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A Matter of Conviction

Ed McBain writing as Evan Hunter

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

For my mother and father,

Marie and Charles

And you who would understand justice, how shall you unless you look upon all deeds in the fullness of light?

Only then shall you know that the erect and the fallen are but one man standing in twilight between the night of his pygmy-self and the day of his god-self.

And that the cornerstone of the temple is not higher than the lowest stone in its foundation.

—THE PROPHET, by Kahlil Gibran

ONE

The azaleas were dying.

Naturally, they would be dying, and he should have known better. A man born and bred in New York City could dig each hole to its properly specified depth, spread peat moss in it, lay the plant onto this rich brown cushion with loving care, keep it watered and spoonfed with vitamins—and the thing would die anyway for no other reason than that a city boy had planted it.

Or perhaps he was being overly sensitive. Perhaps the intense heat of the past few days had been responsible for the plants’ illness. If that were the case, the azaleas might just as well give up the ghost, because today was going to be another scorcher. He rose from his squatting position near the fading shrubs that lined the terrace, squinting into the distant harsh glare of the Hudson. Another bright, sticky day, he thought, and his tiny office came instantly to mind, and he glanced rapidly at his watch. He still had a few minutes, at least time for a cigarette before he began his trek to the subway.

He pulled the pack from his jacket pocket, tore off the cellophane top and shook a cigarette free. He was a tall man with a large-boned frame, his body padded with sinew that would never turn to fat. His hair was black, cropped close to his skull in a crew cut which subtracted five years from his age. At thirty-eight, he still managed to convey to juries the look of a young innocent about to prosecute a case only because it was in the best interest of the people. And, like a young boy, he could suddenly vent seemingly spontaneous fury on a witness, turning his testimony into a shambles under the gleaming truth-sword of the very young. This morning, as every morning, his blue eyes were pale after a night’s sleep. Later in the day they would regain their full color, quickly readable meters of the ebb and flow of energy within the man.

He pulled up one of the rattan chairs, maneuvered it so that it faced the river and the pure cloudless blue of the sky, and leisurely puffed on his cigarette. He turned when he heard the screen door clatter shut behind him.

“Shouldn’t you be on your way?” Karin asked.

“I have a few minutes,” he said.

She crossed the terrace lazily, stooping beside the potted geraniums, plucking a few dead leaves from each plant, and then walking to the huge stone bowl that served as an ash tray, dropping the leaves, and coming to where he sat. He watched her, wondering if all men were still delighted by their wives’ beauty after fourteen years of marriage. She had been only nineteen when he’d met her, and the hunger of a Germany in defeat had robbed her body of its rightful claim to flesh. She was still a slender woman, but slender with the glow of health now, thirty-five years old with the firm unsagging breasts of a young girl, an abdomen only faintly striated by childbirth years before. She pulled up a stool and caught his free hand with her own, bringing it to her cheek. Her long blond hair touched the back of his hand. She was wearing a short-sleeved white blouse and dungarees and he thought, How American she looks, and then realized how ridiculous he was being. Why, even her English, heavily accented when he had first met her in Berlin, had lost its guttural Teutonic bite, had become rounded and polished, a pebble worn smooth by contact.

“Jennie up yet?” he asked.

“It’s summertime,” Karin said logically. “Let her sleep.”

“I never see that girl,” he said. “My own daughter.”

“The prosecution exaggerates.”

“Possibly,” he answered. “But I get the feeling I’ll come home one night and find Jennie sitting at the dinner table with a young man she’ll introduce as her husband.”

“Hank, she’s only thirteen,” Karin said. She rose and walked to the edge of the terrace. “Look at the river. It’s going to be very hot today.”

He nodded. “You’re the only woman I know who doesn’t look like a truck driver when she puts on a pair of pants.”

“And how many other women do you know?”

“Thousands.” He smiled. “Intimately.”

“Tell me about them.”

“Wait until my memoirs are published.”

“There’s the excursion boat,” she said. “I wish we could go one day. Could we, Hank?”

“What?”

“The boat …” She paused and studied him. “I thought it might be fun.”

“Oh. Oh, yes.”

For a moment, a cloud had passed, fleeting, ephemeral, disturbing him with the puritanical fact that he had not been the first with Karin Brucker. Well, it was wartime, he told himself, what the hell. She’s my wife now, Mrs. Henry Bell, and I should be grateful that an incredible beauty like Karin chose me over the competition, but why the hell did there have to be competition, well, it was wartime, it was … and yet, Mary would not have.

Mary.

The name sprang into his mind full-blown, as if it had been waiting to leap from a dark corner of his memory. Mary O’Brien. Not any longer, of course. Married now. To whom? What was his name? If he had ever known, he had now forgotten. Besides, she would always be Mary O’Brien to him, untouched, pure.… You can’t compare them, damnit! Karin lived in Germany, Karin was …

Suddenly he asked, “Do you love me?”

She turned to him, startled. She had not yet made up her face. There were laughter wrinkles at the corners of her hazel eyes, and her unpainted mouth parted in slight surprise and then, very softly, she said, “I love you, Hank,” with a note of wonder and chastisement in her voice and, in what seemed like embarrassment, she went into the house quickly. He could hear her moving noisily about in the kitchen.

Mary, he thought. God, what a long time ago.

He sighed and looked out at the Hudson, dizzily reflecting the early-morning sun. He rose then and went into the kitchen for his briefcase. Karin was picking up the breakfast dishes.

Without looking at him, she said, “About the boat ride, Hank.”

“Yes?”

“For it to be fun, it shouldn’t be on a Saturday or a Sunday.” She raised her eyes to meet his. “For it to be fun, Hank, you would have to take a day away from the office, sometime in the middle of the week.”

“Sure,” he said. He smiled and kissed her briefly. “Sure.”

He got off the subway at Chambers Street, emerging into the bright slanting heat of the city. He knew there was a subway stop closer to Leonard Street and the district attorney’s office, but he preferred the longer walk each morning. Rain or shine, he disembarked at Chambers and then walked toward City Hall, watching the change of geographical climate. It was almost as if the mayor’s shrine were the unofficial border station between the world of big business spreading out from Wall Street and the world of law which had its nucleus on Centre Street.

You walked through the park outside City Hall, and the pigeons pompously strolled like old men deep in thought, and the sunshine washed the painted green benches, and suddenly the towers of business were behind you and ahead lay the impressive gray structures of the law. They squatted together, these formidable buildings somehow smacking of ancient Rome, pillared, strong in their simplicity, their very architecture symbolizing the inevitable power of justice. He felt at home among the buildings of the law. Here, he felt, no matter what damn foolishness they wreaked at Bikini, no matter how many governments changed or severed heads, here was order, here was the true basis of man’s intercourse with his fellow man, here was the law—and here was justice.

And here, passing the County Court Building on the way to his own office, he looked up to the huge triangle of the façade, past the pillars supporting the stone, and read again the legend chiseled there: “The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government.”

He thought simply, Yes, and quickened his pace.

The Criminal Courts Building was at 100 Centre Street. The district attorney’s office, like a Siamese twin irrevocably united to its mate, lay back to back with the other building at 155 Leonard Street, just around the corner. He entered the building and said “Good morning,” to Jerry, the uniformed cop who sat at a desk in the entrance lobby.

“’Morning, Mr. Bell,” Jerry answered. “Lovely morning, isn’t it?”

“Lovely,” Hank said tonelessly, wondering why people insisted on equating summer heat with beauty.

“If it don’t rain,” Jerry added doubtfully as Hank moved toward the elevators. For reasons unknown to Hank, the elevators in the district attorney’s office were run by women, all of them in their middle years. Fanny, a white-haired sprite who addressed the D.A., his assistants, and even judges by their first names while maintaining a cool “Mister” relationship with the building’s custodian, brought her car to a stop, slammed open the doors, said “Good morning, Hank,” and peeked into the corridor.

“Good morning, Fanny,” he answered.

“Nice day for a murder, ain’t it?” she said, stepping closer to her control panel, closing the doors, and setting the car in motion.

Hank smiled but said nothing. The car moved up the shaft silently.

“Number six,” Fanny said, as if she were calling off a number in a Bingo game. She opened the doors for Hank, and he stepped into the corridor.

An attendant sat at the desk just inside the windows overlooking Centre Street and the parking lot across the way. The desk was lost in the marble reaches of the high-ceilinged corridor. The corridor ran like a dark tunnel toward the Homicide Bureau at the far end, windowless except for the patches of light near the two other elevator banks which divided its length into equal thirds. Inside the entrance corridor, marble gave way to walls of neuter paint, to illuminated severe glass plaques indicating public toilets, to small areas of artificial light spaced like sentinels along the long, dark corridor. Hank walked up the hall quickly. There was a cheerlessness to the corridor which sometimes depressed him. He did not like to think of the law as cold and forbidding. He considered it a human thing invented by humans for humans, and the corridor sometimes seemed like a heartless hallway to hell.

Dave Lipschitz, a detective first grade attached to the D.A.’s office, sat just inside the entrance doorway of the bureau.

“Hank,” he said in greeting, and Hank said, “Dave,” in reply and then turned right at the first doorway beyond the desk, passing a door marked “No Admittance,” and going directly to his office, the third one in the hallway, an exact copy of every other assistant D.A.’s office on the floor. A tiny waiting room was tacked to the front part of the office. Four straight-backed wooden chairs sat there playing a ghostly game of bridge. He passed through the waiting room and into the office proper, a twelve-by-fifteen rectangle with windows at the far end. His desk rested before the windows, a leather chair behind it. In one corner of the room was a coat rack. In the other corner was a metal filing cabinet. There were two wooden armchairs in front of the desk and facing it.

Hank took off his hat and hung it on one of the pegs. Then he opened both windows to let in the scant breeze rustling in the sun-drenched street outside. The windows in the Homicide Bureau were made of wire mesh sandwiched between two sheets of glass, and they were attached to the frame in such a manner that they could open outward no more than six inches. It was impossible to shatter them or to crash through them, and it was impossible to squeeze through the narrow wedge they presented when opened. Perhaps such extreme caution wasn’t really necessary. In the eight years Hank had worked for the bureau, he’d never known anyone to try a plunge. But the people with whom the bureau dealt were very often desperate, and suicide to some of them might have seemed preferable to death in the electric chair.

The opened windows did little to lower the temperature in the small cubicle. Hank took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. Following a summertime routine broken only when he was expecting early-morning visitors, he pulled down his tie, unbuttoned his shirt collar and rolled up his sleeves. Then he sat down and pulled the phone closer, fully intending to dial the stenographic pool with a request for a typist. His hand hesitated. Instead, and quite impulsively, he dialed the reception desk.

“Yo?”

“Dave?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“Hank. Think you can call down for some coffee?”

“So early? What happened? Big night last night?”

“No. Just too hot a day. I want to ease into work instead of leaping in with both feet.”

“You go to trial with Tully tomorrow, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Hank said.

“You’re not worried about it, are you?”

“Not a bit.”

“I hear his lawyers are copping a second-degree plea.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Heh-heh, you think I’m a detective for nothing? Am I right?”

“You’re right,” Hank said.

“Sure. I’ll call down for the coffee. Cream and one sugar. Think I’ll have a cup myself while I’m at it.”

“Dave, would you just send it in when it arrives? You needn’t buzz me.”

“Roger,” Dave said, and he hung up.

Hank cradled the phone and sighed deeply. He should, he knew, call the pool for that typist. There was nothing pressing about that, however, and once his notes were retyped his day would settle into the dull routine of waiting for tomorrow and the trial. Nor would there be anything spectacular about the case. The defense attorneys, as Dave’s interoffice spy system had faithfully reported, were pleading guilty to Murder Two. In effect, the trial would be over before it began. Tomorrow, unless someone planted a bomb in the Criminal Courts Building, would be as uneventful as today promised to be, and probably just as hot. And after the Tully trial he would be assigned to a new case, and he would prepare it, and take it to trial, and either win or lose it for the people, and then wait for his next assignment, and his next, and his next, and his …

What the hell’s the matter with me this morning? he wondered. I’m behaving like a man who’s tired of tightening bolts on an assembly line. The truth is that I’m as happy with my work as any man has a right to be. I’m a competent lawyer who isn’t looking for headlines or screaming recognition. I have no political ambitions, and I work in the district attorney’s office not because I’m a dedicated slob but because I suppose I like the idea of representing the people of this county. So what’s wrong this morning?

He swung his chair around to face the windows and the shimmering blue sky beyond.

There’s nothing wrong with this morning but that sky, he thought. It’s a heat sky. It forces a man to think of sailboats and beaches.

Smiling, he swung his chair back to the desk and picked up the telephone receiver. Then, without hesitation, he dialed the stenographic pool and requested a typist. He began rereading his notes before her arrival, making small changes on the first few pages. As he read on, he realized he was making major revisions. He glanced at his wrist watch. It was ten o’clock and the typist had still not arrived. He called the pool again and asked for a stenographer instead. Suddenly there seemed a hundred things to be done before the trial tomorrow, and he wondered if he could complete them all before five o’clock.

He did not leave the building until six that evening.

By that time, the sky had already begun to turn gray with menace.

TWO

It looked as if it might rain.

The July heat had been building in the city all day long, mounting in blast-furnace intensity. Now, at seven-thirty, ominously dark clouds hung on the horizon, bringing with them a false cloak of blackness, an imitation night without stars. The magnificent New York skyline spread across the sham night in bold knife-edged silhouette. Lights had been turned on in defense against the approaching storm and window slits pierced the silhouette like open yellow wounds. There was the distant rumble of thunder across the river in New Jersey. Feeble streaks of lightning crossed the sky like erratic tracer shells searching for a nonexistent target.

When the rain came, it would sweep across the Hudson to lash the Riverside Drive apartment buildings with their doormen and elevator operators, with their obscenities scrawled on the foyer walls of what had once been the aristocracy of dwellings. The rain would continue eastward, driving unchecked through colored Harlem and then Spanish Harlem, racing for the opposite shore of the island and the East River, washing in passing the streets of Italian Harlem.

In Italian Harlem, they sat on the front stoops and talked about the Yankees and the turncoat Giants and Dodgers. The women wore flowered housedresses and the men wore short-sleeved sport shirts. The D.S.C. trucks had been through earlier that afternoon, sprinkling the street with water. But the sun had attacked the asphalt again like a searing blow torch, bringing back the suffocating heat of the street. The sun was gone now, but the heat remained, and the people sipped at cans of beer beaded with cool moisture, and they glanced skyward and wished the rain would hurry. Before the rain, there would be a cool wind that rushed through the street, catching at newspapers, lifting skirts. Before the rain, there would be the sweet pure smell of what was coming, the scent of refreshing cleanliness.

Before the rain, a murder would be committed.

The street was long.

It ran clear across the island of Manhattan, starting at the East River, running westward with the precision of a shishkebob skewer. Hanging on that skewer, one modulating into the other so that all geographical boundaries were lost in the polytypic overlap, were Italians, Puerto Ricans and Negroes. It was a long, long street, piercing the island at its heart, rushing with geometric inevitability toward the rain clouds banked over the Hudson River.

The three came down the street.

The word had gone around that afternoon, passed from lip to lip, mouth to mouth, “The stuff is on, the stuff is on,” and now they came down the street, three tall boys walking rapidly and without fear as they passed el-liberated Third Avenue, and then Lexington Avenue, walking more cautiously as they approached Park, cutting through one of the arches supporting the overhead New York Central tracks and then bursting into the mouth of the street like alien hand-grenade explosions. Their combat boots hit the pavement in regulated chaos, their fists were bunched, there was in each a high-riding excitement which threatened to blow off the tops of their skulls and dissipate their generated anger. The tallest of the three pulled a knife, and the blade glittered in the paling light, and then there were three knives, the silent performers in a vaudeville pantomime, and a young girl shouted in Spanish, “Mira! Cuidado!” and one of the boys yelled, “Shut up, you spic whore!” and a boy sitting on one of the stoops turned his head toward the sound of unaccented English and then suddenly rose.

“There’s one of them!” a voice said, and another voice yelled, “Get him!”

The boy lifted a blank face. A blade flashed, penetrated, flesh ripped in silent protest as the knife gashed upward from the gut. And now the other knives descended, tearing and slashing until the boy fell like an assassin-surrounded Caesar, crumpling to the pavement. The knives withdrew. Blood spattered like early rain to the sidewalk. From the opposite end of the street four boys began running toward the intruders.

“Go, go!” a voice shouted, and the three ran, crossing under the railroad tracks on Park Avenue, running, running, and suddenly it was raining.

The rain drummed relentlessly on the figure balled against the stone of the stoop, diluting the rich red blood that ran from his open belly, washing the blood into the gutter that traversed the long street.

The boy was dead even before the squad car picked up his attackers not four city blocks away.

Detective Lieutenant Richard Gunnison was a tall thin man with stringy blond hair and slate-gray eyes. He had suffered a bad case of acne as a youth, with the result that his face was now pitted with holes of various minuscule sizes. His complexion made it difficult for him to shave without cutting himself, and the various healing slashes on his chin and cheeks gave him the appearance of an undernourished German who’d been on the losing end of a duel.

The lieutenant was in charge of the Twenty-seventh Detective Squad of the Harlem precinct through which the long street ran. His jurisdiction actually ended on Fifth Avenue—ended, to be more exact, at the white line which ran up the middle of Fifth Avenue through Spanish Harlem. The lieutenant had eighteen men on his squad, and he was fond of calling Harlem “the sinkhole of corruption,” a phrase he had heard somewhere and which he’d used since with all the battering power of a non sequitur. The lieutenant was not a very learned man. He had picked up Crime and Punishment once because he thought it might give him an insight into his job, and then had laid it down after a week of laborious and tortured reading with the renewed certainty that nobody—but nobody—could tell him anything he didn’t already know about crime and punishment. The best teacher any man could ever have was Harlem itself, and Gunnison had been working in Harlem for twenty-four years. He knew everything there was to know about this sinkhole of corruption; he had seen it all and smelled it all and touched it all.

The three boys who stood before him now in the squad room were no different—no better, no worse—than the hundreds of criminals he had seen in his twenty-four years of service. Youth was not, to Lieutenant Gunnison, an argument for leniency. A punk was a punk—and a young punk was only an old punk with less experience. Standing before the three boys, his powerful hands on his hips, the butt of a .38 police special protruding from the shoulder holster strapped to his chest, Gunnison was only annoyed because he’d been dragged back to the squad room from his home and his after-dinner newspaper. The boys had been brought into the station house by the arresting officer, who had stopped at the desk only long enough to record the boys’ names with the desk lieutenant and then proceeded upstairs to the Detective Division and the squad room, which ran the length of the building’s upper story. He had informed Detective First Grade Michael Larsen that a homicide had been committed, and Larsen—the official catcher on the three-man detective team which was handling the squad room on the 6 P.M. to 8 A.M. shift—had immediately called the lieutenant at home before calling the district attorney’s office.

The assistant district attorney—a young blond man who looked as if he were fresh out of N.Y.U. Law—was already there when Gunnison arrived. He had, since the case was a homicide, taken the precaution of bringing along a stenographer from the D.A.’s Homicide Bureau. The stenographer, a balding man in his early forties, sat in a straight-backed chair and stared with boredom at the steady rain which streaked the grilled windows of the squad room. Gunnison had a short whispered consultation with Larsen, and then he walked to the boys.

“All right,” he said, looking at the slip of paper in his hand. “Which one of you is Danny Di Pace?”

The boys hesitated. Behind them, the rain oozed monotonously against the glass panes. Night had come in earnest, following instantly on the spikes of the rain. Neon smeared its color splash against the windows; the squad room was curiously silent except for the whisper of raindrops against the asphalt outside.

“You hear me?” Gunnison said.

The boys did not speak. The tallest of the three, a powerfully built youth with dark-brown eyes, stood between the other two, presenting—because of his size—the natural apex of the triangle. The lieutenant took a step closer to him.

“You Danny Di Pace?”

“No.”

“Then who are you?”

“My name is Arthur Reardon,” the boy said.

“How old are you, Arthur?”

“Seventeen.”

The lieutenant nodded. He turned to the redheaded boy on Reardon’s left. “And you?”

“I’m Di Pace.”

“Why didn’t you say so when I asked you?”

“I’m only fifteen,” Di Pace said. “I won’t be sixteen till September. You can’t hold me here. You can’t even question me. I’m a juvenile offender. I know my rights.”

Gunnison nodded sourly to the assistant D.A. “We got a lawyer in our midst,” he said. “I got news for you, sonnyboy, and you better listen to it carefully. The upper age limit for a juvenile offender in New York State is sixteen years old.”

“That’s what I said—”

“Shut up and listen to me!” Gunnison snapped. “The New York code states that a delinquent is a child who violates any law or any municipal ordinance or who commits any act which, if committed by an adult, would be a serious crime, except—and get this, sonnyboy—except any child fifteen years of age who commits any act which, if committed by an adult, would be a crime punishable by death or life sentence. Now homicide, whether you know it or not—”

“Excuse me, Lieutenant,” the assistant D.A. said firmly.

“Yes?” Gunnison said. He turned to face the young man, his hands still on his hips.

“I’ve no desire to interrupt your interrogation. But in all fairness, the boy hasn’t yet been charged with anything.”

Gunnison was silent for a moment, weighing his years of police work against the young man’s inexperience, weighing too their comparative ranks. Calmly, he said, “A homicide was committed.”

“True. And the boy was brought in for questioning in connection with it. He hasn’t yet been booked as either a defendant or a material witness. Besides, you left out an important part of the penal code.”

“Did I?” Gunnison said, and he hoped the sarcasm did not show too clearly in his voice.

“Yes. You forgot to mention that a judge can make and file an order removing the action to the Children’s Court.”

“The fact remains,” Gunnison said levelly, “that homicide is a crime punishable by death or life sentence, and I don’t expect any fifteen-year-old snot to go spouting law texts at me.” He glared at the assistant D.A. as if to make it clear he didn’t expect twenty-five-year-old snots to go spouting law at him either. The young man seemed unruffled.

“May I talk to you privately for a moment, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“Sure,” Gunnison said. His eyes held the hard flat glare of contained anger. Purposefully, he walked to one of the desks inside the slatted rail divider which separated the squad room from the corridor outside.

“What is it?” he asked.

The assistant D.A. extended his hand. “I don’t believe we’ve met before,” he said. “My name is Soames.”

“Glad to know you,” Gunnison said by rote.

“About procedure,” Soames said, “and I’m only anticipating later objections from whoever defends these boys. But you know as well as I that a fifteen-year-old kid isn’t supposed to be interrogated in a police station. All right, granted there’s no place specifically provided for this theoretic interrogation. But most police officers—”

“Most police officers handle the interrogation in a separate part of the precinct so that the rule is at least given some sort of observance. I’m well aware of that, Mr. Soames. If you don’t mind my saying so, however, I just this minute discovered the kid was fifteen.”

“I didn’t mean to imply—”

“I’m sure you didn’t. But I’d like to find out how old the third boy is before I separate the adult killers from the baby killers. With your permission, of course.”

“Go right ahead,” Soames said.

“Thank you.”

Gunnison walked back to the group of boys, stopping before the third one, a dark boy with black hair and brown eyes. Fright crouched behind the wide white of those eyes.

“Your name?” he said.

“Aposto,” the boy answered. “Anthony Aposto.”

“How old are you, Anthony?”

“Sixteen.”

“Okay,” Gunnison said. He turned to Larsen. “Mike, talk to this Di Pace kid in the clerical office, will you? I’ll question the others here. And before we get the A.S.P.C.A. down on our ears, you’d better call Di Pace’s parents and tell them their little darling’s been arrested.”

“Right,” Larsen said, and he led Di Pace from the room.

“So now,” Gunnison said to the two remaining boys, “you killed somebody, huh?”

The boys did not answer. The tall boy glanced sideward at Aposto.

“Or didn’t you know he was dead?” Gunnison asked.

Reardon, the tall one, said, “We just had a little scuffle, that’s all.”

“With knives, huh?”

“You didn’t find no knives on us,” Reardon said.

“No, because you probably dumped them down a sewer or handed them to some pal on the street. We’ll find them, don’t worry. And even if we don’t, your clothes are all smeared with blood. How long were you planning this thing, Reardon?”

“We didn’t plan anything,” Reardon said, and again he glanced at the dark, frightened Aposto.

“No, huh?” Gunnison said. “You just happened to be walking down the street, and you saw this kid, and killed him, is that right?”

“He started it,” Reardon said.

“Oh? Is that right?”

“Yeah,” Reardon said. “Ain’t that right, Batman? The spic started it, didn’t he?”

“Sure,” Aposto said. “He started it, Lieutenant.”

“Well, now, isn’t that interesting?” Gunnison said. “How did he start it? Let’s hear about it.”

“We were walking down the street, like you said, the three of us. And he stopped us and started looking at us funny,” Reardon said.

“He was wearing his bopping hat,” Aposto put in.

“His what?” the D.A.’s stenographer asked, looking up from his notes.

“His bopping hat,” Gunnison explained. “A high-crowned, narrow-brimmed fedora.” He turned back to the boys. “So he was wearing his bopping hat, and he stopped you, is that right?”

“Yeah,” Reardon said.

“And then what happened?”

“He began giving us dirty looks,” Reardon said.

“That’s right,” Aposto agreed, nodding.

“And he started saying we had no right on his turf, like that. Then he pulled a blade.”

“He did, huh?”

“Yeah. And he come at us. So we had to protect ourselves, didn’t we? He woulda killed us otherwise. We had to protect ourselves, can’t you see that?”

“From this kid who stopped you and gave you dirty looks and pulled a knife and came at you?” Gunnison said. “That’s who you had to protect yourselves from, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Reardon said.

“Do you know who this kid was?”

“Never saw him in my life. We were just out for a little stroll. What the hell, who expected to get japped?”

“Get what?” the stenographer asked.

“Japped,” Gunnison said. “Ambushed. This kid ambushed you, right?”

“Sure. He stops us with a blade in his fist. Man, we didn’t want to get killed, so we fought back. Naturally, we fought back. Anybody would.”

“And you killed him.”

“I don’t know whether we killed him or not. But whatever happened, it was self-defense.”

“Sure,” Gunnison said. “That’s easy to see.”

“Sure,” Reardon agreed.

“The boy’s name was Rafael Morrez, did you know that?”

“No,” Reardon said.

“No,” Aposto said.

“You didn’t know him until you had the fight, right?”

“Right.”

“And he stopped you, and gave you dirty looks, and warned you about walking on his street, and pulled a knife and came at you, right? That’s your story, right?”

“Right,” Reardon said.

“And you didn’t know him until he stopped you tonight, is that also right?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s pretty obvious,” Gunnison said.

“What do you mean?” Reardon asked.

“Rafael Morrez was blind,” Gunnison said.

They took three sets of fingerprints from each boy, one to be forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, another to be sent to the New York State Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and the third copy to be sent to the city’s own B.C.I. that night, so that fingerprint information would be ready and waiting at Centre Street before lineup the next day. They made out two arrest cards for each of the boys, and then they took them down to the desk in the precinct muster room and formally booked them.

In the blotter, the desk lieutenant wrote down the names of the three boys, their addresses and the time of day. The desk lieutenant also entered the time of the accident, and the name of the detective assigned to the case, and the case number, and he wrote “arrested and charged with homicide in that the defendant did in concert with others apprehended and arrested herewith commit the crime aforesaid.”

The record listed Detective Lieutenant Richard Gunnison and Assistant District Attorney Albert R. Soames as present at the time of the entry. The boys were searched and their property was confiscated, put in separate envelopes and listed in the record.

The entries in the blotter all ended with the identical three words: “… and to cell.”

On Friday afternoon of that week, the assistant district attorneys assigned to the Homicide Bureau met in the chief’s office. Leisurely, they reviewed for their colleagues the various cases they had handled that week. Albert Soames reviewed the Morrez homicide. The men then voted that they would ask the Indictments Bureau to prepare an indictment for first-degree murder.

They did not seem to harbor any doubt that the grand jury would decide that a crime had been committed and that it was reasonable to assume the defendants had committed it.

The man assigned to the prosecution of the case was Henry Bell.

THREE

Monday was starting wrong.

Or, he supposed, perhaps Sunday night had ended wrong. In any case, and in whatever sequence, this was going to be one of those days which—unless something positive were done about it immediately—would rapidly succumb to the battering combination of error and circumstance. Sitting behind the desk in his small office, the sheaf of transcripts finally, finally, finally before him, Hank tried to reconstruct the events which, like elements of a sorcerer’s evil brew, had united to overboil in chaos.

The first of these elements had been the party last night at the Bentons’. Sunday night was no damn good for parties anyway, since all of the men drank too much in an effort to obliterate what was coming on the morrow, and all the women tried too desperately to maintain a weekend glamour which would instantly evaporate at the first ring of the Monday morning alarm. Add to this particular Sunday night party the fact that Charlie Cooke had got really drunk, absolutely stoned beyond the reaches of civilized inebriation, stinko, blotto, blind drunk, and that Alice Benton had begun wailing about a legendary beating her husband had administered to her some eight years ago, which memory had apparently been evoked by Charlie’s supine position in the middle of the living room, and the pall of the usual Sunday night get-togethers assumed titanic proportions which drove every guest (except the unconscious Charlie Cooke) home long before midnight.

Back in their own house, Hank and Karin had discussed the party over a nightcap. The more they talked about it, the more horrible it seemed until finally, in an attempt to blot out the events of the evening, they’d gone to bed and sought the cleansing solace of love-making. This, as it turned out, was another mistake. Neither of them was in a particularly loving frame of mind, and the harder they drove themselves toward a passion they did not feel, the sharper became the memory of the very real images they were trying to eradicate. Whatever pleasure they derived from their forced mating that night was instantly counteracted by the knowledge that it had been a truly loveless act designed to soften the impact of an evening spent with people who seemed totally devoid of love. They had fought lovelessness with more lovelessness, however mechanically precise, enjoyable only in its precision, but totally unsatisfactory otherwise. Exhausted, beginning to feel the flat aftermath of their hard drinking and their coldly manic intercourse, they had drifted off into restless, dissatisfied sleep.

The alarm clock rang at seven-thirty, as it did every morning. This gave Hank forty-five minutes in which to wash, shave, dress and eat before leaving the house at eight-fifteen. This morning, however, this morning which was starting wrong after a night that had ended wrong, there was a difference. There had apparently been an interruption of electrical service sometime during the night. The power had been off for close to a half hour. When the electric alarm clock began buzzing at seven-thirty, it was really seven-fifty-eight. Hank did not make the discovery until twenty minutes later when he tuned in the kitchen radio to see what the weather would be like that day. When he heard the correct time, he left his breakfast and rushed into the bathroom to shave, opening a welt on his cheek and cursing the Bentons and their lousy party, his wife and her frigid love-making, the goddamn inefficient electric company, and even the radio station which had finally apprised him of the truth. He stormed out of the house wanting to know why Jennie wasn’t awake yet, sprinted all the way to the subway station, and did not arrive at the office until almost ten o’clock. Once there, he discovered that everything that had gone before (and by this time he was beginning to relent the poxes he’d levied on those nice Bentons, his passionate wife, the excellent service of the electric company and the public-mindedness of the radio station) had only been preludes to the true catastrophe waiting at the office.

On Friday afternoon, after the Rafael Morrez case had been assigned to him, he had accepted transcripts of the boys’ interrogation as recorded by the stenographer on the night of the slaying, taken them to his office and put them into his top desk drawer. This morning, this glorious fouled-up morning, the transcripts were gone. It was ten-fifteen, and the weather seemed determined to break all previous records set for heat, and the goddamn transcripts of the police interrogation were gone. He began searching the office. By ten-thirty, he was soaked with perspiration and ready to force open one of the suicideproof windows and leap to the pavement below. He called the building’s custodian and tried to find out whether or not a cleaning woman had inadvertently dumped the typed sheets into a wastepaper basket. He called the stenographic pool and asked whether or not some harebrained typist had picked them up of her own initiative. He buzzed Dave Lipschitz and asked if anyone had been snooping around his office that morning. He searched the office a second time, and then a third time. It was eleven o’clock.

He sat behind his desk and stared glumly at the wall, drumming his fingers on the desk top, ready by this time to commit first-degree murder himself.

It was then that Albert Soames, that bright young bastard, strolled into the office with the transcripts under his arm. Hope you don’t mind, Hank, he’d said, just wanted to check them over myself since I was the one who went up to the precinct on the night of the murder, here they are, safe and sound, this looks like a fine case, I’ll bet you enjoy it, I can read the sentence for you now even before you begin, death in the electric chair, my friend, death in the electric chair.

Looking over the record of the questioning now, wondering what he could do to prevent the next hammer blow of fate from falling on this completely nutty morning, Hank was inclined to agree with Soames’s prediction.

The People were prosecuting for Murder One in the Morrez case, and first-degree murder carried with it a mandatory death penalty. The indictment requested by the bureau seemed fair to Hank. Murder One was either premeditated murder or murder committed during the enactment of a felony. In the case of the People versus Aposto, Reardon and Di Pace—and especially in the light of what they’d said on the night of their arrest—there was little doubt in Hank’s mind that the murder was premeditated. Nor did this appear to be a case wherein the thin line of technicality separated Murder One from Murder Two, a case wherein the premeditation consisted of having drawn a revolver twenty seconds before firing it.

These boys seemed to have gone into Spanish Harlem deliberately and coldly. They had not slain in the heat of passion with intent to inflict only grievous injury. They had come there, it appeared, prepared to kill, and maliciously, blindly, they had struck down the first likely victim. If ever the People had an open-and-shut case of murder in the first degree, this was it. Why, even the lieutenant in charge of the detective squad had ripped holes in Aposto’s and Reardon’s obvious lies.

Nodding to himself, Hank turned to the first page of the interrogation of Danny Di Pace and began reading it.

DI PACE: Is someone calling my mother?

LARSEN: That’s being taken care of.

DI PACE: What are they going to say to her?

LARSEN: What do you expect them to say?

DI PACE: I don’t know.

LARSEN: You killed a kid. You want them to tell her you’re a hero?

DI PACE: It was self-defense.

The telephone on his desk rang. Reluctantly, Hank put aside the transcript and reached for the phone, feeling an immediate sense of premonition. On this morning of all magnificent mornings, he would not be surprised to learn that the bank had foreclosed his mortgage, that the Hudson had flooded and swelled into his living room, and that …

“Henry Bell,” he said.

“Hank, this is Dave on the desk. There’s a woman out here. Says she wants to see you.”

“A woman?” The sense of premonition was stronger now. He found himself frowning.

“Yeah,” Dave said. “Okay to send her in?”

“What does she want to see me about?”

“The Morrez kill.”

“Who is she, Dave?”

“Says she’s Mrs. Di Pace.”

“Danny Di Pace’s mother?”

“Just a second.” Dave’s voice retreated from the phone. “You Danny Di Pace’s mother?” Hank heard him ask. The voice came back to the mouthpiece. “Yeah, that’s who she is, Hank.”

Hank sighed. “Well, I’d planned on seeing her anyway, so it might as well be now. Send her in.”

“Roger,” Dave said, and then he hung up.

Hank replaced the phone on its cradle. He was not looking forward to the woman’s entrance. In the preparation of his case, he’d have summoned her to the office once, and then only to ascertain facts of the boy’s background. Her unexpected arrival now rattled him. He hoped she would not cry. He hoped she would understand that he was the People’s attorney, hired by the citizens of New York County to defend their rights, and that he would defend those rights as vigorously as her son’s attorneys defended his. And yet he knew she would cry. He had never met her, but she was the boy’s mother. She would cry.

He took the typed sheets from his desk top and put them into a drawer. Then he sat back to wait for the mother of Danny Di Pace, hoping against hope that there would not be another scene to add to this day which had begun so badly.

She was younger than he’d expected. He realized that the moment she stepped into the small waiting room outside. She came toward the inner office then, and he saw her face completely for the first time, and he felt as if he’d been struck with something hard and solid, and he suddenly knew that all the events of last night and this morning had been building toward this one shattering practical joke. Shock followed instantly on the heels of recognition to render him completely speechless as he sat behind his desk.

Hesitantly, Mrs. Di Pace said, “Mr. Bell?” and her eyes met his, and then the recognition crossed her face, too, followed instantly by the same shock, a visible thing which knifed her brown eyes and then sent her jaw slack. She shook her head in disbelief and then asked, “Hank?” hesitantly, and then “Hank?” more firmly.

“Yes,” he said, and he wondered why this had to be and he knew with sudden intuition that he was being sucked into a whirlpool where drowning was a distinct possibility, where he must swim or drown, swim for his life.…

“Are you … Mr. Bell?”

“Yes.”

“But I … Have you … have you changed your name? Is that it?”

“Yes. When I began practicing law,” he said. He had changed his name for many reasons, most of which were deeply rooted and unconscious and which he could not have explained rationally if he’d tried. He did not try to explain now. The change of name was a fait accompli, a legal decree reading “ORDERED, that upon compliance with all the provisions herein contained, the said petitioners shall, on and after the 8th day of February, 1948, be respectively known as and by the names of Henry Bell, Karin Bell, and Jennifer Bell, which they are authorized to assume and by no other names.”

“And you’re a district attorney?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And my son’s case is in your …”

“Sit down, Mary,” he said.

She sat, and he studied the face he had once known so very well, the face he had held in his youthful hands—Wait for me, wait for me—it was the same face, more tired perhaps, but the same face that had belonged to Mary O’Brien at nineteen, the brown eyes and the near-red hair, red with a burnished glow, the aristocratic nose, the sensual mouth, the utterly exotic mouth, he had kissed that mouth.…

He had thought of this meeting many times. In the great American fantasy of star-crossed lovers meeting on wind-swept streets, he had imagined meeting Mary O’Brien again one day, and he had thought some of the old love they had known for each other would still be there, and perhaps their hands would touch briefly and they would sigh wistfully over a life together that had never been and never would be—and then once more part. And now, here was the meeting, and Mary O’Brien was the mother of Danny Di Pace, and he didn’t know what the hell to say to her.

“This is … very strange,” he said. “I had no idea …”

“Nor I.”

“I mean, I knew you were married. You wrote to me and told me you were getting married and … and maybe you even mentioned the name, but that was such a long time ago, Mary, and I never.…”

“I mentioned the name,” she said. “John Di Pace. My husband.”

“Yes. Maybe you did mention the name. I don’t remember.”

He could remember every other detail of the day he’d received her letter, could remember the wet drizzle clinging to the airfield in the north of England, the sounds of the Liberators warming up outside, the white plumes of their exhausts sifting through the early-morning rain, the neat red and blue diagonal lines on her airmail envelope, the hurried scrawl of her hand, and the address, Captain Henry Alfred Belani, 714 5632, 31st Bomber Squadron Command, U. S. Army Air Corps, A.P.O. New York, New York, and the words:

Dear Hank—

“When you asked me to wait for you, I said I didn’t know. I said I was still very young. I’ve met someone, Hank dear, and I’m going to marry him, and I hope you will understand. I don’t want to hurt you. I have never wanted to hurt you.…

And the sudden angry roar of the bombers taxiing across the blackened field to take off into the wind.

“I didn’t remember the name,” he said.

They were both silent.

“You’re—you’re looking very well, Mary,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I didn’t know you still lived in the old neighborhood.”

“Harlem? Yes. Johnny’s store is there.” She paused. “My husband. Johnny.”

“Yes, I see.”

“Hank …”

“Mary, I don’t know why you came here, but—”

“Oh, Hank, for the love of God, are you going to kill my son?”

She did not cry. In that moment, he wished she would have cried. She hurled the words across the desk instead, her face dead white behind the startling brown eyes and the full sensual mouth.

“Mary, let’s understand each other,” he said.

“Please. Let’s.”

“What happened between us was a long time ago. You’re married now, and I’m married, and we both have children.”

“And you’re prosecuting my child for murder.”

“Mary—”

“Aren’t you, Hank?”

“Yes, I am,” he said. “I work for this county, and it’s my job to protect the people of this county. Your son committed murder, and as attorney for the—”

“My son had nothing to do with it! It was the others!”

“If that’s true, I’ll find out before the trial.”

“He didn’t even belong to the gang!”

“Mary, believe me, this is not a vengeful office. The case will be investigated thoroughly before it comes to trial. If there are mitigating circumstances—”

“Oh, stop it, stop it, Hank, please. This isn’t what I expect from you. From a stranger, yes, but not you, not Hank Belani.”

“Bell,” he corrected gently.

“I’m Mary,” she said softly, “the girl you once knew. Mary. Who loved you once … very dearly.” She paused. “Don’t tell me about mitigating circumstances.”

“What do you want me to tell you, Mary?”

“That my boy won’t be sent to the electric chair …”

“I can’t promise you anything like—”

“… for something he didn’t do!” she concluded.

The room went silent again.

“No one pays with his life for something he didn’t do,” Hank said.

“You really believe that, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yes. I really believe it.”

She stared at him long and hard. Then she said, “I don’t know you any more, do I?”

“A lot’s happened to both of us,” he said. “We can’t expect …”

“It’s funny,” she said tiredly. “I came into this office expecting a stranger—and I found one. I don’t know you at all. I don’t even know whether or not you’d allow what happened between us to influence what might happen to my son. For all I know—”

“Don’t say it, Mary!” His voice was harsh. “I’m a lawyer, and I believe in justice, and your son’ll get justice. When I got your letter, I was hurt, yes. But that was a long time ago, and everyone grows up.”

“Will my son grow up?” she asked.

And to this there was no answer.

He went into Holmes’s office that afternoon. As chief of the Homicide Bureau, Holmes was familiarly referred to by most newsmen as “Sherlock,” but everyone on the staff called him Ephraim, which was his true given name. He was a short man with white hair and spectacles, his round face giving him the appearance of a television comic, an impression which could not have been further from the truth; Ephraim Holmes was a man almost totally devoid of any humor.

“What is it, Hank?” he asked immediately. “I’m busy.”

“The Morrez case,” Hank said without preamble.

“What about it?”

“I’d like to drop the assignment. I’d like you to assign someone else to the prosecution.”

Holmes looked up suddenly. “What in hell for?” he asked.

“Personal reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Personal reasons,” Hank repeated.

“You getting scared?”

“No. Why should I be?”

“I don’t know. All the newspaper fuss. The bastards are pretrying the case already. Screaming for the death penalty. I thought it might be giving you the jumps.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Then what is it? Don’t you think we’ve got a case?”

“I think we’ve got a very strong case.”

“For Murder One?”

“Yes, for Murder One.”

“Then what the hell’s the matter?”

“I told you. It’s something personal. I’d like to disqualify myself, Ephraim. I’d appreciate it.”

“None of these kids are related to you or anything, are they?”

“No.”

“Are you leary about asking for the death penalty for young kids?”

“No.”

“Are you prejudiced against Puerto Ricans?”

“What?”

“I said—”

“I heard you. What kind of a question is that?”

“Don’t be so high and mighty. Hatred doesn’t choose its jurisdictions. You may be one of those who feel the city’s better off without the likes of Rafael Morrez. You may feel the murder was justified.”

“That’s absurd,” Hank said. “And I don’t think anybody really feels that way.”

“No, huh? You’d be surprised.” Holmes paused. “You still haven’t convinced me that I should reassign this case.”

“Let’s simply say that the defense may concoct some yarn about the unconscious prejudice of the People’s attorney.”

“Then you don’t like Puerto Ricans?”

“I wasn’t speaking of that kind of prejudice.”

“Then what kind?”

“Ephraim, I can’t explain this to you. I want out. I want to drop the case. I’ve barely begun working on it, so there’ll be no real loss of time or energy. And I think the office will benefit by my withdrawal.”

“You think so, do you? And whom would you suggest I assign this to?”

“That’s your job, not mine.”

“Have you ever known me to snow you, Hank?”

“No.”

“All right then. When I tell you you’re the best damn prosecutor on this staff, you’ll know I’m not just making noises. This is an important case, more important than you—”

“It’s just another murder, Ephraim. We prosecute hundreds of murder cases each—”

“It’s not just another murder, and don’t you think that for a minute. It’s damn important. I want you to prosecute it, and the Boss wants you to prosecute it, and I’m not going to reassign it unless you can give me a better reason than you’ve given me so far.”

“All right,” Hank said, sighing. “I know the mother of one of the boys. Di Pace.”

“She’s a friend of yours?”

“No, not exactly. I knew her when I was a kid—before I went into the Army.”

“How well did you know her?”

“We were going steady, Ephraim.”

“Mmm. I see,” Holmes said.

“I asked her to wait for me when I went away. I got a Dear John while I was overseas. I never saw her again until this morning.”

“This all happened how long ago?”

“About fifteen years, I guess.”

