Winston had shown Sereta the box on the second night, happy and sated from his hours of mild pleasure, while Alice was cleaning herself up. He liked displaying his collection to the lovely dark-haired girl, smarter and more alert than her friend as she was, explaining the origins of some of the objects and pointing out little details about them. Sereta guessed that apart from the sex, he just wanted someone to talk to. She didn’t mind. He was a nice old man, generous and harmless. Maybe it wasn’t very smart of him to be trusting a pair of women he barely knew with the secrets of his treasures, but Sereta at least could be relied upon, and she was careful to watch Alice just in case her friend might be tempted to take something in the hope of fencing it later.

The box he was holding was less interesting to her than some of the other items in his possession: the jewelry, the paintings, the tiny ivory statuettes. It was a dull silver, and very plain in appearance. Winston told her that it was very old, and very valuable to those who understood what it represented. He opened it carefully. Inside, she saw a folded piece of what looked like paper.

“Not paper,” Winston corrected. “Vellum.”

Taking a clean handkerchief, he removed it and unfolded it for her. She saw words, symbols, letters, the shapes of buildings, and right in the center, the edge of what looked like a wing.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a map,” he said, “or part of one.”

“Where’s the rest of it?”

Winston shrugged. “Who knows? Lost, perhaps. This is one of a number of pieces. The rest have been scattered for a very long time. I once hoped that I might find them all, but now I doubt that I ever will. I have lately begun to consider selling it. I have already made some inquiries. We shall see…”

He replaced the fragment, then closed the box and restored it to its place on a small shelf by his dressing table.

“Shouldn’t it be in a vault or something?” she asked.

“Why?” said Winston. “If you were a thief, would you steal it?”

Sereta looked at the shelf. The box was lost amid the curios and little ornaments that seemed to fill every corner of Winston’s house.

“I was a thief, I wouldn’t even be able to find it,” she said.

Winston nodded happily, then shrugged off his robe.

“Time for one more, I think,” he said.

Viagra, thought Sereta. Sometimes that damn blue pill was a curse.

When the men offered him money for any information that might lead to the whereabouts of the whores, it didn’t take G-Mack more than a couple of moments to think about it and accept. He figured he didn’t have much choice, since the fat man had made it clear that if he tried to screw them over, he would suffer for it, and someone else would be running his whores as a result. He put out some feelers, but nobody had heard from either Sereta or Alice. Sereta was the smart one, he knew. If Alice stayed close by her and did as she was told, maybe cut down on her habit and tried to get straight, they might be able to stay hidden for a long time.

And then Alice had come back. She rang the doorbell on the Coney Island crib and asked to come up. It was late at night, and only Letitia was there, because she’d come down with some kind of puking bug. Letitia was Puerto Rican, and new, but she had been warned about what to do if either Sereta or Alice made an appearance. She allowed Alice to come up, told her to lie down on one of the cots, then called G-Mack on his cell. G-Mack told her to keep Alice there, not to let her go. But when Letitia went back to the bedroom, Alice was gone, and so was Letitia’s bag, with two hundred dollars in cash. When she ran down to the street, there was no sign of the thin black girl.

G-Mack went ape-shit when he got back. He hit Letitia, called her every damn name he could think of, then got in his car and trawled the streets of Brooklyn, hoping to catch sight of Alice. He guessed that she’d try to score using Letitia’s money, so he cruised the dealers, some of them known to him by name. He was almost at Kings Highway when at last he saw her. Her hands were cuffed, and she was being placed in the back of a cop car.

He followed the car to the precinct house. He could bail her out himself, but if anyone connected her to what had happened to Winston, then G-Mack would be in a world of trouble, and he didn’t want that. Instead, he called the number that the fat man had given him, and told the man who answered where Alice was. The man said they’d take care of it. A day later, Boy Blue came back and paid G-Mack some money: not as much as he’d been promised but, combined with the implicit threat of harm if he complained, enough to keep him from objecting and more than sufficient to make a considerable down payment on a ride. They told him to keep his mouth shut, and he did. He assured them that she had nobody, that no one would come asking after her. He said that he knew this for sure, swore upon it, told them he knew her from way back, that her momma was dead from the virus and her poppa was a hound who got himself killed in an argument over another woman a couple of years after his daughter was born, a daughter he’d never cared to see; one of many, if the truth be told. He’d made it all up-accidentally touching on the truth about her father along the way-but it didn’t matter. He put what they gave him for her toward the Cutlass Supreme, and it now sat on chrome Jordans, Number 23, in a secure garage. G-Mack was in the life now, and he had to look the part if he was going to build up his stable, although he had driven the Cutlass only on a handful of occasions, preferring to keep it carefully garaged and visiting it occasionally like he would a favorite woman. True, the cops might come asking about Alice again once they found out that she’d skipped bail, but then again they had other things to occupy them in this big, bad city without worrying about some junkie hooker who took a skip to get away from the life.

Then the black woman had come around asking questions, and G-Mack hadn’t liked the look on her face one little bit. He had grown up around women like that, and if you didn’t show them you meant business right from the start, then they’d be on you like dogs. So G-Mack had hit her, because that was how he always dealt with women who got out of line with him.

Maybe she’d go away, he thought. Maybe she’d just forget about it.

He hoped so, because if she started asking questions, and convinced some other people to ask questions too, then the men who paid him might hear about it, and G-Mack didn’t doubt for one minute that to safeguard themselves they would bind him, shoot him, and bury him in the trunk of his car, all twenty-three inches off the ground.

It was a strange situation in which Louis and I found ourselves. I wasn’t working for him, but I was working with him. For once, I wasn’t the one calling the shots, and this time what was occurring was personal to him, not to me. To salve his conscience a little-assuming, as Angel remarked, that he had a conscience to begin with-Louis was picking up the tab for whatever expenses arose. He was putting me up in the Parker Meridien, which was a lot nicer than the places in which I usually stayed. The elevators played vintage cartoons on little screens, and the TV in my room was bigger than some New York hotel beds I’d known. The room was a little minimalist, but I didn’t mention that to Louis. I didn’t want to seem to be carping. The hotel had a great gym, and a good Thai restaurant a couple of doors up from it. There was also a rooftop pool, with a dizzying view over Central Park.

I met Walter Cole at a coffee shop down on Second Avenue. Police cadets passed back and forth by our window, hauling black knapsacks and looking more like soldiers than cops. I tried to remember when I was like them and found that I couldn’t. It was as though some parts of my past had been closed off to me while others continued to leach into the present, like toxic runoff poisoning what might once have been fertile soil. The city had changed so much since the attacks, and the cadets, with their military appearance, now seemed more suited to its streets than I did. New Yorkers had been reminded of their own mortality, their susceptibility to harm from outside agencies, with the consequence that they, and the streets that they loved, had been altered irrevocably. I was reminded of women I had seen in the course of my work, women whose husbands had lashed out at them once and would lash out at them again. They seemed always to be braced for another blow, even as they hoped that it would not come, that something might have altered in the demeanor of the one who had hurt them before.