiny. But if his prints drop, so does the mask.