“That’s a long time ago, Hank.”

“Yes, but the defense might use it, and it might weaken our case.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Suppose they put Mary on the stand? Suppose she claims she jilted me in 1943 and that petty revenge is the People’s motive in pushing for the death penalty?”

“How well did you know her, Hank?”

“I told you. We were—”

“Did you go to bed with her?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Might she perjure herself along those lines?”

“To save her son? She might do or say anything.”

“I still don’t think it’ll hurt us. Either way.”

“I wish I could agree with you.”

“Let me explain this case a little, Hank. You said it was just another murder, and I told you it wasn’t. Would you like to know why?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Okay. To begin with, this whole damn juvenile-delinquency thing is giving the city a fat pain in the foot. Everybody’s screaming about it, the cops, the schools, the judges, the press, the grand juries, the whole town’s suddenly full of experts who’ve just discovered that two per cent or more of the nation’s kids wind up before the courts each year. And do you know what they’re all screaming? ‘Let’s get tough! Expel the troublemakers from the schools! Fine the parents! Impose curfews! Give them stiff jail sentences! Stop the murderers! Show them we mean business!’

“God knows, they all mean business and they’re all in the same business, but they’re like a bunch of corporation vice-presidents who can’t seem to decide on the best way to sell their line. Maybe they’ll never decide, but that’s not our problem. I’m only telling you this to illustrate the first pressure being put on this office. We’re being urged in a thousand and one indirect ways to use these killers as examples. We’re being pressured to send them to the electric chair so that others will take heed of the terrible sword of justice.”

“Ephraim, this office has never buckled under to—”

“That’s number one, Hank, and only the beginning, and I think you’ll see in a minute why this is an important case requiring the best legal mind on our staff. Number two is the tolerance groups. Now, the kid who was killed was Puerto Rican. The Puerto Rican people in this city are probably the most oppressed people in the world, the new scapegoats, the new whipping posts for a neurotic society. Whenever a Puerto Rican commits a crime, the newspapers have a field day, playing on an undeniably existing prejudice to form a ready-made villain. I don’t want to go into the psychological relation of crime to minority groups. I just want to say this. This time, the victim is a Puerto Rican. And the tolerance groups have all piled on the band wagon demanding equal justice—and reasonably, I feel—for the dead Rafael Morrez. In short, we’re not only being asked to get tough, we’re being asked to get tough indiscriminately, to show that we’ll take no nonsense from any killer, white, black, brown or tan. We’re being asked to show that justice is not only terrible, it is also fair.”

“I see what you’re driving at,” Hank said. “I still think any other person on the staff—”

“And lastly, there is what the sob sisters would call the human-interest angle. We’re prosecuting this case in the interests of the people of this county. And do you know what the people see? The people see three strapping killers striding into a quiet street and stabbing to death a blind boy. A blind boy, Hank! Don’t you see the outrage here? Don’t you see the affront to decency? How can the streets be safe for anyone if a blind person, protected and sheltered by the unwritten laws of humanity ever since the beginning of time, can be brutally attacked and killed?”

“I see,” Hank said.

“Do you? Then you must also see that it’s essential for this office to prosecute this case with all the talent and energy it can muster. You’re our boy, Hank, and we’re going for the death penalty.”

“I still think—”

“No. Your request is officially refused. For God’s sake, Hank, a lot more than three boys is going on trial here. This office is going on trial.” Holmes paused. “And,” he said, “if you want to look at it in another light, maybe the whole damn city is going on trial.”

He stood on the deck of the ferry, and on his right he could see the high span, beautiful in its ugliness, of the Queensboro Bridge. Dead ahead, squatting on the water like a giant half-submerged whale, was Welfare Island. In the Youth House Annex there, a fifteen-year-old boy named Danny Di Pace was being held, awaiting trial for murder. They had not taken him to the Twelfth Street building because too many escapes, legend held, were successfully executed there.

A cool breeze blew off the East River, caressing the back of his neck, dissipating the dull heat of midsummer. Far off in the distance, pristine and cool, a delicate tracery against the shrieking raw blue of the sky, was the Triboro Bridge. He could remember when the bridge was being built. He could remember walking in the excavation site on 125th Street, a fourteen-year-old boy picking his way among the cinder block and concrete, the steel supporting rods, the freshly turned earth. The summer of 1934, and a young boy who visualized the bridge as a gateway to the treasures of the world. If you could cross that bridge, he had thought, you could get out of Harlem. There was purpose to the bridge, and meaning, and he had decided on that day, with the bulldozers and the steam shovels noisily pushing the land around him, that one day he would leave Harlem—and he would never return.

He did not know whether or not he hated the neighborhood.

But he had recognized with the clear vision of the very young that there were better things to be had from life. And he meant to have them.

One of those better things, he thought later, was Mary O’Brien.

He did not meet her until he was seventeen. Born into an Italian family, possessing a grandfather who—even on the brink of war with the Axis powers—proclaimed Italy as the cultural leader of the world and touted Mussolini as the savior of the Italian people, Hank had found it difficult at first to believe that he could fall in love with an Irish girl. Hadn’t he been told repeatedly by members of his family that the Irish were all drunkards? Hadn’t he been told by brothers of his street fraternity that all Irish girls were fast girls? Hadn’t most of the street fights taken place between the Italians and the Irish? How then could he possibly fall in love with a girl who was as Irish as her red hair?

She was fifteen when he met her. She didn’t wear lipstick then. He dated her on and off for a year before she allowed him to kiss her. Her mouth was a wondrous thing. He had kissed girls before, but he had never known the sweetness of a woman’s mouth until the day he kissed Mary O’Brien. And from that day on, he loved her.

His grandfather took a dim view of the situation.

“Why,” he asked in Italian, “must you go out with an Irish girl?”

And Hank had answered, “Because I love her, Grandpa,” and there was the ring of youthful authority in his voice. Loving her, he discovered her. And discovering her, he loved her more, until she became a part of his plans. When he left Harlem, Mary O’Brien would accompany him. He would carry her away, her red hair streaming over his shoulder, her rich laugh floating on the wind.

In 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Hank, who was twenty-one at the time and in his senior year at N.Y.U., was called up almost instantly. They gave him a party at his grandfather’s house. And while the others ate lasagna—his mother’s specialty—and drank good red wine, his grandfather took him aside and put his tailor’s hands on Hank’s shoulders and said, in hesitant English, “You go to fly aeroplani?”

“Yes, Grandpa,” he said.

The old man nodded. At sixty-eight, he possessed a head of snow-white hair. His eyes were brown behind thick spectacles, the natural accouterments of a tailor who studied his stitches with meticulous care.

“You will bomb Italy?” he asked, and there was sadness in his eyes.

“If I have to,” Hank answered honestly.

The old man nodded again, and his eyes held Hank’s, and he said, “Will they shoot at you, Enrico?”

“Yes.”

His hands tightened on Hank’s shoulders. With great difficulty he said, “Then you will shoot back.” He nodded. “You will shoot back,” he continued, nodding. He lifted his glasses and brushed at his eyes. “Caro mio,” he said gruffly, “take care of yourself. Come back safe.”

He went to see Mary that night. She was nineteen years old now, a woman with the slender curves of a girl. They walked along the East River Drive with the lights of the three-year-old bridge spanning the dark waters uptown, and he kissed her and said, “Will you wait for me, Mary?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m young, Hank. You’ll be gone a long time. I don’t know.”

“Wait for me, Mary. Wait for me.”

None of them had waited for him. He received Mary’s letter the next year. His grandfather died six months later. They would not allow him to go home for the funeral. He’d always been sorry that the white-haired man with the weak eyes and the gentle hands had never met Karin. He knew intuitively that the pair would have formed their own axis, with none of the sinister qualities of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s.

The ferry hit the dock pilings. The captain pulled her in smoothly and easily. The dock lowered to meet the deck of the boat, and then the guardrails were raised, and Hank disembarked and walked rapidly to the building where Danny Di Pace was being held.

The man Hank spoke to was busy answering telephones all the while Hank was there. Three phones rested on his desk, and they rang in frightening succession, so that he barely managed to wedge his conversation between the jangling of the telephones.

“You see how it is,” he said. “A rat race, an absolute rat race. We try to keep up with the boys and girls remanded to us by the Children’s Court, and it’s just like shoveling sand against the tide. It’s too much for us, Mr. Bell. It’s just too much. Do you know what we’d like to do here? Do you know what we could do if we had a staff?” He shook his head dolefully and then glanced abruptly at the phone, as if dreading a further interruption.

“What do you do, exactly, Mr. Walsh?” Hank asked.

“We try to find out what makes these kids tick. We dig. But how much digging can you do when you’re short of shovels?”

“Have you ever had any members of either of these two gangs before, Mr. Walsh?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened?”

“We ran our tests. We always try to find out what it is about a boy’s mentality or his emotional make-up that—”

“Try?” Hank asked.

“Yes, try. We don’t always succeed. For God’s sake, Mr. Bell, we’re swamped with—”

The telephone rang. Walsh lifted the receiver.

“Hello,” he said. “Yes, this is Mr. Walsh. Who? Oh, hello, how are you?” He paused. “Yes, I have a report on him. Just a minute.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Will you excuse me, Mr. Bell? This won’t take long.” He opened a folder on his desk and began speaking into the phone again. “Hello? Yes, we’ve confirmed that. The father is an alcoholic. No, there’s no question, the report is right here on my—Yes. All right, thank you for calling.” He hung up and then sighed deeply. “Deviant homes. We get more damn kids from deviant homes than I can count on—”

“What do you mean?” Hank asked.

“Well, surely you’re aware of all the research that’s been done,” Walsh said, glancing at Hank in surprise.

“No, I’m afraid I’m not.”

“There’s so much, I hardly know where to begin,” Walsh said, the surprise still on his face. “The Gluecks, for example. Their prediction table was based on four principal factors—discipline by the father, supervision by the mother, affection by both parents for the child, and cohesiveness of the family group. It was computed that, if these factors were unfavorable, the possibilities for delinquency were ninety-eight point one out of a hundred. Now, that’s pretty damned high, don’t you think?”

“If the research were accurate, yes.”

“There’s no reason to believe it wasn’t,” Walsh said. “It certainly comes as no surprise to anyone working in the field that deviant homes produce the vast majority of our delinquents.”

“I still don’t know what you mean by deviant homes.”

“Broken homes, immoral homes, criminal homes, homes where there’s a cultural conflict—such as is evident in the homes of some Puerto Rican gang members. We’ve had many such cases here.”

“Have you had Danny Di Pace here before?”

“No. But Reardon was with us for a while.”

“And what happened?”

“What did we discover about him, do you mean? He seemed to us to be an extremely aggressive boy, with a mother who’s overly permissive and a father who’s overly strict. He’s what we term an ‘acting-out neurotic.’”

“I’m afraid you’re going a little beyond me, Mr. Walsh.”

“I’m simply saying that his delinquent behavior seems to be compounded out of strong resentment to his repressive father and the desire to evoke some emotional response from his mother, whose permissiveness he distrusts.”

“I see,” Hank said, not seeing at all. “Why was Reardon here?”

“Oh, some street trouble. I don’t remember now what it was. This was several years back, you understand.”

“What was the final outcome?”

“What was the court disposition, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“He was released on probation.”

“Even though your study showed him to be—well, potentially dangerous?”

“We’re lucky we were even able to make a study, Mr. Bell. We’re operating with one case worker for every seventy-five boys. That’s spreading it pretty damn thin, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I would say so. What happened while Reardon was on probation?”

“Well, the probation officers are pretty much in the same boat we’re in. Each of them is handling a case load similar to our own. This doesn’t leave time for very much individual attention to a boy’s problems. What happens is that a good percentage of boys on probation get into trouble all over again.”

“Like Reardon?”

“Yes, if you wish to use him as an example. He’s only one of hundreds, though.” Walsh paused. “We could do such a job, Mr. Bell, if we had the money and the staff. Such a job.”

Hank nodded. “Don’t you feel, though, that you’re simplifying things somewhat? I mean, by hiding behind all this psychological—”

“Hiding?”

“Perhaps that’s not the word I wanted. But do you feel that delinquency can be reduced to such simple psychological equations?”

“Of course not. There is practically no such animal as a pure delinquent type. The acting-out neurotic, the wayward egocentric boy, even the passive or socialized delinquent—the one who’ll succumb to the pressures of his environment or his group while not truly being a disturbed personality—are hardly ever encountered in a pure state. And we certainly can’t discount the influence of environment, or a poor school situation, or even the unenlightenment of many police officials, as contributing factors to delinquency. But this is not psychological gobbledygook, Mr. Bell. I hope you didn’t mean to imply that.”

“These boys, Mr. Walsh, killed another boy.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Would you excuse their act by telling me their parents have personality disorders?”

“Would I excuse the act of murder?” Walsh asked.

“Yes.”

“It is your job to decide the law, Mr. Bell, not mine. I am dealing with people, not torts.”

Hank nodded. “May I see the Di Pace boy now, please?”

“Certainly,” Walsh said. As he rose, the phone rang again. “Damnit,” he said. “Betty, would you answer that, please? This way, Mr. Bell.”

The boy had his mother’s red hair and brown eyes, the same oval face, the same mouth, which looked curiously feminine on a boy turning into a man. He was a tall boy, muscularly loose, with the huge hands that identified the street brawler.

“If you’re a cop,” he said, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“I’m the district attorney,” Hank said, “and you’d better talk to me. I’m prosecuting this case.”

“All the more reason I got nothing to say. You think I’m gonna help you send me to the electric chair?”

“I want to know what happened on the night Morrez was killed.”

“Yeah? So go ask Morrez. Maybe he’ll tell you. I don’t have to tell you nothing. Go talk to the big-shot lawyers the court appointed. I got four of them all to myself. Go talk to them.”

“I’ve already talked to them, and they had no objections to my questioning you and the other boys. I guess you know you’re in serious trouble. Your lawyers have told you that.”

“I’ll go to Children’s Court.”

“No you won’t, Danny. You’ll be tried with the other boys in General Sessions, Part Three.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. The case will be tried in this county next month. You’ll get a fair trial, but nobody’s going to try to coddle you. You killed a boy, Danny.”

“Yeah? That’s what you got to prove, mister. I’m innocent until I’m proved guilty.”

“That’s true. Now suppose you tell me what happened on the night of July tenth?”

“I told the story a hundred times already. We were out for a stroll. The spic jumped us, so we stabbed him. It was self-defense.”

“The boy you stabbed was blind. You surely must realize that no jury is going to believe he jumped you.”

“I don’t care what they believe. That’s what happened. You can ask Batman and Tower. They’ll tell you the same thing.”

“Who’s Batman?”

“Aposto. That’s what they call him.”

“Who calls him that?”

“The guys on the club he belongs to.”

“What gang is that?”

“You know all this already. Who the hell are you trying to con?”

“I’m asking you anyway,” Hank said. “What’s the name of the gang?”

“The Thunderbirds.” Danny paused. “And it ain’t a gang. It’s a club.”

“I see. And what differentiates a gang from a club?”

“The Thunderbirds never go around looking for no trouble.”

“Then what were you doing in Spanish Harlem on the night of July tenth if not looking for trouble?”

“We were out for a stroll.”

“You and Tower—who I suppose is Reardon—and Batman. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct,” Danny said.

“Why do you call him Tower?”

“I don’t know. I guess because he’s a tall guy. Also, he’s very strong. Tower kind of rhymes with power.”

“What do they call you?”

“Danny.”

“No nickname?”

“What do I need a nickname for? Anyway, Danny is a nickname. My real name is Daniel.”

“Why’d you join the gang, Danny?”

“I don’t belong to no gang.”

“The club then.”

“I don’t belong to no club.”

“Then what were you doing with two members of the Thunderbirds on the night of July tenth?”

“They asked me would I like to go for a stroll, so I said yes. So I went. There ain’t no law against that.”

“There’s a law against murder.”

“Yeah, but this was self-defense.”

“Danny, that’s sheer nonsense and you know it. The boy was blind!”

“So what?”

“So I’m telling you this. If you stick to this story, I can guarantee one thing. I can absolutely guarantee that you’ll end up in the electric chair.”

Danny was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “That’s what you want, ain’t it?”

“I want the truth.”

“You got the truth. Tower and Batman and me were out for a stroll. The lousy spic jumped us and we knifed him. That’s the truth.”

“Did you stab Morrez?”

“Sure, I stabbed him. The lousy spic jumped us. I stabbed him four times.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to stab him. What’s the matter, you think I’m afraid of stabbing somebody? I’d stab anybody got wise with me.”

“A blind boy?”

“Oh, lay off the blind-boy jazz, willya? He jumped us.”

“How could he jump you when he couldn’t even see you?”

“Ask him. Maybe he heard us. Maybe he wasn’t really blind. Maybe he was only faking like he was blind so—”

“Danny, Danny.”

“How the hell do I know why he jumped us? But he did, all right. So we give it to him. One thing about the Thunderbirds, they got heart. They don’t go looking for no trouble, but if it comes, they don’t turkey out, either.”

“All right, Danny. The three of you made up a story, and maybe it was a good story. But it doesn’t work in the light of the facts, and I should think you’d be smart enough to change the story now that you know the facts. This way, you haven’t got a prayer.”

“I’m telling you exactly what happened. You want me to lie?”

“What are you afraid of, Danny? Who are you afraid of?”

“I ain’t afraid of nothing or nobody on the face of the earth. And don’t you forget that neither. And I’ll tell you something else. You may think I’m going to the chair, but you got it all wrong. ’Cause I ain’t. And if I was you, I’d watch my step, mister. I just wouldn’t go walking around no dark streets at night.”

“Are you threatening me, Danny?”

“I’m just advising you.”

“Do you think I’m afraid of a bunch of teen-age hoodlums?”

“I don’t know what you’re afraid of or what you ain’t. All I know is I personally wouldn’t want to tackle fifty guys who are out to burn.”

“The Thunderbirds, do you mean?”

“I ain’t mentioning no names. Just watch your step, mister.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Hank said dryly.

“Because just between the two of us,” Danny said, “you don’t look to me like you could handle a skinny dame, no less fifty guys.”

“You’ve got quite a talent, Danny,” Hank said.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“I came here because your mother told me—”

“My mother? What’re you dragging her in this for? Why’d you send for her?”

“I didn’t. She came to see me. She told me you didn’t belong to the Thunderbirds, and that you’d had nothing to do with the stabbing. When I explained this to your lawyers, they agreed I might see you. So I came. And now I’m convinced more than ever that you did belong to the gang and that you killed that boy cold-bloodedly and with premeditation. That’s your talent, Danny. It should work well with a jury.”

“I didn’t kill him cold-bloodedly or nothing. I stabbed him in self-defense, and I wasn’t trying to kill him. I was only trying to stop him from hurting me.”

“He was blind!” Hank said angrily.

“I don’t know what he was, and I don’t care. All I know is he got off that stoop like a madman, and he had a knife in his hands, and when he come at us—”

“You’re lying!”

“I ain’t lying. He had a knife. I saw it. For God’s sake, I saw it! You think I wanted to get cut? So when Tower and Batman went at him, I went at him, too. I ain’t turkey, mister. When there’s trouble, I got heart.”

“It certainly takes a lot of heart to attack a boy who can’t see.”

“You don’t have to see to be able to stab somebody. There’s guys been stabbed on the blackest night. All you got to do is feel, and stick the blade. What the hell do you know? You lousy pansy, you was probably born on a big estate in—”

“Shut up, Danny!”

“Don’t tell me to shut up. You’re lucky my lawyers are even letting you talk to me. Nobody sent for you, you come of your own free will. Okay, you’re here and this is what I got to say. I say we were walking down that street, and that spic got up off the stoop like a crazy man and come at us with a blade in his fist. We stabbed him because it was either us or him. If he died, that’s tough. He shouldn’t of got wise.”

Hank rose. “Okay, Danny. That’s your story. I wish you luck.”

“And keep away from my mother, mister,” Danny said. “Just keep away from her. You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Then you better do it.”

“There’s only one thing I’m going to do, Danny. I’m going to send you and your friends to the electric chair for the murder of an innocent boy.”

The note was waiting for him back at the office. It was addressed to MISTER DISTRICT ATTORNEY HENRY BELL. The letters were scrawled across the face of the envelope in ink. He tore open the flap and pulled out the single sheet of notepaper. In the same hand were written the words:

IF THE THUNDERBIRDS DIE,

YOU DIE NEXT

FOUR

He went back to the street the next morning and realized in an instant that the image of Harlem as he knew it was no longer valid.

Standing on the corner of 120th Street and First Avenue, he looked westward and tried to visualize himself as a boy and found that geography had passed the dagger of befuddlement to time, and that both had conspired to stab memory.

On the north side of the street, spreading from Second Avenue where the grocery store used to be, where he’d flipped picture cards on hot summer days, spreading from there almost halfway down the block was an open lot, leveled by the bulldozers for a new housing project. The house in which he’d been born and raised—his Aunt Serrie had served as midwife during the delivery—still stood in the center of the block on the south side of the street, but the candy store that had been alongside it was boarded up and demolition had already begun on the houses across the way from it.

“This isn’t where the kids come from,” Detective First Grade Michael Larsen said. “It’s a few blocks over, sir.”

“I know,” Hank answered.

He looked up the street again, feeling change as a sentient thing, wondering if change were truly synonymous with progress. For if the geography of Harlem had changed, if the architecture of the city had imposed upon the gridwork of streets a new pattern of sterile red brick, the model caves of the Miltown Men, the people of Harlem had changed, too. His earlier concept of the three Harlems was one of clear territorial division: Italian, Spanish and Negro. In his mind, he had almost erected the border inspection posts. He recognized now that there was no true border separating the three. Harlem was Harlem. The streets of Italian Harlem were dotted with the tan and white faces of Puerto Ricans, the deeper brown of Negroes. In Harlem could be read the entire immigration pattern of New York City: the Irish and the Italians being the first to succumb to the slow steadiness of integration; the Negroes—later arrivals—melting imperceptibly into the pot of white Protestant respectability; the Puerto Ricans entering last, reaching desperately across a cultural and lingual barrier for the extended hand of acceptance. The hand, they discovered, held an open switch blade.

He wondered what the city had learned, if anything. He knew there were studies, countless studies of housing conditions and traffic problems and schools and recreation centers and occupational opportunities, scores of studies compiled by learned men who knew all about immigration. And yet, projecting the city into the not too distant future, twenty years, twenty-five years, he could visualize it as a giant wheel. The hub of that wheel would be the midtown area where the Idea Men worked, grinding out communications for the entire nation, Eat Crunchies, Wash With Wadley’s, Smoke Saharas, shaping the taste and the thought of the country with their words. And surrounding the camp of the Idea Men would be the nomadic tribes, fighting among themselves for the unproductive earth of the city streets, roaming, shifting, still searching for that welcoming hand of acceptance. A huge loudspeaker would be set atop the Empire State Building in the heart of the hub owned by the Idea Men. And every hour on the hour, the loud-speaker would bleat out a single word which would ring loud and clear on the air of the city, crossing into the territories ruled by the barbarian tribes roaming the fringes of the hub.

And that word would be “Tolerance!”

And Rafael Morrez, swimming in a sea of words, drowned because words don’t float.

“Are you familiar at all with Harlem, sir?” Larsen said.

“I was born here,” Hank answered. “On this street.”

“Oh? Yeah?” Larsen looked at him curiously. “Well, it’s changed a lot since then, I guess.”

“Yes. It has.”

“You know,” Larsen said, “we could’ve brought this girl to your office. You didn’t have to come to Harlem.”

“I wanted to come.”

Walking with the detective who’d caught the initial squeal, he wondered now why he’d wanted to come. Perhaps it was the note, he thought. Perhaps the note challenged my bravery and my manhood. Or perhaps I wanted to see what it was about Harlem that could alternately produce a district attorney and three young killers.

“This is the block,” Larsen said. “The three of them lived right here. And the Puerto Rican kid lived on this same street, only farther west. Great, huh?”

Hank looked up the street. The asphalt had grown gummy in the heat of morning. In the middle of the block, a group of boys had turned on the fire hydrant, and they ran through the stream of water in their clothes, tee shirts sticking wetly to their bodies. The water plunged upward, deflected by a tin can wired to the nozzle of the pump, cascading downward in a waterfall that was costing the city money. Farther up the block, a stickball game was in progress. The garbage cans were stacked alongside the curb, awaiting the D.S.C. pickup trucks. Women in housedresses sat on the front stoops, fanning themselves. Outside the candy store, a group of teen-age boys stood talking.

“If you’re wondering what Thunderbirds look like in their leisure time, you’re looking at them now,” Larsen said.

The boys looked entirely harmless. Sitting on the wooden newsstand outside the store, they chatted and laughed quietly among themselves.

“The girl lives in that building alongside the candy store,” Larsen said. “I phoned before I left the squad, so she knows we’re coming. Don’t mind the dirty looks on the faces of the yardbirds. They know I’m a bull. I’ve kicked their asses around the corner more times than I can count.”

The boys’ conversation tapered off and then stopped as Hank and Larsen approached. Tight-lipped, inscrutable, they studied the pair as they entered the tenement. The entrance hallway was dark and narrow. A stench hit the nostrils immediately, the stench of bodies and of body waste, the stench of cooking, the stench of sleeping and waking, the stench of life contained, confined.

“I don’t know how the hell people manage to live here,” Larsen said. “Some of them make good salaries, too, would you believe it? You’d think they’d get out. This ain’t good for people. You live like a pig, you begin to feel like a pig. She’s on the third floor.”

They climbed the narrow steps. He could remember climbing similar steps when he was a boy. The façade of Harlem might have changed, but the guts were the same. Even the stench was familiar. As a boy, he had urinated behind the first-floor staircase, adding to the stench. You live like a pig, you begin to feel like a pig.

“This is it,” Larsen said, stopping before an apartment marked 3B. “Both parents work, so the kid’ll be alone. She’s sixteen, but she looks a lot older and a lot harder. She seems to be a nice kid, though.” He knocked on the door.

The door opened almost instantly, as if the girl had been standing behind it waiting for the knock. She was a dark-haired girl with wide brown eyes and clean features. Lipstick was the only make-up she wore. She wore a red peasant skirt and a white blouse, and her hair was caught at the back of her neck with a red ribbon.

“Hello,” she said, “come in.”

They entered the apartment. The linoleum was worn, and the plaster was chipped and peeling, and an electrical outlet hung loose from the wall, its naked copper wires exposed. But the apartment was scrupulously clean.

“Miss Rugiello, this is Mr. Bell, the district attorney.”

“How do you do?” the girl said. She spoke in a low whisper, as if she were afraid of being overheard.

“How do you do?” Hank said.

“Would you like some coffee or something? I can put some on. It’d only take a minute.”

“No, thank you,” Hank said.

The girl nodded, as if, convinced beforehand that he would not accept her hospitality, she were now affirming her conviction.

“Well … sit down … won’t you?”

They sat at a kitchen table with an enamel top, the girl sitting at the far end, Hank and Larsen taking chairs on opposite sides of her.

“What’s your first name, miss?” Hank said.

“Angela,” she said.

“I have a daughter almost your age,” Hank said.

“Yeah?” the girl said in seeming interest, but she watched Hank suspiciously.

“Yes.”

“That’s nice,” Angela said.

“Mr. Bell would like to ask you some questions,” Larsen said.

“Yes?” She put the word almost as a question, but she nodded simultaneously, indicating that she knew why the district attorney was here.

“About what happened on the night Morrez was stabbed,” Larsen said. “About the knives.”

“Yes?” she said again, and again it was almost a query.

“Yes,” Hank said. “Can you tell me what happened in your own words?”

“Well, I didn’t see the stabbing or anything. You understand that, don’t you? I didn’t have anything at all to do with the stabbing.”

“Yes, we understand that.”

“Is it wrong that I took the knives? Can I get in trouble for taking the knives?”

“No,” Hank said. “Tell us what happened.”

“Well, Carol and I were sitting on the front stoop downstairs. Carol is my cousin. Carol Rugiello. It was, you know, early yet. Just after supper. You know. Quiet. And none of the fellows was around, but we figured that was because they were getting ready to go bopping. It was decided that afternoon, you see. About the stuff being on between them and the Horsemen, I mean.”

“The Spanish gang?” Hank asked.

“Yeah, the spies,” she said gently, nodding. “They had a truce on before, them and the Birds, but that afternoon the warlords met and decided the stuff was on again. So we knew they were going bopping that night. And there’s a lot of things they have to do before they go, so we figured that’s why none of them was around. Carol’s boy friend is the warlord of the Thunderbirds, so she knew all about it.”

“Do you have a boy friend on the club?”

“Well, no, not a steady or anything like that. I go to their jumps and like that. But I ain’t really interested in none of them. I mean, not for a boy friend. But they’re nice boys. I mean, they seem like nice boys, you know?”

“Yes, go on.”

“Well, we were sitting there on the front stoop, and it was very quiet. It looked like rain. I remember saying to Carol it looked like it was going to rain.…”

CAROL: That’s what we need, all right, is a little rain.

ANGELA: I wouldn’t mind it. It’s been hot all day.

CAROL: I wouldn’t neither. It’s what I said, ain’t it?

ANGELA: I thought you were being sarcastic.

CAROL: No. (She pauses, sighs.) Listen, let’s take a walk or something. I’m dying of boredom here on the stoop.

ANGELA: All right, come on. The fellows won’t be back till late, anyway.

CAROL: They haven’t even started yet. It ain’t even dark.

(They rise from the stoop. They are both wearing blue flaring skirts and white sleeveless blouses. Carol is the taller of the two girls, and the older. They are dressed in what might seem good taste were it not for the high pointed thrust of their brassières. They walk, too, with an exaggerated femininity, as if anxious to emphasize their femaleness in what must seem to them a male-dominated society. They pass Second Avenue and continue westward. Some boys on the corner whistle at them, and they tilt their teenage noses to the sky, aloofly but not without a smug female satisfaction. They are pretty girls, and they know it. Carol knows, too, that she is good in bed. She has been told so. Angela is a virgin, but she tries hard to give an impression of vast sexual knowledge. As they approach Third Avenue, it begins to rain. Running, their skirts flapping about their legs, they duck into a doorway and then look up toward Lexington Avenue.)

CAROL: Hey! What’s that? Up the street! Look!

ANGELA (peering westward, where the thunderclouds are banked against the horizon): It’s Tower, ain’t it? Who’s that with him?

CAROL: Batman and Danny. They’re running!

ANGELA: But I thought …

CAROL: Oh God, they’re all full of blood!

(The boys break across Third Avenue in long loping sprints. Behind them is the sound of a police siren. Fear is mingled with the excitement on their faces. Their hands are drenched with blood. Each is still carrying a bloody knife.)

TOWER (spotting the girls): Hey—hey! Hey, c’mere, quick!

CAROL: What is it? What happened?

TOWER: Never mind, the cops are behind us. Take these! Get rid of them! Come on! Come on, take them! (The knives are offered. They ring the girls in dripping steel. Carol is frozen.)

CAROL: What happened?

DANNY: A spic tried to jap us. We stabbed him. Take the knives! Take them!

(Carol does not move. Her eyes wide, she stares at the blood-smeared fists thrust at her. Angela suddenly offers her hand, and the blades are clasped into it, one, two, three, and then the boys are running again, heading for the safety of their own turf. Angela rushes to the nearest stoop, climbing to the top step, which is shielded from the rain. She sits quickly, thrusting the knives under her skirt, pulling the skirt over them, feeling the long thin blades against her naked flesh, thinking she can feel the oozing blood on each separate long blade.)

CAROL: I’m scared. Oh God, I’m scared.

ANGELA: Shhhh, shhhh.

(The rain lashes the long street. A squad car skids across Third Avenue, its siren wailing. Another squad car, ignoring the One Way sign, enters the other end of the block.)

CAROL (whispering): The knife! One of the knives—it’s showing. Pull down your skirt!

ANGELA: Shhh, shhhh. (She reaches beneath her skirt, thrusting the knife deeper beneath her thighs. There is a narcoticized look on her face. The sirens ring in her ears, and then come the terrifying sounds of two explosions, the policemen firing in the air and the rushed babble of many voices, and then Carol again, whispering beside her.)

CAROL: They got ’em. Oh, God, they’re busted. What were they doing over there alone? Angela, they stabbed a guy!

ANGELA: Yes. (Her voice is a whisper now, too.) Yes, oh yes, they stabbed him.

CAROL: What should we do with the knives? Let’s throw them down the sewer. Now. Before the cops get to us.

ANGELA: No. No, I’ll take them home with me.

CAROL: Angela …

ANGELA: I’ll take them home with me.

“We found them here, sir,” Larsen said. “In the girl’s dresser drawer.”

“Why’d you accept the knives, Angela?” Hank asked.

“I don’t know. I was excited. The boys were so excited, I guess I got excited, too. You should have seen their faces. So they offered the knives to me. So—so I took them. All three of them. One after the other. And I hid them. And then I took them home with me and put them in a paper bag and put them in my drawer, at the back of the drawer where my father couldn’t see them. He’d have got mad as hell if he saw the knives. He’d have begun telling me a good girl shouldn’t have taken the knives like that from the three of them. So I hid them from him.”

“Why’d you call the police?”

“Because I later realized I done wrong. I felt terribly guilty. It was wrong what I done, hiding the knives like that. So I called the cops and told them I had them. I felt terribly guilty.”

“You said that Danny told you Morrez had japped them. Is that exactly what he said?”

“Yes.”

“That he’d been japped?”

“No, that a spic had tried to jap them and they stabbed him. That’s what he said. At least, I think so. I was very excited.”

“Have you read anything about this case in the newspapers?”

“Sure, everybody on the block is reading the stories.”

“Then you’re aware, are you not, that the three boys claim Morrez came at them with a knife. You know that, don’t you?”

“Sure. I know it.”

“Is it possible that Danny Di Pace said nothing at all about being japped? Is it possible you only think he said that—after reading the boys’ claims in the newspapers?”

“It’s possible, but I doubt it. I know what I heard. I took his knife, too, didn’t I?”

“Yes. Yes, you did.”

“You know something?” the girl said.

“What?”

“I still got the blood on my skirt. I can’t get the stain out. From when I was sitting on the knives. I still got blood there.”

At the dinner table that night, he looked across at his daughter Jennifer and wondered what kind of girl she’d have been had she lived in Harlem. She was a pretty girl, with her mother’s hazel eyes and fine blond hair, a bosom embarrassingly ripening into womanhood. Her appetite amazed him. She ate rapidly, shoveling food into her mouth with the abandon of a truck driver.

“Slow down, Jennie,” he said. “We’re not expecting a famine.”

“I know, Pop, but Agatha’s expecting me at eight-thirty, and she’s got some creamy new records, and Mom said dinner would be at seven, but you were late. So it’s really your fault I’m gulping my food.”

“Agatha’s creamy new records can wait,” Hank said. “You slow down before you choke.”

“It’s not really Agatha’s records that are causing the speed,” Karin said. “There’ll be some boys there, Hank.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Well, for Pete’s sake, Pop, don’t look as if I’m going into some opium den or something. We’re only going to dance a little.”

“Who are these boys?” Hank asked.

“Some of the kids from the neighborhood. Actually, they’re all bananas except Lonnie Gavin. He’s cool.”

“Well, that at least is reassuring,” Hank said, and he winked at Karin. “Why don’t you bring him to the house sometime?”

“Pop, he’s only been here about eighty times already.”

“And where was I?”

“Oh, preparing a brief or giving some witness the rubber hose, I guess.”

“I don’t think that’s very funny, Jennie,” Karin said. “Your father doesn’t beat his witnesses.”

“I know. That was just a euphemism.”

“And I suggest you brush up on your figures of speech, which are more incriminating than your original statements,” Hank said.

“Hyperbole?” Jennie asked.

“That’s more like it.”

“We’ve got a creep teaching English,” Jennie said. “It’s a wonder I learn anything. They ought to shoot him up with the next Vanguard.”

She seized her napkin, wiped her mouth, shoved her chair back, and kissed Karin briefly.

“May I please be excused?” she said as she rushed from the dining room. He could see her applying lipstick to her mouth, standing in front of the hall mirror. Then, unself-consciously, she tugged at her brassière, waved back at her parents, and slammed out of the house.

“How about that?” Hank said.

Karin shrugged.

“I’m worried,” Hank said.

“Why?”

“She’s a woman.”

“She’s a girl.”

“She’s a woman, Karin. She applies lipstick like an expert, and she adjusts her bra as if she’s been wearing one all her life. Are you sure it’s all right for her to go over to this Agatha’s house to dance? With boys?”

“I’d be more worried if she were dancing with girls.”

“Honey, don’t get glib.”

“I’m not. For the information of the district attorney, his daughter began to blossom at the age of twelve. She’s been wearing lipstick and bra for almost two years now. She has, I believe, been kissed.”

“By whom?” Hank said, his brow creasing.

“Oh, my God. By many boys, I’m sure.”

“I don’t think that’s wise, Karin.”

“How do you suggest we prevent it?”

“Well, I don’t know.” He paused. “But it doesn’t seem right to me that a thirteen-year-old girl should go around necking with everybody in the neighborhood.”

“Jennie’s almost fourteen and I’m sure she chooses the boys she wants to kiss.”

“And where does she go from there?”

“Hank!”

“I’m serious. I’d better have a talk with that girl.”

“And what will you tell her?”

“Well …”

With a calm smile on her mouth, Karin said, “Will you tell her to keep her legs crossed?”

“In essence, yes.”

“And will that keep them crossed?”

“It seems to me she should know …”

“She knows, Hank.”

“You don’t seem very concerned,” he said.

“I’m not. Jennie’s a sensible girl, and I think she’d only be embarrassed if you gave her a lecture. I think it might be more important if you—” She stopped suddenly.

“If I what?”

“If you came home earlier more often. If you saw the boys who are dating her. If you took an interest in her, and in them.”

“I didn’t even know she was dating. Isn’t she too young to be dating?”

“Biologically, she’s as old as I am.”

“And apparently following in your footsteps,” Hank said, and was immediately sorry afterward.

“Enter the Slut of Berlin,” Karin said dryly.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s quite all right. There’s just one thing, Hank. I wish you’d someday have the guts to believe it was you I fell in love with—and not an American chocolate bar.”

“I do believe that.”

“Do you? Then why do you constantly refer to my ‘lurid’ past? To hear you tell it, I was the chief prostitute in a red-light district which stretched for miles.”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” Hank said.

“Well, I would. Once and for all, I would like to talk about it.”

“There’s nothing to say.”

“There’s a lot to say. And it’s better to say it than to hint at it. Does it trouble you greatly that I went to bed with one other man before I met you?”

He did not answer.

“Hank, I’m talking to you.”

“Yes, goddamnit, it troubles me greatly. It annoys the hell out of me that I was introduced to you by the bombardier of my ship—and that he knew you a lot longer and possibly a lot better than I ever did.”

“He was very kind,” Karin said softly.

“I don’t want to hear about his goddamn virtues. What’d he do, bring you nylons?”

“Yes. But so did you.”

“And did you tell him the same things you told me?”

“I told him I loved him. And I did.”

“Great,” Hank said.

“Perhaps you’d have preferred me to go to bed with a man I despised?”

“I’d have preferred you not to have gone to bed with anyone!”

“Not even you?”

“You married me!” Hank hurled.

“Yes. Because I loved you from the first moment I met you. That is why I married you. That is why I asked Peter never to see me again. Because I loved you.”

“But you loved Pete first.”

“Yes. And didn’t you love someone first?”

“I didn’t go to bed with her!”

“And perhaps she didn’t live in wartime Germany!” Karin snapped.

“No, she didn’t. And you did, and don’t try to tell me that every German girl was fair prey for every American soldier.”

“I can speak for no German girl but myself,” Karin said. “I was hungry. And scared. Damnit, I was scared. Have you ever been scared?”

“I’ve been scared all my life,” he said.

A silence fell over the table. They sat watching each other with slightly dazed expressions on their faces, as if recognizing for the first time that they really did not know each other.

He pushed back his chair. “I’m going for a walk,” he said.

“All right. Be careful, please.”

He went out of the house, and the words “Be careful, please” echoed in his mind because these were the words she’d said to him each time he left her, years ago, to return to the base. He could still remember driving the jeep through the streets of a bombed-out Berlin awakening to face the silent dawn. Those had been good times, and this had been a stupid argument and oh, damnit, what the hell was the matter with him anyway?

He began walking up the street, a well-ordered street with old trees and carefully landscaped plots and meticulous lawns and great white houses with neatly painted shutters, a miniature suburb set in the heart of the city. A city of contrasts, New York, changing in the sudden space of two blocks from the worst slum to the most aristocratic neighborhood. Even here in Inwood, if you walked east for several blocks you came upon a neighborhood succumbing to the shoddiness of time.

He turned and began walking west, toward the river.

Why had he fought with Karin?

And what had he meant when he’d said to her, “I’ve been scared all my life”? The words had leaped from his lips involuntarily, as if wrenched from a secret inner person of whom he had no knowledge.

Scared, yes, at the controls of a bomber with flak bursting silently around the ship. Scared when they were hit over the Channel once and had to ditch, scared when the Messerschmitt dived and strafed the water and he could see the line of slugs ripping up a narrow path as the plane dived and gained altitude and then dived again at the floating crew members.

But all his life? Scared all his life?

He walked onto the path between the bushes at the end of the street, heading for the big rock which overlooked the railroad tracks and the Hudson. He and Karin walked here often on summer nights. Here you could sit and look at the lights of Palisades Amusement Park across the river downtown, the strung necklace of the George Washington Bridge, the moving lights of the water craft. And here, too, you could listen to the water lapping gently against the smaller rocks below, and there seemed to be in this spot a serenity which had somehow passed by the rest of the city, the rest of the world.

He found the rock in the darkness and climbed to its top. He lighted a cigarette then and looked out over the water. He sat smoking for a long while, listening to the sounds of the insects, hearing below him the lapping sounds of the river. Then he started back for the house.

The two boys were standing under the street lamp at the end of the block. They were standing quite still, apparently talking to each other harmlessly, but he felt his heart lurch into his throat at the sight of them. He did not know who they were; he was sure they were not any of the neighborhood boys.

He clenched his fists.

His own house was a half block beyond the lamppost. He would have to pass the boys if he wanted to get home.

He felt the way he’d felt over Bremen with a full cargo of bombs.

He did not break his stride. He continued walking with his fists clenched at his sides, closer to the two husky teen-agers who stood idling by the street lamp.

When he passed them, the taller of the two looked up and said, “Why, good evening, Mr. Bell.”

He said, “Good evening,” and continued walking. He could feel the boys’ eyes on his back. When he reached the front door of his house, he was trembling. He sat on the front steps and groped for the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. His hands shaking, he lighted one and blew out a hasty stream of smoke. Then he looked down the street toward the lamppost. The boys were gone. But the trembling would not leave him. He held his left hand in front of him, watched the spasmodic jerking of his fingers until, in self-condemning anger, he bunched the fingers into a tight fist and slammed the fist down onto his knee.

I’m not afraid, he told himself, and the words had a familiar ring. He squeezed his eyes shut and again he told himself, “I’m not afraid,” aloud this time, and the words echoed on the silent street, but the trembling would not stop.

I’m not afraid.

I’m not afraid.

It had been one of those suffocatingly hot August days that capture the city and refuse to let go of it. People moved about the streets with great effort. The black asphalt had begun to run so that crossing the street became a sticky task. At noon, with the sun directly overhead, there was no shade in the concrete canyon of the city block. The tar glistened blackly, and the sidewalks gleamed whitely with a hard flat glare in the merciless sunlight.

Hank Belani was twelve years old, a gangling awkward youth on the edge of adolescence, a boy whose image of himself was rapidly becoming lost, obscured by the changes of rapid growth. It was for this reason—though he could not have explained his motivation if he’d tried—that he wore the lock. He had bought the lock in the five-and-ten on Third Avenue. He had paid a quarter for it. The lock had no practical value whatever. It was a miniature chromium-and-black ornament meant for decoration alone and not seriously intended as a safeguard for anything. It had come complete with two tiny keys. He wore the lock on the belt loop of his trousers, the loop to the right of his fly. Religiously, he unlocked it whenever he changed his trousers, shifting it from one trouser loop to the other, locking it again, and then putting the miniature key into the top drawer of his dresser, alongside the spare key. The lock was, for Hank Belani, a trademark. It was doubtful that anyone but Hank even knew of its existence. It had certainly attracted no attention until that day in August. The important thing, of course, was that Hank knew it was there, and for him it was a trademark.

