“Talking to him?”

Pellam didn’t want to say that the boy knew about the arson. For the youngster’s sake. The Word on the Street traveled far too fast. He remembered the gun in Ramirez’s hand and how the whole world seemed terrified of Jimmy Corcoran.

“You can,” Carol said dryly, “tell me the truth.” Shoved her glasses onto her nose.

Pellam cocked an eyebrow.

“Happens all the time. One of our kids cops a wallet or something. Then somebody comes in, blushing, and says, ‘I think one of your boys “found” my wallet.’ ”

Pellam decided she was a smart, rich girl turned social worker. Which was probably a very tough category of person to deal with.

“Well, he might be a great thief but he didn’t steal anything from me. I’m making a film and-”

“A reporter?” Carol’s face went ice cold – much angrier than if he’d accused Alex of “finding” his wallet. He thought: her eyes are remarkable. Pale, pale blue. Almost blending into the surrounding white.

“Not exactly.” He explained that West of Eighth was an oral history.

“I don’t like reporters.” A bit of brogue slipped into Carol’s voice and he had a clue to the feistiness inside her – a grit that the director of a place like this undoubtedly needed. A temper too. “All those damn stories on preteen addicts and gang rapes and child prostitutes. Makes it hard as hell to get money when the boards of foundations turn on Live at Five and see that the little girl you’re trying to rehabilitate is an illiterate hooker with HIV. But, of course, it’s exactly kids like that who’re the ones you need to rehabilitate.”

“Hey, ma’am,” Pellam held up his hand. “I’m just a lowly oral historian here.”

The hardness in Carol’s round face melted. “Sorry, sorry. My friends say I can’t pass a soapbox without climbing on top. You were saying, about Alex? You were interviewing him?”

“I’ve been talking to people in the building that burned down. He lived there.”

“Off and on,” Carol corrected. “With his chicken hawk.”

Me and Ray.

She continued, “You know Juan Torres?”

Pellam nodded. “He’s in critical condition.”

The son of the man who met Jose Canseco.

Carol shook her head. “It just kills me to see something like that happen to the good ones. It’s such a damn waste.”

“You don’t have any idea where Alex took off to?”

“Ran in, ran out. Don’t have a clue.”

“Where’s home?”

“He claimed he was from Wisconsin somewhere. Probably is… I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Pellam.”

“First?”

“John Pellam. Go by the last usually.”

“You don’t like John?”

“Let’s say I don’t lead a very Biblical life. Any chance he’ll come back?”

“Impossible to say. The working boys – you know what I mean by ‘working’ – only stay here when they’re sick or between hawks. If he’s scared about something he’ll go to ground and it could be six months before we see him again. If ever. You live in the city?”

“I’m from the Coast. I’m renting in the East Village.”

“The Village? Shit, Hell’s Kitchen sleaze beats their sleaze hands down. So, give me your number. And if our wandering waif comes home I’ll let you know.”

Pellam wished he hadn’t thought of her as a peasant. He couldn’t dislodge the thought. Peasants were earthy, peasants were lusty. Especially red-haired peasants with freckles. He found himself calculating that the last time he’d slept with a woman they’d wakened in the middle of the night to the sound of winds pelting the side of his Winnebago with wet snow. Today the temperature had reached 99.

He pushed those thoughts aside though they didn’t go as far away as he wanted them to.

There was a dense pause. Pellam asked impulsively, “Listen, you want to get some coffee?”

She reached for her nose, to adjust the glasses, then changed her mind and took them off. She gave an embarrassed laugh and readjusted the glasses again. Then she gave a tug at the hem of her sweatshirt. Pellam had seen the gesture before and sensed that a handful of insecurities – probably about her weight and clothes – was flooding into her thoughts.

Something in him warned against saying, “You look fine,” and he chose something more innocuous. “Gotta warn you, though. I don’t do espresso.”

She brushed her hair into place with thick fingers. Laughed.

He continued, “None of that Starbucks, Yuppie, French-roast crap. It’s American or nothing.”

“Isn’t it Colombian?”

“Well, Latin American.”

Carol joked, “You probably like it in unrecyclable Styrofoam too.”

“I’d spray it out of an aerosol can if they made it that way.”

“There’s a place up the street,” she said. “A little deli I go to.”

“Let’s do it.”

Carol called, “Be back in fifteen.”

A response in Spanish, which Pellam couldn’t make out, came from the back room.

He opened the door for her. She brushed against him on the way out. Had she done so on purpose?

Eight months, Pellam found himself thinking. Then told himself to stop.

They sat on the curb near Ettie’s building. At their feet were two blue coffee cartons depicting dancing Greeks. Carol wiped her forehead with the souvenir Cambridge cotton and asked, “Who’s he?” Pellam turned and looked where Carol was pointing.

Ismail and his tricolor windbreaker had mysteriously returned. He now played in the cab of the bulldozer that had been leveling the lot beside Ettie’s building. “Yo, my man, careful up there,” Pellam called. He explained to Carol about Ismail, his mother and sister.

“The shelter in the school? It’s one of the better ones,” Carol said. “They’ll probably get them into an SRO in a month or so. Single room occupancy – a residence hotel. At least if they’re lucky.”

“So, you know the neighborhood pretty well?” he asked.

“Cut my social work teeth here.”

“You’d know the good stuff then. The stuff that we touristas never find out.”

“Try me.” Carol glanced at the tooling on Pellam’s battered black Nokona cowboy boots.

“The gangs,” he said.

“The crews? Sure, I know about them. But I don’t deal much with them. See, if a kid’s in a set he’s gonna get all the support he needs. Believe it or not, they’re better adjusted than the lone wolves.”

“Yo,” Ismail called to Carol. “I going back to L.A. with my homie there,” he said, pointing at Pellam.

“I don’t recall that being on the agenda, young man.” He raised his eyebrows to Carol.

“No, no, it’s cool, cuz. I come with you. Hook up with a Blood or Crip crew. I get myself jumped in with them. Be cool. You know what I’m saying.” He vanished down the alley.

“Give me lesson,” Pellam said. “Gangs 101 in Hell’s Kitchen.”

Carol’s glasses had reappeared. He wanted to tell her she looked better without them. He knew better than that.

“Gangs, huh? Where do I start? All the way back to the Gophers?” Carol smiled coyly. Then she laughed in surprise when Pellam said, “I heard One-Lung Curran’s outa business now.”

“You know more than you’re letting on.”

Pellam remembered an interview with Ettie Washington.

“… Battle Row, Thirty-ninth Street, the turn of the century. Grandma Ledbetter told me what a dreadful place it was. That’s where One-Lung Curran and his gang, the Gophers, hung out – in Mallet Murphy’s tavern. Grandma’d go to dig in bins for scraps of gabardine, or maybe look for knuckle bones and she had to be careful ’cause the gang was always shooting it out with the police. That’s where it got the name. They had real battles. Sometimes it was the Gophers that won, believe it or not, and the cops wouldn’t come back for weeks, until things’d settled down.”

He now said to Carol, “How ’bout the gangs now?”

She thought for a moment. “The Westies used to be the gang here and there’re still some around but the Justice Department and the cops broke their back a few years ago. Jimmy Corcoran’s gang’s pretty much replaced them – they’re the dregs of the old Irish. The Cubano Lords’re the biggest now. Mostly Cuban but some Puerto Rican and Dominican. No black gangs to speak of. They’re in Harlem and Brooklyn. The Jamaicans and Koreans are in Queens. The tongs in Chinatown. The Russians in Brighton Beach.”