“The back door was locked, right?”

“Yeah, they try an’ keep it locked. But, shit, there a lotta traffic, you know what I’m saying? In that back place there, see it, Pellam? This fag doing business, you know? Givin’ head and all. He a cluckhead too.”

A male prostitute… “So people’d come through the back door? His customers?”

“Yeah, we’d sit outside, some of us, what it is, and these guys’d come out the back door and we’d say, ‘Fag, fag…’ And they’d run away. Shit, that was fun!”

“You seen that guy around lately?”

“Naw, cuz. He gone.”

Pellam picked up the building directory, lying where he’d let it fall after Ramirez had tossed it to him the other day. “You know this Ramirez?”

“Shit, Hector Ramirez? His crew be the Cubano Lords. They bad motherfuckers too but they don’t give this nigger no shit. Not like Corcoran. He’s sprung, cuz, Corcoran is. Man be a hatter. But Ramirez, see, he’d wax you but only if he had to.”

Even this ten-year-old was better patched in to the Word on the street than Pellam. He glanced at the name E. Washington on the directory and tossed it to the ground.

A police car cruised slowly past the building and paused. The officer in the driver’s seat was looking his way. He gestured Pellam out of the police tape.

“Ismail-”

The boy was gone.

“Ismail?”

The squad car drove on.

He searched for several minutes but Ismail had vanished. A brittle sound of falling brick and hollow metal filled the night. A soft grunt followed.

“Ismail?” Pellam stepped into the alley behind the building and saw boy, about eighteen, blond, in faded blue jeans and a dirty white shirt. He crouched beside a pile of trash. He was digging something out, occasionally dislodging a small avalanche, leaping back like a spooked raccoon then digging again. He had fine, baby hair, self-cut, ear length. The obligatory Generation X goatee was anemic and untrimmed.

He glanced at Pellam, squinted then returned to his task.

“Gotta get some stuff, man. Some stuff.”

“You lived here?”

The boy said gravely, “In the back.” He nodded toward where the rear basement apartment had been. “Me and Ray, he was like my manager.”

Me and Ray, he was like his pimp.

This was the one Ismail was talking about. The male prostitute. He seemed so young for a life on the street. Pellam asked, “Where’s Ray now?”

“Dunno.”

“Can I ask you some questions about the fire?”

With a grunt of exertion he pulled what he’d been looking for from beneath the pile and wiped at the cover of the book. Kurt Cobain – the Final Year. He gazed at it lovingly for a moment then he looked up. “That’s what I was going to talk to you about, man. The fire. You Pellam, right?” He flipped through the book.

Pellam blinked in surprise.

“So, here’s the deal. I can tell you who started the fire and who hired them. If you’re, like, interested.”

“How’d you know about me?”

“Just did.” The boy caressed the glossy cover of the book with a filthy hand.

“How?” Pellam persisted, as curious as he was suspicious.

“You know. Like, you hear things.”

“Tell me what you know. I’m not a cop.”

His laugh said he already knew this about him.

The Word. On the street.

The boy’s attention returned to his book, like a child’s Golden Book, just a photo laminated on a cardboard cover. The type was large and the words sparse. The photos were terrible.

Pellam prompted, “So who set the fire? Who hired him?”

In a very young face, the very old eyes narrowed. Then the boy broke out into a laugh.

Gear-greasing is expensive work.

Pellam mentally totaled his two savings accounts and an anemic IRA, penalty for early withdrawal, and some remaining advance money from WGBH. The figure eighty-five hundred floated into his mind. There was a little equity left in the house on Beverly Glen. The battered Winnebago had to be worth something. But that was it. Pellam’s lifestyle was often liquid but his resources largely were not.

The boy wiped his nose. “A hundred thousand.”

He thought a grunge-stud like this would have more modest aspirations. Pellam didn’t even bother to negotiate. He asked, “How’d you find out about the fire?”

“The guy who did it, I sorta know him. He’s hatter. Crazy dude, you know. He gets off burning things.”

The pyro Bailey had told him about – the one A.D.A. Lois Koepel, whom Pellam already detested, was so eager to track down.

“He told you who hired him?”

“Like, not exactly but you can figure it out. From what he told me.”

“What’s your name?”

“You, like, don’t need to know it.”

You, like, know mine.

“I could give you one,” the boy continued. “But so what? It wouldn’t be real.”

“Well, I don’t have a hundred thousand bucks. Nowhere near.”

“Bullshit. You’re, like, this famous director or something. You’re from Hollywood. Of course you got money.”

In front of them the police cruiser eased down the street again. Pellam thought about tackling the skinny kid and calling the cops over.

But all it took was one look into Pellam’s eyes.

“Oh, nice try, you asshole,” the boy shouted. Clutching the precious book under his arm, he burst down the alley.

Pellam waved futilely at the police car. The two cops inside didn’t see him. Or they ignored the gestures. Then he was racing through the alley, boots pounding grittily on the cobblestones, after the kid. They streaked through two vacant lots behind Ettie’s building and emerged onto Ninth Avenue. Pellam saw the boy turn right, north, and keep sprinting.

When the kid got to Thirty-ninth Street Pellam lost him. He paused, hands on hips, gasping. He examined the parking lots, the approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel, the rococo tenements, bodegas and a sawdust-strewn butcher shop. Pellam tried a deli but no one in there had seen him. When he stepped out into the street Pellam noticed, half block away, door swinging open. The boy sprinted out, lugging a knapsack, and vanished in a mass of people. Pellam didn’t even bother to pursue. In the crowded streets the boy simply turned invisible.

The doorway the kid had come out of was a storefront, windows painted over, black. He remembered seeing it earlier. The Youth Outreach Center. Inside he saw dingy fluorescent-lit room sparsely furnished with mismatched desks and chairs. Two women stood talking in the center of the room, arms crossed, somber.

Pellam entered just as the thinner of the two women lifted her arms helplessly and pushed through a doorway that led to the back of the facility.

The other woman’s pale, round face was glossy with faint makeup, barely hiding a spray of freckles. She wore her red hair shoulder-length. He guessed she was in her mid-thirties. She wore an old sweatshirt and a pair of old jeans, which didn’t disguise her voluptuous figure. The long-sleeved top, maroon, bore the Harvard crest. Veritas.

Pellam had a fast memory of the Cubano Lord. Verdad, he recalled.

Primero con la verdad.

She glanced up at him with some curiosity as he stepped inside. She glanced at his camera bag. He introduced himself and the woman said, “I’m Carol Wyandotte. The director here. Can I help you?” She adjusted a pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses, break in the frame fixed with white adhesive tape – shoving the loose glasses back up her nose. Pellam thought she was pretty the way a peasant or farm girl would be. Absurdly, she wore a choker of pearls.

“A kid left here a minute ago. Blond, grungy.”

“Alex? We were just talking about him. He ran inside, grabbed his backpack and left. We were wondering what was going on.”

“I was talking to him down the street. He just ran off.”