The heat had rendered the boys on the block lifeless. They had matched War cards for a while—at that time the War cards showed the Sino-Japanese war and vividly illustrated the atrocities of the Japanese—but then had grown weary of even such limited activity. It was too hot to be flipping cards. Eventually, they all just stretched out alongside the brick wall of the grocery store and talked about swimming. Hank sat with the rest of the boys, his sneakered feet stretched out, lying on one hip so that the lock in his trouser loop hung suspended and caught the unblinking rays of the sun.

One of the boys in the crowd was called Bobby. He was only thirteen, but one of those kids who are very big for their age, with straight blond hair and a lot of pimples on his face. He was always picking at his pimples or saying, “I need a shave again,” even though all the other kids knew he didn’t shave yet, although he did have a lot of blond fuzz all over his face. The kids in those days hadn’t tipped to the luxury of dungarees. In the winter, they wore knickers with knee socks, and in the summer they wore shorts. Hank’s knees were always scabby in the summer, but all the kids’ knees were that way, because flesh and concrete didn’t blend too well. Bobby was wearing shorts. He had big muscular legs, well, he was big all over, and he had this thick blond caterpillar fuzz on his legs, too. Everybody was just laying there talking about swimming, and all of a sudden Bobby said, “What’s that?”

At first, Hank didn’t know what he was talking about. He’d been listening to the swimming talk and wishing he was swimming, and he was in a sort of hazy dream mood because he was so hot and because it was nice to just sit with the fellows and talk about swimming on a day like this.

“What’s that on your pants, Hank?” Bobby said.

Hank looked at him sleepily and then looked down to where the lock hung on his trouser loop. “Oh, that’s a lock,” he said.

“A lock!” Bobby said.

“Yeah, a lock.”

“A lock!” The idea seemed to repel and fascinate Bobby. He turned to the other boys and said, “He’s got a lock on his pants,” and he laughed his curious laugh, a mixture of a man’s and a boy’s, and he said again, “A lock!”

“Yeah, a lock,” Hank answered, not seeing at all what was so peculiar about the darn thing.

One of the other kids started talking about how to do a jackknife dive, but Bobby wouldn’t let it go. He brought his voice up a little higher and he said, “Why you got a lock on your pants?”

“Why not?” Hank said. He was not angry. He just didn’t want to be bothered. It was much too hot to be going into why he did or didn’t have a lock on his pants.

“What’re you lockin’ up?” Bobby wanted to know.

“I ain’t lockin’ up anything.”

“Then why you got the lock?”

“’Cause I want the lock.”

“That seems pretty stupid to me,” Bobby said.

The kid who was explaining the jackknife said, “The whole secret is how you get the jump on the board. You got to spring so that …”

Bobby said, “That seems pretty stupid to me,” a little louder this time.

“Hey, you mind?” the other kid asked. “I’m trying to explain something.”

“Well, it seems pretty stupid somebody should have a lock on his pants,” Bobby persisted. “That’s the first time in my life I ever seen anybody with a lock on his pants, I swear to God.”

“So don’t look at it,” the other kid said. “If you don’t spring right, you can’t get to touch your toes. Sometimes, you get these boards where …”

“You wear them on all your pants?” Bobby asked.

“Yeah, all my pants.”

“You change it from pants to pants?”

“Yeah, I change it from pants to pants.”

“That seems pretty stupid. It looks pretty stupid, too, you want to know the truth.”

“So don’t look at it,” Hank said, repeating the other kid.

“Well, I don’t like it. That’s all. I don’t like it.”

“Well, who cares what you like? It’s my pants, and it’s my lock. So if you don’t like it, who cares? I don’t care.” He was beginning to feel a little frightened. Bobby was much bigger than he, and he didn’t want to start a fight with a boy who could kill him. He wished desperately that Bobby would let go of the conversation. But Bobby wasn’t in a mood to let go of anything. Bobby was having a real good time.

“Whyn’t you put the lock on your shirt, too?”

“I don’t want no lock on my shirt.”

“Whyn’t you put it on your underwear?”

“Whyn’t you shut up?” Hank said. He was beginning to tremble. I’m not afraid, he told himself.

“Whyn’t you stick it on your pecker?”

“Oh, come on,” Hank said. “Shut up, willya?”

“What’s the matter? You nervous about your damn lock?”

“I ain’t nervous at all. I just don’t want to talk about it. You mind?”

“I want to talk about it,” Bobby said. “Let’s see that damn lock, anyway.” He leaned over and stretched out his hand, ready to touch the lock, ready to have a closer look at it. Hank backed away a little.

“Keep your hands off it!” he said, and he wondered in that moment why this had to be, why he couldn’t be left alone, and he felt the trembling inside him, and again he told himself, I’m not afraid, knowing that he was afraid, and hating the fear, and hating Bobby, and watching the older boy’s face break into a malicious grin.

“What’s the matter? I can’t touch it even?”

“No, you can’t touch it,” he said. Come on, stop it, he thought. What do we have to fight for? Come on.

“What’s the matter? It’s gold?”

“Yeah, it’s platinum. Keep your hands off it.”

“I only wanted to look at it.”

“You said you didn’t like to look at it. So keep your hands off it. Go look someplace else. Go look around the corner, why don’t you?”

The lock hung from the trouser loop, steel and fabric wedded together. Bobby glanced at it. And suddenly he reached out for it, grasping the lock and pulling it, ripping the trouser loop, clutching the lock in his closed fist. Hank was too shocked to move for an instant. Bobby was grinning. Hank hesitated. The gauntlet had been dropped. Trembling, fighting to keep the tears from his eyes, he got to his feet.

“Give me the lock,” he said.

Bobby stood up. He was at least a head taller than Hank, and easily twice as wide. “What’s the matter?” he asked innocently.

“Give me that lock!”

“I think I’ll throw it down the sewer with the rest of the crap,” Bobby said, and he took a step toward the gutter, not realizing that for all intents and purposes he was holding Hank’s heart clutched in his fist, was holding an identity, an existence, a life in his fingers. He had reasoned correctly that Hank was afraid of him. He could see fear in Hank’s narrow, trembling body, could read it in the tightly controlled face, the eyes moist and refusing to succumb to the onslaught of tears. But he did not know he was holding something precious in his hand, something that gave meaning and reality in a concrete and asphalt maze that threatened anonymity. He did not know until Hank hit him.

He hit Bobby quite hard, so hard that Bobby’s nose began to bleed instantly. Bobby felt the blood gushing from his nostrils, and his eyes went wide with surprise. Hank hit him again, and then again, and Bobby kept trying to feel his nose while he was being hit, and suddenly he was falling to the hot pavement, and Hank was straddling him, and he felt fingers around his throat, wildly clutching at his windpipe, and he recognized in a moment of terrifying awareness that Hank would choke him to death.

“Give him the lock, Bobby,” one of the other kids said, and Bobby—twisting his head, trying to escape the viselike fingers around his throat—sputtered, “Take it, here, take it!”

He opened his fist and the lock dropped to the sidewalk. Hank picked it up quickly. He held the lock clenched in one fist, the other hand closed over it, and the tears finally reached his eyes, spilled down his face. Stuttering, he said, “Why why why c-c-c-couldn’t you m-m-mind your own b-b-business?”

“Go home, Bobby,” one of the other kids said. “Your goddamn nose is all bloody.”

That was the end of the fight, and the last of the trouble he was to have with Bobby. He stopped wearing the lock immediately afterward. He wore something else from that day on: a recognition of his own fear and the lengths to which he would go to keep it from erupting.

“Dad?”

He looked up. For a moment, he did not recognize the young lady standing before him, the long blond hair, the face with the questioning look of a woman, the firm bosom, the narrow waist and long legs. My daughter? he thought. A woman already? When did you leave my knee, Jennie? When did you join the mysterious sorority?

“Are you all right, Dad?” she asked. There was concern in her voice.

“Yes,” he said. “Just having a last cigarette before I turned in.”

“It’s a nice night,” Jennie said. She sat on the stoop beside him, pulling her skirt over her knees.

“Yes.” He paused. “Did you walk home from Agatha’s?”

“Yeah. The kids are still there, but I left. It was a big drag.” She paused. “Lonnie wasn’t there.”

“Lonnie?”

“Lonnie Gavin.”

“Oh. Oh, yes.”

They sat in silence for several moments.

“It sure is a nice night,” Jennie said.

“Yes.”

The silence closed in on them.

“You … you didn’t see anyone in the street, did you? On your way home?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Some boys?”

“No. Nobody.”

“You shouldn’t go walking around alone at night,” he said.

“Oh, there’s nothing to be afraid of around here,” she answered.

“Well, still.”

“Don’t worry,” she said.

Again they were silent. He had the oddest feeling that Jennie wanted to talk to him. He felt it would be good for the two of them to talk together, but instead they sat like strangers in the waiting room of a small-town railroad station, uncommunicative, ill at ease.

At last his daughter rose and smoothed her skirt.

“Mom up?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Think I’ll have a glass of milk with her,” Jennie said, and she went into the house.

He sat alone in the darkness.

At nine o’clock the next morning, he started his working day by requesting the assignment of a team of detectives to a twenty-four-hour surveillance of his house.

FIVE

The entrance to the candy store was on the right-hand side of the shop, its door opening on the three tightly cramped booths which sat alongside the wall there. A fountain with four stools was opposite the booths closest to the rear wall. A telephone booth stood against the rear wall next to a curtained doorway which led to the back of the store. A glass display case upon which was an assortment of chewing gum and a cash register was just inside the door, forward of the fountain and stools.

There was a combined feeling of shoddiness and hominess to the candy store. For whereas the place was badly in need of a paint job, whereas the leatherette of the booths was stained with hair oil and thumb smears, whereas the penny candy in the display case looked stale and unpalatable, the store exuded an atmosphere of relaxed comfort. Standing in the doorway, he could understand why the Thunderbirds had chosen the spot as their hangout. He walked into the shop just as the telephone rang. The proprietor went to answer it, and he remembered for a moment the days in Harlem when telephones were not to be found in every apartment. The owner of the candy store would answer the phone and then send a kid to get whomever the call was for. The rules stated that the messenger rated a tip—usually a nickel, sometimes a dime. The rules further stated that the tip had to be spent in the store. There was always a mad rush from the street whenever the telephone in the candy store rang. Today, on a similar side street in Italian Harlem, the kids barely looked up when the phone rang. Telephones were no longer a luxury. They were as essential to day-by-day living in Harlem as were television sets. The rooftops bristled with electronic antennas, irrefutable testimony to the effectiveness of installment buying.

The proprietor of the store held a brief conversation with whoever was on the other end of the line and then hung up. The four boys sitting in the booth closest to the phone did not look up as he walked back to the display case. He was a short man with a spotlessly clean white apron and a spotlessly clean bald pate. He walked with a slight limp, but the limp—rather than weakening him—seemed to give him a strength of character which was totally lacking before the limp was noticed.

“Help you, Mac?” he said to Hank.

“I’m looking for the members of a club called the Thunderbirds,” Hank said. “I’ve been told this is their hangout.”

“Somebody told you wrong, mister.”

“The somebody who told me was Detective Lieutenant Richard Gunnison of the Twenty-seventh Squad. He’s not a man who makes mistakes.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Where are they?”

“And who are you?”

“Assistant District Attorney Henry Bell.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

The boys in the rear booth looked up. One made a motion to rise, but a second boy laid a hand on his arm, and he sat instantly.

“Well, well,” the proprietor said, “we never had a D.A. in this store before. I’m honored.”

“Where do I find the Thunderbirds?” Hank gestured to the rear booth. “Are those boys members of the gang?”

“I sure as hell wouldn’t know, mister,” the proprietor said. “All I do is run a candy store.” He extended his hand across the case. “Name’s Joey Manetti. Pleased to know you.”

Hank took the hand. “Mr. Manetti,” he said, in a voice which carried to the rear booth, “the lieutenant gave me a list of names and addresses of known members of the Thunderbirds. Now, I can have these kids picked up and brought to my office for questioning. I thought I’d save time if I could talk to them here—in Harlem. Which will it be?”

Manetti shrugged. “You’re asking me? Mister, I run a candy store.”

Hank turned to the rear booth. “How about it?” he said.

A boy with heavy shoulders and muscular forearms studied Hank with pale hooded eyes. He nodded imperceptibly. “Come on over,” he said.

Hank walked to the booth. The boys sitting there ranged in age from fifteen, he guessed, to nineteen. The one who’d called him over was the oldest of the group, and the biggest. He wore his black hair combed flat against his skull, the sideburns long. A silver identification bracelet dangled from his left wrist. There was a scar on the forearm, several inches above the bracelet. His brows were heavy and black, shading thickly lidded blue, almost gray eyes. When he spoke, his lips barely moved.

“Sit down,” he said. “Concho, get the district attorney a chair.”

One of the boys slid out of the booth and went through the curtained doorway at the rear of the shop. When he returned, he put the chair down at the head of the table and then took his position in the booth again. Hank sat.

“My name’s Diablo,” the oldest boy said. “You know what that means?”

“It means devil,” Hank answered.

“That’s right.” He smiled thinly and then looked to the other boys. One of them nodded.

“Are you Spanish?”

“Me?” Diablo said. “Me? Cut it out, willya?”

“Diablo is a Spanish word.”

“Yeah?” the boy said, surprised. “I thought it was Italian. I’m Italian.”

“Diablo Degenero,” Hank said. “Your real name is Carmine. You’re the so-called warlord of the Thunderbirds.”

“That’s right,” Diablo said. “Boys, this is the district attorney. These are some of the boys. Concho, Nickie and Bud. What can we do for you?”

“You can answer a few questions,” Hank said. “Either here or downtown. It’s up to you.”

“We’ll answer them here,” Diablo said. “If we like the questions.”

“If you don’t like the questions, you can answer them downtown. With a stenographer present.”

“You got a lot of courage, Mr. District Attorney,” Diablo said. “Coming in here without an escort of bulls.”

“I don’t need any detectives,” Hank said.

“No?”

“No. Do you think I do?”

Diablo shrugged. “Mr. District Attorney, I would say—”

“The name is Bell,” Hank corrected. “Mr. Bell.”

Diablo was silent for a moment. “Mr. District Att—”

“Mr. Bell,” Hank said.

Diablo stared at him. Then he smiled again, the same thin mocking smile. He shrugged. “Sure. Mr. Bell. Whatever you say, Mr. Bell. What are your questions, Mr. Bell?”

“Is Danny Di Pace a member of your gang?”

“What gang, Mr. Bell?”

“The Thunderbirds.”

“The Thunderbirds ain’t a gang, Mr. Bell. It’s a social and athletic club. Ain’t that right, boys?”

The boys in the booth nodded. They did not take their eyes from Hank.

“Is Danny a member of the club?” he asked.

“Danny Di Pace, did you say, Mr. Bell?”

“Yes.”

“Danny Di Pace. Now, let me see. Oh yes, that’s right. He lives on this block, don’t he?”

“You know he does.”

“Yes, that’s right, so he does. A very nice kid, Danny Di Pace. But I hear he got himself into a little trouble. He went over there to Spanish Harlem and got himself jumped by some little spic bastard. Is that the Danny Di Pace you mean, Mr. Bell?”

“Yes,” Hank said.

“Now what was your question, Mr. Bell?”

Hank paused for just a moment. Then he said, “You’re wasting my time, hotshot, and my time is valuable. Either I get straight answers, or you get dragged into my office. Now take it whichever way you want it.”

“Why, Mr. Bell,” Diablo said innocently. “I am answering you as straight as I know how. I just forgot your question, that was all.”

“Okay,” Hank said, “suit yourself.” He shoved back his chair. “I’ll see you all at Leonard Street. We may keep you there a while, so don’t make any extended plans.” He turned and started for the door. There was an excited buzzing at the table behind him.

Then Diablo called, “Hey!”

Hank did not turn.

“Mr. Bell! Mr. Bell!”

Hank stopped. Slowly, he faced the table. Diablo was smiling, somewhat sheepishly.

“What’s the matter? Can’t you take a little joke?”

“Not on the county’s time. Are you ready to talk to me?”

“Sure. Come on, sit down. Don’t get excited. We clown around all the time. Makes life interesting, you know? Come on, sit down.”

Hank went back to the table and sat.

“You want some coffee, Mr. Bell? Hey, Joey, coffee all around, huh?”

“Now what about Danny?” Hank said.

“I can tell you this. If you give that kid the electric chair, you’ll be making a big mistake.”

“I don’t set the sentence for anybody,” Hank said. “I only prosecute the case.”

“That’s what I mean. Can I talk frank, Mr. Bell?”

“As frankly as you like.”

“Okay. Them three guys are innocent.”

Hank said nothing.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Diablo said. “They killed a guy. And he was blind. But there’s more here than meets the eye, Mr. Bell. I mean it.”

“Like what?”

“Like, for example, there was a bop scheduled for that night. Now, I’m talking to you like a goddamn brother, giving you inside dope I don’t have to give you, right?”

“Go ahead.”

“I know we were supposed to bop because I set the thing up with this spic they call Gargantua. He’s their warlord. The Horsemen’s, you know? He takes dope. I happen to know that for a fact. Half the guys on the Horsemen take heroin. I think that’s even where they got the name for their club. Horse, you know? H. Heroin. One thing for the Birds, we don’t touch any of that stuff. We break a guy’s arm, we find out he’s on junk. Ain’t that right, boys?”

The boys nodded in self-righteous agreement.

“Anyway, it was me set up the thing. So I know where it was supposed to be, and all that. And we decided there wasn’t going to be no sneak raid or anything like that. We was supposed to meet like there’s a project on a Hun’ Twenty-fifth. Right there. And that was where we was supposed to have it out, you know? At ten o’clock.”

“What’s your point?” Hank asked.

“My point is this. You think it makes sense that three of the Birds would go into enemy turf looking for trouble when we got enough trouble scheduled for later that night? It don’t make sense, does it? They were out for a walk, that was all. Just out for a walk.”

“Why’d they walk over to Spanish Harlem?”

“How do I know? Maybe they just wandered over there by accident. Maybe they were looking for a little shtupie, you know? Lots of guys, they fool around with the Spanish girls. They’re very hot people, the Spanish.”

“So they walked into Spanish Harlem, just wandered over there,” Hank said, “and jumped a blind boy and stabbed him to death. And you say they’re innocent.”

“Not of stabbing him to death. Oh, they killed that little spic, all right.”

“Then of just what are they innocent?”

“Of murder,” Diablo said.

“I see.”

“This kid pulled a knife on them, didn’t you know?”

“So I’ve been told,” Hank said wearily.

“It’s the truth. I been asking around. I mean, there are some spies I know who are coolies, and really, you know, okay.”

“Coolies?”

“They don’t belong to no club.”

“Like Danny?”

Diablo did not answer. “I talked to some of these guys,” he said, ignoring Hank’s question, “and they seen the knife themselves. How about that?”

“That’s very interesting,” Hank said. “Did Danny belong to the Thunderbirds?”

“I’ll tell you something,” Diablo said, ignoring the question again. “It was self-defense for Tower and Danny. For Batman—” he shrugged—“well, Batman is a little pazzo, you know?”

“Crazy, do you mean?”

“Well, not crazy. But … slow? Stupid? You know, like he needs somebody to wipe his nose for him. He ain’t really responsible for nothing he does.”

And that was it. The nonlegal mind of Carmine (Diablo) Degenero had just, all unwittingly, provided Hank with the line of defense the opposition would use. For Batman Aposto, they would try to show mental incompetency. The boy simply did not know what he was doing and could not be held responsible for his actions. For Tower Reardon and Danny Di Pace, they would try to establish a case of justifiable homicide. The boys had killed in self-defense. They would try, in short, to get all of the boys off scot free.

Thank you, Diablo Degenero, Hank thought. I’m a little slow this morning.

“Do you want to help your friends?” he asked.

“Naturally. They’re innocent.”

“Then tell me a few things I’d like to know.”

“Go ahead.”

“Tower belongs to the club, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And Batman?”

“Yes.”

“And Danny?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It may make a lot of difference.”

“To your case, you mean? You mean you can send him to the chair quicker if he’s one of us?”

“If he’s guilty, he’ll be convicted,” Hank said. “And it has nothing whatever to do with whether he’s one of you or not. This may come as a surprise to you, but I’m only interested in the truth.”

“It comes as a surprise, all right,” Diablo said. He grinned. “In fact, it comes as a surprise whenever anybody connected with the law is interested in the truth. Around here, they’re only interested in beating hell out of you every chance they get.”

“Was Danny a member?”

“Yes and no,” Diablo said.

“What kind of an answer is that?”

“It’s the truth. You said you wanted the truth. Okay, you got it.”

“Did he belong or didn’t he?”

“I told you. Yes and no. He wasn’t exactly a coolie, but he wasn’t exactly a Bird, either. He was like—I don’t know what the hell you would call him. Like if there was a fight, he went down with us. But sometimes he didn’t. And we never pushed him.”

“How’d he achieve this status?” Hank asked.

“Huh?” Diablo said.

“He sounds like somebody special. He enjoys the gang privileges, but he doesn’t necessarily abide by the gang rules. How’d he work that?”

“Well …” Diablo paused. “There are some guys you automatically don’t mess around with. I mean, especially if he’s one of you. Don’t get me wrong. We got heart, plenty of it. And like, if we wanted to bust Danny, we coulda. But we didn’t want to. I mean, like from the very first, he made himself clear, you know? So we respected it. Also, like I said, he was sort of one of us.”

“But not actually.”

“No. Like he never bought a jacket or nothing. We got these jackets we sometimes wear, but not so much any more because the Horsemen see you wearing them they get excited and the stuff’s on. And even the cops don’t like the jackets. Jackets make everybody nervous. We hardly ever wear them. But Danny wouldn’t even buy one.”

“Did you ask him to join the club?”

“Sure. Lots of times. I mean, he’s practically one of us already. But he ain’t. He just wanted to be …” Diablo shrugged. “I can’t explain it. He’s okay, though. A down cat. We knew that right from go. Right from when he first moved around here.”

“When was that? I thought he’d lived in Harlem all his life.”

“No, no, his mother was from here. And his father, too. But they moved out to Long Island when he was a little kid. His father worked in one of the airplane factories out there. Then he lost his job, and they came back to the city. This musta been about a year and a half ago, I guess. So they came back to Harlem.”

“Did you know Danny when he was younger?”

“No. He usta live on a different block. I only met him when they moved here from Long Island.”

“Can you remember what happened?”

“Sure. You know, he was a new kid on the block. Besides, that’s when he made himself clear. I mean, where he stood. So, sure, I remember. We all remember. Right, boys?”

The boys nodded.

“What happened?” Hank asked.

“Well, it was wintertime, I remember,” Diablo said. “We had a big snow, and the plows had come through and pushed all the snow up against the curb, you know? It was a big drag, man, like who needs snow? You couldn’t drive a car or nothing for a couple of days. We were real inactive. So we were sitting right here in this candy store that afternoon. I think it was these very same guys. No. Nickie wasn’t here. It was me, and Concho, and Bud, and a kid who ain’t here, we call him Botch. We were sitting right here, in this booth, having hot chocolates. I think we were talking about gash …”

DIABLO: Listen, I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t care how much you talk about Spanish girls when none of the debs are around. But I ever hear anybody mention a spic when I’m with Carol, and I swear to God, there’s a busted head. I swear to God.

CONCHO (He is a thin boy with deep-brown eyes and black wavy hair. He is very proud of his widow’s peak, which his mother has told him is a mark of distinction in a man. He has also been told about a famous male movie star who tweezes his widow’s peak to keep it well defined. He has been tempted to use tweezers on his forehead, but he is afraid the boys would find out and consider it unmasculine. He is concerned about masculinity because his father is a drunkard whose most masculine act is beating Concho’s mother regularly and brutally. Concho is disturbed by the fact that he’s skinny. If he were huskier, he would beat up his father whenever he came near his mother. As it is, he can only stand by in impotent anger while his father, a hulk of a man, commits the unmanly act of beating a woman. Concho’s real name is Mario. He began calling himself Concho after he’d seen a Western movie in which the marshal of the town, a man named Concho, cleaned out a saloonful of toughs with his bare hands. In a street fight, Concho behaves like a wild man. He never goes into a fight unarmed, whatever the terms laid down by the war counselors. He knows he has personally stabbed fourteen spies in various rumbles. He does not know that he is responsible for having torn to shreds the ligaments in an opponent’s right hand, rendering that hand forever useless. If he knew, he would boast about it. His speech is peppered with the pseudomusical jargon of the gutter. He dresses neatly and precisely and prides himself on the fact that he always carries a clean handkerchief.): What I mean is this. Can you feature anybody actually marrying a spic chick? I mean, this is insane.

DIABLO: What’s the difference? A chick is a chick. The Spanish guys marry them, don’t they?

CONCHO: Sure, but it must drive them nuts. They’re all nymphos.

DIABLO: How the hell do you know?

CONCHO: I know. Somebody told me. You can’t never satisfy a Spanish girl. They want more and more.

DIABLO: You can’t even satisfy your hand, you shmuck. What the hell do you know about Spanish girls?

CONCHO: Listen, I know. Don’t I know, Botch?

BOTCH: Sure. He knows. (Botch is seventeen years old and enjoys a reputation as a ladies’ man. He is a good-looking boy with a magnificent profile and a thick-lipped mouth from which the name Botch—short for “Bacia mi,” Kiss me—was derived. His father works in a restaurant in the Wall Street area. His mother is dead. His older sister takes care of the house. He also has a younger brother, and he is determined to “break both his arms” if the kid ever gets involved in gang-busting. His reputation as a lover is based on the fact that he went to bed with a young married girl on the block. The gang beat up the girl’s husband when he came around looking for Botch afterward. Botch has visited the girl regularly ever since. He thinks she is afraid to refuse him, but he has never told this to the gang. The gang considers him a man of the world, and he would not shatter this illusion for anything.)

DIABLO: You ever had a Spanish girl, Botch?

CONCHO: Look who he’s asking. The master!

BOTCH (with dignity): I don’t like to talk about what I had or didn’t have.

CONCHO: Anything that walks with a skirt on, this guy has had. He’s modest. He’s a gentleman.

BOTCH (with the same dignity): If you was a girl, would you like some guy telling what he done or didn’t do with you?

CONCHO: I wouldn’t, but thank God I ain’t a girl. Besides, everybody knows about you and Alice. Even that banana she’s got for a husband.

BOTCH: Little man, there are some things we don’t talk about. Inform him, Diablo.

BUD: Hey, talkin’ about bananas.

(He gestures toward the door with his head. Danny Di Pace has just entered the candy store. Bud surveys him with unconcealed and immediate malice. There is a marked difference in the appearance of the two boys, and perhaps this is responsible for the instantaneous antagonism Bud feels. For he is truly ugly, a boy who—at the age of sixteen—is already beginning to lose his hair. His face festers with acne. His nose is gross, the bones having healed crookedly after being shattered in a street fight when he was fourteen. He is short and squat, and at one time he was called Ape by the boys. He discouraged this by beating up three members of the gang. He is now called Bud, which he considers more dashing than Charles, his given name, or Charlie, his childhood nickname. He does not like to talk about sex. He has never kissed a girl in his life. He knows this is because girls consider him ugly. Looking at Danny Di Pace, who, at the age of fourteen, stands erect and tall in the doorway of the candy store, his red hair neatly combed, surveying the place with the secure knowledge of his good looks, Bud is glad the sex talk is ending, glad this smug intruder has come into their hangout looking for trouble.)

DIABLO (whispering): Who’s that?

BUD: Beats me. He looks like a banana.

BOTCH: That’s the new kid moved in at 327. Up the block.

DIABLO: Yeah?

BOTCH: He used to live over on the next street when he was little. He just moved back from someplace out on Long Island.

DIABLO: Where on Long Island?

BOTCH: I don’t know. Someplace where they got the plane factories. His mother knows mine from when they were kids. She was up the house the other day.

DIABLO: We got branches in some Long Island towns, you know.

BOTCH: Yeah, but this guy’s a coolie, I think. Look at him.

(Danny has purchased a pack of cigarettes. He tears off the cellophane top, rips the package open and puts a cigarette between his lips. He is lighting it when Bud walks over to him.)

BUD: Hey, got a butt?

DANNY (shaking one loose, extending the pack): Sure. Help yourself. (He smiles. He is obviously making a thrust at friendship.)

BUD (taking the pack): Thanks. (He strikes the pack against his hand, shaking loose one cigarette. He tucks this behind his ear. Then he shakes loose another.) For later. (He smiles, then shakes a half-dozen cigarettes into the palm of his hand.) In case any of the boys want one. (He is about to hand the pack back to Danny. He changes his mind, shakes another half dozen into his palm.) I got a very big family, and they all smoke. (He hands Danny the near-empty pack.)

DANNY (studies it for a moment; then, handing the pack to Bud): Here. Keep the rest.

BUD (smirking): Why, thanks, kid. Hey, thanks.

DANNY: And buy me another pack. Pall Mall’s the brand.

BUD: What?

DANNY: You heard me. I ain’t running a Salvation Army soup kitchen. Those butts cost me twenty-seven cents. You can just shell out the same for a fresh pack.

BUD: You can just go to hell, little man.

(He turns to go. Danny claps his hand on Bud’s shoulder and whirls him around, then drops his hand immediately, spreading his legs wide, bunching his fists at his sides.)

DANNY: I still ain’t got the cigarettes.

BUD: You touch me again, little man, and you’re gonna get a hell of a lot more than the cigarettes. Believe me.

JOEY (coming around the counter, wiping his hands on a rag): Cut that out. I don’t want no trouble in here, you understand? (To Danny) You get out of here, you little snotnose.

DANNY: Not until he buys me a new pack of cigarettes.

BUD (turning away from him): Don’t hold your breath, kid. I ain’t—

(But Danny clamps his hand onto Bud’s shoulder a second time. This time he does not spin him around. He pulls him backward, off balance, and through the open door of the candy store, hurling him onto the street against the snow banked near the curb. Bud strikes the snow and then leaps erect, bracing himself with the natural instincts of a street fighter. It is very cold on the street and, as a result, the street is almost empty. The two boys face each other, their breaths pluming from their open mouths. Bud is the first to move. He comes at Danny with his fists clenched, and Danny sidesteps agilely and—as Bud passes—clobbers him at the back of his head, swinging both hands, which are clenched together like a mallet. Bud feels the blow. It knocks him off his feet and to the pavement. He is still on the ground when the other boys swarm out of the candy store. Concho makes a move toward Danny, but Diablo stops him.

Bud is on his feet now. There is no anger on his face. All rage has been replaced by the cold deadening logic of the battle. He knows now that Danny is not a pushover. He knows, too, that he is being watched by the other boys in the gang, and that his honor is at stake. Without hesitation, moving intuitively and economically, he reaches into his pants pocket, takes out a switch blade and snaps it open.)

BUD: Okay, pal.

DANNY: You better put that away before I ram it down your throat.

BUD: We’ll see who’s gonna ram what where!

(He charges at Danny, the knife extended. He is kicked instantly and excruciatingly in the groin, the impetus of his rush adding to the power of the blow. He doubles over, the knife still clenched in his hand. Danny reaches down, seizing him by the collar, jerking him to his feet and slamming him up against the snowbank. The knife drops from Bud’s hand. Danny hits him once, a short sharp blow that drops Bud to the pavement again. He lies there very still as Danny picks up the knife, steps on the blade and snaps it off at the handle. He reaches down for Bud then, rolls him over and counts out twenty-seven cents in change from his pocket, no more, no less. The other boys watch. Danny gets to his feet and faces them.)

DANNY: Anybody else want to settle this now? Or do I wait for some dark night to get stabbed in the back?

DIABLO: What’s your name, kid?

DANNY: Danny Di Pace. What’s yours?

DIABLO: I’ll ask the questions.

DANNY: Yeah? Ask some to your crumby friend on the sidewalk. I got better things to do than stand around with you. (He starts off down the street.)

DIABLO: Hey! Hey, Danny!

DANNY (stopping, turning): Yeah?

DIABLO (grinning): My name’s Diablo Degenero. (He pauses.) Why don’t you come have a hot chocolate?

DANNY (pausing, then returning the smile): Okay, I think I will.

“Why’d you let him get away with it?” Hank asked.

“I don’t know,” Diablo said. “Maybe ’cause Bud’s got a hot head, and the kid wasn’t really looking for no trouble. Ain’t that right, Bud?”

Sitting in the booth alongside Diablo, Bud nodded and said, “Yeah, I got a hot head. Danny’s all right. We got no bad blood between us.”

“But he beat you up,” Hank said.

“So? I tried to con him out of his butts, didn’t I? He had a right to get sore. I’da done the same thing.”

“Did he come in here for the hot chocolate?”

“Sure,” Diablo said. “We had a long talk. He told us all about where he was from.”

“Then what?”

“Then he went home. And that night we waited for him, and we beat the crap outa him. Just to let him know where he stood.”

“But I thought—”

“Oh, sure,” Diablo said, “we didn’t give it to him that afternoon. But this was a different thing. I mean, what’s right is right. Bud stepped out of line, and Danny had the right to clobber him. We only beat him up that night so he wouldn’t get the idea he could go around slamming a Thunderbird whenever he wanted to.”

“What did he do?”

“When? When we nailed him?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing. What could he do? He fought like a bastard, but we were twelve guys. We nailed him good. We almost busted his arms for him.”

“And then what?”

“Then the next day I went around to see him. I asked him to join the club. He said he didn’t want to join no club that was full of japs. I told him we were only trying to show him what was what in the neighborhood. I told him we realized he was a good man with his fists, and we’d like him on the club now.”

“What did he say?”

“He said we should shove the club. He also said that if ever we jumped him again, we’d better kill him. Because if we didn’t, if we only for example sent him to the hospital, he’d come around as soon as he could and kill the first Thunderbird he met on the street. You know something?”

“What?”

“I believed it. I told Dominick—that’s our president. Dominick said he sounded all right. He said we shouldn’t bother him again. So we never did. And, like I said, lots of times Danny’s come along with us when we go gang-busting. He’s all right.”

“Then, in effect, it’s true that he’s not a member of the Thunderbirds.”

“Yeah, that’s true. I suppose.”

“Then what was he doing with two of you on the night of July tenth?”

“You better ask him that, Mr. Bell,” Diablo said. “I guess he’s the only one who’d know.”

“I see. Thank you.” Hank rose and started to go.

“Ain’t you gonna wait for your coffee?” Diablo asked. “I ordered coffee, Mr. Bell.”

“No, thank you. I want to get back to the office.”

“A real game kid, Danny,” Diablo said. “Twelve of us beat the crap outa him. Twelve of us. And we were using bottles and everything. You know many guys who could take a beating from twelve other guys with bottles?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Think about it, Mr. Bell. It’s enough to give you the shivers. Twelve guys with bottles. Just think of it.”

“I will.”

“And you might start thinking about how innocent them three kids are. You might start thinking about that, too.”

“Might I?”

“Yeah.” Diablo paused, smiling. “It’s a shame you can’t stay for your coffee. I enjoyed the chat. It reminds me of the chat I had with Danny that afternoon—when I bought him the hot chocolate. You remember me telling you about that, don’t you, Mr. Bell? About buying him hot chocolate? And then about the twelve of us beating him up that very same night?” Diablo’s smile widened. “Boy,” he said, “it’s enough to give you the shivers.”

Their eyes met. Hank said nothing. Without haste, he walked out of the candy store.

Behind him, still smiling, Diablo said, “We’ll be seeing you, Mr. Bell.”

SIX

Holmes came into the office the moment Hank returned.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Fine,” Hank said.

“Got a few items of interest for you. Want to hear them?”

“Sure. Have you had lunch yet?”

“No. Are you going out, or shall we send for something?”

“I’d just as soon have a sandwich in the office. There’s a menu in one of the drawers there.”

Holmes found the menu while Hank took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and loosened his tie.

“I’ll just take a ham sandwich and a chocolate malted,” Hank said.

Holmes nodded and began dialing. “I understand you’ve had some cops assigned to your house. How come?”

“I got a threatening letter the other day. I’m not looking for reprisals against my family.”

“Mmm,” Holmes said, and he gave the lunch order into the phone. When he hung up, he asked, “Still think we’ve got a good case?”

“Yes.”

“Heard anything further from the boy’s mother?”

“No. But I found out one of the things she’d told me was true. Di Pace wasn’t actually a member of the gang.”

“That won’t help him much.”

“No, I don’t see how it will. Besides, he was closely enough allied with the gang so that he can really be considered a member. His nonmember status is more a mental trick than a fact.”

“How do you mean?”

“For reasons of his own, Danny Di Pace preferred to think of himself as a loner even though he engaged in gang activities and was, for all practical intents and purposes, a member of the gang.”

“I see. What do you suppose the line of defense will be?”

“For Reardon and Di Pace, they’ll attempt to justify the homicide. For the Aposto boy, mental incompetency.”

“You ready to fight them?”

“As for the self-defense, we still haven’t turned up the knife Morrez was supposed to have pulled. And his blindness would seem to eliminate any foolish theories about his being the attacker. As for the Aposto boy, I’d like him examined by Bellevue. Would you arrange for his remand, Ephraim?”

“Be happy to. What’s your next move?”

“I’m going up to Spanish Harlem tomorrow. I want to track down this knife thing. If they’re going to use it, I want to be prepared. What’d you have to tell me, Ephraim?”

“First of all, Judge Samalson is going to try the case.”

“What?”

“I thought you’d be surprised. Defense counsel raised a hell of a stink. Claimed he was a friend of yours, claimed you studied under him at N.Y.U., claimed he was prejudiced in your favor.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Of course. But it didn’t stop them from asking for a change of venue.”

“That must have sat very well with Abe.”

“Abe Samalson is the fairest judge we’ve got on the bench. In words of one syllable, he denied the motion by telling the defense to go straight to hell.”

“Good for Abe!”

“This didn’t stop them. They insisted on a change of venue. Claimed the local press had made prejudicial and inflammatory statements about the case. Abe still told them to go to hell. He recognized their motion for just what it was. Another dilatory tactic. This makes the third. First they made a motion to examine the grand-jury minutes on the grounds that the indictment was handed down without proper legal evidence. The motion was denied. Next they asked for a bill of particulars identifying the witnesses, the place, the weapons—but this only gained them a week. The trial is still set for next month, and Samalson will still be hearing it. Are you pleased?”

“Yes. I like Abe. He’s a good man.”

“Seen him recently?”

Hank suddenly laughed. “I think he’s coming to dinner this weekend!”

“Oh, great,” Holmes said. “I’d advise you not to discuss the case.”

“Thanks. I didn’t plan to.”

The phone on Hank’s desk buzzed. He picked up the receiver.

“Yes?”

“Hank, this is Dave on the desk. Two people here for you. One’s got a carton full of lunch.”

“Who’s the other?”

“Guy named Barton. Claims he’s a reporter. Ever hear of him?”

“Mike Barton?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard of him. What does he want?”

“Wants to talk to you.”

“Tell him we’re just about to have lunch. If he doesn’t mind my mumbling around a sandwich, he’s welcome to join us. And send it in, Dave. I’m starved.”

The lunch and Mike Barton came into the office together. Barton was a tall man with the shoulders and chest of a truck driver. His lips were thick, and attention was drawn to his mouth by a heavy black mustache which sat under his nose like a smear of printer’s ink. He extended his hand immediately.

“Mr. Bell?” he asked.

“How do you do?” Hank said, and he took the hand. “Ephraim Holmes, chief of the bureau. Ephraim, Mr. Barton.”

“We’ve met,” Holmes said dryly.

“Having a tête-à-tête with your star prosecutor, Sherlock?”

“Just having lunch with him, Mike,” Holmes said, taking the sandwiches and drinks out of the cardboard box. He paid the delivery boy and then made himself comfortable in one of the chairs, spreading the food out on the desk top.

“What’s on your mind, Mr. Barton?” Hank asked.

“Good question,” Barton said, smiling. When he smiled, his teeth were startlingly white against the black mustache. His eyes, too, seemed to gleam with reflected pinpoint light, a deep brown against the wide expanse of his face. He has a very big head, Hank found himself thinking. It’s too bad he’s not in the theater. “What’s on everybody’s mind these days?” Barton continued.

Hank unwrapped his sandwich and began munching on it. “Well, I’m not qualified to speak for everybody. Only myself.”

“And what’s on your mind?”

“The Morrez case.”

“The very same thing that’s on my mind, Mr. Bell.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“That’s exactly why I’m here. Have you been reading our paper lately?”

“I’m sorry,” Hank said. “I don’t read the tabloids.”

“Snobbery in a public official?”

“Not at all. I just never got into the habit.”

“Our tabloid happens to be a good one,” Barton said.

“What are you running this week?” Holmes asked dryly. “An exposé on Park Avenue call houses?”

Barton chuckled, but there was no humor in the laugh. “We fill a public need,” he said. “And we also perform a public service.”

“Sure. You tell the average citizen where he can go to get laid. You give the Vice Squad extra headaches.”

“We also ran a series on the Vice Squad,” Barton said.

“Your paper stinks,” Holmes said flatly. “It’s a cheap, sensational, yellow tabloid which poses under the banner of liberalism to sell extra copies and advertising. What do you want here?”

“I came to talk to Mr. Bell,” Barton said, his brows pulling down darkly.

“I’m chief of the bureau,” Holmes answered, picking up the implied challenge. “I can hear anything you’ve got to say to Mr. Bell.”

“Okay,” Barton said. “How does it look so far?”

“How does what look?” Hank asked.

“The case. Do you think they’ll burn?”

“I’m prosecuting for murder in the first degree,” Hank said. “That’s what the indictment read.”

“What about this story they’ve concocted about the Morrez kid carrying a knife and attacking them?”

“I haven’t investigated it thoroughly as yet.”

“Well, when do you plan on starting?”

“I’m afraid that’s my business, Mr. Barton.”

“Is it? I thought you were a public servant.”

“I am.”

“Then it’s the public’s business, too.”

“If the public were capable of trying this case, I might agree with you, Mr. Barton. Unfortunately, the public hasn’t been trained in the law, and I have. And I’ll investigate and prepare the case as I see fit.”

“No matter what the public wants?”

“How do you mean?”

“The public wants those three kids to die in the electric chair. I know it, and you know it, too.”

“So?”

“So what are you doing about it?”

“What would you like me to do, Mr. Barton? Personally transport them to Sing Sing and throw the switch on them tomorrow? They’re entitled to a fair trial.”

“No one’s denying them their right to justice. But there’s only one justice in this case, and it’s apparent to everyone. They killed a defenseless kid in cold blood. The public demands retribution!”

“Are you speaking for the public, or for yourself?”

“I’m speaking for both.”

“You’d make a good foreman of a lynching party, Mr. Barton,” Hank said. “I still don’t know why you came here.”

“To find out how you felt about this case.”

“This isn’t the first murder case I’ve ever tried. I feel about it the way I’ve felt about every other one. I’m going to do my job the best way I know how.”

“And does that job involve sending those kids to the chair?”

“That job involves prosecuting for first-degree murder. I don’t deliver the sentences in this county. If the boys are convicted by a jury, Judge Samalson will determine the sentence.”

“The death sentence is mandatory, and you know it.”

“That’s true.”

“Then if you succeed in prosecuting for first-degree murder, you will also succeed in sending those kids to the chair.”

“The jury may ask for and receive leniency, in which case a life sentence may be decided upon. It’s been done before.”

“Is that what you’ll be trying for? A life sentence?”

“That’s out of order!” Holmes snapped. “Don’t you answer that, Hank!”

“Let me set you straight, Mr. Barton,” Hank said. “I’m going for a conviction in this case. I will present the facts as I understand them to the jury and the court. The jury will decide whether or not those facts, without any reasonable doubt, add up to first-degree murder. If they convict, Judge Samalson will determine the sentence. My job is not to seek vengeance or retribution. My job is to show that a crime was committed against the people of this county, and that the defendants I’m prosecuting are guilty of that crime.”

“In other words, you don’t care whether they die or not?”

“I’ll be prosecuting for—”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I wouldn’t dignify it.”

“What’s the matter, Bell? Are you afraid of capital punishment?”

“I’ve sent seven men to the electric chair since I became a public prosecutor,” Hank answered.

“Have you ever sent any kids to the chair?”

“I’ve never tried a murder case involving boys of this age, no.”

“I see.” Barton paused. “Ever hear of a girl named Mary O’Brien, Mr. Bell?”

Hank hesitated a moment. Holmes caught his eye.

“Yes,” Hank said.

“I spoke to her yesterday. I understand you played footsie with her when you were both kids.”

“I think you’d better leave, Mr. Barton.”

“Is Mary O’Brien—now Mary Di Pace—the reason for your reluctance to …”

“Get out, Barton!”

“… prosecute this case the way the public wants it prosecuted?”

