With a towel around my waist, I followed signs to the men’s sauna and steam rooms. The sauna was empty but in the steam room, lying on one of the tiled tiers, was a hard mound of flesh with a towel around its waist and over its face. I sat on a lower tier where it was still possible to breathe and waited for a moment as the steam floated about me and the sweat started sucking from my body.

When sweat dripped from my nose to my knees I said finally, “Enrico Raffaello didn’t kill Bissonette.”

“Good morning, Victor,” said Jimmy Moore, without lifting the towel off his face.

Concannon had told me that Moore worked out at the Sporting Club every morning, primarily by sweating out the alcohol from the night before in the sauna or steam room, depending on his mood. It was directly to the councilman that the door Raffaello opened had led, it was Moore whose answers to the big questions I needed to hear.

“Where did you gather your startling bit of information?” he asked.

“From Raffaello himself.”

“So you had an audience with the pope and the pope told you he’s innocent.”

“And I believe him,” I said. “No reason for him to lie, his hands are already crimson. Which raises the question I have raised before and to which I still don’t have an answer. Who killed Bissonette? Did you?”

He grabbed the towel off his face, sat up, and let out a long grunt that was like the baying of a great wounded mammal.

“If you want, councilman,” I said, “you can have your attorney present when we have this conversation.”

He pushed himself off his tier and stepped down, loosening the towel from his waist and letting it drop into the puddled steam slipping across the tiled floor to the drain. Beside the door was a cold-water shower and he turned it on. His muscles were turning slack and what was once a formidable chest was dropping, but what I noticed most clearly was the size of his prick, which was big, huge, like a bull elephant’s, it flopped down and hung there and the size of it was sickening. I wrapped the towel more tightly around my waist.

“I think I can handle this without Prescott’s help,” he said from inside the shower, water streaming down his face and body. “So you want to know if I killed the ballplayer. If I am a murderer. Because the way you figure it, it was me who beat him to death with a baseball bat.”

“You’ve lied to Chester and me about who did it and you’re setting up Chester for a fall. It doesn’t make sense unless you killed him.”

“Get dressed,” he said, wiping his face with a towel and opening the steam room door. A blast of frigid air swirled in. “We have time for a morning drive before court.”

“Do you know how I was first elected to City Council, Victor?” asked Jimmy Moore. We were inside the limousine now, driving north on Broad Street. Henry and the car had been waiting in the alley next to the old Bellevue Stratford, where the Sporting Club was situated. Inside the limousine was a tray of danish and a steel thermos, out of which Jimmy poured us each a cup of coffee. “Cream?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“I ran on an anti-busing platform,” he said. “I opposed integration. I promised to keep our neighborhoods crimefree, which is political shorthand for white. You don’t have to use Klan language to grab the racist vote. Talk about maintaining the integrity of the neighborhoods, talk about the scourge of crime, talk about protecting the American dream of home ownership and maintaining real estate values, talk about busing and the electorate understands. I even got into a fistfight in the Council chamber over a Gay Pride Day. I was opposed to it, of course. In my district the politics of hate were good politics and all I wanted was my city post, my city car, the power to make deals, so they were my politics too. The papers hated me, I was a joke, except that I carried my district with seventy-three percent of the vote.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Drugs were the other people’s problem,” he said, ignoring my question. “You know much about the gospels? No, of course not. Saul, an agent of the Jews and the scourge of Christianity, on his way to Damascus has a vision, hears a voice. ‘Saul, Saul, why persecuteth thou me?’ It is the voice of Jesus. At that moment he becomes a new man, he changes his name to Paul, he becomes Jesus’s messenger on earth. Well, I didn’t hear any voice. What I heard was a silence. My own daughter’s silence. But it spoke to me just as clearly. ‘Daddy. Daddy. Why forsaketh thou me?’ And I didn’t have an answer for her. Not a one.”

He took a sip from his coffee and another, looking out the side window into the desolation of North Philadelphia.

“Now I do,” he said.

“One of our most important programs here at the Nadine Moore Youth House,” said Mrs. Diaz as she led Jimmy Moore and me through a tour of the facility, “is our community outreach program. Actually, it was at the councilman’s insistence that we began the program and it has become the cornerstone of our effort. So often the only place children in trouble can receive help is through the criminal justice system and by then it is often too late. Through our education and outreach programs we can get hold of these children and deal with their problems before they enter the criminal system. That makes all the difference, we’ve found.”

Mrs. Diaz was a handsome woman with broad cheekbones and strong hands. We were walking down a hallway running around the perimeter of the building. All the classrooms had windows facing the hallways, which gave the construction a large and airy feel, more like a fine office building than a prison school. We stopped in front of a classroom where a group of twenty teenagers, dressed alike in white shirts and navy pants, were sitting in a semicircle around a teacher in goggles performing a chemistry experiment.

“The day for our children starts early in the morning,” said Mrs. Diaz. “We have a regular school curriculum, supplemented in the afternoons with classes designed to meet the specific needs of the individual child. The afternoon classes include group therapy. What we have found is that these children go back to school with their scholastic skills improved to such a point that they excel, which is primarily why our graduates generally do so well on the outside. Through our monitoring and counseling program, which continues long after the children leave here, we have found that almost ninety percent have stayed off of drugs and out of trouble.”

“Explain to Mr. Carl where our funding comes from, Loretta,” said the councilman as we continued our walk down the hall.

“We get some support from the city,” she said. “Councilman Moore has been able to secure for us some federal funds. And of course there are private donations. Whatever you’d like to give, Mr. Carl,” she said with a warm smile, “would be greatly appreciated. And then CUP, Citizens for a United Philadelphia, has been extremely generous. In the past, whenever we have anticipated a shortfall, CUP has balanced our budget.”

We followed Loretta Diaz up a flight of stairs into a gym where a large class of young men and women in their blue pants and white shirts were marching, in short-order drill, like soldiers on the parade ground. A teacher was barking out commands, “Left face. Right face. Quarterturn. About face,” and the marchers were chanting together, to the beat of their footsteps, “We got to go home on our left, our right, we got to go home on our left, our right.”

“There’s a consensus growing around the country,” said Mrs. Diaz, “that army-type discipline helps build self-esteem. So-called boot camps. I’m not so certain about whether it works or not, but the President is enamored with the idea and so it helps with the grant monies. As our plans for the future are ambitious, everything we can do to increase our funding we do. Besides, the children seem to actually like it.”