“You want me to throw you out, Barton?”

“It’d take a bigger man than you, Mr. District Attorney,” Barton said. He grinned. “I was leaving anyway. Don’t miss tomorrow’s paper. It’ll curl your hair.” He turned to Holmes. “So long, Sherlock,” he said, and he left the office.

“The son of a bitch,” Holmes said.

He went to see Mary that afternoon.

He called her from the office to say he was coming, and she said she would be out until three but that she would expect him then.

The street was sufferingly hot. No place in the world gets hotter than Harlem, he thought. Name a place and Harlem’s hotter because Harlem is a giant concrete coffin and nothing stirs in that coffin, there is no breath of air. In July and August …

In July …

He could remember a Fourth of July in Harlem. He had been eight years old at the time, and there had been no law forbidding the use of fireworks in those days. He had sat with his mother at the window of their sixth-floor apartment, overlooking the street, hearing the explosions of the firecrackers and the cherry bombs, watching the Roman candles erupt over the rooftops. The street was a bedlam of noise and excitement, boys igniting fuses and then running, tin cans leaping into the air with the force of contained explosion, girls shrieking. It had been a hot day, and even on the sixth floor there was no breeze. He had leaned out over the sill, watching the excitement in the street below. His father, in the parlor, was listening to the Yankee game.

At six o’clock, his mother discovered they were out of bread. His father, absorbed in the impending doom of a White Sox rally, would not budge from the radio.

“You go down, Henry,” his mother said. “I’ll watch you from the window.”

He took the money for the bread and ran down the steps. The grocery store—the only open one on the street—was three doors away. In the street, the noise and the excitement claimed him completely. His eyes wide, he walked to the grocery store, made his purchase and was starting back when the older boys surrounded him.

At first he thought it was a game. Then he saw that they were all holding burning pieces of clothesline in their hands, and then he realized they were touching the ropes to the fuses of firecrackers, and suddenly the explosions came, bursting at his feet, bursting in the air over his head, a medley of cacophony unleashed by the boys. He tried to escape the sound, fear rolling over him in engulfing shock waves, but the boys would not break the circle, would not let him out of the exploding circle of red and yellow, would not allow him to run away from the fear, the fire, the threat, the bombs, and he tried to yell but his voice was drowned out in the terrible roar of the explosions, the stink of the gunpowder, and far above him his mother’s voice yelling, “Henry! Get away from him! Henry!” while the firecrackers burst around him and he shrieked in silent terror.

His father sprang from the mouth of the tenement like a wild man, striking the nearest boy a blow that sent him sprawling to the pavement. He picked up his son and ran upstairs with him, and Hank clung to the loaf of bread in his arms, squeezing it to a pulp. Upstairs, his mother said, “I shouldn’t have sent him. You had to listen to your damn ball game! I knew he shouldn’t be on the streets today! I knew it! I shouldn’t have sent him.”

Hank’s father said, “He’s all right, he’s all right. They didn’t hurt him.”

And maybe they didn’t.

But he began stuttering on the day of the incident, and he did not stop stuttering until he was eleven years old, and even then not completely. All through adolescence, whenever anything upset him, the old stutter would come back, and he would remember again that Fourth of July in Harlem with the firecrackers exploding around him, the devils of hell at his feet, at his head, surrounding him.

He climbed the steps of the tenement in which Mary Di Pace lived. He found her apartment on the fourth floor. The catch for a milk-bottle lock hung limply from the outside of the door, and his first thought was, They still steal milk in Harlem. He smiled grimly. Men could develop satellites to spin in outer space, men could shoot rockets to the moon, devise intercontinental ballistic missiles which could destroy cities, and in Harlem—unless you put a wire loop on your door, a loop controlled from inside the apartment—they still stole your milk. Sighing, he knocked on the door.

“Hank?” her voice called.

“Yes.”

“Just a minute, please.”

He waited in the hallway. From somewhere in the building, he heard the voices of a man and woman raised in heated argument.

“So what do you do with the money?” the man wanted to know.

“What do you think I do with it? I buy rubies and furs, what the hell do you think? I buy gasoline for my Cadillac!”

“Don’t get smart, you stupid bitch! I give you forty dollars a week for the house. So where is it? Every Wednesday, you’re broke. What do you do with it? Eat it?”

“I keep a stable of Arabian ponies,” the woman said. “That costs money. I give cocktail parties for the ladies in the Social Register. What the hell do you think I do with all that money, all that big forty dollars?”

“I know what you do with it,” the man said. “You play the goddamn numbers. You think I don’t know?”

“Shut up, the windows are all open,” the woman said.

“The hell with the windows! Stop spending my money on the numbers!”

The door opened.

Mary smiled. “Hello, Hank,” she said. “Come in.”

She was wearing a tan linen suit, the jacket unbuttoned over a white blouse. A stray wisp of red hair curled alongside her cheek. He had the impression that she had just come into the apartment and removed her hat. Her eyes were tired, and the strain of the past few days showed in the weary set of her mouth. But he knew in an instant that she, like every woman he’d ever known, had come beyond the terror and hysteria of initial shock and then rebounded with amazing resiliency to face whatever lay ahead. There was in her eyes—and he knew the look because he had seen it often on Karin’s face—a combination of strength and dignity and determination. The look frightened him somewhat; it was the look worn by the tigress guarding the entrance to her den of cubs.

“Come in, Hank,” she said. “I just got back this minute. I was talking to Danny’s lawyers.” He stepped into the apartment. “No scenes this time,” she said. “I promise.”

He followed her through a short corridor past an open bathroom door and then into a living room furnished with a suite from one of the stores on Third Avenue. A television set rested on a table in one corner of the room. Drapes hung over the single window, which opened on the airshaft between the buildings. A fire escape was outside the window. From somewhere upstairs Hank could still hear the arguing couple, their voices echoing in the shaftway.

“Sit down, Hank,” Mary said. “It’s not too bad in here. We get a breeze through that window, and it crosses into the bedroom facing the street.”

“Thank you,” he said, and he sat on the sofa. They were awkwardly silent for a moment. Then he said, “You’ve got a nice apartment, Mary.”

“Don’t kid me, Hank,” she answered. “I moved here from Long Island. I know what nice is.”

“Why’d you come back to Harlem, Mary?”

“They cut production, and Johnny lost his job. We’d saved some money, and I suppose we could have held on to the house. But a friend of ours was opening a shoe store here in Harlem. He asked Johnny if he wanted to go in as a partner. Johnny thought we should. I thought so, too.” She shook her head. “It seemed like the right decision at the time.” She paused. “If we could have seen ahead, if we could have known—” She cut the sentence and lapsed into silence. He sat watching her, wondering if the initial shock had truly passed. She raised her eyes suddenly, meeting his, and they looked at each other across a wide gulf of years, and neither said anything for several moments. Then, as if struggling with an inner secret resolve, Mary said, “Would you like a drink?”

“Not if it’s any trouble. I only came to …”

“I’m a little ashamed of myself, Hank,” she said, lowering her eyes, “for the way I behaved in your office the other day. I hope—”

“Under the circumstances …”

“Yes, yes, I know, but …” She raised her eyes, meeting his directly again. “I want to apologize.”

“Mary, there’s no need to …”

“This is—you know, you never think anything like this is going to happen to you. You read about it in the newspapers all the time, but it means nothing. And suddenly, it’s happening to you. Your family. You. It … it takes a while to … to realize it. So—so please forgive me for the way I behaved. I wasn’t myself. I just …” She rose suddenly. “We only have rye and gin. Which would you like?”

“Gin would be fine,” he said softly.

“Tonic?”

“If you have some.”

“Yes, I think so.” She walked into the kitchen. He heard her open the door to the refrigerator, heard her uncapping the bottle of quinine water, heard the rattle of ice-cube trays. She came back into the living room, handed him his drink, and then sat opposite him. They did not toast. Quietly they sipped at the drinks. Down in the areaway someone clanked a garbage-can cover into place.

“It’s funny about people, isn’t it?” she said suddenly. “How two people who once knew each other so well can meet and—and be strangers.” A curious laugh of puzzlement, joyless, escaped her mouth. “It’s funny,” she said again.

“Yes.”

“I’m—I’m glad you came today, Hank.”

“I came to tell you—”

“I like to believe that people who once meant something to each other … that … that if you knew someone very well …” She struggled with the thought silently and then said simply, “You meant a lot to me, Hank.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“When we were kids, you—you did a lot for me.”

“I did?”

“Yes. Oh, yes: You see, I’d always thought of myself as very ugly until—”

“Ugly? You?”

“Yes, yes. And then you came along, and you thought I was so very beautiful, and you kept telling me so until—until I began to believe it. I’ll always be grateful to you for that, Hank.”

“Mary, of all the people in the world, you’re hardly the one to have doubted your own good looks.”

“Oh, but I did. I did.”

There was an ease now, somehow, miraculously, there was a complete relaxation of tension. At last, the barrier of years had been spanned, leaving only the ease they once had known, the familiarity with which they had discussed the very serious problems of the very young, big and small, all earth-shattering. Looking back, he felt a peculiar tenderness for the two infants who had held hands and talked together in low earnest whispers. The people here today in this tenement living room bore very little resemblance to those two of long ago—and yet he recognized them, and he felt a pleasant warmth spread through him. For the moment, he forgot why he had come to see her. For the moment, for now, it was enough that they could talk to each other again.

“You did a lot for me, too,” he said.

“I hope so, Hank.” She paused. “Hank, let me tell you what happened because—I was always a little sorry I’d sent that letter, always a little ashamed that I’d taken the coward’s way out. Do you know, do you understand—I hope you understand—that I loved you?”

“I thought so. But then your letter …”

“I used to lie awake at night and wonder what you were doing. Were they firing at you? Were you hit? Was your plane going down? Would you be captured and tortured? I used to cry at night. One night my mother came in and said, ‘Mary, Mary, what’s the matter?’ and I said, ‘He may be dead,’ and she said, ‘You damn fool, you should have married him, you should have taken whatever love you could get because love isn’t something you find on street corners.’ And I began crying again, and praying—I’ve never really been religious even though I was raised as a Catholic—but I prayed so hard for you, Hank, I prayed that you would be safe and whole and that … that you’d come back to me. And then I met Johnny.”

“Yes?” he said.

“This may sound stupid. But I wouldn’t have started seeing him if it weren’t for you. And I wouldn’t have loved him if I hadn’t loved you first. It was because of your gentleness, and your … your love for me that I was capable of loving another man. That’s why my letter was so cruel. I should never have written that letter. I should have swum to England, crawled to you to thank you, kissed your hands, Hank. I shouldn’t have sent a letter.”

“Mary, you—”

“And the other day, in your office, I was terribly unfair to a person who’s been fair all his life. I know you have a job to do. I know you’ll do it the way it has to be done. And now I respect that. I respect it the way I’ve always respected you. I could not have loved you so completely if you hadn’t been the person you were. And I don’t think that person has changed very much. You’re still Hank.”

“I’ve changed a great deal, Mary.”

“The surface? The polish? Oh, yes, you’re not the awkward young man who once picked flowers for me in the park. But I’m not the redheaded skinny young …”

“You were never skinny!” he protested.

“… girl who accepted the flowers so self-consciously. But I think we’re essentially the same, Hank. I think, when we lower the masks, we’re essentially those two silly kids who thought the world was full of dragons and shining white knights.” She paused. “Aren’t we?”

“Perhaps.”

She nodded, lost in thought. Then she said, “You’re not here to talk about Danny, are you?”

“No.”

“Good. Because I’d rather not. You see, I feel we’re both after the same thing. Justice. And I don’t want to mess it up with emotion. I was very wrong the other day. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“I forgave you a long time ago,” Hank said, and their eyes met for just an instant, and then Mary nodded, and sighed, and sipped at her drink, and the tenement was very still, the summer heat mushrooming silently outside the window.

“Why did you come, Hank?”

“At lunchtime today, I spoke to a reporter named Mike Barton.”

“Yes.”

“He said he’d talked to you yesterday.”

“That’s true.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him that Danny was innocent.”

“I mean … about us.”

“Oh.”

“You did mention something about us?”

“Yes, I did. I said we’d known each other when we were younger.”

“How’d you happen to mention that?”

“He asked if I’d ever met the man who’s prosecuting the case? I said yes, I had, and in fact we’d known each other when we were younger.”

“Is that all?”

“I think so. Yes. That’s all. Why?”

“He implied—more.”

“More? You mean …?”

“Well, he implied we really knew each other. He implied we’d …”

“I understand.” She paused. “But of course, we never did.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t. I—I should have given you that. When you’ve given everything else, it seems so petty to cling to … I should have allowed you that.”

“Mary, the important thing is—”

“Does it embarrass you? My talking like this?”

“No.”

“Good. Because I think you should know, in fairness you should know, that I wanted you as much as you seemed to want me.”

“I’m glad to know that.”

“I was a silly little girl.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Yes, I was. A person shouldn’t draw boundary lines for love. Love is giving. I should have given you everything I had to give.”

For a moment he thought of Karin and the bombardier, and his brow creased in puzzlement.

“About Barton,” he said. “He’s writing a story. God knows what it’ll say. But you can bet it won’t be flattering. It’ll be nothing we can sue him or the paper for, but it’ll be loaded with the implication that you and I were far more than casual friends, and that our past relationship might influence the outcome of the case.”

“I see.”

“I thought I ought to warn you.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

“I mean, I didn’t think your husband should …”

“Should what?”

“Should … should get the idea that … that his wife …”

She looked at him in complete surprise. “Why, I’ve told Johnny how close we were, Hank. I’ve even told him I was a little sorry you and I hadn’t made love together.”

“You told him that?”

“Yes.”

“And … and what did he say?”

“He said—I remember this very well—” she smiled—“he said it wouldn’t have mattered to him, and it might have mattered very much to us. That’s what he said.”

“He sounds like … like a remarkable man.”

“I think you’d like him.”

“Well, then the story won’t cause you any trouble.”

“No. None at all. Not with Johnny, anyway.”

“I’m relieved to hear that.”

“And this is why you came?”

“Yes.”

“You could have told me this on the phone.”

“I know I could have,” he said.

“Then why did you come?”

He paused for a moment, and then he smiled, and then he said, “I guess I wanted to make sure I hadn’t been a fool when I fell in love with a girl named Mary O’Brien.”

SEVEN

When he got home that afternoon, there was company waiting in the living room.

Karin met him at the door and said, “John and Fred are here. I don’t think it’s a social visit.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see. They have the look of men who’ve discovered goldenrod in their neighbor’s lawn.”

“No kiss for the returning warrior?” he said.

“Why, certainly.”

She kissed him briefly, and he said, “I’ll see you later. Where’s Jennie?”

“She’s having dinner at one of her friends’. She’ll be gone until eleven or so.”

“It bodes well,” Hank said.

“Does it? I haven’t been asked yet.”

“I don’t believe in asking my women. I just drag them into my cave by the hair.”

“If I were you, I’d go talk to the Committee for the Preservation of Green Lawns in Inwood first.”

“I intend to do that right now. Did you mix some Martinis?”

“I did.”

“Good. I’d like one.”

“They’re on the bar. I’d join you, but someone around here has to get dinner going.”

“Chill some wine,” he said.

“My, my,” Karin answered. “What brings on the sudden romanticism?”

“The very sight of you, my dove,” he said, and he winked and went into the living room.

“Well, well,” he said, “this is a surprise. John, Fred, how are you?”

Both men rose as he entered the room. John McNalley was in his early thirties, a tall sinewy man with prematurely gray hair. He worked for a chemical research plant in Yonkers. Fred Pierce was an advertising man, art director for a firm which specialized in photographic layouts. In contrast to McNalley, he was short and rotund, with the sloppy look of an artist living on the Left Bank. They shook hands with Hank, and then McNalley said, “Home from the wars, eh?”

“Busy day,” Hank said. “Busy day. Either of you care for a Martini? I’m going to have one.”

Pierce looked as if he were about to accept, but McNalley promptly said, “No,” for both of them. Hank went to the bar, picked up the pitcher there, held the swizzle stick to its lip and poured a hefty Martini into his glass. He plucked two olives from the open jar on the bar top and dropped them into the glass.

“Here’s luck,” he said.

“Drink hearty,” Pierce said, and then he glanced at McNalley as if wondering whether he had his approval to speak.

Hank loosened his tie and sat down. “What can I do for you, fellas?” he said. “Donation for the P.T.A.? Little League? What is it this time?”

“Well, nothing very serious,” McNalley said.

“Just a little friendly visit, that’s all,” Pierce said, glancing again at McNalley.

“Well, it’s always good to see you,” Hank said, and he watched them over the rim of his glass, wondering why they were here, suspecting at once that this was not “just a little friendly visit.”

“Good for neighbors to get together every now and then,” McNalley said.

“Especially in a neighborhood like this one,” Pierce said. “Where everybody knows everybody else. Where the people have been living on the same street for years. It’s a good neighborhood, Hank.”

“It certainly is,” Hank replied. He was, in truth, not overly fond of Inwood. But as a prosecutor for New York County, he was required to maintain residence within the county. They had thought of moving to Greenwich Village when he’d first got the job, but Karin had rightfully insisted that Inwood would provide a more countrified environment for Jennie, who was, at the time, only five and a half years old. Still, he had never really felt any deep-rooted ties with the community.

“We’d like to keep it good,” McNalley said.

“That’s a reasonable hope,” Hank answered, sipping at the Martini. He felt rather good. He’d felt this way ever since his talk with Mary. He was hoping these two rather forlorn-looking neighbors of his would go home for dinner so that he could go kiss his wife.

Out of a clear blue sky, Pierce said, “How would you like your daughter marrying one of those Puerto Ricans?”

Hank blinked. “What? What did you say?”

“Now, just a minute, Fred,” McNalley said. “I thought we agreed that I would do the—”

“I’m sorry, John. Only, we were talking about the neighbor—”

“I know what we were talking about. Boy, you’re about as subtle as a locomotive!”

“Well, I’m sorry if I—”

“Oh, just keep quiet and let me explain this to Hank. You’re going to give him the wrong idea, for God’s sake.”

“The wrong idea about what, John?” Hank asked.

“About the neighborhood. And the city.”

“Why, I think this is a nice neighborhood,” Hank said. “And a nice city.”

“Sure you do,” McNalley said.

“See, I told you he’d agree with us,” Pierce said.

“About what?” Hank asked.

“About keeping the neighborhood good. And the city.”

“I don’t think I know what you mean,” Hank said.

“Well, then let’s discuss it a little, Hank,” McNalley said. “Now you know that Fred and I and all the rest of our neighbors are not prejudiced people. We’re—”

“Of course not,” Hank said.

“Of course not. We’re normal American citizens who happen to believe that all men are created equal and that everyone’s entitled to his place in the sun. Am I right, Fred?”

“Absolutely,” Pierce said.

“Sure,” McNalley agreed. “And we don’t happen to believe there’s any such thing as a second-class citizen. But we do feel that certain elements in this city would be better suited to a rural rather than an urban culture. You can’t expect to take people who are used to cutting sugar cane and fishing, you can’t just take these people and throw them into the middle of the biggest city in the world and hope they’ll make an amicable adjustment to civilization. These elements—”

“Which elements?” Hank said.

“Well, Hank, I don’t have to bandy words with you, because I’m sure we see eye to eye and I know you won’t mistake me for a man with prejudices. I’m talking about the Puerto Ricans.”

“I see,” Hank said.

“Who are a fine people, that’s for sure. I understand there’s a very low crime rate on the island of Puerto Rico itself, and that it’s as safe to walk around down there as it would be in a hospital nursery. But down there isn’t up here. And it isn’t safe to walk around in Spanish Harlem, and there is a very high crime rate in Spanish sections, and those sections are spreading all over the city. And pretty soon it won’t be safe to walk anywhere without being afraid of getting knifed. And that goes for Inwood, too.”

“I see,” Hank said.

“Now obviously, we can’t tell these damn people where they should live. They’re American citizens—just like you and me, Hank, just like you and me—and they’re free men who are entitled to their place in the sun, and I wouldn’t deny it to them. But it seems, to me they should be taught that they can’t simply come into a civilized city and turn it into a jungle suitable only for jungle animals. I’m thinking of my wife and kids, Hank, and I guess you ought to be thinking of that lovely little daughter of yours because I sure as hell wouldn’t want her getting raped by some farmer from Puerto Rico some night.”

“I see,” Hank said.

“Which brings us to why we’re here. Now, none of us on this street condones murder, that’s for damn sure, and I hope you realize we’re all law-abiding citizens who are anxious to see justice done. But nobody goes into the jungle—and I know that particular word is overused these days—but nonetheless nobody goes into the jungle and hangs a hunter for having killed a dangerous tiger. Nobody would ever think of doing a thing like that, Hank.”

“I see,” Hank said.

“Okay, so we have these three young white boys who happen to be strolling in Spanish Harlem—which you’ll agree is a part of the jungle—and this jungle animal comes at them with a knife and …”

“Just hold it a minute, John,” Hank said.

“… it only seems reasonable to—Huh?”

“I hope I’m misunderstanding you so far. I hope I’m not getting the impression that you came in here in an attempt to tell me how to try the Rafael Morrez case.”

“We wouldn’t do a thing like that, Hank, and you know it.”

“Then why did you come in here?”

“To ask you whether you’re seriously going to try to inflict the death penalty on these three white boys who—in self-defense—would not allow this Puerto Rican—”

“This Puerto Rican was as white as you are, John.”

“All right, have your little joke,” McNalley said, “but we happen to think this is serious. And we’re your neighbors.”

“Admittedly. So?”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to prosecute for first-degree murder as charged in the indictment handed down by the grand jury.”

“You’re going to try to hang these boys?”

“I’m going to try to convict them.”

“Why?”

“Because I believe they’re guilty.”

“And do you realize what this will mean?”

“What will it mean, John?”

“It’ll mean that every damn Puerto Rican in this city will think he can get away with murder! That’s what it’ll mean!”

“Haven’t you got your facts a little mixed up? It’s the Puerto Rican who was killed.”

“He came at them with a knife! Are you trying to tell me that decent citizens should be penalized for protecting their own lives? Or their property? For God’s sake, Hank, you’re opening the door for anarchy! You’re paving the way for jungle animals to take over the civilized world!”

“There’s an inscription outside the Criminal Courts Building downtown, John, at the south entrance hall. It says—”

“Oh, don’t quote inscrip—”

“It says, ‘Where law ends, there tyranny begins.’”

“What’s that got to do with what we’re discussing?”

“You’re talking about the civilized world. Law is the civilized world. Without law, we’ve got tyranny, and anarchy, and jungle animals. And you’re asking me to suspend law in favor of—”

“I’m not asking you to suspend anything! I’m asking you for justice.”

“What kind of justice?”

“There’s only one kind of justice,” McNalley said.

“Exactly. And she’s blind, and she doesn’t know the difference between a dead Puerto Rican and a dead native of this city. She knows only that the law has been broken.”

“How would you like your daughter marrying one of those Puerto Ricans?” Pierce said.

“Oh, nuts,” Hank answered.

“Well, how would you?”

“Stop worrying so damn much about the superiority of your sexual prowess. I imagine Puerto Rican men copulate much the same way that you do, no better, no worse. I doubt if we’re in any particular danger of losing our women to the alien hordes!”

“There’s no sense talking to him, John,” Pierce said. “There’s just no sense.”

“You can do what you want to,” McNalley said ominously. “I just want to tell you, Hank, that the opinion of this neighborhood—”

“The hell with the opinion of this neighborhood,” Hank said, rising, slamming down his glass. “And the hell with the opinion of the newspapers, which happens to be contrary to the opinion held by this neighborhood. I’m riding this particular jackass, and I don’t want to wind up in the river.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’ll prosecute this case exactly as I want to, without any hints or advice from anybody! Is that clear enough?”

“It couldn’t be clearer. Come on, Fred.”

Without another word, both men stalked out of the house. Karin came in from the kitchen.

“Wow!” she said.

“Yeah. I’m going to have another Martini. You want one?”

“Yes.” She shook her head. “I had no idea … Have the newspapers been giving you trouble, too?”

“I saw a reporter this afternoon. Karin, there’s something you should know.”

“What’s that?”

He handed her the drink. “The mother of one of the boys—Mary Di Pace—is the girl … the girl I …”

“The girl you loved?”

“Yes.” He paused. “The newspapers will try to make something of it. I thought you should know.”

She watched him as he raised his glass. His hand was shaking. He downed the drink quickly and then poured another.

“I won’t even read the stories,” she said.

He shrugged and then wiped a hand over his face. Outside, the sky was beginning to darken with sudden summer rain clouds. He walked to the big picture window. Aimlessly, he said, “Rain coming.”

“Yes.”

She could see his face, could see the beginning of a tic at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t let them bother you,” she said. “McNalley or Pierce or any of the others. Just do your job.”

“Yes,” he said, and he nodded.

In the distance, lightning flashed across the sky, followed instantly by the low rumble of thunder. He turned to her.

“Karin?”

“Yes?”

“Could—could we go upstairs?”

“Yes, darling,” she said. She took his hand and led him to the steps. She could feel tension surging like electricity through his fingers. A lightning bolt crashed closer, and she felt him start unconsciously, wince when the thunder bellowed its near answer. He pulled her to him suddenly, fiercely. Standing on the step below her, he pressed his face to her bosom. His body was stiff, his jaws clamped together, the trembling visible.

“I need you,” he said. “Karin, I need you so much.”

She did not answer. She took his hand and led him to their bedroom and she could remember the first time he’d said those words to her, so long ago, the first time she began to know a little about the man she loved so much. They had driven out of Berlin on a Friday afternoon, a weekend pass tucked into the pocket of his blouse, the jeep bouncing along bomb-pitted roads under a sky as bright as blue enamel. He looked very handsome in his captain’s tunic, the twin silver bars gleaming on his shoulders, his eyes reflecting the blue of the flawless sky. They had found an inn a hundred kilometers from the city, the familiar Zimmer sign hanging out front. He had joked about the word on the drive to the inn, thinking it amazing that this family named Zimmer had managed to corner the market on all the hotels in Germany. They’d eaten dinner alone in the small dining room while the proprietor hovered over them, pouring from a bottle of French wine he’d managed to save from “the good days.” They’d gone up to the room then, and he’d begun unpacking his small bag while she undressed. He was taking out his pajamas when she whispered, “Hank.”

He turned to her. She stood naked, one arm crossed over her breasts, the other arm extended.

“Give me the top,” she said. “I want to wear your pajama top.” There was a curious look in her eyes. He went to her, sensing that it was very important that he give her the pajama top. Her eyes made it an important thing. He handed it to her, and she put it on and then hugged her arms across her body.

“It’s nice,” she said. “It’s very nice. I knew it would be nice.” She reached up to put her arms around his neck, shorter now without her high-heeled pumps, looking very small and very vulnerable in the overlarge pajama top. “May I kiss you, please?” she asked.

“What for?”

“To thank you.”

“What for?”

“For finding me. For taking me away from Berlin this weekend. For lending me your pajama top.”

“Karin …”

“Are you very tired?” she asked, a slight smile on her mouth.

“Tired?”

“After all that driving,” she said.

“No, I’m not.”

“I thought you might be tired,” she said.

“No,” he answered, returning the smile, “I’m not tired at all,” and she kissed him.

She could not remember afterward how many times she awakened him during the night. She could not sleep at all. Lying in the circle of his arms, she was sure this was not real, this untouched inn hung with medieval gables, leaded windows that had not been shattered by bombs, clean white sheets, and Hank beside her with a three-day pass, no rush to the base in the morning, this could not be real. In the darkness of the ancient room, the fat mattress cradling them, embracing them, the windows open, the town silent and still except for the occasional rumble of an airplane droning toward Berlin, she lay wide awake, her eyes saucer-wide, a small smile of childish disbelief on her mouth.

She woke him the first time to ask, “Are you real?”

He blinked at her in the darkness. “Yes,” he said sleepily. “I’m real.”

“Why don’t you make love to me?” she said.

“Now?”

“Can you think of a better time?”

“Yes. Tomorrow morning.”

“That’s a good time,” she agreed. “But now is a good time, too.”

She lay awake afterwards, thinking, He’s had a very tiring drive in a jeep, he must be exhausted, I mustn’t demand too much of him, but I want to touch him, I want him to be awake, I want to know that he is real, I want hours and hours and hours of him, I never want to leave this bed, I want to stay in this bed for the whole three days, I love his pajama top.

“Hank?”

“Mmmm?”

“I love your pajama top.”

“Mmmm.”

“You’ll never be able to wear it again without thinking of me.”

“Mmm.”

“Will you?”

“No. Won’t.”

“Do you want to sleep?”

“Don’t you?”

“I want to talk. Hank, we can sleep all day tomorrow. We have three whole days together. Can we talk?”

“All right.”

“Isn’t Mr. Vettiger nice?”

“The proprietor? Yes. Adorable.”

“Are you very sleepy?”

“No, no, notatall.”

“Do you think he knows we’re not married?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not very talkative.”

“I’m listening.”

“I think he knows,” she said.

“I don’t think he cares,” Hank answered.

“He likes us. We’re a wonderful couple.”

“Mmm.”

“You looked so handsome today.”

“Go to sleep,” he said.

“I’ll wake you later.”

“All right.”

“You’ll know you’re being awakened.”

“Will I?”

“Yes. You’ll know,”

“Why don’t you go to sleep?”

“I’m too excited. I love you too much. We’ve got three days together, Hank. Oh, I’m so happy, I’m so damn happy!” She chuckled and then caught herself. “I mustn’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Laugh on Friday, cry on Sunday,” she said. “Don’t you know that expression?”

“This is Saturday,” Hank said. “It’s past midnight.”

“Yes, but it’s really Friday,” Karin said adamantly.

“That’s not logical. It’s not even sensible.”

“Laugh on Friday, cry on Sunday. I don’t want to cry on Sunday.”

“This is Saturday. You can laugh all you want.”

“When I was a little girl, all I did was wet my pants and cry. That’s what my father said, anyway. He used to call me ‘Benässen und Weinen.’”

“What’s that?”

“It means ‘Wet and cry.’”

“It’s a good name. I’ll call you that from now on.”

“Don’t you dare! Go to sleep. I’ll wake you later.”

“You twisted my arm,” he said.

He was asleep again almost instantly. She listened to his heavy breathing and she thought again, He’s so tired, I should let him sleep. She got out of bed and walked to the dresser where he’d put his cigarettes and his billfold and his dog tags. She shook a cigarette free from the pack, lighted it, and then went to stand at the window, looking out over the fields, silvery white in the moonlight. The floor was cold. She stood by the window for just a little while, one arm folded across his pajama top, the other moving to her face each time she sucked in on the cigarette.

She put out the cigarette then and went back to the bed. “You’re so warm,” she said. He grunted in his sleep and she grinned delightedly and thought, He really is. He’s the warmest human being I know. He’s always so warm. His feet are never cold. How does he keep his feet so warm?

“Warm my feet,” she said, and he grunted again, and she stifled a laugh.

I mustn’t laugh. It’s really Friday, no matter what he says, it won’t be Saturday until I wake up in the morning, why are men so ridiculous about time? She lay in bed with a smile on her face, holding his hand between her own, clutching his hand to her bosom. In a little while she fell asleep, the smile still on her mouth.

She heard the shower going, and she opened her eyes. She could not have been asleep for more than a few hours; there was bright sunlight streaming around the edges of the leaded casements. He began singing in the bathroom, quite suddenly and quite awfully, and she grinned and stretched and pushed her blond head deeper into the pillow, feeling very luxuriant and very loved and also very tired.

Well, he sings in the shower, she thought. She was pleased, even though he sang terribly. She pulled the covers to her throat, feeling that she looked very impish and pure and clean without make-up, and probably very horrible. When he sees me, he’ll run out of the room screaming. Maybe I ought to get up and put on some lipstick. The singing stopped, and then the sound of the water. The bathroom door opened. He had wrapped the towel around his waist and he headed for the dresser now, apparently going for a comb. He had not dried himself very thoroughly. There were droplets of water clinging to his shoulders; his face and hair no were still wet, the hair clinging to his forehead. He moved totally unaware of her, stepping into a narrow wedge of sunlight, his eyes suddenly flashing very blue. She watched him, the broad shoulders and the narrow waist, the pathetic droplets of water clinging to him, the damp hair flattened against his forehead, his face glistening wet, the blue eyes captured by sunlight. She watched him silently, seeing the man as he moved toward the dresser, thinking, This is the man unawares, this is the man I love.

She made a small sound.

He turned, mildly surprised, his eyebrows quirking upward, his mouth beginning a smile. “Oh, are you awake?”

She could not answer for a moment. She loved him so much in that instant that she could not speak. She nodded and kept watching him.

“You look nice,” she said at last, inadequately.

He went to the bed, knelt by it, took her face in his hands and kissed her. “You look lovely,” he said.

“Oh, ja, ja, ja. I’ll bet.”

“Oh, ja, ja, ja. You’d win.”

“I look horrible. I’m a horror.”

“You’re the most beautiful horror I’ve ever seen.”

She ducked her head into the pillow. “Don’t look at me, please. I have no lipstick on.”

“The better to kiss you, my love,” he said, and he turned her face to him, capturing it in his hands again. His mouth was reaching for hers when they heard the airplanes. He lifted his head. The noise of the planes filled the sky, and then the small room. His eyes turned toward the window. A squadron of planes, Karin thought, heading for Berlin, and then she noticed that he was trembling and she was filled with instant alarm.

“What is it?” she said.

“Nothing.”

She sat up and gripped his arms. “What is it, Hank? You’re shaking. You’re—”

“Nothing. Nothing. I … I …”

He got off the bed and walked to the dresser. He lighted a cigarette quickly and then went to the window, following the progression of the squadron across the sky.

“Transports,” he murmured.

“Yes,” she said softly. “The war is over, Hank.”

“In Germany it is,” he said. He took a hasty drag at his cigarette. She watched him for a moment and then threw back the covers, swung her legs over the side of the bed and went to stand alongside him at the window. The planes were out of sight now. Only their distant hum could be heard in the sky.

“What is it?” she said firmly. “Tell me, Hank.”

He nodded bleakly. “I’m flying on Monday. That’s why I got the weekend. I’m taking some brass to …”

“Where?”

He hesitated.

“Where?”

“One of the islands in the Pacific.” He squashed out his cigarette.

“Will there be … shooting?”

“Possibly.”

They were silent.

“But you aren’t sure?” she said.

“Half the island is still held by the Japanese,” he said. “There’ll be shooting. And planes probably.”

“Why did they pick you?” she said angrily. “It isn’t fair!”

He did not answer her. She faced him, looking up at him, and she said, very softly, “You’ll be all right, Hank.”

“Sure.”

“You will, darling. Whether they shoot or not, you’ll be all right. You’ll come back to Berlin. You have to, you see. I love you very much, and I couldn’t bear losing you.”

And suddenly he pulled her to him, and she could feel tension surging through his body like a sentient force.

“I need you,” he whispered. “I need you, Karin. Karin, I need you so much. I need you so much.”

And now even the sound of the planes was gone.

EIGHT

This was McNalley’s jungle.

It didn’t look like a jungle at all.

Hank had come down the long street, starting in Italian Harlem and walking west, retracing the steps of the three young killers on that night in July. Now, on Park Avenue, he walked into the market beneath the New York Central tracks, listening to the babble of voices around him. He felt as if he had truly entered a foreign land, but he felt no fear. He felt again, and very strongly, that the idea of three Harlems existing as separate territories was truly a myth. For, despite the change of language, despite the change of color—the Puerto Rican people ranged from white to tan to brown—despite the strange vegetables on the stalls and the religious and mystic pamphlets printed in Spanish, he felt that these people were no different from their neighbors to the east, or the west. In fact, they shared a common bond: poverty.

And yet he could, in part, understand McNalley’s fear. For here was, on the surface at least, the alien. What ominous words were being spoken in this foreign tongue? What malicious thoughts lurked behind these brown eyes? Here among the botanical herbs on the stalls, the hedionda, and maguey, and higuito, and corazón, here where the housewives haggled over the price of fruit and vegetables—“How much the guenepas? The chayote? The ají dulce, the mango, the pepino?”—here was another world, not a jungle certainly, but a world as far removed from Inwood as was Puerto Rico itself. Here, in a sense, was the unknown. And McNalley, the caveman squatting close to his protective fire, looked out into the darkness and wondered what terrible shapes lurked behind each bush, and he fed his own fear until he was trembling.

He walked to the exit at the end of the long tunnel and came out into sunlight again. On the corner of the street a butcher shop nestled beneath the tenement, its Carnicería sign advertising the meats resting on trays in the window. Alongside it was a bodega, cans of groceries stacked in the window, strings of peppers hanging overhead. He walked past the grocery and into the street where Rafael Morrez had been killed.

The people knew instantly that he was the law.

They sensed it with the instinct of people who have somehow discovered the law to be not their protector but their enemy. They allowed him a wide berth on the sidewalk. They watched him silently from the front stoops of the tenements. In the open lots strewn with rubbish, children looked up as he walked by. An old lady said something in Spanish, and the crone with her began laughing hysterically.

He found the stoop where Morrez had been sitting on the night he’d been killed. He checked the address again and then walked past a thin man in his undershirt who was sitting outside on a milk-bottle case. The man was smoking a long black cigar. The undershirt was stained with sweat. Hank paused in the hallway and struck a match, examing the mailboxes. Four of the boxes had been sprung from their locks. None of the boxes carried a name plate. He walked out onto the front stoop again.

“I’m looking for a girl named Louisa Ortega. Do you know where I—”

“No hablo Inglés,” the old man said.

“Por favor,” Hank said hesitantly. “Donde está la muchacha Louisa Ortega?”

“No entiendo,” the man said, shaking his head.

Hank stared at him. His Spanish had been slow and halting, but certainly intelligible. And then he realized the man did not want to tell him.

“She’s not in any trouble,” Hank said. “It’s about Rafael Morrez.”

“Rafael?” the man said. He looked up at Hank. His brown eyes said nothing. “Rafael está muerto,” he said.

“Si, yo comprendo. I’m investigating. Soy investigator,” he said lamely, wondering if that were the Spanish word. The man looked at him blankly. “Habla Italiano?” Hank said, in a desperate thrust at establishing communication.

“No,” the man said. He shook his head. Then, in English, he added, “Go ’way. Don’ bodder me.”

“Who you looking for, mister?” a voice said, and Hank turned. The boy stood at the foot of the stoop, his hands on his hips. He wore dungarees and a gleaming white tee shirt. His complexion was tan, his eyes brown, his black hair cut close to the scalp except for a high crown at the front of his head. His hands were square, with big knuckles, a signet ring on the third finger of his right hand.

“I’m looking for Louisa Ortega,” Hank said.

“Yeah, and who are you?”

“District attorney,” Hank said.

“What do you want with her?”

“I want to ask her some questions about Rafael Morrez.”

“You got any questions, you can ask me,” the boy said.

“And who are you?”

“My name’s Gargantua,” the boy said.

“I’ve heard of you.”

“Yeah?” A slight smile formed on his mouth. “Yeah, maybe you have. I been in the papers a few times.”

“I didn’t get your name from the papers,” Hank said. “I got it from a member of the Thunderbirds. A boy named Diablo.”

“Don’t talk to me about that stinking creep. I ever see him again, he’s dead. Wham! Dead.”

He clenched his fists when he spoke, and his face became transposed in that instant to a grimace of hatred, as if he were acting out the real murder of Diablo. His expression, the way his big hands tightened when he spoke, left no doubt that he truly wanted Diablo dead.

“Where do I find Louisa Ortega?”

“I told you. You talk to me.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Hank said, “but I really have nothing to say to you. Unless you happened to be sitting on this stoop the night Morrez was murdered.”

“Oh, you admit he was murdered, huh?”

“Cut it out,” Hank said impatiently. “I’m on your side. I’m prosecuting this case, not defending it.”

“A cop on my people’s side?” Gargantua said. “Ha!”

“Don’t waste my time,” Hank said. “Do you know where she is, or do I have to send a detective to pick her up? I can guarantee he’ll find her.”

“Don’t get excited,” Gargantua said. “What’d Diablo say about me?”

“Nothing more than that you were warlord of the Horsemen.”

“Was he straight?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you know? Most of them Thunderbirds are on junk. You know what I mean? They’re addicts. They all take dope. One thing you never find on our club is a guy who’s hooked. We kick him off so fast, his head spins.”

“That’s interesting to know,” Hank said. “Where’s the girl?”

“Apartment fourteen on the first floor. She probably ain’t even home.”

“I’ll take a chance,” Hank said.

“Listen, I’ll wait for you. I want to talk to you.”

“I may be a little while.”

“That’s okay. I got nothing to do, anyway.”

“Fine,” Hank said, and he went into the building.

Tenements are tenements. There is no such thing as an Italian tenement or a Puerto Rican tenement or a Negro tenement. They’re all the same, he realized, and they all stink. The stink begins building in the outer lobby with the broken mailboxes and the shattered naked light bulb in the ceiling. It assails you as you climb the narrow stairs in the dark hallway, punctuated by feeble air-shaft light at each landing. The camouflaging Lysol stench is almost as overwhelming as the urine smell it attempts to cover. The smells of cooking reach out from every doorway, half a hundred apartments oozing the smell of fish, the smell of meat, spaghetti, arroz con pollo, cabbage, bacon, until all the smells unite into an unsavory stench which has no origin, and no association with food. It’s like a poison gas seeping through the hallways, invading the nostrils and the throat, a total assault wave designed to make you retch.

As he climbed to the first floor of this tenement in Spanish Harlem, he was aware of the mounting attack of smell, aware of the putrescent aroma of garbage coming from behind the steps on the ground floor where the garbage cans were stacked. He found Apartment 14 and twisted the bell set at shoulder height in the door. The door was painted to simulate natural-grain wood, the painter’s idea of this being to paint the door a deep brown and then smear erratic tan lines over the brown. The wood of the door itself was covered with a tin coating, and it was over this that the painter had exercised his artistic flair. The bell was loose. It did not sound with a clear sharp ring. It rattled noisily in its metal cup and then died. He tried it again. Again the bell issued its deathlike trembling.

“Sí, sí, vengo!” a voice shouted from inside the apartment.

Hank waited. He could hear the steel bar of the police lock inside the door being lowered to the floor. The door opened a crack, stopping sharply when the additional precaution of a chain caught it. Part of a face appeared in the crack.

“Quién es?” the girl asked.

“I’m from the district attorney’s office,” Hank said. “Are you Louisa Ortega?”

“Sí?”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions. May I come in?”

“Oh.” The girl seemed flustered. “Oh, not now,” she said, “I am busy now. There ees someone with me.”

“Well, when—”

“It will be soon,” she said. “You come back fi’, ten minutes, okay? I talk to you then, okay?”

“All right,” Hank said. The door closed, the girl’s face vanished. He could hear the bar of the police lock being wedged back into place. Wearily, he went down to the street again. Gargantua was nowhere in sight. Neither was the old man in the undershirt. Hank looked at his watch, lighted a cigarette and leaned against the wall of the building. A stickball game was in progress in the middle of the street. The game went on excitingly, with the usual number of temper flareups and arguments. But the players might just as well have been in Yankee Stadium performing before thousands of people. In fact, there was possibly more violence in a major-league game than was evident in this street game played by teen-agers who conceivably were capable of slitting another teen-ager’s throat.

Standing on the front stoop of the building, he realized that Harlem, on its surface at least, was as well-ordered and nonviolent as any other community in the city. True, you could not equate a Harlem tenement with an apartment building on Sutton Place. You could not simply discount the fire escapes cluttered with the paraphernalia of living, could not easily ignore the lots covered with rubble, the flies crawling over the meat in the window of the butcher shop, the poverty which sprang from every darkened doorway. But the tempo here, the feel, was not much different from what you would find anywhere else in the city. These were people going about their daily tasks. There was no trace of a violent undercurrent running through the life of the community—not now there wasn’t, not at ten o’clock on a sunny morning in midsummer. Then why did violence erupt here? Why did three kids from Italian Harlem, three blocks and three thousand miles away, stride into this street and take the life of an innocent blind boy? He could not lay it all at the doorstep of racial misunderstanding. He had the feeling that this was only a symptom and not the disease itself. Then what was the disease, and what caused it? And if the three boys who killed were diseased, were sick, was the state justified in eliminating them from society?

The question startled him.

What else can you do? he asked himself. You don’t allow lepers to roam the streets, do you?

No. But you don’t kill them either, he reasoned. And even though no cure is known, you nonetheless keep searching for a cure.

Come on, he told himself. You’re not a psychologist, and you’re not a sociologist. You’re a lawyer. You’re concerned with the legal aspects of crime. You’re concerned with punishing the guilty.

The guilty, he thought.

He sighed and looked at his watch. Five minutes had gone by. He lighted another cigarette. He was flicking away the match when a young sailor came out of the building, squaring his white hat.

“Nice day, huh?” the sailor said.

“Lovely,” Hank answered, and he thought he could now safely assume that Louisa Ortega was free to talk to him.

“Man, I’m hungry,” the sailor said. “I ain’t had breakfast yet. Any good places to eat around here?”

Hank shrugged. “You can try a Hundred Twenty-fifth Street,” he said.

“Thanks. Which way is that?”

“Uptown. That way.” Hank pointed.

“Thanks a lot, Mac,” the sailor said. He paused on the stoop. “You, uh, going up there?”

“Yes,” Hank said.

The sailor winked. “You better have breakfast first. You’re gonna need all the strength you got.”

“I’ve already had breakfast,” Hank said, smiling.

“Okay,” the sailor said. “Well, I be seeing you. Stay out of jail.” And he walked off toward Park Avenue.

Hank put out his cigarette and went upstairs again. This time Louisa opened the door for him. She was wearing a flowered pink wrapper belted at the waist. Her long black hair hung over her shoulders. She wore no make-up and no shoes. Her face was thin, but her body was well curved, and she smiled somewhat embarrassedly and said, “Come een,” and Hank entered the apartment.

“I’m sorry I keep you waitin’,” the girl said. She closed the door behind him.

“That’s quite all right,” Hank said.

“Si’ down,” Louisa said.

He looked around the room. A rumpled, unmade bed was against one wall. A rickety wooden table and two wooden chairs rested against the opposite wall alongside an old gas refrigerator and a sink.

“The bed is mos’ comfortable,” she said. “Si’ there.”

He went to the bed and sat on the edge of it. The girl sat at the other end, pulling her legs up under her.

“I’m tired,” she said. “I di’n get to sleep all night. He was bodder me every fi’ minutes.” She paused. With complete frankness, she said, “I’m a hooker, you know.”

“I assumed.”

“Sí.” She shrugged. “Iss nothin’ wrong with hookin’. I radder sell my body than sell dope or somethin’. Verdad?”

“How old are you, Louisa?” Hank asked.

“Nineteen,” she said.

“Do you live with your parents?”

“I got no parents. I come here from dee islan’ to stay with my aunt. Then I move out. I like it better to be free, entiende?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Iss nothin’ wrong with hookin’,” Louisa said again.

“That’s your personal affair,” Hank said, “and it doesn’t concern me. I want to know only what happened on the night of July tenth. The night Rafael Morrez was killed.”

“Sí, sí. Pobrecito. He wass a nice kid. I remember once he wass up here when I wass with a frien’. He wass play his music. It wass very dark in the apar’ment, an’ my frien’ an’ me we wass on the bed, an’ Ralphie he wass play his music.” She chuckled. “I think maybe he got a little excited, Ralphie.”

Hank listened and wondered what weight the testimony of an admitted prostitute would carry with a jury.

“I give him one free one time,” Louisa said. “Ralphie, I mean. He wass a good kid. Iss not his fault he wass born blind, verdad?”

“What happened on the night he was killed?”

“Well, we were si’n downstairs on the stoop. Me, an’ Ralphie, an’ this other girl—she’s a hooker, too, her name is Terry. She’s a Spanish girl, too. She’s older than me, abou’ twenty-two, I guess. She wass suppose to meet one of her friens a little later. An’ it looked like it wass rain soon, you know? So we were si’n there, her an’ me, talking. An’ Ralphie was on the bottom step, jus’ listening. He wass a good kid.”

“What were you talking about?”

“Well, Terry wass tellin’ me what happened to her with a cop of the Vice Squad, how that happened that afternoon.”

“What did she say?”

“Well, let me see. I remember the sky wass gettin’ dark all at once.…”

(The clouds are banking high over the Hudson, spreading in a black canopy over the tenements of Spanish Harlem. A wind is starting in the canyon, sweeping through the street. It lifts the skirts of the two girls standing on the front stoop, talking in Spanish. Louisa is fully made up now, but she does not look cheap or garish. Neither does Terry. Both are well-dressed, perhaps two of the best-dressed girls in Harlem. Both look fresh, both look passionate, with a dark-eyed, dark-haired exotic beauty that promises much to the seeker of erotica. It is common knowledge along this street that they are prostitutes. The boys have very little to do with Terry or Louisa, except to bandy sex talk about. The boys consider it beneath them to sleep with a prostitute, and even the virgin boys on the Horsemen would rather pretend to experience than to find that experience with a prostitute. The girls’ friends are usually men who drift uptown because they have heard you can find girls like Louisa and Terry in Spanish Harlem. They very often go home with something more than a gratified sex appetite. Muggings are common in the streets of Harlem, and a man who has come there for sex is not likely to complain later to the police about a criminal assault. The girls do not encourage the muggings, nor are they affiliated with the muggers. Theirs is a strict business operation, a body for a bill. They euphemistically, and in an unbusinesslike way, refer to their bed partners as “friends.” This applies to anyone with whom they commit the act of intercourse, except the man they happen to be living with at the moment, if they are indeed living with anyone. This person serves as part-time pimp and part-time lover. He is referred to as “my old man.” Some of the girls’ friends are respectable businessmen from New Rochelle or the suburbs of Long Island, but they are never entertained in Spanish Harlem. These men are visited at various places of assignation throughout the city. One of Louisa’s friends is a book publisher who maintains an apartment in Greenwich Village away from his large home in Roslyn. He likes the fresh young look about Louisa. Terry can remember going on a party in the stockroom of a machine-parts factory in the Bronx. There was no bed. She entertained twelve men, one after the other, on a blanket spread on the stockroom floor.

The transient customers, the ones who approach the girls in bars, generally satisfy their needs in Harlem. The girls will use an empty apartment which they will rent for the evening or for the hour from an old crone who derives her income alternately through supplying the apartments and through baby-sitting for mothers who work. Louisa maintains her own apartment, and she does not live with an “old man.” But she is afraid the Vice Squad will crack down on her one day. This is her constant fear. She has never had trouble with the police, but she knows that trouble will come one day. She talks freely about her profession to various cops she knows, and even to some she doesn’t know. But the Vice Squad cop is a shadowy figure to her, and she dreads picking up a man, taking him to her apartment, and then being arrested by him at the crucial, specified-by-law point when one “exposes her privates.”)

TERRY: He look jus’-like anyone you would meet. He wass wear a summer suit, an’ a straw hat. La mera verdad, era guapo.

LOUISA: Wha’ did he say to you?

TERRY: He said he wass lookin’ for a good time. He said I look like the kind of girl who could show him a good time.

LOUISA: So what did you tell him?

TERRY: I said it depends on what he consider a good time.

(Rafael Morrez sits on the bottom step of the stoop, half listening to Terry’s discourse. His eyes are black in his thin, sixteen-year-old face. He wears a sport shirt with a bright Hawaiian print. Despite the heat, he wears corduroy trousers, the color of which does not match the basic color of the shirt. He is not dressed sloppily, but he has about him the slightly askew look of a blind person which, on a person who can see, might indicate a hasty dresser. The sounds of the street are magnified to him. He knows, too, that it is going to rain soon. He can smell rain and feel it. He has been blind since birth, but every other part of his body is highly sensitive to everything happening around him. There are some who hold that Morrez can even smell danger. But there is danger coming within the next few minutes, and he does not seem to be aware of it. The skies are black and swollen now. It will rain soon. It will rain heavily.)

LOUISA: So what happened?

TERRY: Mama Teresa got me an apartment. I ask for the money first. He give it to me. La mera verdad, era un buen tipo. Until I took off my dress.

LOUISA: What did he do?

TERRY: He said he wass from the Vice Squad, and he is going take me to jail. Then he took back his money and put it in his wallet.

LOUISA: But di’n you ask for identification?

TERRY: He showed it, he showed it. No cabe duda, he wass a detective. I wass very scared. La mera verdad, I never been so scared in my life. Then he says to me maybe we can work it out.

LOUISA: What did he mean, “work it out”?

TERRY: What you think?

LOUISA (shocked): An’ did you?

TERRY: Seguro. You think I want to go to jail?

LOUISA: I would never have done thees. Never, never. Nunca, nunca, nunca.

TERRY: He had me caught! What you want me to do?

LOUISA: Quién sabe, but I would never have done thees. Nunca, nunca! I would rot in jail first!

(The girls fall silent. The street, too, has become silent, anticipating the storm. On the steps, Rafael Morrez tilts his head skyward, as if listening for something. Louisa turns to him.)

LOUISA: Ralphie, why you don’ play us some music?

TERRY: Ándale, Ralphie, some music.

(At the girls’ request, Morrez reaches into his pocket, and at that instant the three boys enter the street. There is trouble in their stride, and Louisa recognizes it instantly. She starts down the steps, and then sees that the boys have spotted Morrez.)

LOUISA: Mira! Cuidado!

TOWER: Shut up, you spic whore!

(Rafael turns toward the boys. He stands suddenly. Something glints in the hand he has taken from his pocket. He faces the boys blankly.)

TOWER: There’s one of them!

BATMAN: Get him!

(A blade flashes, penetrates, flesh rips in silent protest as the knife gashes upward from the gut. And now the other knives descend, tearing and slashing until Morrez falls like an assassin-surrounded Caesar, crumpling to the pavement. The knives withdraw. Blood spatters like early rain to the sidewalk. From the opposite end of the street four boys begin running toward the intruders.)

TOWER: Go, go!

(The three boys begin running down the street toward Park Avenue. Louisa comes off the steps, running to the felled Morrez.)

LOUISA: Ralphie! Ralphie! Madre de Dios! Virgencita mía!

(And suddenly it is raining.)

“What happened then?” Hank asked.

“I hold his head in my lap. He iss … iss bleeding everywhere, everywhere—they rip him all up. Then the police come. Police all over the street. Sirens going, police chasing the others, and police asking questions—always the police. When it is too late.”

“Did Morrez have a knife?” Hank asked flatly.

“A knife? A knife?”

“Sí. Un cuchillo.”

“Un cuchillo? Ralphie? Qué hace con un cuchillo? A knife? No, this iss not so. Who said this to you?”

“The boys said he pulled a knife and attacked them.”

“This is a lie. He stood up when I yell, and he turn to face them. But it is they who attack. No, he did not have a knife.”

“Then tell me something, Louisa. What was it he took out of his pocket? What was it that glittered?”

“Glit—Oh! Oh! The harmonica, you mean? You mean the harmonica on what he plays his music? This is what you mean?”

Gargantua was waiting downstairs when Hank came out of the building. Another boy was with him. The second boy wore dark glasses and a high-crowned, narrow-brimmed hat. His eyes were invisible behind the glasses. A straggly mustache clung to his upper lip. The suggestion of a Dizzy-kick formed a sparse triangle of hair between his lower lip and his chin. He was very fair, with the almost alabaster coloration of a high-born Spaniard. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a narrow blue tie and dark-blue trousers. A tattoo mark was on his right forearm. His hands were big, and he wore a wrist watch on his left wrist. He stood with his hands behind his back, surveying the sidewalk and the street. He did not turn to look at Hank as he approached.

“Here’s the D.A. now, Frankie,” Gargantua said, but the boy did not turn. “Did you find her?”

“I found her,” Hank said. “She was very helpful.” He stopped before the two boys. The one called Frankie was still looking off up the street disinterestedly, the dark glasses effectively hiding his eyes.

“This is Frankie Anarilles,” Gargantua said. “He’s president of the Horsemen. It was him who named the club. I don’t think I got your name, mister.”

“Bell,” Hank said.

“Frankie, this is Mr. Bell.”

Frankie nodded. “Nice to know you, man,” he said. “What brings you to the turf?”

“Rafael Morrez. I’m prosecuting the case,” Hank said.

“Oh, yeah. Gone. Good luck with it. Kill them, man.”

“We can tell you things about them goddamn Thunderbirds,” Gargantua said, “would make you lay down and die, believe me.”

“Listen, I don’t know about you two,” Frankie said, “but I’d like a brew. Come on. I’ll buy.”

They began walking toward Fifth Avenue. Both boys walked with a peculiar headlong shuffle, their hands in their pockets, their heads and shoulders erect, their eyes looking straight ahead. He felt emanating from the two the same casual security that Hollywood celebrities wear. They knew who they were, and they wore their notoriety with aloof indifference but with a measure of pride.

In an attempt at making conversation, Hank said, “Do you like Harlem?”

Frankie shrugged. “Yeah. I like Harlem.”

“You do?” Hank said, faintly surprised.

“Sure. Sure I like it.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why? I live here. Everybody knows me here.”

“Don’t they know you anyplace else?”

“Oh, they know me when I crack somebody’s head, all right.” He chuckled. “The wops know me, all right. That ain’t what I mean, man. I mean, like when I’m here, when I’m walking the streets here, they know me, and I feel like myself, you dig? I’m Frankie. Everybody knows I’m Frankie. Everybody knows I’m president of the Horsemen.”

“That can get dangerous, can’t it?” Hank asked.

“Oh, man, like sure it can get dangerous,” Frankie said, and there was pride in his voice now. “I mean, it’s like with anything else. You get a rep, a name, then you got to watch out.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, man, it’s the same with everything, ain’t it? Like any big shot, not that I’m a real big shot. But anybody who makes it, there’s always people who are ready to knock them down. You know what I mean? So I’m president of the Horsemen, and there’s lots of people would like to knock me down. That’s all. It’s the same all over this country, ain’t it?”

“In a sense, I suppose,” Hank said.

“But they ain’t never gonna knock you down,” Gargantua said.

“You can say that again, man. They got to get up real early in the morning to jap this boy. Hey, how about here?” Frankie said.

They had walked up past 111th Street to a small bar on Fifth. The bar boasted its name in gilt letters on two front plate glass windows: “Las Tres Guitaras.”

“The Three Guitars,” Frankie said. “We call it Las Tres Putas. That means The Three Whores. That’s because you can usually find hookers hanging around in here. But it’s a nice place. They give you a good glass of beer. You like beer?”

“Yes,” Hank said.

“Good. Come on.”

They walked into the place. The bar ran the length of the room on the left side. There were booths opposite it, and a shuffleboard setup alongside the hot table at the far end of the room. Three men were standing at the bar drinking when Hank walked in with the boys. They downed their drinks instantly, sidled past Hank and left.

“They think you’re a T man,” Frankie explained. “Everybody in Harlem got the jitters about junk. They see a stranger, they automatically figure he’s a Fed looking to make a narcotics pinch. All the bulls in the barrio they know. But a stranger who’s dressed nice—bang, he must be a Fed. And they don’t want to be anywhere around if there’s going to be a narcotics pinch. Because sometimes the guy who’s pinched, he’ll like throw the stuff away, you know? The deck, I mean. The heroin. You know what I mean, or am I just talking?”

“I know what you mean,” Hank said.

“Okay, so they’ll ditch the junk, and it might land near you, near your feet or something. And the next thing you know, you’re arrested for holding, or maybe even for intent to sell if there’s enough of the junk in the deck. So if you spot a T man, the best thing is to get the hell out, man, go, go. Let’s sit in this booth here. Hey, Miguel, let’s have three brews, huh? Good beer here. You’ll like it.”

They sat. Frankie’s hands were immense on the table.

“So you’re working for Ralphie, huh?” Frankie said.

“That’s one way of putting it, I suppose,” Hank answered.

“It looks open and shut to me,” Frankie said. “The Birds ain’t got a chance.” He paused. Casually, he said, “Have they?”

“I think we’ve got a good case against them,” Hank said.

“Yeah, well, I hope you give it to them good. Between them and the niggers, there ain’t much choice who you should hate most. But that’s a contest I think the Birds win.”

“Do you have trouble with the colored gangs, too?” Hank asked.

“Man, that’s our middle name, trouble. And that’s where we are, right in the middle. The wops look down on us, and the niggers look down on us, and where does that leave us? It leaves us holding the sloppy end of the stick. It’s like we don’t belong to the human race, you dig? We’re something crawled out of the sewer. The niggers think they’re hot stuff because all of a sudden they’re wearing white shirts and ties instead of carrying spears in the jungle. Man, my people are a proud race. Puerto Rico ain’t no damn African jungle. And what makes the wops think they’re so high and mighty? What’d they ever have? Mussolini? Big deal! This guy Michelangelo? Okay. But what the hell have they done recently?” Frankie paused. “You ever hear of a guy named Picasso?”

“Yes,” Hank said.

“Pablo Picasso,” Frankie said. “He’s the greatest artist ever lived. I went all the way down the museum to see that show of his they gave. Man, he sings! And you know something? He got the same blood in his veins that I got in mine.”

“You went to the museum to see the Picasso exhibit?” Hank asked, surprised.

“Sure. Gargantua went with me. Remember?”

“Sure, I remember. That was the night we bopped with the Crusaders.”

“Yeah, that’s right. When we got back from the museum.”

“Who are the Crusaders?”

“This gang from the West Side,” Frankie said. “Colored guys. A bunch of bananas. We sent them home crying that night.”

“I tell you the truth,” Gargantua said, “a lot of them Picasso pictures I didn’t understand.”

“You’re a meatball,” Frankie said. “Who says you got to understand it? All you got to do is feel it. This guy paints with his heart. He’s got his heart spread all over the pictures. You can feel it. Hell, he’s Spanish!”

The bartender brought the beers to the table, eying Hank curiously. He wiped his hands on his apron and then went back to the bar.

“Did you know any of these fellows personally?” Hank asked. “The ones who killed Morrez?”

“I know Reardon and Aposto,” Frankie said. “That bastard Reardon is the one I really hope you get.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, Aposto’s—you know—not all there. I mean, this is a kid you tell him to push his mother in the river, like he’ll do it. He’s a little … feeble-minded? Retarded? You know.” He tapped his temple with a circling forefinger. “This is legit because my kid brother’s in his class at school, so he knows.”

“What school is that?”

“S.A.T. Manhattan. The School of Aviation Trades, you know? My brother goes there.”

“And your brother’s in Aposto’s class, and he says Aposto’s retarded, is that right?”

“Yeah. But Reardon ain’t. Reardon is a shrewd son of a bitch. Tower, he calls himself. Tower. I’ll give him a tower, that bastard.”

“Why don’t you like him?”

“Because I don’t like punks who try to behave like wheels, that’s why. I mean, this guy is nothing,” Frankie said. “A real nowhere. But he’s always trying to make a name for himself. He’s got this idea, you know, that the big-time racketeers are watching him. He makes a name in a street club, and he thinks he’s going to control the waterfront next week. He’s got holes in his head. I mean, man, this bopping is sheeeeeet, you know. I mean, real sheeeeet, man. But he keeps trying to get a rep. So now he’s got one. Now he’s got a rep going to take him straight to the electric chair. You want to know something?”

“What’s that?”

“We had a bop scheduled for the night Ralphie was killed. The Birds knew all about it. Gargantua met with their warlord, this cat called Diablo, a Spanish name, how do you like that? So it was all set up. The project on a Hun’ Twenty-fifth. At ten o’clock. The Birds knew this. And if the Birds knew it, then Reardon knew it, too. He makes it his business to know everything that happens on that club. So what happens? Early in the night, he rounds up this idiot Aposto, and this kid Di Pace who I never heard of, and he stages his own private raid into our turf. Man, don’t you read it?”

“He was looking for personal glory?”

“Sure, what else? He’s trying to make a rep for himself. Naturally, he didn’t expect the cops to get him. Nobody expects to get busted. He figured he’d come in here and raise a little hell, and then go back to the Birds and get elected president or something. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that was just how it happened. Reardon conned those two shmoes into coming in here. Hey, you ain’t touched your beer.”

Hank picked up his glass and drank from it.

“Good, ain’t it?”

“Yes, very good,” Hank said. “You talk as if you know Reardon very well.”

“I once give him a hole on the side of his head, I bet he’s still got the scar,” Frankie said.

“When was this?”

“In a bop. I hit him and he went down, so I kicked him in the head. I was wearing combat boots, I mean anybody goes bopping without combat boots is out of his mind. So I musta split his head wide open.”

“Why’d you kick him?”

“Because he was down, and I didn’t want him to get up again.”

“Do you kick anyone who’s down?”

“Anybody.”

“Why?”

“Because I know that if they get me down, they’re gonna kick me. You ever been stomped, mister?”

“No.”

“Well, it ain’t so much fun. Unless maybe you like getting stepped on all over. Me, I don’t like it. So I do it to the other guy first. This way, when he’s down, he stays down, and he can’t hurt me. Reardon hit me with a ball bat once, you know that? He almost broke my leg, that bastard. Man, I got a thing for him, believe me. If you don’t kill that son of a bitch, I’m gonna do the job for you some day.”

“And get busted?” Hank asked.

“Not me. Besides, if I got busted it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Then I could stop all this gang bopping. Maybe getting busted is the only way out. Or else getting drafted in the Army. ’Cause, man, this bopping is strictly sheeeeeeet.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“You got to live, don’t you? You got to protect your rights.”

“Which rights?”

“Your turf, man, your territory. Otherwise they be coming in here all the time—like they done with Ralphie. You got to stop them, don’t you? You can’t let them step all over you.”

“They seem to feel that you’re the intruders,” Hank said.

“Yeah, big intruders,” Frankie said. “All we try to do is get along, so all we get is trouble. With guys like Reardon around, you can’t even blow your nose. He’s a real troublemaker, that bastard. All the time. Right from when he first joined the Birds. You remember that time at the pool, Gargantua?”

“Yeah, I remember that time, all right. They almost drowned Alfie.”

“When was this?”

“Last summer,” Gargantua said. “There’s a pool on First Avenue. The Jefferson Pool. It’s open in the summertime, you know? It’s near the school—only the school’s on Pleasant Avenue. This is on First, around a Hun’ Thirteenth. So we used to go over there sometimes. It gets pretty hot around here in the summer, you know.”

“Yeah, but we don’t go there no more,” Frankie said. “They made sure of that. We go over there, it’s like taking our lives in our hands. Even if we didn’t have to pass through their turf to get there. That pool is like a battleground. We step in there, man, there’s fireworks. Like that day last summer.”

“Di Pace was there, you know that?” Gargantua said to Frankie. “I remember that was the first time I seen him. He just moved in the neighborhood that winter, I think. Yeah, he was with Reardon that day.”

“I don’t remember him,” Frankie said. “Aposto was there, I know, because I remember he threw the first punch. But I don’t think I ever seen this Di Pace kid. It don’t matter, anyway, because it was Reardon started it all. He was the one.”

“What happened?” Hank asked.

“Well, it was a real hot day,” Frankie said. “Hotter even than today. We were hanging around doing nothing and somebody said let’s go over to the pool. So we got our trunks and towels, and we grabbed a cab to take us—”

“You took a taxi?”

“Sure, there was six guys, so what did it cost us, a dime each or something? Including the tip? We hopped in the cab and went right to the pool. Then we changed in the locker room and went outside. All we had on our minds was getting in that water.…”

(The temperature on this August day is going to break all records previously set for the city of New York. It is now noon, with the sun at its apex directly overhead, and the thermometer on the brick wall of the bathhouse reads 100.6. As the Puerto Rican boys emerge from the locker room to the pool area, they are assailed by the hum of voices which seems to hover over all bathing places, indistinct, a rumble like the ocean itself, interspersed with the clearer sounds of water splashing, laughter, the reverberating deep click of the diving board.

The pool, a glistening blue rectangle, ripples with reflected sunlight. It is crowded on this Saturday, but then it is usually crowded on weekends. Most of the people in the pool and surrounding it are young. There is the usual amount of horseplay, the duckings, the shrieking girls being tossed into the water, the water fights with young girls sitting astride the shoulders of their mock stallions.

The entrance of the Puerto Rican boys does not evoke an immediate show of antagonism. They walk carefully and cautiously, because they are, after all, in enemy turf no matter how allegedly neutral the ground. But their entrance has gone largely unobserved. There are six boys in all. One is brown, another white, and the remainder range the tan spectrum. The dark boy, Mike, speaks only Spanish. He has no desire to learn English. He is afraid that if he learns to speak English well, he will be mistaken for a Negro. The fact that he speaks Spanish, then, is a badge of pride to him. He has resisted every effort of his schoolteachers to get him to learn English. Another of the boys, Alfredo, cannot speak English too well, either, but it is not through lack of trying. He is an intelligent boy who, being taught by born-and-bred New Yorkers who do not speak Spanish, finds it difficult to learn. He is also a devout Catholic, and he wears a slender gold chain about his throat, from which dangles a miniature gold cross. The boys enter the water. They stay close to each other, swimming in the tight formation of a convoy. The lifeguard glances at them disinterestedly and then goes back to chatting with a blonde who seems determined to lose the top half of her two-piece swimsuit.

Tower Reardon straightens up from the water fountain where he has just taken a drink. He is a tall, excellently proportioned boy who lifts weights. He ordered the weights from the back cover of a comic book. He worked in a grocery store for a full summer to earn the price of the weights. His father makes fun of his efforts. “I never needed to lift weights,” he says. “I worked on the goddamn railroad laying ties, and my muscles are real. Yours are fake. All weight lifters are muscle-bound.” He has warned Tower that he will throw out the “whole shooting match” the first time any of the neighbors complain. And so Tower is very careful when he’s working out. He works out with the weights every evening for two hours. He lifts them toward the ceiling, and then he deposits them very gently on the floor because he does not want the people in the apartment below to yell about his making noise. Sometimes he walks into the kitchen, spans his mother’s tiny waist with his powerful hands and lifts her off the floor. He enjoys exhibiting his strength to her. His mother makes a big fuss of being annoyed. “Put me down, you idiot,” she will say, but he knows she enjoys it, too. Secretly, Tower believes he is stronger than his father. He would like to test it someday. He would like to Indian-wrestle with him or something. But his father is always too busy watching the ball games on television. And besides, Tower is afraid his father might, just might, beat him in a test of strength and then he’d never hear the end of the goddamn railroad stories. And, too, he does not wish to lose face before his mother.

His mother does not know he belongs to a street gang. She constantly warns him about the dangers of Harlem. She cautions him against accepting cigarettes from strangers. “That’s how they get you started on dope,” she tells him. “You be careful, Artie. There are a lot of dope peddlers in Harlem.” Tower has not told her that he once tried marijuana. He has not told her, either, that the only reason he hasn’t tried the bigger stuff is because he is afraid it will milk his strength. He likes to be strong. He enjoys his nickname. Tower. He chose it himself and later pretended the gang members gave him the name.

He walks to the edge of the pool and looks out at the water, spotting the Puerto Rican boys at once. The only boy he knows is Frankie Anarilles, with whom he has had some close calls but never any real trouble. He knows, however, that Frankie is president of the Horsemen. He knows, too, that—by unspoken word—the pool is supposed to be neutral territory. In any case, there has never been any trouble here before. He is not now consciously looking to promote trouble. But seeing the Puerto Rican boys in the pool somehow makes him angry.

He gestures toward Aposto, who comes dripping out of the pool to where Tower stands.)

BATMAN: What’s the matter, Tower?

TOWER: Look in the water.

(Batman looks. He sees nothing. He does not very often catch things the first time around. He reacts slowly to thought and to suggestion. The only time he is really alert is when he is in a fight. He fights completely by instinct, and his instinct is that of an animal. He derives great pleasure from fighting because he knows he does it well. He knows, too, that it is possibly the one thing he does well. He has never been interested in school, but not because he realizes that his very low I.Q. sets him apart from other more intelligent boys. It simply doesn’t seem very interesting to him, and he would quit if he could find a good job, but nobody seems to want to hire him. He is a student at Manhattan Aviation Trades where he is totally inept in both his academic and manual-training classes. His teachers, however, do not consider him a “difficult” student. He never causes any trouble in the classroom. They have not the slightest inkling that he belongs to a street gang and that in the heat of battle he is capable of killing. They figure him for a slow child. When they are questioned a year later, after the killing of Rafael Morrez, they will all express honest shock and astonishment that a quiet kid like Anthony Aposto could “go berserk.” This quiet kid, Anthony (Batman) Aposto, does not want to go berserk. This quiet kid wants to fight because everybody tells him he is a good fighter. That’s all he wants to do. He would make an excellent soldier and would probably be decorated for valor in the field. Unfortunately, he is too young to be drafted. Unfortunately, he will kill another very real—to him—“enemy” long before he is old enough to be drafted.)

BATMAN: I don’t see nothing in the water, Tower. What is it? Something in the water?

TOWER: Over there. Spics.

(Batman looks. He sees the Puerto Rican boys, but he is not angered by the sight of them. He looks for some hidden meaning in Tower’s words but can find none. Are the spics peeing in the water or something? Is that it?)

BATMAN: Yeah, I see them. What’re they doing, Tower?

TOWER: You like swimming with them?

BATMAN (shrugging): Gee, I don’t know. I didn’t even notice them until you told me. Gee, what’re they doing, Tower?

TOWER: Get Danny.

BATMAN: Danny? Yeah, he was over there with a girl. I’ll get him, Tower. I’ll get him.

(He leaves Reardon. Reardon stands at the edge of the pool, his hands on his hips. He counts the Puerto Ricans. Six of them. He wishes there were more Thunderbirds around. But he knows that if there is trouble, they will materialize from nowhere. This is one of the advantages of gang membership. He knows now that there will be trouble. But in his mind he is not the person who is going to cause the trouble. The trouble, he feels, began the moment the Puerto Ricans came into the pool. They are the troublemakers; he is innocent; he is vindicated.

Danny approaches. He has been swimming at the pool all summer long. He is burned to a deep brown, and his red hair is lighter than it is in the wintertime.)

DANNY: What’s up, dad?

TOWER: Take a look. San Juan’s polluting the water.

DANNY: Huh? (He glances at the pool.) Aw, what the hell, let them swim. It’s hot enough to melt concrete.

TOWER: We let them in, they’ll be bringing over the whole West Side.

DANNY: They been here before. Relax, Artie.

TOWER (correcting him): Tower.

DANNY: Yeah. So relax, Tower.

TOWER: I don’t like the idea.

DANNY: So who are you? Head of the Immigration Department or something?

TOWER: I’m me, and I don’t like it, and I say we kick them out.

DANNY: So go ahead and kick them out. What the hell do you want from me? I was talking with a girl there.

TOWER: I didn’t know you were turkey.

DANNY: What?

TOWER: You heard me.

DANNY: What’s this got to do with being turkey? They want to swim here, who gives a damn?

TOWER: This pool is in our turf.

DANNY: But they always swim here! They’re always coming over. Look, I got a girl over there and—

TOWER: Sure, go ahead, turkey.

DANNY: Now wait a minute—

TOWER: I never knew you to punk put of something before. I thought you was a down cat.

DANNY: I am! I just can’t see any sense—

TOWER: Okay, forget it. You want me to go over and sound them all by myself, that’s what I’ll do. Me and Batman’ll take care of it.

DANNY: Look, there’s six of them. You go over there …

TOWER: Never mind. I shoulda known better than to ask somebody ain’t even on the club.

DANNY: What’s that got to do with it? I just can’t see—

TOWER: Forget it. Come on, Batman.

DANNY: Wait a minute.

TOWER: What?

DANNY: You go sound them, there’ll be a rumble. Right here. I can guarantee it. That’s it. I’m telling you.

TOWER: I ain’t afraid of a rumble.

DANNY: Neither am I.

TOWER: So? You coming or staying?

DANNY: I ain’t afraid. You know that, damnit!

TOWER (sarcastically): Sure, I can see you’re not afraid.

DANNY: All right, all right. Damnit, I was talking to a girl. All right, come on, let’s get it over with.

(They start around the edge of the pool toward the other side, where the Horsemen are emerging from the water. As they walk, we notice other boys watching them, and then getting to their feet to join them, so that the long march around the edge of the gleaming blue pool becomes a sort of recruiting march, as if the bugle has been sounded for formation of ranks and the Thunderbirds are massing. It is a terrible thing to watch them, because there is the silence of a vigilante committee about them, the menacing deadly purposefulness of a lynch mob. Tower, Batman, and Danny are in the front rank. As they walk, the other boys fall in behind them, not in strict formation, but nonetheless presenting the formidable appearance of an army on the move. The lifeguard on his high chair looks over to the boys. He is not a cop, and he doesn’t feel like getting involved with a bunch of hoods. He stays where he is, studying the water for drowning people, of whom there are none at the moment. The hum over the pool begins to subside, and then it is gone altogether. Barefoot, bare-chested, the Thunderbirds—at least a dozen of them now—cross the pool area. Trouble is in the air. The silence of trouble is a louder noise than the gay hum of voices which preceded it. Five of the Puerto Rican boys have gone over to the fountain on that side of the pool. Only one—Alfredo—remains by the edge of the pool, his feet dangling in the water. He does not see the Thunderbirds until they are almost upon him. He scrambles to his feet and looks frantically for the other members of his party, but he is surrounded before he establishes contact. The boys ring him in, and he faces them with his back to the pool.)

TOWER: What are you? A little girl?

ALFREDO: A gorl? What you minn?

TOWER: You’re wearing a necklace. I thought only girls wore necklaces.

ALFREDO: A neck—(His hand goes up to the chain and cross. He is trying to see past the boys to where his friends are, but the circle is tight and unbending.) Tha’s no necklace. Tha’s Jesús Cristo. Don’ you got no religion?

TOWER: Oh, you got religion, huh? He’s got religion, boys.

ALFREDO: Come on, wha’ you wann here, anyway?

TOWER: We want to see how religious you are, spic.

ALFREDO: Hey, don’ call me—

TOWER: We want to see if you can walk on the water, spic.

ALFREDO: Walk on dee—

(Batman shoves out at him, and Alfredo hurtles backward into the water. The Thunderbirds are in the pool almost instantly, splashing wildly as Alfredo surfaces. Alfredo is frightened now. He is surrounded by a dozen boys, and his feet are not on the ground. He has never been a good swimmer; he came here today only to be one of the boys. Now the boys have deserted him and …)

TOWER: Get him! Get him!

(The Thunderbirds reach for Alfredo. He strikes out at them, but his punches are ineffectual in the water. Batman seizes him from behind.)

TOWER: Shove him under!

(Batman pushes down on Alfredo’s shoulders, shoving him beneath the surface of the water. Alfredo pushes up again, his mouth open for air, and another boy strikes him, and then Batman seizes his hair and pushes down with all his might. Another boy closes in, adding the force of his arms to Batman’s. A bubble breaks the surface of the water. The pool is terribly still. The lifeguard weighs his responsibility—someone is likely to drown out there—and then decides his responsibility does not extend this far. He comes down off the chair, though, and sidles away from the crowd in search of a cop.)

DANNY: Okay, let him up. That’s enough.

TOWER: Hold him!

DANNY: You’re going to drown him! Let him up!

TOWER: I said hold him!

(Another air bubble breaks the surface. The boys stand in a silent circle. Beneath the water, held tightly by Batman and the other boy, Alfredo struggles, but he cannot break the grip. Then he stops struggling.)

DANNY: Let him go! He’s drowning, can’t you see?

TOWER: He’s faking! He’s holding his breath.

DANNY: Damnit, you’re gonna kill him! Tower, let him go!

TOWER: Shut up!

(Beneath the surface, Alfredo is beginning to go limp, his eyes opening wide in terror. From the water fountain, Frankie senses the sudden silence of the pool. He turns, takes one look and then says “Mira!” and the other Puerto Rican boys turn, and then they break into a trot toward the pool’s edge. They do not stop at the lip. Led by Frankie, they dive into the water, striking first at Batman and the boy holding Alfredo under. Alfredo, released, surfaces, grabs for the lip of the pool, and feebly sucks in air. In the pool, the boys are fighting now, cursing loudly. The girls around the edges of the pool are screaming. The lifeguard rushes back with a policeman. The sound of his whistle splits the air.)

“Then Tower started it all, is that right?” Hank said.

“Damn right, he started it,” Frankie said. “And we weren’t doing nothing, either. Just swimming. So he got us all hauled down the station house, that dumb jerk. And for what? Just so he could be a big man.”

“Did Danny actually resist Tower’s command?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did he try to save this boy Alfredo?”

“I didn’t even know he was there,” Frankie said. “I just found out today, same as you did.”

“He was there,” Gargantua said. “Some guys told me he was yelling they should let Alfie go. That’s what I heard around, anyway. He ain’t really a Thunderbird, you know. He just kind of hangs out with them.”

“He oughta choose his friends better,” Frankie said. “They all stink, every one of them. You ever meet the president of that club?”

“No. Who’s he?” Hank said.

“A guy named Big Dom. He’s really a little shrimp. You could fit him in your side pocket.” Frankie shook his head. “I don’t know where they dug him up, I swear to God. Ain’t a president supposed to have leadership qualities? Not that I’m a big leader, but this Dominick character is strictly for the sparrows. Argggh, they’re a nowhere club altogether.”

“You’d do good to send them three to the chair, Mr. Bell,” Gargantua said.

“Yeah,” Frankie agreed, “you’d do real good.” He turned to face Hank. His eyes were still invisible behind the dark glasses, but suddenly he was no longer the Picasso-lover with the proud Spanish blood. His face seemed to go suddenly hard, and his voice, though issuing from his mouth in a monotone, was menacing. “You’d do real good, Mr. Bell.”

“It wouldn’t be nice for them to get away with this,” Gargantua said.

“No,” Frankie said. “A lot of people might not like it.”

They sat in silence for a moment. The two boys stared at him, as if trying to make their meaning clear without the necessity of further words.

Finally Hank rose. “Well,” he said, “thanks for all the information,” and he reached into his back pocket for his wallet.

“The beers are on me,” Frankie said.

“No, let me—”

“I said the beers are on me,” he said, more firmly this time.

“Well, thank you, then,” Hank said, and he left the bar.

The mother of Rafael Morrez did not arrive home from work until 6 P.M. She was a seamstress in the garment district. She had come to Harlem from a town in Puerto Rico called Vega Baja, where she had worked in a one-room factory that made children’s shirts. From the outside of the building, the place where she had worked had not resembled a factory at all. There was a grilled iron railing, and then a pastel-colored building set back from a small courtyard where wild orchids grew. Violeta Morrez would begin work at eight in the morning, and she worked through until six o’clock in the evening. She had better working conditions and higher wages in New York, that was true. But in Puerto Rico, at the end of the working day, she would go home to her son Rafael. In New York she could no longer do that. Her son Rafael was dead.

She had come to New York at the request of her husband, who had been a dishwasher in a restaurant on Forty-second Street. He had preceded her to the mainland by a year, living with some cousins of his and saving enough money finally to rent his own apartment and to send for his wife and his son. She had joined him reluctantly. For whereas she knew that New York was a city of opportunities, she was very fond of Puerto Rico and dreaded leaving familiar safe surroundings. Six months after she arrived in the city, her husband took up with another woman, leaving her and the boy to find their own way in the city.

Now, at thirty-seven—two years older than Hank’s wife Karin—Violeta Morrez looked like a woman of sixty. Her body was thin and her face was gaunt, only a slight hint of beauty lingering about the eyes and the mouth. She wore no make-up. Her black hair was pulled back severely into a tight bun.

They sat in the “parlor” of her fourth-floor walk-up, and there was a stillness to the room as they faced each other. Her eyes, wide and brown in the hollow face, stared at Hank with a frankness that made him uneasy. It was like looking into the eyes of immense sorrow, he realized, a sorrow too great for empathy, a sorrow that demanded solitude and resented solicitude.

“What can you do?” she asked. “What can you possibly do?”

She spoke English well, with only a trace of an accent. She had told Hank earlier that she’d studied the language for a year before joining her husband in New York. She had gone to school at night in Puerto Rico.

“I can see that justice is done, Mrs. Morrez,” Hank said.

“Justice? In this city? Do not make me laugh. There is justice here only if you are born here. For the others, there is nothing but hatred.” He listened to her voice, and he thought, There is no bitterness in her words, even though the words themselves are bitter. There is only an unutterable sadness, a despair, a surrender to sorrow.

“This is a city of hatred, señor. There is hatred in this city’s heart, and it is a bad thing to feel.”

“I’m here to help your son’s case, Mrs. Morrez. Anything you can tell me about—”

“To help his case, yes. But to help him, no. You can never help Rafael again. It is too late to help him. My son is dead, and the ones who killed him are still alive. And if they continue to stay alive, there will be more killings because these are not human beings, these are animals. These are animals full of hatred.” She paused. Her eyes held his. Like a child asking her father why the sky was blue, she said, “Why does this city hate, señor?”

“Mrs. Morrez, I …”

“I was taught love,” she said, and suddenly her voice was wistful, a tenderness creeping into it, a gentleness which for a moment overwhelmed the sorrow. “I was taught that to love is the best thing. I was taught this in Puerto Rico where I was born. It is easy to love there. It is warm there, and slow, and the people say hello to you on the street, the people know who you are, they know you are Violeta Morrez, they say, ‘Hello, Violeta, how are you today, have you heard from Juan? How is your son?’ It is important to be somebody, don’t you think? It is important to know that you are Violeta Morrez and that the people in the street know you.” She paused. “Here, it is different. Here it is cold, and here everyone rushes, and here there is no one to say, ‘Hello, Violeta,’ or to wonder how you are feeling today. There is no time for love in this city. There is only hatred. And hatred has robbed me of my son.”

“Your son will have justice, Mrs. Morrez. I’m here to see to that.”

“Justice? There is only one justice, señor. And that is to kill the murderers the way they killed him. It would be justice to put out their eyes and then come at them with knives, the way they came at my Rafael in his darkness. This is the only justice for animals. And they are animals, señor, make no mistake. If you do not send these murderers to the electric chair, there will be no safety any more. I tell you this from my heart. There will be only fear. Fear and hatred, and they will together rule this city, and decent people will hide in hallways and pray to God.

“My Rafael was a good boy. He never did a wrong thing in his life. There was the spirit of gentleness about him. His eyes were dead, señor, but there was great life in his heart. It is easy to feel, you know, that a blind person needs to be watched always. It is a mistake we make. I made this same mistake. I watched him, I cared for him, always, always. Until we came here. And then his father left, and I had to take a job. One must eat. And so Rafael went on the street while I worked. And it was on the street that he was killed. A good boy. Dead.”

“Mrs. Morrez—”

“There is only one thing you can do for me and for my Rafael. Only one thing, señor.”

“What’s that, Mrs. Morrez?”

“In this city of hatred, you can add my hatred,” she said, and there was still no bitterness in her voice, only an emptiness, a haunting preoccupation with cold facts too complex to grasp. “You can add this hatred I shall feel as long as I live. And you can kill the boys who killed my Rafael. You can kill them and rid the streets of animals. This is what you can do for me, señor.

“God forgive me, you can kill them.”

Karin was in the living room, talking on the phone, when he arrived home that evening. He went directly to the bar, poured a Martini from the waiting pitcher, kissed her briefly on the cheek, and then listened to her end of the conversation.

“Yes, Phyllis, of course I understand,” she said. “Well, babysitters are always difficult to come by, and I know I did give you rather short notice. We did so hope you could come, though. We wanted you to meet—Yes, I see. Well, there’ll be other times. Certainly. Thanks for calling. And give my regards to Mike, will you? ’Bye.”

She hung up and then went to Hank, putting her arms around his neck and giving him a real kiss. “There,” she said. “How’d the day go? May I have one of those?”

He poured a drink for her, sighed and said, “The plot sickens. I go into Harlem, and I feel as if I’m dipping my hands into a quagmire. I can’t see the bottom of it, Karin. All I can do is feel around with my hands and hope I don’t hit any sharp rocks or broken bottles. I talked with one of the girls who was with Morrez on the night he was stabbed. Do you know what it was he pulled out of his pocket? The thing the defense claims was a knife?”

“What?”

“A harmonica. How about that?”

“They’ll still claim their clients mistook it for a knife.”

“And well they might have.” He paused. “This Tower Reardon is shaping up as a real prize package, if I can believe his enemies.” He paused again. “Karin, I don’t think you’d believe the situation in Harlem unless you actually saw it. It’s almost too goddamn illogical. These kids are like armies massed to attack, with war counselors and armories—and the same blind enemy hatred. Their uniforms are their jackets and their cause is as meaningless as the causes that motivate most wars. They don’t even have an over-all theme to hold over their heads as a banner, no ‘Make the world safe for democracy,’ or ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ or any of the tried-and-true slogans used to inflame good patriots into anger. Their wars are just a way of life. It’s the only way they know. I mean, Harlem was a rotten place when I was a kid, but it’s more rotten now because something’s been added to the rottenness that comes with slums and poverty. It’s as if these kids, forced to live in a prison, have further subdivided their big prison into a lot of little prisons, creating arbitrary boundary lines, this is my turf, this is yours, you walk here and I’ll kill you, I walk there and I’m dead. It’s as if it wasn’t quite hard enough for them to begin with, they’ve had to make it harder by imposing a gridwork of minute ghettos upon the larger ghetto they were forced into. Do you know something, Karin? I think I could question them until I’m blue in the face, trying to find out why they fight. And I think they would tell me it’s because they have to protect their turf, or their girls, or their pride, or their national honor, or whatever the hell. And I think they really won’t know the answer themselves.”

He paused and studied his glass.

“Maybe there’s something to this ‘compulsive behavior’ idea, after all. Maybe all these kids are just sick.”

“Sick, sick, sick,” Karin said.

“It’d be funny,” he said solemnly, “if it weren’t so goddamn serious.”

“I didn’t mean to …”

“Karin, if those three boys hadn’t gone into Spanish Harlem to kill Morrez that night, I’m sure that three Puerto Rican boys, sooner or later, would have strolled into Italian Harlem and killed one of the Thunderbirds. I’ve heard them talking about their enemies. This isn’t kid cops-and-robbers stuff, Karin. When they say they’d like to kill someone, they mean they’d like to kill him. You can see it in their eyes.”

“You can’t excuse murderers on the grounds that they one day might be victims.”

“No, of course not. I was only thinking of what Mrs. Morrez said to me this evening. The mother of the dead boy.”

“Yes?”

“She said they were animals, the ones who killed her son. Are they animals, Karin?”

“I don’t know, Hank.”

“And if they are, who the hell put them into the forest they roam?”

“The same could be said of any murderer, Hank. All human beings are a product of their society. But we nonetheless have laws to protect …”

“If we send these three boys to the electric chair, will we stop three other boys from killing?”

“We might.”

“Yes, we might. But we might not. In which case we’d be adding the senseless murder of Di Pace, Aposto and Reardon to the senseless murder of Morrez. The only difference being that our murder will have had the sanction of society.”

“Wow!” Karin said. “You’d better go easy, my friend.”

“Where the hell is justice?” Hank asked. “What the hell is justice?”

The telephone rang. Karin went to it, lifted the receiver and said, “Hello?” She paused. “Oh, hello, Alice, how are you? Fine, thanks, everyone’s fine.” She paused again, listening. “Oh?” she said. “Oh, I see. Yes, well, that’s understandable. No, I wouldn’t expect you to leave him. Yes, I understand completely. I hope he feels better soon. Thank you for calling, Alice.” She replaced the receiver, a puzzled look on her face.

“Alice Benton?” Hank asked.

“Yes.”

“What’s the matter?”

“She can’t make it this Saturday.” She hesitated, nibbling her lip. “I invited some of the neighbors for dinner, Hank. To meet Abe Samalson.”

“Oh. Something wrong at the Bentons’?”

“Frank has a fever. Alice doesn’t think she should leave him alone.”

The telephone rang again. Karin turned to it and then looked at Hank. Slowly, she crossed the room to answer it.

“Hello? Yes, this is Karin. Hello, Marcia, how are you? No, you’re not interrupting dinner. Hank just got home a little while a—What?” She listened. “Oh. That’s too bad. We were looking forward to—Yes, mistakes can happen, especially when two separate calendars are kept. Yes, I understand. Certainly, Marcia. I’m glad you called.” She hung up and then stood by the phone.

“Marcia Di Carlo?”

“Yes.”

“Can’t make it this Saturday?”

“Can’t make it this Saturday,” Karin said, nodding.

“Reason?”

“Joe had made a previous engagement. Put it down on his calendar. When I called, she didn’t realize they had this other date. She begged off. Said they’d see us soon.” Karin paused. “That makes three cancellations so far, Hank.”

“Mmmmm. Do I detect the fine hand of McNalley and Pierce at work here?”

“I don’t know. Would our neighbors …?”

“Would our neighbors assume we were threatening their way of life by trying to find justice for a dead Puerto Rican? Karin, I don’t know. I gave our neighbors credit for a lot more intelligence and tolerance.”

The telephone rang again. “I’ll get it,” Hank said. He put down his drink and went to the phone. “Hello?”

“Hank?”

“Yes, who’s this?”

“George Talbot. How goes it, boy?”

“So-so. What’s up, George?”

“Ran into a slight snag, Hank boy. Afraid Dee and I will have to pass up the festivities this Saturday.”

“What kind of a snag, George?”

“The brain trust at my sweatshop decided they ought to send me to Syracuse for the weekend. To talk to a prospective sucker about his breakfast cereal. So what can I do? I’m a slave to the hidden persuaders, only this time they’re not so hidden.”

“I’d say they’re not hidden at all,” Hank said.

“Sure. So what’s more important, lad, a drink in the fist or bread and butter on the table?”

“Sure,” Hank said. “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow. That is, I think tomorrow. Be gone until Monday. Unless the big brass change their mind. In any case, I wouldn’t count on the Talbots.”

“Seen McNalley or Pierce lately?” Hank asked.

“Huh?”

“John and Fred,” Hank said. “Our good neighbors. Seen them recently?”

“Well, I always see them around. You know how it is.”

“I know exactly how it is, George. Thanks for calling. I’m sorry you can’t make it this Saturday. But then, a lot of other people in the neighborhood seem to have come down with the sniffles, or grandmothers dying out in Peoria. Maybe you can all get together and have a little party of your own.”

“What do you mean, Hank?”

“A sort of do-it-yourself party. You can make all kinds of interesting things.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Hank.”

“You can make a lovely wooden cross and then come set fire to it on my lawn.”

“Hank?”

“What is it, George?”

“I really do have to go to Syracuse. This has nothing to do with the junk McNalley and Pierce are spreading.”

“Okay.”

“Do you believe me?”

“What’s not to believe?”

“I just wanted you to know. I don’t ask your advice on how to write copy that sells cigarettes. And I don’t intend to tell you how to do your job.” Talbot paused. “Guilt by association is a sin, too, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, George. But this telephone has been going like crazy.”

“I just wanted you to know I haven’t joined the barbarian hordes. My reason for not coming is legit. As a matter of fact, I was looking forward to meeting Samalson.”

“Okay, George. I’m sorry you can’t make it. Thanks for calling.”

“See you soon,” Talbot said, and he hung up.

Hank replaced the receiver on its cradle. “Who else did you invite?” he asked.

“The Cronins.”

“They haven’t called yet?”

“No.”

“Think they will?”

“I don’t know.”

He went to her and took her in his arms. “Are you angry?”

“No. Just a little sad. I rather liked this neighborhood.”

“Stop talking as if we have to move out tomorrow.”

“That isn’t what I meant. I didn’t think the people here …” She shook her head. “Is it wrong for a man to do his job the way he feels it should be done?”

“I always felt that was the only way to do a job,” Hank said.

“Yes.” Karin paused. “So the hell with them. I’m selfish enough to want Abe’s company all to ourselves, anyway.”

“Sure,” Hank said, and he smiled.

“Only it makes me wonder. If these high-minded citizens of Inwood, these pillars of the community, these people who are shaping thought—if these people can behave this way, can we expect any more from the kids living in Harlem? Maybe there doesn’t have to be a reason, Hank. Maybe people would much rather hate than love.”

“I doubt it,” he said, and he smiled again. “I’d much rather love, wouldn’t you?”

“You’re a sex fiend,” she said. “One day you’ll be exposed and locked up for the rest of your natural life.”

The telephone rang.

“That’s the Cronins,” Hank said. “That should make it unanimous. We now know that everyone on the street thinks we should bury Morrez in a hurry and forget all about him. And maybe we should put up a statue in the park to the three kids who killed him. Do you want to answer it, or shall I?”

“I’ll take it,” Karin said.

“Bury Morrez before he begins to stink. Pat the young killers on the back and say, ‘A job well done, lads.’ And thereby win the acclaim of McNalley and Pierce and all the pure-white Protestants in the neighborhood.”

“The Cronins are Catholics,” Karin said. “You’re beginning to sound like McNalley.”

“I was using a figure of speech,” Hank said.

Karin lifted the receiver. “Hello?” she said. She listened for a moment and then, still listening, she nodded knowingly at Hank.

NINE

Judge Abraham Samalson sat in the outdoor slate patio of the Bell house in Inwood, a brandy snifter of cognac in his delicate hands. The sky to the west was peppered with stars, and the judge tilted his bald head and examined the heavens, and all the while he rolled the glass of cognac in his thin hands, and occasionally he sniffed at the bouquet, and occasionally he drank. Music came from the hi-fi setup inside the house, oozing onto the patio, where Karin had planted a wild array of summer-blooming flowers that formed the flanking walls of the terrace. The open side of the terrace faced the river and the New Jersey cliffs on the opposite shore.

“That was a nice job Barton did on you in the newspapers, Hank,” Samalson said.

“Oh, very nice,” Hank agreed.

“I think it’ll work in reverse for you. It makes you sound very dashing and romantic. Who is there in the entire city of New York who hasn’t longed to lift the skirts of an Irish lass? Not that I believe a word of the story’s implications. But it serves to illustrate the dangers of incompetent composition. Barton starts out to kill you, and what does he achieve? He creates a romantic figure.”

“I didn’t think the story was so romantic,” Hank said.

“You’re too sensitive. The Mike Bartons of America are people to laugh at, not to hate. Give Barton a trench coat and a juicy piece of gossip and he’s happy. He can play at being a reporter.”

“I think he’s a dangerous man,” Hank said.

“Only if we take him seriously. If we laugh at him, the danger is immediately dissipated.”

“I wish I could agree with you, Abe,” Hank said.

“You never did agree with me, so I see no reason for you to begin now. You were the most argumentative student I ever had in any of my classes, and I taught law for fourteen years. I might add, in the fairness becoming my role as a magistrate, that you were also the most promising student I ever had.”

“Thank you.”

“I think I can safely say, in fact, that in the fourteen years I taught law I had only six students who I thought should be lawyers. The rest should have been shoe clerks.” Samalson paused. “Or is that a prejudiced statement?”

“A bit snobbish perhaps, but …”

“I’m referring to Danny Di Pace’s father. He runs a shoe store, doesn’t he?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“What sort of a person is he?”

“I’ve never met him.”

“He must be—Well, forget it.”

“What were you going to say?”

“Only that delinquency doesn’t simply spring from the soil. If a kid turns bad, chances are nine out of ten you’ll find some sort of trouble with the parents.”

“So what do we do? Prosecute the parents instead of the kids?”

“I don’t know what we do, Hank. The law makes no provision for the allocation of blame. If three men conspire together to commit a murder and only one of them actually pulls the trigger of the gun, the three are nonetheless tried for acting in concert. On the other hand, if parents, through neglect or overindulgence, or just plain indifference, produce a boy who stabs another boy, the parents are not considered the lawbreakers. But have they not, in all fairness, contributed to the crime? Weren’t they, too, acting in concert?”

“You’re saying we should arrest the parents, too?”

“I’m saying nothing of the sort, and I won’t have you pulling any of your trick shyster-lawyer questions on me.” Samalson chuckled. “I’m simply asking a question. Where does the blame begin? And where does it end?”

“That’s the big question, Abe. Answer that one, and you can start your own TV quiz show.”

“I get that question every day in my courtroom. And every day I make my decision, and I pass my sentence as specified by law, the punishment to fit the crime. But sometimes I wonder about justice.”

“You? Abe, you don’t!”

“Ah, but I do, and this is strictly out of school and if you ever repeat it to a goddamn soul, I’ll tell the newspapers that you once prepared a theoretical defense of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.”

“He never forgets a thing, Karin,” Hank said. “He’s got a mind like a blotter.”

“Spongy and blue,” Samalson said.

“I’m interested to know why you doubt justice,” Karin said.

“I didn’t say I doubted it, I said I wondered about it.” He turned to Hank. “Are you training her to be a shyster, too?”

“She’s the best damn lawyer in New York,” Hank said. “You should hear some of our arguments.”

“Well, how do you wonder about it?” Karin persisted.

“Look at her,” Samalson said. “Like a terrier with a bone, anxious to start gnawing at it. I wonder about justice, my dear, because I’m not sure I’ve ever dispensed real justice in my courtroom.”

“And just what is real justice?”

“Real justice is nonexistent,” Samalson said. “Is retribution justice? Is there justice in the Bible’s eye for an eye? I doubt it.”

“Then where is there justice?” Hank asked.

“To be just is to be actuated by truth and lack of bias, to be equitable and evenhanded. There is no such thing as justice.”

“Why not?”

“Because men administer justice. And there is no such thing as a truthful, equitable, evenhanded, unprejudiced man.”

“Then we might just as well forget law and order,” Hank said. “We might just as well become barbarians.”

“No. The law was designed by men to fill the needs of men. If our justice is not pure, it is at least an attempt to maintain the inherent dignity of man. If someone has been wronged, it is the duty of society to give him redress. Your Rafael Morrez was allegedly wronged. An act of larceny was committed against him. The grandest sort of larceny. His life was stolen from him. And now Morrez, or society speaking for Morrez, is seeking redress. You are protecting the dignity of Rafael Morrez by prosecuting those who allegedly wronged him.”

“And this is justice,” Hank said.

“No, this is not justice. Because if we were truly seeking justice, the Rafael Morrez case would consume a lifetime. Don’t you see, Hank? In our courtrooms, we are concerned only with blacks and whites. Did these three boys commit this crime against this other boy? If so, they are guilty of first-degree murder and must be punished as specified by law. If not, they are free. But where are the grays? How can a man be fair, and truthful, and equitable, when he has only the most obvious black and white facts before him?”

“The county will present all the facts, Abe. You know that.”

“The facts of the crime, yes. And, of course, there will be psychologists presented by both sides, and the defense will try to show that these poor boys were misguided and a product of our times, and you will try to show that we cannot blame our times for the product, that a modern murderer is no different from a Colonial murderer. Three weeks from now, the jury will listen to all this, weighing the facts of the crime, and I will guide them as to points of law in the case. And then they will turn in their verdict. And if they decide the boys are not guilty, I shall free them. And if they decide the boys are guilty of first-degree murder, and if they do not ask for leniency, I shall do what I am duty-bound and sworn to do. I shall administer sentence as prescribed by the law. I shall send those three boys to the electric chair.”

“Yes,” Hank said, and he nodded.

“But will that be justice?” Samalson shook his head doubtfully. “Crime and punishment. A noble concept. But how much of our system of punishment is based on the guilt-ridden complexity of modern man? Are we satisfying our own hunger for self-punishment every time we level sentence on a so-called criminal?”

“You can’t apply modern psychology to laws conceived thousands of years ago, Abe.”

“Can’t I? What makes you think man has changed so very much in the past thousand years? We’re the guiltiest animals on the face of the earth. And we share a race memory of guilt. And we cover our shame with the high-flown notion that justice will triumph. But I’ll tell you something, Hank, and this I firmly believe, and it has nothing to do with my ability to judge a case as I’m supposed to. I do that very well within the specified confines of my job. But I do not believe that justice very often triumphs. There are more murderers loose than I’d care to count. And I’m not talking about the people who pull the trigger or plunge the blade. Until mankind can decide where the act of murder begins, there will be no real justice. There will only be men armed with rhetoric and—like our friend Mike Barton in his reporter role—they will only be playing at the game of administering justice. They will only be fakes.”

Samalson looked up at the stars.

Somberly he said, “Maybe it takes a God. We’re only men.”

He began preparing his case on Monday and, with the trial three weeks away, he found he could not get the judge’s words out of his mind.

Usually, Hank was a careful and meticulous worker, preparing his cases with the preciseness of a mathematician. It was his contention that a lawyer should never make the mistake of thinking a jury would appreciate subtleties. Beginning with the assumption that a jury knew nothing whatever about the law or the case being tried, it was his task to present the facts so that, once understood, they led to an inescapable conclusion. In offering the facts, he tried to leave nothing to the imagination. Piece by piece, he built his jigsaw puzzle. By the time he was ready to make his closing statement, the scattered evidence would have locked together into a clear and indisputable picture from which one conclusion, and one conclusion alone, could be drawn. The skill of such a trial performance depended largely upon the groundwork he did in his office before the trial. It was no simple task to batter a jury with facts and at the same time leave them convinced that they had done all their own reasoning. He was, in a sense, demanding total identification from them. Moving from the jury box into the figure of the prosecutor, they were in the position of being able to assay the facts as he himself had done earlier. But, and he knew this with the instincts of an actor, the jury needed more than identification. They demanded, too, a performance. They wanted to see a show, especially in a murder trial. And so it became important to decide which witnesses preceded others, how the testimony given could be presented so that it built to a logical and seemingly effortless climax of overwhelming truth. And, in addition to this, he had the defense’s case to worry about. He had to be prepared for whatever they might hurl at him. In effect, he had to prepare two cases—his own, and the defense’s as well.

His desk on that Monday morning three weeks before the trial was a clutter of disorder. Slips of paper covered its top, each held in place with a metal paperweight. Large lined pads were filled with scribbled notes. Folders of testimony taken by civil-service stenographers were stacked at one corner of the desk. A folder containing the psychological report rested near his telephone. And his memo pad held jottings of things yet to do:

Call Police lab! Where the hell is report on knives?

See Johnny Di Pace?

Leader of Thunderbirds—Big Dom?

Jennie’s birthday, August 26

In the midst of the disorder, there was an order known only to Hank. It disturbed him that the police laboratory had not yet presented its report on the murder weapons. On his tentative mind graph of the trial’s chronological progression, he could visualize the presentation of the weapons as one of the highest peaks on the steadily rising dramatic line. He intended to start with witnesses who would testify to the events leading up to the killing, intended to reconstruct that July night in the courtroom as if it were happening before the jury’s eyes. He could almost hear his words now—“The boys put these knives into their pockets, these knives. They are not penknives. They are not knives used for mumblety-peg. They are weapons.” And then he would press the stud on one of the knives and allow the blade to snap open. He knew the device would be effective. Props were always effective and knives automatically generated excitement. There was something inherently menacing about a knife, any knife. A switch blade held the added element of surprise, the long blade snapping from the handle with sudden viciousness. And he knew, too, that most people would rather face the snout of an automatic pistol than stare at the tempered steel length of a blade. In the mind of the ordinary citizen, a shooting was something which happened in the movies. But every ordinary citizen had cut himself accidentally at one time or another, had seen the flow of blood, had known what a knife or a razor blade or a seemingly harmless kitchen utensil can do to flesh.

Hank would use the knives well, playing on the natural fear of blades and coupling this with the direct testimony of the killers themselves, whom he intended to call to the witness chair last. He knew, of course, that the boys could not be forced to testify against themselves, and that if they refused to take the stand, Judge Samalson would immediately inform the jury that this was in no way to be construed as an admission of guilt. But he felt certain that Aposto would be allowed to testify, if only to establish his low mentality. And the jury’s unconscious adverse reaction to anyone who refused to take the stand would be doubled against Reardon and Di Pace if one boy were allowed to speak and the others restrained. Besides, with a plea of self-defense the one chance the boys had, it did not seem likely that their attorneys would advise them against testifying. So he felt fairly certain he could get them into the witness chair, and once there he would pry from their own mouths the story of what had happened that night. But first he would present the knives.

So where the hell was the report?

Annoyed, he dialed the police laboratory at headquarters on Centre Street and was connected with a man named Alex Hardy.

“This is Mr. Bell of the Homicide Bureau,” he said. “I’m prosecuting the Rafael Morrez case, which comes to trial three weeks from today. I’ve been expecting a report on the murder weapons, but I haven’t received one as yet. I’m preparing my case now, and I’d like to use whatever you can give me on those knives.”

“Morrez, Morrez, oh, yes,” Hardy said. “That Puerto Rican kid. Yes, we have the knives, all right.”

“I know you have them. How about the report?”

“Well, that’s another thing again.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Dennis is on vacation, you see.”

“Who’s Dennis?”

“Dennis Bennel. He’s head of the lab.”

“So?”

“So he didn’t leave any instructions concerning those knives.”

“Well, who’s second in command there? Does your whole shop fall to pieces when one man goes on vacation?”

“Not at all, not at all. And there’s really no need to get snotty, Mr. Bell. We’re only doing our job here.”

“Your job was to run some tests on those knives. When will I have that report?”

“I’m just a working stiff, Mr. Bell. You’re wasting your time getting sore with me.”

“Whom do you suggest I get sore with?”

“I’ll connect you with Lieutenant Canotti. Maybe he can help you.”

Hardy covered the mouthpiece. Hank impatiently tapped a letter opener on the desk. A brusque voice came onto the line.

“Canotti here.”

“This is Assistant District Attorney Bell of the Homicide Bureau. I asked for a report on the murder weapons in the Rafael Morrez case. I still haven’t received it. Your man just told me Mr. Bennel …”

“Lieutenant Bennel. Yes?”

“… is out of the office on vacation. Now how do I go about getting that report?”

“Just ask,” Canotti said.

“I’m asking.”

“Okay. What’s all the heat about?”

“I’m trying the case in three weeks, that’s what all the heat is about. Listen, what is this? Some sort of a comic routine?”

“I’ll put somebody to work on the knives as soon as possible, Mr. Bell.”

“Thanks a lot. When will I have the report?”

“As soon as it’s ready.”

“And when will that be?”

“We’re a little understaffed at the moment. Half our men are on vacation, and there are murders being committed every day in this fair city, Mr. Bell. Now I’m sure you feel that the prosecution of a case is more important than the solving of another case, but our police department feels differently. We can’t satisfy everybody, Mr. Bell. We plod along and try to do our level best. But then, I’m sure you’re not interested in our internal problems.”

“Nor in your irony, Lieutenant. Can I have that report by the beginning of next week?”

“Certainly. If it’s ready.”

“Lieutenant Canotti, I’d hate like hell to have to go into the D.A.’s office on this.”

“I’d hate that to happen, too, Mr. Bell. Especially since we are now engaged on a project dumped into our laps by one of the Mayor’s committees. Do you understand, Mr. Bell?”

“I do. If I haven’t got that report by next Monday morning, you’ll be hearing from me.”

“Nice talking to you,” Canotti said, and he hung up.

Hank slammed down the receiver. How the hell was he supposed to get to the bottom of this without co-operation? How could he show the beginning, the middle, and the end of a murder without …

Until mankind can decide where the act of murder begins, there will be no justice.

The judge’s words. Strange words for a man sitting on the bench.

Well, he could not concern himself with the intricate problems of mankind. No. No matter what the judge said, Hank’s duty was clear. To prosecute a case according to the grand jury indictment. First degree murder. That was it, and that was all. Was he supposed to indict the entire city of New York? Of did it end there? Where did it go? The state? The nation? The world? You could extend responsibility to the outer reaches of time and come up with the conflicting opinion that everyone and no one was responsible. In which case, the murderers would roam the streets and havoc would replace civilization.

No.

He knew what he had to do. Present his case. Show the facts. Convict the three killers.

Purposefully, he picked up the folder containing the psychological report on Anthony Aposto. The letter from Bellevue Hospital was addressed to Judge Abraham Louis Samalson, from whom the court order remanding Aposto to Bellevue had been obtained. It read:

DEPARTMENT OF HOSPITALS

Bellevue Hospital, Psychiatric Division

CONFIDENTIAL—

THIS IS A PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATION

To: Judge Abraham Louis Samalson, Court of General Sessions, Part III.

In response to your remand of Anthony Aposto on July 25th, 1958, we beg to submit the following report of his psychological examination administered on July 28th, 1958, by Charles Addison, M.A., staff psychologist assigned Ward PQ-5:

Tests Administered:

1.  Wexler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale

2.  Rorschach Test

3.  Machover Figure Drawing Test

4.  Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test

Wexler–Bellevue:

Yields three scores, verbal I. Q., performance I. Q., and full scale I. Q.;

Verbal Scale (Information, vocabulary, arithmeic, abstract reasoning, social reasoning and memory)

Verbal I. Q.: 59

Performance Scale (Picture arrangement, picture completion, object assembly, block design, digit symbol)

Performance I. Q.: 82

Full Scale (Approximate average of verbal and performance scales, corrected for age)

Full Scale I. Q.: 67

Rorschach:

Patient gave very few responses, most of which were simple popular responses. Seemed to expend little effort and had many F-minus responses indicative of poor sense of reality and poor judgment. Emotional control very poor, with a preponderance of pure color responses.

Machover:

Figure drawings typically those of a much younger child, perhaps a ten-year-old, and were pathognomic for mental deficiency. Drawings also indicated poor impulse control.

Bender:

Drawings were negative for organic involvement. Strongly suggestive, however, of mental deficiency.

SUMMARY and CONCLUSIONS:

All techniques administered are indicative of mental deficiency. The Wexler-Bellevue subtest patterning indicates that this youngster is presently functioning at or close to his endowment level, which falls high in the mental-deficiency category. His Rorschach is typical. Poor contact with reality, poor judgment and extremely poor emotional control are indicated. The Machover Test—a projective test similar to the Rorschach wherein the patient through his drawings of the human body projects aspects of his own personality—supports these findings. The Bender Test, from which we may obtain indications of organicity such as brain tumors, etc., indicates that there is no organic central nervous system condition here. Diagnosis offered: Mental deficiency in an emotionally immature, poorly developed personality.

Respectfully submitted,

Walter J. Deregeaux, M.D.,

Assistant Director, Psychiatric Division

Bellevue Hospital

Hank put the report back into its folder.

If there had been any doubt before about the defense for Batman Aposto, there was none now. And, in the face of the report—a copy of which had undoubtedly been furnished to the defense attorneys, too—Hank knew he didn’t stand a chance of convicting Aposto. Nor, truly, did he feel there would be any real justice in such a conviction.

Real justice is nonexistent.

The judge’s words again. And certainly, would it not be just for Aposto to pay for a crime he’d committed, no matter what his mental state? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Where did the person Aposto end, and the personality Aposto begin? What divided the killer from the mental deficient? Were they not one and the same person? Admittedly they were. And yet you could not send a boy with the mental age of a ten-year-old to the electric chair. This would not be justice. This would simply be blind animal reaction.

Blind.

Rafael Morrez was blind. And was not his deficiency as great as the low mentality of Anthony Aposto? Yes, but his blindness did not save him from Aposto’s quick sentence. And yet Aposto’s mentality would save him from the sentence of the state. And that, Hank thought, is the difference between animals and men.

Justice, he thought.

Justice.

On Wednesday evening of that week, he was not thinking of justice. He was instead filled with an all-consuming rage at the injustice of what was happening to him.

He had worked late at the office, preparing an outline for the questioning of Louisa Ortega. He had decided to use the fact that the girl was a prostitute, rather than try to hide it from the jury. The defense would only shatter her testimony later if he concealed her occupation, and so he tried to fashion the questions he would ask her so that she would emerge as a victim of circumstance, a girl forced into the oldest profession because of poverty and hunger. He did not think it wise to reveal the fact that the girl had had relations with Morrez on at least one known occasion. His jury-image of Morrez was that of the defenseless blind boy, the victim of three cold-blooded murderers. He did not wish to destroy this ideal image by offering the jury a glimpse at something they might consider sordid.

He would, of course, be very careful in the selection of jury members. He was allowed an unlimited number of challenges for cause, and he was allowed to peremptorily challenge a total of thirty-six prospective jurors. He could, for example, excuse a man simply because he did not like the color of his eyes. Ideally, he’d have wanted at least three Puerto Ricans on the jury. He knew this would be impossible, and he’d consider himself lucky if the defense permitted him to empanel even one. He debated in his own mind whether or not he preferred men or women on the jury and decided that it didn’t make much difference either way. Whereas men would more readily accept the testimony of Louisa Ortega, they might unconsciously identify with the virility of the three killers. And whereas a woman’s maternal instinct might cause her to embrace the image of Morrez protectively, she would certainly rebel against anything a prostitute said under oath.

As it almost always did, it would break down to a sense of feel. He would know instantly when questioning a prospective juror whether this man or woman would be impartial. He knew lawyers who maintained that the best way to select a jury was to accept immediately the first twelve men or women and let it go at that. He did not agree with them. He felt that there was more to winning a case than pure chance, and he tried to establish during the questioning period whether or not the jury member would like him personally. He was, after all, an actor in a show—one of the stars—and unless the jury empathized with him his case would indeed be a difficult one.

His own personal gauge was a prospective juror’s eyes. He always stood very close to the man or woman he was questioning, and he liked to believe that he could read intelligence or lack of intelligence, fairness or prejudice, empathy or antagonism in that person’s eyes. Perhaps his gauge was fallacious. He had certainly empaneled jurors in open-and-shut cases only to have the verdict go finally against him. But if the eyes were not the windows of the soul (and he had forgotten who made that original observation) he did not know which part of the body was a more accurate measure of what went on inside a man.

He called Karin at six to say that he would not be home for dinner.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “That means I’ll be eating alone.”

“Isn’t Jennie home?”

“No, she’s gone out.”

“Where in the name of God does that girl go all the time?”

“There’s a new Brando picture at Radio City. She went with some of the girls.”

“Neighborhood girls?” he asked pointedly.

“No. The neighborhood girls seem to be avoiding our daughter. She called some friends from school.”

“What the devil,” Hank muttered. “Can’t they even leave her alone? What time will she be back, Karin?”

“Not too late. Don’t worry about it. There are two detectives prowling the house like sentries. One of them is very good-looking. I may invite him in for dinner.”

“Ja, ja, you do that.”

“Would it make you jealous?”

“Not in the slightest,” he said. “But it may lead to a homicide in Inwood. Honey, I may be home very late. Don’t wait up for me if you don’t feel like it.”

“I’ll wait up. Hank, if you get lonely, call me again, will you?”

“I will.”

“All right, darling. Goodbye.”

He hung up, smiling, and went back to work.

At 7:10 P.M. his telephone rang. Absent-mindedly he lifted it from the receiver and said, “Hello?”

“Mr. Bell?” a voice asked.

“Yes,” he said.

There was no answer.

“Yes, this is Mr. Bell.”

He waited. There was still no answer.

“Hello?” he said.

The silence on the phone was unpunctuated, unbroken. He waited with the receiver in his fist, saying nothing, listening, waiting for the sound of the phone being hung up on the other end. The sound did not come. In the stillness of his office, the silence on the phone seemed magnified. He was aware all at once that his hand was sweating on the black plastic of the receiver.

“Who is this?” he said.

He thought he could hear breathing on the other end of the line. He tried to remember what the voice which had said “Mr. Bell?” sounded like, but he could not.

“If you have something to say, say it,” he said to the empty phone.

He wet his lips. His heart was pounding, and he resented the foolish staccato beat in his chest.

“I’m hanging up,” he said, not expecting the words to find voice, surprised when they did. His statement had no effect on the party at the other end. The silence persisted, broken intermittently by staticlike sounds, the minute impulses of electricity on any telephone wire.

He slammed the receiver back onto its cradle.

When he picked up the outline on Louisa Ortega, his hands were trembling.

He left the office at nine that night.

Fanny, her white-thatched head drooping slightly, opened the doors of the one elevator which was still running.

“Hello, Hank,” she said. “Burning the midnight?”

“Got to wrap up this Morrez case,” he told her.

“Yeah,” she said. She closed the doors. “Well, what’re you going to do? That’s life.”

Solemnly, remembering the shaggy-dog story, Hank said, “Life is a fountain.”

“Huh?” Fanny said. “What do you mean, life is a fountain?”

He looked at her with a mock stunned expression. “You mean life isn’t a fountain?”

“Hank,” she said, wagging her head, “you’re working too hard. Close the windows in your office. Don’t let the sun in.”

He grinned, and then he remembered the silent phone call, and the grin dropped from his mouth. In the street outside, the buildings of justice had closed their faces for the night. An occasional light burned like an unblinking eye in the otherwise gray façades of the buildings. The streets, thronged with counselors and clerks and offenders and witnesses during the daytime, were almost empty at this hour. He glanced at his watch. Nine-ten. With luck, he’d be home before ten o’clock. A nightcap with Karin, outdoors perhaps, and then to bed. It was a beautiful balmy night, and the night stirred something deep inside him, a memory impulse leaping into vague restless prominence. He could not pinpoint the memory, but he felt very young all at once, and he knew the memory was connected with his youth, the smell of a summer night, the giant black arc overhead dotted with swarming stars, the sound of the city all around him, the myriad sounds gathering and rising to become the sound that only a city possessed, the heartbeat of a metropolis. It was a night to drive along the West Side Highway with the top of a convertible down and the jewel lights of the city gleaming in the sky, reflecting on the waters of the Hudson. It was a night for listening to “Laura,” a night designed to show man that romance was a very real thing which had nothing whatever to do with the daily grind of the rat race.

He was unconsciously smiling when he entered City Hall Park. His step, too, was lighter, and his shoulders were back and his head was erect and he felt as if he owned the city of New York. Lock, stock, and barrel, the city was his, a giant wonderland of peaks and minarets and soaring towers designed for his pleasure alone. He hated this city, but, by God, it sang in his blood, it roared there like the intricate tonality of a Bach fugue, it was his city, and he was a part of it, and as he walked beneath the spreading leaf canopy of the park trees he felt as if he were merging with the concrete and the asphalt and the steel and the blazing tungsten, as if he were truly the city personified, and he knew for a fleeting instant how Frankie Anarilles felt when he walked the streets of Spanish Harlem.

And then he saw the boys.

There were eight of them, and they sat on two benches flanking either side of the path which wound through the small park. The lampposts along the path, he noticed, had either gone out accidentally or been put out. In any case, the benches upon which the boys sat were in total darkness and he could not see the boys’ faces. The area of blackness, intensified by the high covering arch of the heavily laden trees, spread for at least fifty feet along the path. The darkness began not ten feet ahead of him.

He hesitated.

His stride broke, and he remembered the telephone call—“Mr. Bell?”—and then the silence, and he wondered if that call had been made to ascertain the fact that he was still in the office. There were two detectives assigned to his home in Inwood, but … Suddenly he was frightened.

The boys sat motionless on the benches. Silently, like wax figures shrouded in impenetrable darkness, they sat and waited.

He decided to turn and walk out of the park.

And then he decided he was being foolish. There was nothing ominous about a group of young kids sitting in a park in the middle of a city. For God’s sake, there were probably a thousand policemen cruising the area! His right foot touched the patch of darkness on the path, moved into it, followed by his left, and then his right again, and then the darkness was everywhere around him as he approached the benches and their silent cargo, the fear returning in him with alarming suddenness.

The boys sat quietly. There was no talking—hardly any breathing, it seemed to him—as he passed between the two benches looking neither to the left nor the right, neither acknowledging their presence nor denying it.

The attack came swiftly, surprisingly because, if anything, he expected a punch to be hurled, but instead something lashed across his chest, something hard and sinuous, something alive with fury. He balled his fists and turned to the first attacker, but the same live terror leaped out of the darkness at his back, and he heard the rattle of metal, the sound of chains, chains? can it be they’re using? and then he felt the sharp snap of metal across his face, and now there was no doubt that the weapons in the hands of these eight boys were tire chains, skid chains, spiked with metal prongs to catch at the snow, wielded with surprising deftness and agility.

He threw a punch at a shadowy figure and someone grunted in pain, and then from behind him another of the skid chains whipped at his legs and he felt raw pain rocket up his spine to explode inside his skull. Another of the flailing chains whipped across his chest, and he seized at it with his hands, pulling at it, feeling the ripping of his flesh as his hands tore across the metal prongs.

There was a curious silence to the scene. None of the boys spoke. Occasionally they grunted when he struck one of them, but they said nothing intelligible. There was only the sound of heavy labor, and the sound of the metal chains lunging into the darkness, colliding with his body until he felt pain everywhere and still the chains would not stop their metallic methodical beating. A chain struck the calf of his right leg, and he felt himself losing his balance, and he thought I must not fall, they’ll stomp me, they’ll kick me with combat boots, and then his shoulder slammed against the concrete path and a kick exploded against his rib cage, and another set of tire chains descended on his face with the wild power of a medieval mace. And then the chains and the boots joined in a medley of organized pain, and still there was no sound but the chains and the labored breathing of the boys and far off the muted hum of an automobile engine somewhere on the street.

He was filled with rage, an impotent blind rage that threatened to consume him, overwhelming the shrieking pain he knew. There was injustice to this beating, but at the hands of his assailants he was helpless, helpless to stop the prongs which tore at his clothes and his flesh, helpless to stop the thick leather of the boots as they descended on him. Stop it, you goddamn fools! he screamed mentally. Do you want to kill me? What are you solving? What the hell are you solving?

A kick tore open his face. He could feel the skin ripping apart like the skin of a frankfurter on the outdoor barbecue grill of his home in Inwood, his face tearing, it was funny, the warm flow of blood, I must protect my teeth, the city swarming about him, all the sounds of the city rushing into the vortex of fifty-foot blackness on the path of the park, and the chains whipping, and the boots, the boots, and within him the outrage at the injustice, the impotent outrage suffocating him, rising inside him until a shocking star-shell explosion of pain rocked the back of his head and sent him soaring wildly into unconsciousness.

And in that last instant before the darkness became complete, he realized that he didn’t know whether his attackers were the Thunderbirds or the Horsemen.

And it didn’t make a damned bit of difference either way.

TEN

She stood by the bed.

She wore a white skirt and a black sweater, and her blond hair was pulled back into a pony tail captured by a small black ribbon.

“Hello, Dad,” she said.

“Hello, Jennie.”

“How do you feel?”

“A little better.”

He had been in the hospital for three days now, but this was the first time Jennie had come to visit. Sitting up in bed with his face and his body bandaged, he looked at the sunlight playing on his daughter’s hair, and he thanked God that the pain was gone now. The only pain now was in the memory of what had happened to him. The police had found him on the park path a little after midnight. The path around him had been stained with blood, and the hospital doctors later told him he’d been in deep shock. They’d dressed his wounds and filled him with sedatives and now, three days later, the pain in his body was gone. But the other pain still lingered, a pain of puzzlement, the pain of not being able to understand an attack that was senseless and cruel.

“Why did they beat you, Dad?” Jennie asked.

“I’m not sure,” he answered.

“Did it have something to do with the Morrez case?”

“Yes. In a twisted way, I suppose it did.”

“Are you doing something wrong?”

“Wrong? Why, no. What makes you think that?”

Jennie shrugged.

“What is it, Jennie?”

“Nothing. Just … the way the kids in the neighborhood have begun treating me, like a leper or something. I thought—I thought maybe you were doing something wrong.”

“I don’t think I am, Jennie.”

“All right,” she said. She paused. “Mommy went to see that boy the police picked up.”

“What boy?”

“The one who wrote you the threatening letter. About the Thunderbirds. You know the one.”

“Yes?”

“Well, they picked up the boy who wrote it. I guess your beating finally goosed the police into action.”

“Jennie, that’s hardly the proper language for a young lady to—”

“Anyway, they got him, Daddy. He’s a cripple.”

“A cripple?”

“A polio victim. He walks with a limp. They had his picture in the newspaper. He looked very sad, Daddy.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. When I saw his picture, I wondered what it would be like to be crippled and—and growing up in Harlem. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Mommy went to see him this morning. The police let her. She asked him if he’d meant the threat, if he’d really meant that he would kill you.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said, ‘Yes, goddamnit! Why would I send the note otherwise?’”

“Jennie, your language …”

“I’m only quoting him, Dad.” She paused. “But he wasn’t in on the beating. He isn’t even one of the Thunderbirds, and he has an alibi for the night you were beat up. I talked to Mommy on the phone before I came over here. She said they’ll release him as soon as someone puts up the bail for him.”

“How much?”

“Two thousand dollars. Daddy, will this sound strange?”

“What, Jennie?”

“If I had two thousand dollars, I’d put it up for bail. Because, Daddy, he looked so sad. He looked so damn sad.” She paused. “Does that make any sense to you?”

“A little,” he said.

Jennie nodded. “Will they be letting you out of here soon?”

“A week,” he said. “Maybe a little longer.”

“They hurt you pretty badly, didn’t they?”

“Yes.”

“How does it feel? To get beat up, I mean.”

“Well, it doesn’t feel good,” he said, and he attempted a smile.

“Daddy, whichever way this case works out, isn’t … isn’t there the possibility that you may be beaten up again?”

“I suppose there’s that possibility.”

“Are you afraid?”

He met her eyes with his own, and he saw that she was seeking honesty, but he lied nonetheless. “No,” he said, “I’m not afraid,” and he knew instantly he’d made a mistake by lying.

Jennie turned her head away from him. “Well,” she said, “I guess I ought to be scramming. Mommy said to tell you she’ll be here tonight.”

“Will you come again, Jennie?” he asked.

“Do you want me to?” she said, and again her eyes met his.

“Yes, I’d like you to.”

“I’ll try,” she said.

“Maybe … maybe we’ll be able to talk.”

“Maybe.”

“I meant without nurses or anything interrupting.”

“Yes. I know what you meant. The way we used to talk when I was a little girl.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe,” she said again. “But it’ll have to be after next week sometime. Mommy’s sending me to Rockaway to stay with the Andersons.”

“Oh? When was this decided?”

“Last night.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“A week.” Jennie hesitated. “I think Mommy’s afraid something might happen to me if I stay in the city.”

“I see,” Hank said.

“Do you think something might happen to me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well …” Jennie shrugged. “I’ll be going now, Dad.” She bent over the bed and kissed him hastily. “Take good care of yourself.”

She walked to the door, and he watched it close gently behind her. And then she was gone.

The next week went by very slowly, despite Karin’s daily visits. He thought of the attack often during that long, lonely week, and he wondered if he would ever be well enough to forget that Wednesday night, ever be well enough to forget the silent savagery of the boys who had attacked him. He had learned quite a bit from the beating. He had learned, to begin with, that a beating reduced a man to nothing more and nothing less than an open wound shrieking its pain to the night. A man was powerless when attacked by a gang intent on administering a merciless, methodical beating. The gang was a cold jury, a harsh judge, an emotionless hangman. And, lacking emotional content, the beating took on even more horrifying meaning. A man who’d been beaten, Hank knew, would never forget the pain, and the humiliation, and the empty terror of his helplessness.

And yet, the gangs in Harlem conducted warfare on a regular basis. Didn’t each gang skirmish have, by simple logic, a winning side and a losing side? And hadn’t each gang member experienced at one time or another the pain of defeat in battle? A battle, he reminded himself, is not a beating. But still, didn’t they enter each fight with fear? How could they face guns, and knives, and broken bottles—and tire chains—without fear? How could they rationalize the knowledge that if they fell they would surely be stomped into the pavement? Were they fearless heroes, men of steel, nerveless men of action?

No.

They were afraid. He knew they were afraid. And yet they fought. For what?

For what?

He did not know the answer. The question plagued him all that week. On the day before his release, the question still echoed in his mind. He wondered if this last day would ever pass, if he would ever truly leave this damned clean, sterile, antiseptic isolation booth. He was thankful for the respite from his thoughts and his loneliness when, at two that afternoon, his nurse, a woman in her fifties, walked into the room.

“Do you feel like talking to someone, Mr. Bell?” she asked.

“Any time,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh, not me,” she said. “There’s a visitor outside.”

“Oh? Who?”

“A man named John Di Pace.”

“And he wants to talk to me?”

“Yes.”

“Send him in, won’t you?”

“Provided you don’t get all excited,” the nurse said.

“Dear,” he told her, “I’m getting out of here tomorrow. How are you ever going to survive without me to fuss over?”

The nurse smiled. “We’ll miss you sorely,” she said. “You’re the nastiest patient we ever had on this floor. I guess the beating didn’t teach you anything.”

“It taught me the pleasures of an alcohol rub,” he said, and he winked lewdly.

“You’re impossible. I’ll send in Mr. Di Pace.”

He adjusted the pillows behind him and waited for Di Pace’s appearance. He felt rather odd. He was about to meet the man who had taken Mary from him so long ago, when Mary had meant so much, and he felt no rancor now, only an absorbing curiosity. Nor did the curiosity have anything to do with Mary. He realized with a start that he was not interested in meeting the husband of Mary Di Pace; he was only interested in meeting the father of Danny Di Pace.

A knock sounded on the door.

“Come in,” he said. “It’s open.”

The door swung wide, and John Di Pace entered the room. He was a tall man who seemed embarrassed by his own height as he walked hesitantly toward the bed. His hair was dark and his eyes were brown, and Hank wondered what quirk of nature had provided Danny with his mother’s recessive coloration. The man provided an instant impression of gentleness. Not knowing Di Pace, never having heard him speak, Hank instantly knew that he was one of the gentle people, and he was suddenly glad he was here.

“Sit down, Mr. Di Pace,” he said, and he extended his hand. Di Pace took it. Fumblingly, he sat.

“I didn’t know whether I should come or not,” Di Pace said. His voice was low, almost a whisper, and Hank instinctively knew again that this was a man who rarely raised his voice in anger. “But I read about what happened, and I … I thought I should come. I hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s a pleasure to see you,” Hank said.

“How do you feel?”

“Okay now. I’m getting out of here tomorrow.”

“Oh. Then I just caught you in time.”

“Yes.”

Di Pace hesitated. “Was it as bad as the newspapers said?”

“I guess so. Yes.”

“Eight of them,” Di Pace said, and he shook his head. “I can’t understand it.” He paused. “Can you?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“Was it the—the Puerto Ricans? Or Danny’s friends?”

“I don’t know. It was dark.”

“Not that it matters,” Di Pace said, and he laughed nervously and then stopped, and in his eyes there was the greatest sadness Hank had ever seen on the face of a man. “I just don’t understand it,” he said. “Maybe people behave this way, I don’t know. Maybe in war or something? But—Were you in the service?”

“Yes,” Hank said.

“Oh sure. That’s stupid of me. Of course you were.…” The voice trailed off. “I missed it,” he said. “I had a punctured eardrum. I was four-F.” He paused. “A friend of mine used to send me Yank magazine.”

“That was a good magazine,” Hank said.

“Yes. Then, of course, I met Mary. She’s a wonderful girl.”

“Yes.”

“And now my son is a murderer.” He shook his head. “If you understand it, Mr. Bell, please tell me. Because I don’t. I’ve wracked my brain trying to understand it, and I can’t. Jesus, I can’t! I can’t understand the damn thing!”

His face was in anguish now, and Hank felt he would begin crying at any moment. “Mr. Di Pace,” he said, “there are lots of things we …”

“Do you know what I’ve been doing ever since this happened?” Di Pace said. “I’ve been going over everything, everything we ever did, every word I ever spoke to my son, every slap I ever gave him, every present, every place I took him. I’ve been reliving his life. I’ve been going over it step by step, inch by inch, and trying to find out why he did this. Because if he did this thing, he’s not to blame. What did I do wrong, I keep asking myself. What? What? Where did I fail my son?”

“You can’t blame yourself for a slum environment, Mr. Di Pace. Danny might have been all right if …”

“Then who do I blame? Who do I blame for getting fired when I worked out on Long Island? Who do I blame for the decision to come back to Harlem? Mr. Bell, who do I blame for the fact that I’m a failure and my son is a murderer?”

“You’ve got a shoe store. You’ve got—”

“I’ve got a life that’s a failure, Mr. Bell. John Di Pace, failure. Even Danny knew it. Mary? Mary loves me. Whatever I want to do is all right with her. But you can’t expect the same love from a child. You’ve got to prove yourself to a child. And what did I ever prove to Danny? I can remember when he first found out I hadn’t been in the service. He came in one day and said his friend’s father had been a sailor, and he wanted to know what I had been. I told him I hadn’t been drafted. I told him I had a punctured ear drum. He asked me what that was, a punctured eardrum. I told him it was a hole in my ear through which poison gas could enter, that gas masks hadn’t been designed to stop this possibility. He said, ‘But weren’t you in the Army?’ I told him I wasn’t. ‘The Navy?’ he said. No, not the Navy either. ‘Then what? The Marines?’ No, not the Marines. ‘Nothing?’ he said. ‘You were nothing?’

“I was nothing, Mr. Bell. You were flying bombers over Germany, and I was nothing.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody wanted to go fight a war.”

“I wanted to. How do you explain a punctured eardrum to an eight-year-old kid who only wants to know that his father was a hero? I heard him outside one day a little while later. This other kid was telling him that his father had been on a destroyer and that it had been sunk by Japanese suicide planes. When he was finished, Danny said, ‘You should see my Daddy’s stamp collection. I’ll bet it’s the biggest stamp collection in the world.’ A stamp collector against a sailor on a destroyer that went down.”

“I don’t think that had anything to do with—”

“Do you have any kids, Mr. Bell?”

“Yes. A daughter. She’s thirteen.”

“Girls are easier. I guess you’re lucky.”

“They’re not so easy.”

“Do you ever get the feeling that you don’t know your own kid?”

“Sometimes.”

“I used to get that feeling a lot, even before this happened, before the—the killing, I mean. I used to look at Danny, and I saw him growing up before my eyes, and I knew that one day soon he’d be a man, and I didn’t even know him. And I used to wonder when I stopped knowing him, when he became something less than my son, and something more than my son, when he became this person called Danny Di Pace who was a person in his own right, a person very different from the two people who’d produced him. I used to wonder where he’d come from all of a sudden, this stranger who sat at the dinner table with us and told stories about friends I didn’t even know. Where did he come from? Who was he? My son? Why, my son was just a little thing I used to hold in my arms while giving him his bottle. Who was this—this man almost that I didn’t even know? Do you ever feel that way, Mr. Bell? With your daughter?”

“Yes,” he said uneasily. “Sometimes.”

“But girls are different. You don’t have to worry with girls. I read someplace that five times as many boys as girls are arrested each year. And with girls, it’s mostly sexual offenses. They don’t get into the more serious trouble. The beatings and the … the killings.”

“I guess you’re right,” Hank said.

Di Pace nodded. The room was silent. Then he said, “You know, I remembered something the other night. It just came to me out of the blue when I was sitting and thinking over the things we’d done and said. It was something that happened right after I lost my job. I remember I was out covering some bushes. We were going to sell the house anyway, we’d already decided to come back to Harlem, you see, but I don’t like to see living things die, and that was a bad corner in the winter, the way the wind used to rip around it, the bushes could have been damaged, so I covered them every year. This was in the fall, I can remember it was a very bright clear day, but with a nip in the air, you know those kind of days. I was outside working. I had on an old brown sweater, I remember.…”

(The housing development in which the Di Paces live is typical of the low-cost developments on Long Island. The house is priced at $11,990 and the Di Paces were required to produce a thousand dollars in cash when they first bought it. Monthly mortgage payments used to be $83, but they are now $101 because the house was finally assessed and also because the bank holding Di Pace’s mortgage says there is an escrow shortage, a term he does not fully understand. He does understand that the house is now costing him eighteen dollars more per month than he had figured on.

Di Pace’s house is a six-room ranch on a corner plot. The plot is seventy feet by one hundred feet as opposed to the sixty-by-one-hundred plots most of his neighbors own. But because the house is on a corner the back yard is really a side yard, and this disturbs Di Pace. He has always wanted a true back yard. The fact that he must barbecue on the side of his house where all the neighbors can see him embarrasses him. He is working in his side yard now, covering his bushes with tarpaulin. The houses of the development stretch in endless symmetry toward the horizon. There is a flawless blue sky overhead. The leaves on the spindly maples which sprout on the front lawns of all the houses are turning brown. There is a sharp wind, and it lifts Di Pace’s hair as he works. The sunshine is very bright. It is a good crisp fall day. It holds the death of summer and the promise of winter.

Di Pace works tirelessly and fastidiously. The brown sweater he is wearing is torn at the elbows and unraveling at the throat. But he likes this sweater. It was given to him by Mary years ago, when they were just kids going together. When he received it, it reminded him of an Army sweater. It smells of perspiration now, and there are streaks of paint on it from previous household chores, but it is a warm sweater and it fits him well. He has not gained a pound since the time Mary gave him the sweater. He knows he will never gain any weight or lose any. He is what he is, and he’ll be that until he dies.

When Danny approaches him, Di Pace does not look up. He continues working on the bush, securing the tarpaulin with cord, tying the cord tightly about the thicker lower stems. Danny is almost thirteen years old, a tall boy who is beginning to fill out, his awkward long-leggedness giving way to the well-proportioned body of a young man. He watches his father silently for a moment.)

DANNY: Pop?

(He has never called his father Dad. There is something effete in the word, he believes. He feels, too, an inadequacy in the word Pop. It does not express to him the father-son relationship he desires. He would like a word that expressed warmth and companionship and man-to-manness. “Dad” does not do that, and “Pop” is somehow lacking. He has thought often of calling his father Johnny. This, he thinks, would establish something between them. But he knows that his father would not like it, even though he has never discussed it with him. He knows intuitively that his father would not like it. And so, rejecting the word expressing a false relationship, eliminating the word for the relationship he desires, he has settled upon “Pop,” which fills but does not satisfy the need.)

DI PACE: What is it, Danny?

DANNY: Is it true?

DI PACE: What?

DANNY: That we’re moving?

DI PACE: Oh yeah. It’s true. Would you hand me that ball of twine?

(Danny hands his father the twine, watching him as he works on the bush. He would like to help his father. He can remember wanting to help his father ever since he was a little kid. When his father was painting, he would come out and ask if he could paint, too, and his father would invariably say no. He could understand this somewhat. His father is a careful and fastidious worker, and he does not like a child slowing down the work or making a mess. But still he wished he could have helped his father sometime.)

DANNY: Where … where are we going?

DI PACE: To Harlem.

DANNY: Where Grandma lives?

DI PACE: Near there. Yes. Give me that scissors.

(Danny hands him the scissors. He recalls that on the few occasions he did help his father it was always in the capacity of the person who handed him things or held things. In his mind, he has created a fantasy wherein he and his father are painting the side of the house, sitting on the same scaffold. He calls his father Johnny, and they crack jokes together and laugh together, and at lunchtime they sit on the scaffold and eat sandwiches Mary has made, and then Johnny says, “Well, back to the salt mines,” and they begin painting again. Occasionally, as they work, they begin singing. The song is spontaneous, and it stops just as quickly as it has started, usually ending on a laugh. At the end of the day, they lower the scaffold and then they back away from the job and, paint-smeared hands on dungareed hips, they survey their work. And Johnny says, “That’s a damn good job, son. Let’s go up to the center and get ourselves a couple of sodas.” It is a nice fantasy. It has never happened. It will never happen.)

DANNY: I don’t like Harlem much.

DI PACE: Well, you’ll get used to it, Danny. Your mother and I think it’s best for us to—

DANNY: I saw a beating there once.

DI PACE: When was this?

DANNY: When Grandpa died. When we went to the funeral. I was walking with Christina. We were going to get some ice cream pops.

DI PACE: You never told me this.

DANNY: They were chasing this colored kid. A whole bunch of them were after him. He tried to climb onto a car that stopped for a light. He tried to get away from them that way. But the car had no running board, and he hung to the door handle when the car started, and lifted his feet off the street, trying to hang on. But the car sped up, and he dropped off, and they surrounded him. They hit him with an ash can. I can remember him laying in the street, and the kids kept lifting up this ash can and throwing it down on his back, and the colored guy just kept laying there with his hands covering the back of his neck while that ash can went up and down, up and down, passing from hand to hand. Then the cops came.

DI PACE: You never told me this.

DANNY: And later, when I was walking with Christina, we were behind one of the kids, and he said, “Man, did you see me hit that jig? I musta split his head wide open with that ash can.” That was what he said. And he laughed. And the kid with him laughed, too. That was when Grandpa died. We went back to the funeral parlor then, and Grandpa was laying in the coffin. I began crying, don’t you remember? I didn’t cry for Grandpa up until that time. But I cried then.

DI PACE: I didn’t see you crying, Danny. I didn’t know my father meant that much to you.

DANNY: Pop, I don’t like Harlem.

DI PACE: Well, I haven’t got a job here any more, Danny. And this shoe store …

DANNY: Pop, do we have to move to Harlem? Pop, I really don’t like it. I’ve got friends here and—

DI PACE: You’ll make new friends there.

DANNY: I don’t want to be friends with kids who hit a colored guy with an ash can.

DI PACE: All the kids in Harlem aren’t like that.

DANNY: Pop, listen to me. Can you stop working on that bush for a minute? Can you listen to me?

DI PACE: What is it, Danny?

DANNY: I don’t want to live in Harlem, Pop. Please. I don’t want to live there.

DI PACE: It’s not as easy as that, Danny. I’ve lost my job.

DANNY: Well, for Christ’s sake, why’d you lose it?

DI PACE: I don’t like that kind of language.

DANNY: I’m sorry, but why’d you have to lose your job? Why couldn’t you hang on to it? What’s the matter with you, Pop?

DI PACE: They cut production, Danny. It’s not my fault.

DANNY: I don’t want to live in Harlem!

DI PACE: (with some anger): You’ll live where we have to live!

DANNY: I don’t want to live there! I don’t want to live where guys—

DI PACE: Danny, we’re moving and that’s it. I don’t want to hear anything more about it.

DANNY: Pop, please, don’t you see? I couldn’t live there. I’d be … I’d be …

DI PACE: You’d be what?

DANNY: I’d … I’d …

(He turns and runs out of the yard. His father stares after him for a moment and then goes back to tying his bush.)

“He never finished the sentence?” Hank asked.

“No,” Di Pace said. “But the other night, thinking about it, I knew what he was trying to tell me.”

“And what was that?”

“He was trying to say he’d be afraid. Afraid.” Di Pace paused. “And I wouldn’t hear him.”

ELEVEN

With the trial only three days away, with his face still covered with adhesive plaster even though he’d been released from the hospital, Hank received a call at the office that Friday.

“Mr. Bell, this is Lieutenant Canotti.”

“Hello,” Hank said.

“I’ve got that report you wanted.”

“The report? What report?”

“On those knives.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, of course. I’d almost forgotten.”

“What’s the matter, Bell? Losing your pep? You were ready to go in to your boss on this, remember?”

“I remember.”

“So where’s the fighting assistant district attorney now?” Canotti paused. “That street beating take the starch out of you?”

“I’m busy, Canotti,” Hank said. “Make it short, and make it sweet, and cut the bull. I don’t know you well enough to start a feud.”

Canotti chuckled and then said, “We ran a lot of tests on these knives. No good latent prints because they got smeared when this Rugiello girl handled them. But there was something else that was interesting. At least, I think it was interesting.”

“What was that?”

“Well, you’ll see when you get the report. I’m sending a copy over together with the knives. Don’t forget to sign for receipt, will you?”

“When will this be?” Hank asked.

“I’m sending them over right now. The trial ain’t till Monday, am I right?”

“That’s right.”

“Sure. So you got all weekend to think about it.” Canotti chuckled again. “I hope it don’t upset your case, Mr. Bell.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you read the report. Like I said, it’s pretty interesting.”

“Okay, I’ll read the report.”

“Sure. So long, Mr. Bell. It was nice dealing with you.” And Canotti hung up. Hank replaced the receiver on the cradle. The instrument erupted into sound again instantly. He picked up the receiver again.

“Hello?”

“Bell? This is Lieutenant Gunnison of the twenty-seventh. I got something that might interest you. Can you run up here?”

“What is it?”

“It’s connected with the Morrez case. It might give you a new slant.”

“I can’t get away right this minute,” Hank said. “After lunch sometime?”

“I’ll be here all afternoon. Come whenever you can. There’s somebody I’d like you to talk to.”

“Okay, I’ll see you later,” Hank said, and he hung up.

The report from the police laboratory did not arrive until two-thirty that afternoon. Hank, packing his briefcase to leave the office, stuffed the report in with his other papers, locked the enveloped knives in his desk drawer, and then signed the receipt while the messenger waited. His plan was to stop in on Gunnison and then go directly home, where he would put the finishing touches to his case before beginning the selection of jurors on Monday.

He did not reach the precinct house until a little after three. He looked up at the green lanterns flanking the wide stone stoop and then climbed the steps into the muster room. A sign at the desk read: “All visitors must state their business to the desk officer.” He walked to the high desk, caught the sergeant’s eye and said, “I want to see Lieutenant Gunnison. I’m from the district attorney’s office.”

“Upstairs,” the sergeant said, and he went back to his work.

Hank followed the pointing DETECTIVE DIVISION sign into the upstairs corridor. A man in shirt sleeves, a .38 hanging from a shoulder holster, stopped him just outside the squad room.

“Help you, sir?” he said.

“I want Lieutenant Gunnison,” Hank said.

“The loot’s busy just now. Somebody else help you?”

“Gunnison called me this morning, asked me to stop by. I’m from the D.A.’s office.”

“You Bell?”

“Yes.”

“Hello. I’m Detective Levine. Come on in and have a chair. I’ll tell the loot you’re here.”

Hank passed through the slatted rail divider and sat at one of the desks. Levine went into the lieutenant’s office and emerged a moment later with Gunnison.

“Mr. Bell?” Gunnison said.

“Yes, how do you do?”

“I’m Lieutenant Gunnison. You got a few minutes?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“I had a visitor this morning. An eighteen-year-old kid named Dominick Savarese. Ring a bell?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“He’s a punk, they’re all punks. But he’s also the leader of the Thunderbirds. They call him Big Dom.”

“Oh yes. I’ve heard of him.”

“Yeah, well, he told me something interesting, not that I didn’t suspect as much all along. They’re all punks, believe me.”

“What’d he tell you?”

“I’d like you to hear it from his own mouth. I know where we can find him if you’ve got a few minutes.”

“I’ve got plenty of time.”

“Fine, let me get my hat.”

There was, Hank noticed as they walked through Harlem, a perpetual look of sourness on the face of Richard Gunnison. It was as if he carried garbage in his back pocket but, rather than put it into the nearest garbage can, he preferred to bear the smell stoically and with great malice. His eyes flicked over the streets as they walked, and the look of sourness claimed his face completely.

“Harlem,” he said at last. “Beautiful, ain’t it? I been stuck in this lousy squad for twenty-four years. I’d rather be in a Russian concentration camp in Siberia. Look at them!”

“They don’t look too bad,” Hank said.

“That’s ’cause you don’t know them. They’re all thieves, every single one of them. Or pimps. Or whores. Or gamblers. Or junkies. You see that old lady there with the shopping bag?”

“Yes,” Hank said.

“Go over to her and ask her what number’s leading. She’ll tell you in a minute. The numbers racket is against the law, and everybody in Harlem knows it. But anytime in the afternoon, you can stop anybody on the street and say, ‘What’s leading?’ and they’ll tell you. They can’t feed their kids, but they can scrape up that two, three bucks to lay on a number.”

“I’m not for lawbreaking,” Hank said, “but those people probably feel that the numbers are a pretty harmless diversion. A lot of countries have legal lotteries, you know.”

“This ain’t a lot of countries, this is Harlem, and it’s against the law here, and half the goddamn police force is kept busy shagging ass after the offenders. Look at them! And half these people you see on the street are junkies, you know that? We got enough junk in Harlem to keep everybody in the world supplied for the next ten years.”

“Then why don’t you do something about it?”

“We try, all right. And the Narcotics Squad ain’t exactly asleep, either. But we ain’t got enough cops to go around. I’ll tell you something, Bell. I’ve never known a cop to take a bribe on a narcotics pinch. That’s the truth. I’m not saying you can’t fix anything else you’d care to in this city—including maybe murder. But junk, absolutely not. There ain’t a cop in this city who’ll take a nickel to square a junk rap. So you can’t say we ain’t trying. We just ain’t got the men. You know how many people there are in this precinct? Thousands! And we’ve only got a hundred and eighty-five patrolmen and eighteen detectives attached to the Twenty-seventh. And they’re supposed to keep all these people from slitting each others’ throats or taking dope or burglarizing apartments or selling stolen goods or mugging or pimping or whoring, and I tell you, my friend, it just can’t be done. You think we’d have these street gangs if we had enough cops? We’d rap these kids with a nightstick whenever they even looked at anybody cockeyed. That’s all half of them need, anyway.”

“Maybe,” Hank said.

“No maybes about it. A punk is a punk, and these kids are all punks. And I never yet seen a punk who didn’t begin blubbering the minute you cracked him one.” He paused. “We’re going to a poolroom on Second Avenue. We can find Big Dom there.”

“In your opinion, then,” Hank said, “all we have to do is get tough and we’ll wipe out the juvenile delinquency problem, is that right?”

“That’s right. A swift kick in the ass instead of all this mollycoddling. Since when have the psychiatrists become the ones who decide what’s right and wrong? A criminal is a criminal! We got enough nuts in the booby hatch now without trying to excuse every thief of his crime by saying he’s a disturbed personality. So who ain’t a disturbed personality? You? Me? We’re all a little nuts, but we’re also law-abiding citizens. Crack their goddamn skulls, that’s the answer. If a punk steps out of line, send him up and throw away the key. That’s the answer.” He paused. “Here’s the poolroom. You’re about to meet another punk who should have been locked up when he was six years old.”

They climbed the stairs leading to the second floor. There was the strong smell of urine in the hallway. Hank wondered, as they climbed, whether there was a single flight of stairs anywhere in Harlem which did not smell of human waste.

They found Big Dom at a table near the back of the pool hall. He nodded at the lieutenant, racked up the balls and then broke them. He’d been trying to knock one ball loose from the neat triangle. Instead, the balls scattered all over the table when the cue smashed into them. He looked up, shrugged and said, “Lousy break.”

“This is the D.A., Dom,” Gunnison said. “He wants to talk to you. He wants to hear the story you told me.”

“Yeah?” Big Dom studied Hank’s face. “Somebody beat you up, Mr. Bell?” he asked.

“Don’t get wise, punk,” Gunnison said. “You read the newspapers same as anybody else. Just tell Mr. Bell the story you gave me.”

“Sure,” Big Dom said.

He was truly a short boy, with wide shoulders and a thick neck and waist. He seemed to be having trouble now as he reached over the table for a long shot. He wore his hair very long, combed into a high black crown, with sideburns that dropped past his ears. In his left ear lobe he wore a circular gold earring. The ornament did not look feminine on him, however. If anything, there seemed to be a bull-like strength emanating from the boy. And immediately upon seeing him, Hank knew that Frankie Anarilles had been wrong in his judgment of this boy. For whatever his faults—and playing bad pool seemed to be one of them—this boy was definitely not lacking in leadership qualities. In the presence of a police lieutenant and a district attorney, he continued to shoot his solitaire pool as if he were an oil baron being visited at his estate in the California hills. He missed two shots in a row, studied his cue and said, “No wonder. The stick’s warped.” He went to the rack, held up a new cue, looked down the length of it with one eye closed and then went back to the table.

“So you want to hear my story, huh?” he said.

“Yes,” Hank answered.

“Mmm,” Big Dom said, and he triggered off another shot, missing. The new cue had not seemed to improve his game noticeably.

“You know who I am?” he said. “I’m Big Dom.” He paused. “Five ball in the side pocket.” He shot and missed. “This damn table is crooked,” he said. “The floor’s on a bias.”

“I’ve heard of you,” Hank said.

“Sure, everybody has. I had my name in the papers a total of sixteen times. They got my address wrong one time.” He wiped his nose on his forefinger and squatted so that he was just peering over the edge of the table as he sized up his next shot. Then he said, “Eight ball in the corner,” shot and missed.

“You know why they call me Big Dom?” he asked, straightening up.

“Come on, cut the jazz,” Gunnison said. “Mr. Bell’s a busy man.”

“They call me Big Dom ’cause I’m a shrimp,” he said. He laughed. “But everybody knows if they ever really call me a shrimp, they’re dead.” He laughed again. “Dead. So they call me Big Dom.”

“You’re a very tough punk,” Gunnison said sarcastically. “Tell Mr. Bell the story before I bust that pool cue over your head.”

“These kids you’re trying to send to the chair, Mr. Bell. They’re all nice guys.”

“They committed murder,” Hank said.

Big Dom shrugged. “Lots of nice guys all through history have killed people. In a war, the more people you kill, the more medals you get. That don’t make them any less nice, does it?”

“What makes you say these boys are nice?”

“They all got heart,” Big Dom said. “Courage. You can count on them. They’re not going to turkey out when you’re supposed to go down on another club. They’re okay, every one of them.”

“Is Di Pace a Thunderbird?”

“No, man. He don’t swing with our club.” He studied the table. “Twelve ball banked up to this corner.” He shot and missed. “Not enough chalk on the stick,” he said. He began chalking the stick, the blue dust particles covering the front of his dark shirt. He didn’t seem to care very much. “We got a tight club here, mister,” Big Dom said. “Danny wasn’t one of us, but he never punked out of nothing, either. Whenever we jitterbugged, he was there with us. He never let us down.”

“Is he a good fighter?” Hank asked.

Big Dom shrugged. “Who gets time to notice when everything’s jumping? But he knocked the crap out of a kid named Bud when he first moved around here. I wasn’t around that day, but Diablo told me all about it. That night, we sent a little squad around to take care of Danny. But he’s all right. Take it from me. A good kid.”

“Who—with two other good kids—killed Rafael Morrez.”

“Maybe Morrez needed killing,” Big Dom said. “What do you think he was? An angel or something?”

“He was blind,” Hank said.

“So? Being blind makes him an angel?”

“What are you saying?”

“Tell him your story,” Gunnison said. “We haven’t got all day.”

“Okay, okay.” Big Dom put down the pool cue. “It happened like only this spring. There was this Spanish girl like a lot of the guys on the club used to make it with, you know. She was no prize package, but she was always available. So some of the guys from the Horsemen, they found out about it. Like this girl didn’t mean crap to them, you know what I mean? But all of a sudden, just because the Birds are making it with her, they get excited. So we had a meet. Me and Frankie, and Diablo and Gargantua. There was a cool on at the time, until this thing with the girl happened.”

“A cool?”

“Yeah, like no fighting. What do you think, we fight all the time? Man, don’t you think we got anything better to do?”

“All right, so what happened?”

“So we tried to decide where it was gonna be and all that. First, it was gonna be a fair one, like you know where two guys put on the gloves, but we decided the hell with that, so it was gonna be a real bop, only we couldn’t settle where, so we decided to have another meet the next night. Only you can’t trust those Spanish guys, I mean they’re all hopheads, how the hell can you trust them, they’d knock off their own mothers for some pot. So that very night, right after we had the meet, I mean with everything still up in the air about where the bop was gonna be, that very night …”

(It is a mild spring night in Harlem, and we can hear music on the air, drifting from the open windows of the tenements to find its way into the street. There is a peaceful feel to the block. We hear occasional laughter, an occasional baby crying from one of the apartments. But it is an idle night, heavy with the magic of spring, because spring comes to Harlem too, and the people of Harlem know her headiness, know her rare smile, know the beauty in her eyes and on her mouth. The Thunderbirds are sitting on one of the tenement stoops, seven of them: Big Dom, Diablo, Botch, Bud, Reardon, Aposto and Concho. Danny Di Pace is with the Thunderbirds, too. The boys are passing around a cheap bottle of wine. The girls with them do not accept the bottle, not because they don’t drink but only because they don’t want to drink on the front stoop, in public. Besides, the girls are playing it rather cool this evening. They have heard about the impending rumble between their boys and the Horsemen, and they know that the cause of the dispute is a fourteen-year-old slut named Rosie who is Spanish and probably diseased. Carol is particularly offended because she and Diablo are supposed to be going steady, and she understands that Diablo hasn’t been exactly reticent with that Spanish pig, either. In fact, Carol has not spoken to Diablo since she learned about the incident, and she is the one who sets the pace now for the other girls. The boys play the game in their own way. If the girls want to be cool, so be it. They can be equally cool. And the wine they drink, thirty-nine cents a quart, helps them to ignore the girls. It also helps them to drop their usual attitude of caution. For if there is one noticeable trait about all gang members, it is their constant vigilance. Walking down the block, sitting on a stoop, idling on a corner, their eyes constantly flick the streets, looking, watching, waiting for any sudden attack. Tonight their usual wariness is not present. Aided by the wine, drinking in retaliation against the coolness of the girls, they have dropped their guard—and this can be a fatal error in Harlem.

The attack comes swiftly and unexpectedly.

The automobile turns the corner and shrieks into the street. It careens onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing Bud, who leaps off the stoop. Another car follows it, chasing Concho, who has leaped off the front stoop after Bud and who is trying to cross the street to get to a cellar where he knows a gun is hidden. The doors of the cars open. Twelve boys spring to the pavement and then break into a trot. The drivers of the cars gun the engines and race off up the street. Many of the Horsemen are armed. Big Dom is the first to see this.)

BIG DOM: They got pieces! Scatter!

(The guns begin to erupt. The Thunderbirds, close to the edge of drunkenness, reel off the stoop and into the street, trying to escape the guns. The guns, fortunately, are zip guns—one shot to a customer, and that’s all. These particular zip guns were made with rubber bands, the filed hammers of cap pistols, wooden frames and the cylinders of automobile radio aerials. The rubber band activates the cap pistol firing pin, discharging a .22-caliber cartridge through the car aerial barrel. It is easy to come by real guns in Harlem and the Horsemen boast of three .38-caliber pistols in their armory. Tonight, however, for reasons of their own—largely centered upon the fact that they realize the basis for this quarrel is very thinly founded—they are using weapons which, in Harlem, are considered passé. It is unlikely that they even intend to do any real damage tonight. In fact, they have probably staged this sneak raid to avoid the impending rumble which—for a girl whom they know to be a pig—would be both senseless and costly.

But a zip gun, while lacking the accuracy or fire power of a professionally manufactured weapon, is not a toy. The .22 slugs which carom about the gutter are the same cartridges used in a real pistol. And they are equally capable of killing.

One of these slugs catches Big Dom in the leg, and he hurtles to the sidewalk and then begins crawling up the street, anxious to find the safety of a cellar. Tower Reardon and Danny Di Pace run to where Dom has fallen, each catching an arm and half dragging, half pulling him to the chain-barricaded steps leading to the basement of a tenement near the corner. The shots are becoming sporadic now. Only eight of the boys were armed, and seven have already fired the single-cartridge guns. The last boy shoots wildly into the street, and then the twelve rush for the corner, passing the hiding place of Big Dom, Tower and Danny.)

BIG DOM: The sons of bitches! The dirty jap bastards!

DANNY: Shhhh, shhhh, they’ll hear us!

BIG DOM: Do you think I’ll lose my leg? Oh God, will I lose my leg?

TOWER: Quiet! For the love of Mike, shut up!

DANNY: What are they doing?

TOWER: They’ve stopped on the corner.

DANNY: What’s that? Listen! (They listen.)

TOWER: A siren! The cops!

DANNY: Good! They’re all carrying pieces. Man, this’ll—

TOWER: Wait a minute. Look at that.

(The three boys lean forward. The Horsemen have stopped on the corner. Rafael Morrez is standing on that corner, his jacket open. One by one, the Horsemen quickly hand him the zip guns, slapping the weapons into his open hand. One by one, he tucks the guns into his shirt and into his waistband, moving with the tactile speed of a blind person. Frankie Anarilles is the last man to free himself of an incriminating weapon. The other Horsemen have already run off in pairs, in threes. Frankie gives his gun to Morrez.)

FRANKIE (clapping him on the shoulder): Good boy, Ralphie.

(He runs off. Rafael Morrez zips up the front of his jacket. Using a home-fashioned cane, he begins tapping his way up the street as a squad car pulls to the curb.)

FIRST PATROLMAN: You! Hey you! Hold up there.

(Morrez turns blankly toward the car. The first patrolman is ready to get out when his partner, closer to the curb, stops him.)

SECOND PATROLMAN: It’s all right, Charlie. He ain’t one of them. He’s a blind kid. I seen him around.

(The squad car pulls away. Morrez begins walking faster, his cane tapping rapidly as he continues up the long street to Spanish Harlem.)

“Don’t you see?” Big Dom said. “The kid was a gun-bearer for the Horsemen. They gave him the pieces, and he walked away safe. That way, if the bulls picked up any of the guys who staged the raid, they’d be clean.”

“It beats car aerials six ways from the middle, don’t it?” Gunnison said.

“What do you mean?” Hank asked.

“They use car aerials as weapons sometimes,” Gunnison explained. “They break them off automobiles. It makes a wicked whip, can cut a kid’s face to ribbons. And it has the advantage of being available at the scene and easily disposed of afterward. Car aerials are dispensable. Guns aren’t.”

“You’re hip to the car aerials, huh?” Big Dom asked.

“Sonnyboy, there ain’t nothing you can use that we ain’t seen already.”

Big Dom shrugged. “The point is,” he said tiredly, “this Rafael Morrez wasn’t no angel.”

“You’re telling me he was a gun-bearer on one occasion?” Hank asked.

“On one occasion? Mister, I’m telling you he was a member of the goddamn gang!”

She knew all the signs of his restlessness.

Sitting opposite him in the silence of their home, she pretended to be working on last Sunday’s crossword puzzle, but she watched Hank over the edge of the newspaper as he reread his carefully typed notes, and she knew that something was wrong.

He had left the desk three times to go into the kitchen for water. He had been to the bathroom twice. He had sharpened four perfectly sharpened pencils and then sharpened them again not ten minutes later. Poring over the notes for his case, he fidgeted and squirmed in the chair.

“Hank?” she said.

“Mmm?” He turned to her, removing his reading glasses. His eyes were very pale, and she knew he was exhausted. He looked young and defenseless in that moment. A thin smile touched his mouth, and she felt quite maternal all at once, felt like going to him and holding his head against her breast.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. I’m fine.” He smiled again.

“Nervous about the trial?”

“Usual jitters,” he said. He sighed. “Maybe I ought to knock off now. I’ve got all weekend to go through this stuff.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Well, I’ve got a report from the lab I want to read,” he said. “And then …” he shrugged. “Karin—”

“Yes?”

“Murder is—It is murder, isn’t it?”

“Darling?”

“Never mind. It’s just … Never mind.” He put his glasses on again and then dug into his briefcase, pulling out a report in a blue folder. She watched him as he leafed through it. She saw his back stiffen, and then he sat erect in the chair, and then he bent over the report and read it again, tracing his finger down the page, reading it line by line, like a beginning reader in a backward group. He shook his head and shoved his chair back, and then he began pacing the room, and she watched him helplessly.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. Jennie won’t be back for a while, will she?”

“She went to a party. The neighborhood boycott seems to be easing.”

“Then let’s go. Please, Karin. I need some air. I have to think.”

They walked out of the house and down toward the river. It was a mild night, dark clouds scudding over a thin crescent moon. They walked through the woods and then sat on the flat rock overlooking the railroad tracks and the water. They lighted cigarettes. In the glow of the match, she saw his face—troubled, vulnerable, youthful. Again she wanted to touch him.

“What is it, Hank?” she said.

“The trial begins Monday,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I’ve got an airtight case for Murder One. I spent a month knocking the case together, a month tracking down every possible lead. And today, today I … tonight, reading over my notes, my carefully prepared notes, my meticulously prepared case, tonight I’m puzzled. Tonight, I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell to do.”

“Isn’t the case a good one?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. No, it isn’t. Damnit, it isn’t. It’s no damn good at all! Karin, I found out today that the victim was a gang member himself! I couldn’t believe it at first. How could a blind kid become involved with thugs, with hoodlums? But I had some members of the Horsemen brought in, right to the precinct, and I questioned them in the detective squad room, and they all admitted it. Rafael Morrez was a member of their gang. A highly valuable member, as it turned out. His blindness practically guaranteed immunity from the law.”

“So?”

“So where does it end, Karin? Where the hell are the boundaries? Not only was he a member of the Horsemen, but two of the boys who killed him had seen him on at least one previous occasion. Which means they might have recognized him on the night of the murder. And if they did, then they knew he was a blind boy when they killed him.”

“Then on the one hand you have the cold-blooded murder of a known blind boy, and on the other a victim who is not entirely blameless himself.”

“Well, it shouldn’t matter what Morrez was. I mean, what the hell, if a racketeer is killed, we still prosecute his murderer. It only matters in that … Karin, I’m just not sure what’s right or wrong any more. I’ve finally got a report from the police lab on those knives. The report—Karin, I’m supposed to convict those kids! I’m supposed to prove they’re guilty of murder. That’s what I’ve been working on. That’s the assumption I started with, and that’s what I’ve been building my case to prove. But when I talk to them, when I get the feel of them, when I know them, and their parents, and the whole damn gang structure, and the streets, those goddamn long, dark streets … Karin, Karin.”

“Darling, please don’t.”

“All of it has suddenly become something which defies my concept of right and wrong.”

“Murder is wrong, isn’t it?” Karin said.

“Yes, of course it’s wrong. But who committed this murder? Who’s responsible for this murder? Do you see what I’m driving at?”

“Not entirely.”

“The kids did the actual stabbing, yes. But is the final act the one to examine? Too many things led to this killing. If I blame these kids, I’ve also got to blame their parents, and the city, and the police—and where does it end? Where do I stop?” He paused. “Karin, I’m not a crusader.”

“The law tells you where to stop, Hank. Your only concern is the law.”

“As a lawyer, yes. But I’m also a person. And I can’t very well separate the part of me that’s a lawyer from the rest of me.”

“Nor can you separate the killer in these boys from.…”

“I know I can’t. But what made them kill? Damnit, Karin, that’s my point. They killed, but does the simple fact of murder make them killers?”

“I think you’re involving yourself in semantics, Hank. If they killed, they are guilty of murder. That’s all you should concern yourself with.”

“Do you believe that, Karin?”

“I’m trying to help you, Hank.”

“But do you believe what you just said?”

“No,” she answered. Her voice was very low.

“Neither do I.” He paused. “I’m not a crusader.”

“Hank—”

“I’m not a crusader, Karin. I never have been. I guess maybe we can thank Harlem for that. I guess maybe I’m a coward at heart.”

“Hank, no. You’re a very brave person.”

“Karin, I’ve been afraid. I’ve been afraid for so long, so long. I think that’s the legacy of the streets. Fear. Fear that’s always there, always ready to explode inside you, a keg of gunpowder with a lighted fuse, waiting to explode, waiting to—to destroy you. I … I …”

“Hank, please don’t. Please, you mustn’t.”

“I carried it with me during the war, always there, always inside me, waiting, waiting, fear, fear! Of what? Of life! Of day-by-day living. Fear that started when I was a kid, until all I could think of was getting out of Harlem, getting away from the place that bred the fear, and when I did get out it was too late, because the fear was something that was a part of me, like my liver or my heart. And then I met you.”

She took his hand and she held it close to her face, and he could feel the wetness of her tears against his palm. He shook his head.

“You begin—you begin to doubt, Karin. You’re faced with the overwhelming terror of the streets, and inch by inch it eats away at you until you wonder who you are, what you are. Are you a man? If you were a man, why’d you lose your girl to someone else while you were away? Why’d you allow your grandfather to die? Why are you afraid all the time? What the hell are you? What are you?”

He pulled her to him suddenly, awkwardly. She could feel his body trembling in the darkness.

“And then you. You, Karin—warmth, and light, and wonder. And suddenly the fear left me for a little while, until—until I began thinking you’d loved someone before me, you’d known someone before—”

“Hank, I love you.”

“Yes, yes, but …”

“I love you, I love you!”

“… I wondered why there had to be someone else, why, why? And I was afraid I’d lose you, the way he’d lost you, what’s the matter with me, Karin? Don’t I know you love me, didn’t I know you broke with him, you wanted me, me, but it got all mixed up with the fear inside me until … until …”

He was crying now. She heard his tears, and she went weak with helpless terror. Her man was crying, and she did not know how to stop him, her man, her man, and there was no more pitiful sound in the universe than the sound of his tears in the darkness. She kissed his wet face, and she kissed his hands, and he said again, very softly, “I’m no crusader. Karin, it scares me. The enormity of it scares me. I know what I should do but I—I’ll go into that courtroom on Monday morning, and I’ll pick my jurors and I’ll try the case for first-degree murder because that’s the safe way, the easy way, because—”

“No. Don’t say it.”

“Because I’m—”

“Don’t!” she said sharply. “Don’t!”

They were silent for a long while. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose. The clouds had covered the moon completely now. The flat rock was in complete darkness.

“Shall we go back?” she asked.

“I’d like to sit here for a while,” he said softly. “If you don’t mind.”

“Jennie will be coming home.”

“You go back. I’ll be all right.”

“All right.” She rose and smoothed her skirt. She stared at him in the darkness, unable to see his face. “Shall I make some coffee?”

“Yes. That would be nice.”

“Hank?”

“Yes?”

“You’re not a coward.”

He did not answer.

“You’re very brave.”

Again, he did not answer. She reached into the darkness and touched his cheek. “I love you, liebchen,” she said. “I love you.” And then, almost in a whisper, she said, “You make me very proud,” and she turned and walked off quickly into the trees.

He put out his cigarette and stared out at the water.

What is a lawyer to do? he wondered.

I must blame them.

Who else killed? Can I blame a culture which robs parents of identity, pressuring them, compressing them, sealing them in vacuum cans on the rat treadmill so that fathers are no longer sure they’re males and mothers are no longer sure they’re females? Can I impose the neuroses of society at large upon three kids who killed? But goddamnit, they killed, they killed! What is a lawyer to do?

Suppose you went into that courtoom, he thought. Suppose you went in there, and picked your jurors, and then presented the case so that …

No.

I’d never get away with it. Abe Samalson would smell a rat and stop the trial at once. And then he’d drag me into his chambers and ask me who the hell I was representing in this case, the killers or the people?

Aren’t the killers part of the people?

They are the defendants, and I am the prosecuting attorney, and my job is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they did willfully and with malice aforethought stab to death a boy named Rafael Morrez.

Aposto’ll be acquitted. You know that. He’s a mental deficient. You haven’t a prayer in hell of convicting him.

That leaves Reardon and Di Pace. And my job is to …

Does it? What about that report on the knives? Aren’t you forgetting something, Mr. Bell?

The report meant nothing, a freak accident, something that had to do with the way the knife was held, or the rain perhaps.

Or perhaps something else? Perhaps something important?

Damnit, I’ve got to put the blame someplace! I can’t just exonerate …

Then put the blame, damnit! Stand up in that courtroom before the judge and the jury and the newspapermen …

Mike Barton’s newspaper would cut me to ribbons. He’d murder me.

… and the world and put the goddamn blame! For once in your life, do something, be something, take the chance, risk something, stop playing it safe!

And if I get killed? If they slaughter me? What then? Henry Bell goes down the drain. You remember Henry Bell, don’t you? That bright young lad—well, not really that young—who used to work in the D.A.’s office before he goofed on the Morrez case. Oh, there was a lot of public sentiment aroused on that one, don’t you remember? Open-and-shut case of first-degree murder, open and shut, three cold-blooded killers stabbing a blind boy to death, a blind boy, open and shut. And Bell muffed it. Stood up in court and presented his case as if he were …

… interested in justice?

I am interested in justice.

Then what about that report?

What about it? It means nothing.

Come on, Bell, you know what’s in that report. Will you try to suppress it?

There’s nothing to suppress. The defense won’t even bring it up, that’s how important it is. They won’t even mention the damn thing. They admit the stabbing. Their only hope is self-defense. That report isn’t important at all.

You know how important it is! You know because you’ve lived with fear, you’ve been kissed by that ugly bitch, she’s held you in her arms, she’s …

STOP IT!

Stop it.

Stop. Please.

I owe them nothing. I owe them nothing. I don’t even know them. They’re strangers to me. I don’t know them.

You know them, Bell. They’re not strangers. You know them very well.

I owe them nothing, he thought. I owe them nothing.

The night was quite still. He sat looking out over the water, and he thought over and over again, I owe them nothing. He was not sure at first that he heard footsteps coming through the trees. Suddenly alert, he listened. Yes, footsteps. Stealthy, uncertain, moving cautiously through the trees toward the rock where he sat.

“This way,” a boy’s voice whispered, and Hank felt a sudden chill race up his spine to raise the hairs at the back of his neck.

Another beating, he thought. Oh, my God, another beating.

He clenched his fists. He expected to be frightened, as frightened as he’d been when approaching that bench in City Hall Park, but instead there was no fear. He was surprised by his own reaction. Sitting with his fists clenched, he listened to the approaching footsteps, recognizing a rising determination inside him.

I will not be beaten again, he thought. Those bastards won’t do it to me again!

Like an animal crouched to spring, he waited.

The boy’s voice sounded in the darkness again. “Over here. This way. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” a voice said, and Hank’s brow furrowed in puzzlement because the second voice belonged to a girl.

“Here,” the boy said. “Let’s sit under this tree here.” There was silence. “Wait a minute. Let me put my jacket down.”

Lovers, Hank thought, and he was filled instantly with deep embarrassment. He unclenched his fists. There would be no battle; only a balcony scene. He smiled grimly. The thing to do now was to get away from here as swiftly and as quietly as …

“This is a nice spot,” the boy said. “Nice and cool. You get a breeze here from the river.”

“I love the river,” the girl answered. “I love to look at the lights. I always wonder where the boats are going.”

“Would you like a cigarette?” the boy asked.

“I’m not supposed to smoke.”

“I’ve seen you smoke,” the boy said.

“Yes. But I’m not supposed to.”

The boy laughed. In the darkness, Hank could barely make out the figures of the boy and the girl sitting on the ground. A match struck and then moved closer to the girl’s cigarette. Her back was to him. All he could see in the sudden illumination was the girl’s startling blond hair. And then the match died.

“I’m glad we got out of that place,” the boy said. “That was the draggiest party I’ve been to in years.”

“Death,” the girl agreed.

Lying flat on the rock, Hank tried to work out an escape route. He did not want to frighten the couple, nor did he wish to embarrass them. But at the same time, he did not want to be a captive audience to their adolescent patter. Unfortunately, the only way back to the street was past the couple who sat under the huge tree to the right of the path. Sighing, scarcely daring to breathe, Hank resigned himself to his fate.

“How old are you, anyway?” the boy said.

“Thirteen. Well, almost fourteen. I’ll be fourteen at the end of the month.”

“You’re still a kid,” the boy said.

“Not such a kid. How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“I know older boys.”

“You do?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I got to admit,” the boy said, “you look a lot older than thirteen.”

“Do I look older than fourteen?”

“As a matter of fact, you do.”

“How old would you say I looked?”

The boy was silent for a while. Then he said, “I’d say you looked at least fifteen.”

“That old?”

“Easy.”

“This is nice,” the girl said. “Sitting here, I mean.”

“Yeah. Do you like the summer better, or the winter?”

“Summer.”

“Yeah. Me, too. You can’t get out in the winter. I mean, you know, you’re stuck inside all the time.”

“Yeah.” The girl paused. “What’s your favorite color?”

“Red. What’s yours?”

“Yellow. Who’s your favorite singer?”

“Vic Damone.” He paused. “Oh, no, don’t tell me!”

“What?”

“It isn’t the Pretzel, is it?”

“Elvis? Oh, no. He needs a haircut.” The girl giggled. The boy laughed with her. “This is nice,” she said. “Talking like this. Do you find it hard to talk to people?”

“Sometimes. I find it easy to talk to you, though.”

“Well, I enjoy talking to you, too. It’s especially hard with older people, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Talking.”

“Oh, yeah. Man, I hate to talk to old people. They give me the creeps.”

“Well, I didn’t mean real old people. Like people who are ready to die or something.”

“Neither did I. I meant regular old people. You know. Forty, forty-five, like that.”

“Yes. How old are your parents?”

“Too old,” the boy said, and he laughed.

“Mine aren’t so old.” The girl paused. “But it’s awfully hard to talk to them, isn’t it?”

“Boy, I’ll say.”

“Do you tell them things?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I remember once I was telling my father about how I was involved in this three-way deal where we were saving up to buy a car when we were old enough, you know? I mean, it was a very complicated thing because we were going to clean cellars on weekends and sell the junk and like that, you know? So I spent about a half hour explaining it to him, and then he looks up and says, ‘That’s a good boy, Lonnie.’ How do you like that? I knock myself out for a half hour, all excited about the big business deal we worked out, and he tells me I’m a good boy. I don’t even think he was listening to me, you know that? So after that, I figured the hell with this noise, and that was it. Lonnie the Clam, they call me.”

“My mother thinks I tell her things,” the girl said, “but I don’t really.”

“Well, there’s really no percentage in telling parents anything,” the boy said, “because if they understand it they usually raise hell about it; and if they don’t understand it, you might as well have saved your breath to begin with. That’s the way I look at it.”

“I used to talk to my father a lot,” the girl said. “When I was small. We used to have nice talks.”

“Yeah? What about?”

“Oh, everything. We just talked. I remember I was very proud of myself because I could have grown-up conversations with my father.”

“But you don’t talk to him now?”

“Not very much. He’s busy.”

“Oh, boy, are they busy!” the boy said. “Always running someplace.”

“Besides, I—I don’t have anything to say to him,” the girl said.

“Yeah,” the boy agreed. There was a wistful note in his voice.

“I wish I had something to say to him,” the girl said. “But I don’t. I just don’t.”

“Yeah.” The boy paused. “Well, they’re busy. You know.”

“Yes. Yes, I know.”

“I mean, what the hell, they brought us this far. Fed us and clothed us. We’ve got to give them a rest sometime, don’t we?”

“I guess so.”

“It isn’t as if they owed us anything, really. I mean, I don’t go for these guys who are always saying, ‘I didn’t ask to be born.’ All right, who did ask to be born? Does anybody have a choice? I didn’t ask to be born, either. But I’m sure glad I’m here.”

“That’s a very nice thing to say, Lonnie.”

“There’s nothing that beats being alive,” the boy said. “Aren’t you glad you’re alive?”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

“Sure. So they don’t really owe us anything, you see. They brought us into the world. They gave us life. That’s enough for me.”

“Lonnie?”

“Yes?”

“Do … do you love anyone?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know.”

“Like my mother? Or my father?”

“Well …”

“But that isn’t like real love, is it? That’s more like a habit.”

“Yes.”

They were silent for several moments.

Then the boy said, “Jennie?”

“Yes?”

“Jennie, could I kiss you?”

The girl did not answer.

“Jennie?”

She still gave no answer.

“Well, okay,” he said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind if I …”

“I wouldn’t mind, Lonnie,” she answered, and there was such a tender innocence in her voice that Hank, lying on the rock, felt like weeping. “But …”

“What, Jennie?”

“Could you … could you …”

“What, Jennie? What?”

“Could you please tell me you love me first?” she said.

Hank’s eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. He lay on the rock in the darkness while his daughter was being kissed, his hand over his face to muffle his sobs. He kept shaking his head over and over again, biting his lip, overwhelmed with his sudden knowledge, feeling small and insignificant and yet strangely powerful with knowledge that raced through his mind.

“I love you, Jennie,” the boy said.

“I love you, Lonnie.”

He listened to the words and suddenly he wanted it to be Monday, suddenly he wanted the trial to begin.

“What time is it, Lonnie?”

“It’s almost twelve.”

“Would you take me home, please? I don’t want them to worry.”

“Could I kiss you once more?”

“Please.”

They were silent, and then Hank heard them getting to their feet, heard them thrashing awkwardly through the bushes and onto the path. In a little while, their footsteps died out.

I don’t owe them anything, he thought.

I don’t owe them anything but the future.

TWELVE

It was common knowledge among New York City’s lawyers that Judge Abraham Samalson permitted no nonsense in his courtroom. In General Sessions, Part III, on the Monday that marked the beginning of the Morrez trial, an air of solemnity pervaded the sunswept, wood-paneled room despite the throngs of prospective jurors, spectators, and reporters who packed the court. Seated at the rear of the room, Karin and Jennifer Bell listened to the Honorable Abraham Samalson, impressive in his robes of justice, as he reminded the spectators that this court was concerned with serious business and that any attempts to turn it into a circus would result in his barring all spectators from the trial. With the patience of a kindergarten instructor he explained what his function as a judge would be, and then he asked that the first of the prospective jurors be called.

From all outward appearances, the selection of jurors proceeded in an orderly and totally unsurprising manner. Hank, for the prosecution, asked the questions he was expected to ask. The lawyers for the three defendants—there were twelve appointed by the court—similarly asked the questions expected of them. The process was long and, for the most part, unexciting. Mike Barton, listening to the proceedings with the rest of the reporters, stifled many a yawn as the jurors were either empaneled or excused.

“Mr. Nelson, if the prosecuting attorney proved to you, beyond any reasonable doubt, that these three young boys were guilty of premeditated murder, would you have any qualms about voting for a verdict of guilty?”

“Why should I have any qualms?”

“Because there is a mandatory death penalty attached to the crime of first-degree murder.”

“No, I would not have any qualms.”

“You would send them to the electric chair?”

“Yes. If they were guilty, I would.”

“If, on the other hand, the facts as presented seemed to warrant a plea for leniency, could you find it in keeping with your morals and your ethics to ask the court for leniency in sentencing these boys?”

“I could.”

“Yes, and if we can show that a lesser crime than first-degree murder was committed, would you accept the facts as shown and consider bringing in a verdict on, for example, second-degree murder or manslaughter?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“He means,” Samalson interrupted, “that whereas the district attorney will try to prove that these boys committed murder in the first degree, the facts as presented before this court may indicate that a lesser crime, such as second degree murder or manslaughter, was actually committed. In which case, would you allow the grand-jury indictment or the high office of the district attorney to prejudice you against bringing in a verdict for a lesser crime?”

“No, I would not.”

“Does that answer your question, Mr. Randolph?”

“It does. Thank you, Your Honor. And if it were shown before this court that these boys did not commit any crime, would you vote for an acquittal, would you set them free?”

“I would.”

“Thank you,” Randolph said. “Excuse this juror.”

“Tell me, Mrs. Riley, where do you live?”

“On a Hundred Thirty-eighth Street and Bruckner Boulevard.”

“Are there many Puerto Ricans in that neighborhood?”

“Yes, there are quite a few.”

“Do you like the neighborhood?”

“It’s all right.”

“There are things about it you don’t like?”

“Yes, there are some things.”

“Like what, for example?”

“Well, the neighborhood’s getting run down.”

“What do you mean by ‘run down’?”

“Well, you know.”

“No, I don’t know. Would you please explain it, Mrs. Riley?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Bell,” Samalson said, “but what are you getting at?”

“I don’t think I have to mince words here, Your Honor. The dead boy in this case was a Puerto Rican. I am trying to find out whether or not Mrs. Riley may feel the neighborhood is getting run down because Puerto Ricans are moving into it.”

“Then don’t mince words, and ask the question directly.”

“Is that what you feel, Mrs. Riley?”

“Well, I certainly don’t think the Puerto Ricans are helping real estate val—”

“Challenge,” Hank said.

“Would you have any objections to sitting on a jury where the case being tried is a murder case?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Why?”

“I’ve been on three juries in the past two years. I don’t like jury duty, and I wish they’d stop calling me.”

“If there are no objections,” Samalson said sourly, “I think we can excuse this good citizen.”

“Do you have any children, Mrs. Frankworth?”

“Yes. I have three children.”

“Boys or girls?”

“Mixed.”

“How old are they?”

“Thirteen, ten and eight.”

“Could you send three boys to the electric chair?”

“Yes, I think so. If they were guilty.”

“Do you think they are guilty?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Have you read anything about this case in the newspapers?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve formed no opinion yet as to whether the boys are guilty or innocent.”

“No. I don’t believe what I read in the newspapers.”

“Will you believe what you hear in this court?”

“Yes.”

“Will you believe everything you hear?”

“What do you mean?”

“You may hear conflicting stories from the prosecution and the defense. Your delivering a verdict assumes you must believe one or the other.”

“I’d have to hear the facts first. Then I’d decide what was right and what was wrong.”

“Is murder wrong, Mrs. Frankworth?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Not always.”

“I don’t think it’s wrong if the murder was committed in self-defense.”

“Have you ever known any Puerto Ricans?”

“No, sir.”

“Would you mind living next door to one?”

“I’ve never lived next door to one, so I wouldn’t know. I guess if they were good neighbors, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

“Were you born in this city, Mrs. Frankworth?”

“No.”

“Where were you born?”

“In England. I came to America when I was twelve years old.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Frankworth. If the court please, I have no objection to empaneling this juror.”

“What sort of work do you do, Mr. Abbeney?”

“I own a chain of restaurants.”

“Where?”

“Here in the city.”

“Do you employ Puerto Ricans?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“They’re good workers.”

“How many Puerto Ricans are in your employ?”

“Oh, I’d say about fifty or so.”

“Ever deal with them personally?”

“Sure. I like Puerto Ricans.”

“Do you employ any Negroes?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I just never have, that’s all.”

“You don’t have any principles against hiring Negroes, do you?”

“I should say not. I’ve just never had the opportunity to employ them, that’s all.”

“Mr. Bell,” Samalson said, “as far as I know, there are no Negroes involved in this case. This may become a rather lengthy trial, and I can see no reason for prolonging it by questioning prospective jurors on matters which can have no possible bearing on the case.”

“I was simply trying to find out, Your Honor, how far Mr. Abbeney’s tolerance extended.”

“Nonetheless, his attitude toward Negroes could not have any relevant bearing on the case before this court.”

“Then I have no further questions, Your Honor. I’d like this man excused.”

It took a week for both sides to agree on the jurors they wanted. At the end of that time the attorneys made their opening statements. Hank told the jury he would prove beyond reasonable doubt that the three boys were guilty of first-degree murder. The defense attorneys, quite naturally, told the jury that they would prove the boys were innocent.

“You will hear a lot of inflammatory oratory during this trial,” one of the defense attorneys said, “a lot of impassioned speeches about racial tolerance, about physical handicaps, about this poor innocent blind boy who was allegedly ruthlessly murdered by these three youngsters. But we ask you, in the name of justice, in the name of fairness, in the name of God, to listen with your minds and not with your emotions. We will present the facts clearly and logically, and those facts, when added up unemotionally, will tell you what verdict to bring back from that solemn room where you will decide whether or not three young boys will be deprived of their lives. And that verdict will be Not Guilty.”

And then the trial began in earnest.

The witnesses were paraded: the policemen who had made the arrest, the assistant D.A. who had initially handled the call from the detective squad room, Lieutenant Gunnison, Detective Larsen—all testifying to the blood-smeared condition of the three boys on the night of July 10. On the second day of the trial, Hank called Anthony Aposto to the stand. A hush fell over the courtroom as the boy was sworn in. He wore a neat blue suit, a white shirt, a dark tie. He took the chair and Hank approached him, studied him for a moment and then said, “Would you tell the court your name, please?”

“Anthony Aposto.”

“Are you also known as Batman?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did you get that name?”

“I picked it.”

“Why?”

“Batman?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you have any idea why you picked this particular name?”

“He’s in the comics. Batman, I mean.”

“Yes, I know. Do you like reading comics?”

“I like the pictures, yeah.”

“Do you have trouble with the words?”

“A little, yeah.”

“But you like reading comics anyway, is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you like the comics about Batman?”

“He’s brave. Also, he wears a nice suit, all black. And he’s got this friend Robin that he lives with. They’re like brothers almost.”

“Do you have any brothers?”

“No.”

“Would you like to have brothers?”

“I don’t know. I guess it wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Would you rather be Batman or Robin?”

“Objection!”

“Mr. Randolph?”

“The boy’s reading tastes seem irrelevant to me.”

“They are a part of the boy’s character, and since we’re trying to determine whether or not this boy committed murder, the question is relevant. Objection overruled. The witness will please answer the question.”

“What was the question again?” Aposto asked.

“Read him the question, please,” Samalson said.

“‘Would you rather be Batman or Robin?’” the court stenographer said.

“I’d rather be Batman.”

“Why?” Hank asked.

“Because he’s bigger, and he’s braver. And he wears this nice black suit. To tell the truth, Robin looks a little like a girl.”

“Do you like school, Anthony?”

“No, not so much.”

“What are you studying?”

“How to be an airplane mechanic.”

“Are you doing well in school?”

“Well, not so hot.”

“Would you like to be an airplane mechanic?”

“It’s a pretty good job. It pays good.”

“Yes, but would you like it?”

“I guess so.”

“Yes or no?”

“Well … no. Not really.”

“What would you rather be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it for a moment. If you had your choice, if you could be anything in the whole wide world, what would you choose?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it.”

“I guess I’d like to be a prize fighter.”

“Why?”

“I like to fight. I’m a pretty good fighter. Everybody knows that.”

“Would you like to fight because of the money involved?”

“No, not so much the money. I just like to fight, that’s all. I’m a good fighter. You can ask anybody.”

“If this court frees you, Anthony, what will you do with your life?”

“Objection!”

“Overruled. Proceed.”

“My life?”

“Yes.”

“Gee, I don’t know.”

“Suppose you were released this afternoon, what would you do?”

“Gee, I don’t know.”

“Would you go to a movie? Or a ball game? What would you do?”

“I guess I’d go back to the block. I guess that’s what I’d do. Yeah, I’d do that first.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? You mean what would I do tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Gee, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Do I have to know what I’d do tomorrow?”

“Witness will please answer the question,” Samalson said.

“Tomorrow? Gee …” Aposto’s brow furrowed in thought. “Tomorrow?” He wiped perspiration from his brow. For an awkward three minutes, he sat in the chair, thinking. Finally he said, “I don’t know what I’d do tomorrow.”

Hank turned from the boy. “Your witness,” he said to the defense.

One of Aposto’s attorneys rose. “We have no questions, your honor.”

“Very well, the witness may step down. Call the next witness, please.”

“Call Charles Addison.”

“Charles Addison will please take the witness stand.”

Addison, a tall thin man in a gray suit, walked to the front of the court and was sworn in. Hank walked to his table, picked up a folder and handed it to the court clerk. “I would like this marked as evidence, please,” he said.

“What is it?” Samalson asked.

“A report from the Psychiatric Division of Bellevue Hospital on Anthony Aposto, one of the defendants.”

“Let me see it,” Samalson said. He glanced through the folder and then handed it back to the clerk. “Mark it Exhibit One for the People.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Hank said. He turned to Addison. “Your name, please, sir?”

“Charles Ad—” Addison cleared his throat. “Charles Addison.”

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Addison?”

“I’m a psychologist.”

“Does that mean you’re a doctor?”

“No. I have a master’s degree in psychology.”

“I see. Where do you work, Mr. Addison?”

“At Bellevue Hospital.”

“What do you do there?”

“I’m a staff psychologist on Ward PQ-5.”

“What is Ward PQ-5?”

“The Adolescent Service.”

“Have you been attached to the Psychiatric Service of Bellevue for a long time?”

“Twelve years.”

“And have you administered many psychological tests during that time?”

“Yes. Very many.”

“Exactly how many, would you say?”

“I couldn’t say exactly. I administer tests every day of the week.”

“Would you say the number of tests you’ve administered was in the hundreds?”

“More than that.”

“In the thousands, would you say?”

“Yes, I would say so.”

“Is it true that you administered several psychological tests to Anthony Aposto when he was remanded to Bellevue for examination?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“When was this, Mr. Addison?”

“I tested him on July twenty-eighth.”

“And prepared a report which was signed by your superior, Dr. Deregeaux, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Would you look at this, please?” He handed Exhibit One to Addison. “Is that the report you prepared?”

Addison leafed through it. “Yes, that’s the report.”

“Now, there are a lot of psychological terms in this report, Mr. Addison, and I’m not sure what they all mean. I wonder if you could explain some of them to me.”

“I’ll try.”

“You say here that Aposto made responses indicative of poor sense of reality and poor judgment. What does that mean in terms of a boy who might have stabbed another boy?”

“Well, it could mean that the stabbing, for this boy, had no real basis in reality. For example, someone may have said to him, ‘Stabbing this boy will be fun.’ In which case, Aposto might have seized upon the idea that it would be fun. Or perhaps he misinterpreted something someone said, allowing it to anger him out of all proportion to the real meaning of the remark. In short, his motive could have had nothing whatever to do with the reality of the situation. That’s what is meant by a poor sense of reality. His reasons for the stabbing could have been completely unrealistic ones controlled by some inner conflict.”

“I see. In your opinion, Mr. Addison, is Anthony Aposto capable of committing an act which requires premeditation?”

“No. If I may qualify that. We must assume that a person capable of planning something is a person with a sound grasp of reality. I am speaking now of a real plan, you understand.”

“A long-range plan? A plan for a career? A savings plan? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Or a shorter-range plan? A plan for tomorrow?”

“Well, that’s not exactly what I had in mind. That might be extending the word ‘plan’ somewhat.”

“Did you hear the testimony of Aposto a few moments ago?”

“I did.”

“When I asked him what he would do tomorrow, he couldn’t seem to decide.”

“Well, that may have been due to the excitement of being questioned by a district attorney.”

“Are you excited now?”

“Not terribly.”

“Then what makes you think Anthony Aposto was excited?”

“Anthony Aposto is a disturbed personality with an intelligence quotient of sixty-seven. My I.Q. is one hundred fifty-two, and to the best of my knowledge I am not disturbed.”

“In spite of his excitement,” Hank said, “shouldn’t he have been able to decide what he wanted to do tomorrow?”

“I think Anthony Aposto is perfectly capable of making a plan for tomorrow. Because of his low I.Q., he may execute the plan badly, but he could certainly make a short-range plan such as that.”

“I see,” Hank said. He seemed suddenly troubled. “Would he be capable of planning the murder of Rafael Morrez?”

“Objection,” the defense screamed.

“Your Honor, a boy was killed,” Hank said, “and I am trying to find out whether or not one of the defendants was, in the opinion of a practicing psychologist, capable of planning that boy’s death. Since premeditation is an integral part of the crime of first-degree murder, and since we are prosecuting for first-degree—”

“Objection overruled,” Samalson said. “Proceed.”

“Would you answer the question, please. Mr. Addison?”

“I do not believe he would be capable of formulating an advance plan of murder,” Addison said.

“But he would be capable, would he not, of stabbing another boy on the impulse of—”

“Objection!”

“Sustained. Rephrase it, Mr. Bell.”

“Could he kill on impulse?”

“Yes.”

“At the height of passion?”

“Yes.”

“Would he know that he was killing?”

The courtroom was suddenly very silent.

“Yes,” Addison said. “He would know that he was killing.”

Sitting at the back of the room, Karin saw Hank’s back stiffen and knew instantly that this was not the answer he had expected.

“Now, just a minute, Mr. Addison,” Hank said quickly. “In your report, you said this boy was functioning at close to his endowment level. What does that mean?”

“The endowment level is a theoretical concept. It simply means the intelligence he was born with. A boy functioning at close to his endowment level has come as far intellectually as he is ever going to.”

“The intelligence he was born with? Do you mean that Aposto is functioning with the intelligence of a newborn baby?”

“No, I …”

“Can a newborn baby tell the difference between right and wrong, Mr. Addison?”

“I didn’t mean to imply that Aposto has the intelligence of a newborn baby. Surely you know that. When we’re dealing with intelligence we’re usually dealing with averages. We try to establish a norm, an intelligence level for an age level. In psychological terms, intelligence is intelligence only when we—”

“How long have you worked for Bellevue?” Hank asked quickly.

“Twelve years.”

“And all you can say is that intelligence is intelligence is intelligence? Doesn’t that sound a bit like Gertrude Stein?”

At the back of the room, Karin immediately recognized Hank’s change of tactics. He had initially built up Addison as an expert, and he was now trying to make him appear the fool. She put her hand to her mouth, wondering what he was trying to accomplish by this sudden switch.

“This is a little difficult to explain to a layman,” Addison said aloofly. “When we say that someone has the intelligence of a ten-year-old, we don’t actually mean that. There are a great many qualitative differences.”

“And when you say someone who is a mental deficient, who has an I.Q. of sixty-seven, who has poor sense of reality, judgment and emotional control, who is functioning at close to his endowment level—when you say this person would know that he was committing an act of murder, what do you mean then, Mr. Addison? Is it the same intelligence-is-intelligence double talk? Do you know what you mean, Mr. Addison?”

“I know exactly what I mean. Emotionally, Aposto may not have known what he was doing. But he knew what he was doing intellectually. He knew that if he stabbed a boy, he was committing a crime.”

“Are you aware of the legalistic concept of insanity?”

“I am. Aposto is not insane. Either legalistically or medically. He is a mental deficient, but he was capable of understanding the consequences of a stabbing.”

“And how do you know that?” Hank said angrily. “How can you possibly know what was in this boy’s mind when, and if, he stabbed another boy?”

“I can’t know. But neither can I testify that he did not know what he was doing. That’s what you want me to say, isn’t it?”

“I want you to say whatever you want to say,” Hank answered. He turned away from Addison. “Your witness,” he said to the defense table.

Aposto’s attorney rose. “No questions, Your Honor,” he said.

Samalson looked first at the defense table, and then at Hank. “The court will recess for ten minutes,” he said briskly. “Would Mr. Bell please join me in my chambers?”

“The court will recess for ten minutes,” the court clerk announced. “All rise.”

The spectators, the witnesses, the reporters, the defendants, the lawyers all rose as Samalson walked out of the room, his robes trailing behind him.

“Why does he want to see Daddy?” Jennie asked.

“I don’t know,” Karin said.

“Is he allowed to do that? Without having the defense attorneys present?”

“It may be considered prejudicial, but it’s Abe’s courtroom, and he can do whatever he wants in it.”

“I wonder why he wants to see Daddy,” Jennie said.

“Sit down, Hank,” Samalson said.

“Thank you.”

“No more judge and district attorney. For now, just friends. That okay with you?”

“That’s fine with me.”

“All right, answer one question for me, will you?”

“Shoot.”

“Are you trying to lose your job?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Now, Hank, you know damn well what I mean. You just questioned that witness with the objective of getting him to say Aposto was not responsible for his actions. Obviously, that was what the psychiatric report indicated to you. When Addison refused to go along with you, you tried to discredit his testimony.”

“I suppose I …”

“I’m going to tell you something, Hank. The defense attorneys are not boobs. They were appointed by the court, and they probably accepted the case because they knew there’d be a lot of newspaper publicity, but they are not boobs. They are sharp criminal lawyers. And they damn well know that the state will accept the testimony of either two psychiatrists or one psychiatrist and one psychologist as evidence that a defendant had no knowledge of the consequences of a crime while committing it. And you can damn well bet they’ve got those two psychiatrists in their pocket, ready to testify that Aposto wouldn’t even know the consequences of a game of checkers! Which is why they waived cross-examination of your witness. They’ve got their own men waiting. So your move was a dumb one because you were trying to do their job for them when they’re prepared to do it better themselves. But what I want to know is this. Why are you trying to do their job? Suppose you tell me.”

“Abe …”

“If you have doubts about the guilt of these boys, you should have gone to the district attorney with them. Damnit, you can get fired for this. Do you want to get fired?”

“No. I don’t want to get fired.”

“Then why didn’t you take this to your superiors? Or why didn’t you come to me? The old adage about criminal law being the bargain basement of the profession has a lot of truth in it. I’m sure the defense would be willing to talk a deal. What are you trying to do, Hank? Throw your own case?”

“Abe, you don’t understand.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“I’m doing something I’ve got to do.”

“And what’s that?”

“Let’s say I do have doubts.”

“Do you?”

“This is all supposition.”

“It’s all supposition because you don’t trust me.”

“I trust you, Abe. But you’re the judge in this case.”

“I’m not the judge right now. I’m your friend. I wouldn’t give a damn what happened to you if I weren’t your friend.”

“When we get back into that courtroom, you become the judge again.”

“Damnit, Hank, trust me. What are you trying to accomplish?”

Hank took a deep breath. “I’m trying to get acquittals for Aposto and Di Pace. I’m trying to get leniency for Reardon.”

“What in the holy hell for?”

“Because … because I think that would be justice.”

“Then why didn’t you go to the D.A.? Why didn’t you come to me before the trial?”

“Because, Abe, for the first time in my life I want newspaper headlines.”

Samalson rose from his desk. “You’re committing suicide. You’re killing yourself.”

“No.”

“Yes, damnit, yes. You’ll get fired as sure as I’m standing here. You’ll make the D.A.’s office look foolish and ridiculous. They won’t stand for it, Hank.”

“I don’t care. If it accomplishes—”

“It’ll accomplish nothing. You’ll lose your job, that’s all. And nobody else will want to hire you. You won’t even be able to get arrested in this city.”

“Maybe.”

“No maybes about it. That’s what’s going to happen. I won’t let you do it. We’re going out there right now to talk to the defense attorneys. When you tell them—”

“Abe, no, please. Let me do this my way.”

“Let you kill yourself? Is that what you’re asking me? Don’t you know your office wants to use these three kids as examples? Don’t you know the city is—”

“I am going to use them as examples. Examples of human beings. Abe, they’re not mystifying aliens from another planet. They’re scared, lonely kids.”

“Tell that to the mother of Rafael Morrez. Psychology isn’t going to help the victim in this case, Hank.”

“Yes, Abe, it is, because every damn kid involved in this murder is a victim.”

“The law is clear on—”

“This has nothing to do with the law. The hell with the law! Abe, I’m a lawyer, and the law has been my life. You know that. But how can I convict these kids until I know who really killed Rafael Morrez? And when I know that, the law becomes meaningless.”

“Don’t you know who killed that boy?”

“Yes, Abe, I do. We all killed him.”

“Hank, Hank …”

“We all killed him, Abe, because we’re not doing anything. We sit around and we talk about it, and we appoint commissions, and we listen to viewpoints, and all the while we know what’s wrong, we’ve already got the facts, but we won’t act on them. Instead, we allow Rafael Morrez to lose his life.”

“So what do you want to do? Start a campaign right this minute? In my courtroom? Hank, you’d never—”

“Can you think of a better time, Abe?”

Samalson shook his head. “This is the wrong way, Hank.”

“It’s the right way, the only way. Somebody’s got to get up and yell! Somebody’s got to be heard!”

“Why the hell does it have to be you?”

“I don’t know why. Don’t you think it scares me? I’d rather face a cannon than go out into that courtroom and reverse my own case. But, Abe, if somebody doesn’t do it now, if somebody doesn’t take a stand to stop this damn thing, we might just as well throw down the barricades. And then law and justice won’t mean a thing, because the world will be run by savages. I don’t want to raise my kid or my kid’s kid in a barbarian camp. I don’t want them torn apart, Abe. These kids are too important! They’re too goddamned important to waste!”

The room went silent.

After a long while, Abe Samalson said, “I wish I were younger.”

“Abe …?”

“I’ll hear the trial fairly. Don’t expect favors of me.”

“You know me better than that, Abe.”

“You’ll be slitting your own throat.”

“Maybe.”

“All right, all right,” Samalson said, sighing. “Let’s get out there before they accuse us of collusion.” At the door he hesitated. He put his hand on Hank’s shoulder. “Good luck,” he said. “You’re going to need it.”

The first witness Hank called after the recess was Angela Rugiello.

The girl took the stand hesitantly, scanning the courtroom with frightened brown eyes. She wore a green dress and high-heeled pumps. She pulled her skirt demurely over her knees as soon as she sat.

“Your name, please?” Hank asked.

“Angela Rugiello.”

“Where do you live, Miss Rugiello?”

“In Harlem.”

“Would you look over there to where the defendants are sitting, please? Do you know those three boys?”

“Yes,” she answered. Her voice was very low.

“Are you frightened, Miss Rugiello?”

“A little.”

“Of me?”

“No.”

“Of His Honor?”

“No.”

“Surely not of the defense attorneys,” Hank said, smiling. “They seem harmless enough.”

“No, I’m not afraid of them.”

“I read in the newspapers that you had received a note warning you against testifying. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you’re afraid?”

“Yes.”

“But you have just sworn to tell this court the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Will you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Despite the note?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Did you see those three boys on the night of July tenth?”

“Yes. I saw them.”

“Take a good look. Are you sure it was those three boys?”

“Yes.”

“What were they doing?”

“They were running.”

“From where?”

“From across Third Avenue. They were coming from the west side.”

“Were they carrying anything?”

“Yes.”

“What were they carrying?”

“Knives.”

“How do you know?”

“They gave the knives to me.”

Hank walked to his table, picked up three knives and then said, “If the court please, I would like these knives marked as evidence.”

“Mark the knives as evidence,” Samalson said. “Exhibits Two, Three and Four.”

“Would you mind looking at these knives, Miss Rugiello?”

“Yes?”

“Are these the knives those three boys gave you on the night of July tenth?”

Angela Rugiello studied the knives. “Yes. Those are the ones.”

“Do you remember which boy gave you which knife?”

“No. It all happened so fast. I just took the knives from them and then brought them home.”

“Was there blood on these knives?”

“Yes.”

“On all these knives?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do with the knives when you took them home?”

“I put them in a paper bag at the back of my drawer.”

“Did you do that as soon as you got home?”

“Yes.”

“Did you wash the knives first?”

“No.”

“You did not wash these knives?”

“I did not wash them.”

“Not even one of them?”

“None of them. I just put them in a paper bag and put them at the back of my drawer.”

“Let me understand this clearly, Miss Rugiello. You did not wash any of those knives, is that correct?”

“That’s right.”

“You did not wash one of those knives?”

“No … I told you.”

“Then the way you turned those knives over to the police later, they were in the same condition that you’d received them, is that right?”

“That’s right. I didn’t do anything to them.”

“But you do not know which of these knives came from which boy, is that also true?”

“That’s true.”

“I have no further questions.”

“You may proceed with the cross-examination,” Samalson said.

Randolph, one of the defense attorneys, approached the witness chair. “Miss Rugiello,” he said, “are you certain that the three boys who gave those knives to you were Arthur Reardon, Anthony Aposto and Daniel Di Pace?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I know them, don’t I?”

“Yes, but wasn’t it dark that night?”

“It wasn’t so dark that I couldn’t see them.”

“But it was dark, wasn’t it?”

“It wasn’t nighttime yet. It wasn’t that kind of darkness.”

“But it was dark.”

“Only because it was raining.”

“And in this darkness, couldn’t you have mistaken the three boys who allegedly gave you those knives?”

“No. I didn’t make any mistake. It was the three of them. I talked to them, so how could I have made a mistake?”

“I see. Who gave you the first knife?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Was it Reardon?”

“I don’t remember. It all happened so fast.”

“Was it Di Pace?”

“I told you, I don’t remember.”

“But you do remember that it was these three boys who gave you the knives? You’re sure of that. But you’re not exactly sure who gave you the knives, are you?”

“Objection! Defense counsel is attempting to distort the witness’s testimony. She has already stated that the knives were given to her by Reardon, Di Pace and Aposto. She simply does not remember the order of presentation.”

“Sustained. Strike the question.”

“I have no further questions,” Randolph said.

“Call Daniel Di Pace.”

Danny rose from where he was sitting. He glanced at the defense attorneys, received their nod and then walked hesitantly toward the witness stand. He wore a dark-brown suit. His red hair caught the rays of the sun which streamed through the long windows lining the courtroom. The clerk swore him in and he took the chair, wiping the palms of his hands on his trousers. Hank approached him. Silently, they surveyed each other.

“You are Danny Di Pace?”

“Yes.”

“You know, don’t you, Danny, that you’ve been accused of murder in the first degree, and that if this jury finds you guilty, you can go to the electric chair? You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes. I know.”

Hank picked up the knives and held them up to Danny.

“Recognize these knives?”

“No.”

“You’re under oath, Danny!” Hank snapped. “Don’t add perjury to the charge against you.”

“Is that any worse than first-degree murder?”

“Look at these knives. Do you recognize them?”

“No. I don’t recognize them.”

“Tell me the truth, Danny.”

“Objection!”

“These are the knives that were used in the murder of Rafael Morrez. Now, you recognize them, so don’t lie to me. I don’t want to hear lies.”

“Objection! Witness is being intimidated.”

“Overruled.”

“Do you recognize these knives, or don’t you?”

Danny hesitated. “Okay,” he said at last. “I think maybe I recognize them.”

“Never mind thinking maybe. Yes or no? Do you or don’t you?”

“All right, yes. I do.”

“Which one is yours?”

“I don’t know.”

“Which of these knives is yours, Danny?”

“I can’t remember. How do you expect me to remember?”

Hank extended one of the knives. “Is it this one?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look at it!”

“I am looking.”

“Is it your knife?”

“I don’t know.”

“Whose knife is it? It has a black handle and a silver stud. Did your knife have a black handle?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Then this isn’t your knife. Is that right?”

“I guess so.”

“If your knife didn’t have a black handle, this can’t be your knife, isn’t that right?”

“I suppose so.”

“Yes or no? Is this your knife, or isn’t it?”

“All right, no. It isn’t.”

Hank sighed. “Thank you. Now what about this other knife—with the mother-of-pearl handle? Is it yours?”

“No.”

“These first two knives are not yours, is that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“Then this last knife is yours, isn’t that also correct?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, look at the knife. Take a long look at it, and then tell me whether it’s the knife you used on July tenth.”

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

“Just tell me if it’s your knife, Danny.”

“I don’t know.”

“When I came to visit you on Welfare Island, you told me you’d stabbed Morrez four times. Now is—”

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

“Did you or did you not tell me you had stabbed Morrez four times?”

“I—I don’t remember what I told you. That was a long time ago.”

“Yes or no?”

“I … I … suppose I told you that.”

“That you stabbed Morrez?”

“Objection!”

“Overruled.”

“In self-defense,” Danny said.

“But you stabbed him, did you not?”

“Objection! Your Honor …”

“Overruled.”

“Yes,” Danny said. “In self-defense.”

“With this knife?”

“Objection!”

“Your Honor, I cannot examine this witness properly if my every word is challenged,” Hank said angrily. “I can see no objection to my line of questioning. If counsel for the defense would simply shut up and allow me to—”

“You’re leading the witness,” Randolph shouted.

“Damnit, you allowed him to take the stand, didn’t you?”

“Order! Order!” Samalson said firmly. “I want no such further outbursts! The line of questioning seems acceptable to this court. I must warn defense counsel against harassment of the district attorney. Witness will please answer the last question.”

“What—what was it?” Danny asked. He was beginning to perspire. He wiped sweat from his brow and his upper lip.

“Read back the question, please.”

“‘With this knife?’”

“Well, Danny?”

“What if it is my knife?”

“Answer the question!”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

“Thank you. Now tell me what happened on the night of July tenth.”

“I already told you.”

“Tell the court.”

“We were out for a walk,” Danny said, almost by rote. “Morrez jumped us. He had a knife in his hand. So we protected ourselves.”

“Whose idea was it to go for a walk?”

“We just got the idea. All of us together.”

“Who was it who first said, ‘Let’s go for a walk’?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Was it you?”

“No.”

“Aposto?”

“No.”

“Then it must have been Reardon.”

“I suppose so. Maybe it was Tower who got the idea to go for a walk.”

“Did he say he wanted to go for a walk?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Or did he say he wanted to go into enemy turf to stir up a little trouble?”

“Objection!”

“It was his idea to go into Spanish Harlem and start a little trouble, wasn’t it?”

“Objection!”

“Your Honor, you just warned …”

“And I must warn you, Mr. Bell, against leading your witness. Objection sustained. Strike both those questions.”

“Did Tower Reardon,” Hank said, “when he first brought up the subject of a walk, suggest that you walk into Spanish Harlem?”

“I don’t remember. I think he just said, ‘Let’s take a walk,’ or something like that.”

“Didn’t he say where?”

“Maybe.”

“Did he say, ‘Let’s walk over to Park Avenue’?”

“Maybe.”

“Did he say, ‘Let’s walk into Spanish Harlem?’”

“Maybe.”

“All right, when you got into Spanish Harlem, what did you do?”

“We started up the street …” Danny turned to Samalson. “Do I have to answer that?”

“The question is acceptable. You will answer it, please.”

“We just walked up the street.”

“Who was the first of you to spot Morrez?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“Tower?”

“Yes, I … I guess so. I don’t know. What difference does it make? We all stabbed him!”

A murmur went up in the courtroom. Hank leaned closer to Danny, and the murmur suddenly died.

“Why did you stab him, Danny?”

“He jumped us. He had a knife.”

“He had a harmonica, Danny!”

“What?”

“Isn’t that true? Didn’t he have a harmonica? It wasn’t a knife at all, was it?”

“I … I don’t know. It looked like a knife.”

“Then you knew it was a harmonica?”

“No, no, I’m just saying it looked like …”

“What did?”

“The harmonica, I told you! You just said it was a harmonica, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but when did you realize it was a harmonica?”

“Just this minute. I didn’t know until you—”

“You knew it was a harmonica when you stabbed him, didn’t you?”

“No. No, I thought it was a knife.”

“Who stabbed him first?”

“T-T-Tower.”

There was not a sound in the courtroom now. For Danny and Hank, the courtroom did not exist. They faced each other with the sweat streaking their faces, each straining forward as if to establish a contact which was somehow denied them.

“And who next?”

“Batman.”

“And then you?”

“Yes, yes. I don’t want to answer no more questions. I don’t want to—”

“How many times did you stab him?”

“Four, four.”

“Why?”

“I told you. He …”

“Why, Danny?”

“I don’t know!”

“You knew it was a harmonica, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“No!”

“You knew! You knew! Tell me the truth, Danny!”

Randolph leaped from his chair. “Just a minute here! Just a—”

“Tell me the truth! You knew it was a harmonica. You saw it!”

“Yes, yes, I knew,” Danny shouted. “All right? I knew.”

“Then why did you stab him?”

“I … I …”

“Why? Why, Danny? Why?”

“The—the—the others. Because the others … the others …”

“The others stabbed him?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“And so you stabbed him, too?”

“Yes. I stabbed him four times! What do you want from me? I stabbed him, I stabbed him, I stabbed him!”

“You didn’t stab him!” Hank shouted. “You’re lying!”

“What?” Danny said. “What?”

And then, before anyone fully realized what was happening, before the shock of Hank’s hurled words had worn off, he whirled to his table, snatched a blue folder from its top and thrust it at the court clerk. “I want this marked as evidence,” he said rapidly. “It’s a report from the New York City Police Laboratory on the weapons used in the Morrez slaying. The report states that the blades of only two of the knives were stained with blood. The blade of the third knife was clean. Only the handle of that knife had any blood on it.” He whirled back to Danny. “That was the knife you identified as yours, Danny! You turned the knife around, didn’t you? You only pretended to stab Morrez. You only struck his body with the handle of your knife!”

“No, no, I stabbed him!”

“Don’t lie, Danny! What the hell are you afraid of?”

“Order! Order!”

“I stabbed him, I stabbed him!”

“You’re lying!”

“I … I … I …”

And suddenly Danny Di Pace went limp. He slumped back into the chair, utterly resigned now, shaking his head over and over again, beginning to cry gently and quietly like a whimpering animal.

“Did you stab him?” Hank asked. His voice was almost a whisper.

“I never stabbed anybody in my life,” Danny mumbled through his tears. “Never, never, never. I never hurt nobody. Never, oh, Jesus, never, never.”

“All right, Danny,” Hank said gently.

“But I—I didn’t want them to think I was afraid. How could I let them know I was afraid? How could I do that?”

The reporters, led by Mike Barton, had already started their rush for the back doors. Mary Di Pace, sitting with her husband in the first row of benches, got to her feet and made an involuntary move toward her son.

“Order!” Samalson said quickly. “We will recess until two o’clock this afternoon. Will the district attorney and the defense counselors join me in my chambers immediately?” He rose.

“All rise!” the clerk shouted, and as Samalson swept out of the room, the court suddenly disintegrated into a rushing swirl of moving figures and raised voices.

On the witness chair, Danny Di Pace sobbed silently. Hank pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and said, “Here, son. Dry your eyes. It’s all over.”

“I shouldn’t be crying,” Danny said, trying to hold back the racking sobs. “Crying is for cowards.”

“Crying is for men, too,” Hank said, and he was grateful when Danny took the handkerchief.

He was stopped by Mary and her husband, stopped by the defense attorneys, stopped by the reporters who had made their rush calls and then hurried back into the courtroom. And finally he reached the side of his wife and daughter, and he held them to him, and Karin kissed him swiftly and cleanly and then looked up into his face, her eyes sparkling.

“You were wonderful!” she said.

“Daddy, Daddy!” Jennie said, and she squeezed his hand.

“I’ve got to go back to see Abe,” he told them. “Will you wait for me? We’ll have lunch together.”

“Hank, will there be trouble?”

“Maybe. I may lose my job, Karin.”

“There are other jobs,” she said.

“Yes. There are other jobs.” He paused. “I was scared stiff, Karin. Did it show? Could you tell my knees were trembling?”

“No, darling. You looked very brave—and very magnificent.”

“I was scared,” he said again. He paused. “But I’m not scared any more.” He laughed suddenly. “Damnit, all I am is hungry.”

“Hurry,” she said. “You mustn’t keep Abe waiting.”

“No.” He hesitated, clinging to her hand. “Karin?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

“I’m not worried,” she said.

“Good. Listen, wait for me, will you? I’ll be right back.” He paused again. “I love you both. Very much.”

And then he turned and walked toward the paneled door to the left of the judge’s bench. The sunlight covered his back for a moment, touched the erectly held head. He hesitated at the door. And then he pushed the door open purposefully and strode out of the courtroom.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ed McBain is one of the many pen names of legendary author Evan Hunter (1926–2005). Named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, Hunter is best known for creating the long-running 87th Precinct series, which followed an ensemble cast of police officers in the fictional city of Isola. A pioneer of the police procedural, he remains one of the best-loved mystery novelists of the twentieth century. Hunter also wrote under the pseudonyms Richard Marsten, Hunt Collins, John Abbott, Ezra Hannon, Curt Cannon, and others.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The lines on page ix are reprinted from The Prohpet by Kahlil Gibran with permission of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright 1923 by Kahlil Gibran; renewal copyright 1951 by Administrators C. T. A. of Kahlil Gibran Estate, and Mary G. Gibran.

Copyright © 1959 by Ed McBain

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3921-5

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Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Copyright Page