"Maybe that's what the kidnappers are doing to Plankton right now-making him listen to hip-hop," Barner said.

"For Plankton, that would certainly fit the description of 'feeling the pain,' what the kidnappers said they had in store for the J-Bird."

"Although," Barner said, "if it's Plankton's homophobia that the FFFers are mad about, they probably have some gay-something they're using to get under Plankton's skin."

"Right. Like the tattoos Moyle got. But something that won't just insult Plankton but. .. 'educate' him was what they told Moyle. Moyle was uneducable, the FFFers said, but Plankton, a better candidate for some reason, was headed for the reeducation farm. I don't know what the FFFers have in mind, but the term is ominous. Maoists used it in China and Cambodia."

"Aren't the Amish sort of communistic?" Barner said.

Back to Thad. "No, I don't think so, Lyle. Well, yes, in the sense that there's a theory of sharing, and nonconformity is discouraged. But I don't think the Amish rough people up when they stray from the Mennonite party line. They just treat them like they don't exist. Whoever's got Jay Plankton isn't shunning him. They seem to want him to suffer and to change through suffering."

"Maybe that's not Amish," Barner said, "but it does sound religious. Mennonite is, like, a religion, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's a Christian church, though I think the Men-nonites believe in simplicity and self-abnegation, but not self-flagellation."

"I guess Thaddie doesn't have to self-flagellate," Barner said. "Not with you and Timothy Callahan around."

I decided not to try to sort that one out. Instead, I turned up the radio, which described traffic conditions-"flowing smoothly" was the overly optimistic description-as well as the weather. The forecaster said clouding up, then rain early Sunday. This was followed by another report on the abduction of the J-Bird. Little new information was offered, just the release of a statement from the Bush campaign saying the Texas governor had been shocked and saddened by "this attack on a great American," and the entire campaign was praying for Plankton's safe return to his loved ones.

I said to Barner, "There's no relief for the deity's listening posts tonight."

"The pols are keepin' the Almighty hoppin'," he muttered, and hung a right onto Union Avenue.

Chapter 18

"So how'd they get away?" Barner was asking two cops, a buxom black woman and her portly white male companion, both of whom appeared to be in their twenties.

"We think they must have come out when the Mister Softee truck stopped in front of the building," the female officer said. "There was a lot of people on the sidewalk waiting for the ice-cream wagon. And then when it stopped, it played its dumb little tune, and more people came out of the bodega across the street where we were parked."

"It was either we didn't spot them come out and walk away through the crowd," the male patrolman said, "or they remained concealed on the other side of the truck."

"This was just, like, five minutes ago," the female officer said. "Jeez, I guess we blew it."

"Jeez, I guess you did," Barner said, and shook his head. The two cops looked glum, hurt and worried.

It was the building superintendent, Ignacio Melendez, in fact, who had informed us upon our arrival that the occupants of Samuel Day's apartment had left the building just minutes earlier. Three men from the apartment had passed by the open door to the super's first-floor apartment. He knew they were under police surveillance, Melendez said, but he did not try to stop them. He assumed the police would follow them. Anyway, he said, he thought the three men might be dangerous if the cops were interested in them. One of the men, according to Melendez, was carrying a long-handled shovel with a sharp blade.

Barner asked the super to describe the men. The one he knew was Sam Day, he said, a tall, bearded man in his forties, who had been renting a second-floor apartment for the past two years. The second man was a slender, paler man of about the same age, with a patch of chin whiskers. He was the one wielding the shovel. Melendez said this man seemed to live with Day at least part of the time, and both of them kept late hours. Their companion when they left the building moments earlier was described as a blue-eyed man with big ears. That sounded like Thad.

The super was lingering in the entryway to the building, along with a number of tenants and neighborhood residents apparently curious about the police presence.

They seemed wary but not hostile. Most looked Hispanic. Barner had told me earlier that Williamsburg had become in recent years a mix of Central Americans, Hasidic Jews and hip white kids in their twenties who couldn't afford to live in the no-longer-low-rent East Village near the bars and clubs where they hung out. Most of the young crowd were farther west, though, and the business signs on Lorimer were mainly in Spanish.

Barner and I went up to the super and Lyle asked him to step inside for a moment so they could have a word. In the dingy entryway, Lyle told Melendez, "We'd l i k e to look inside Day's apartment. Have you got a key on you?"

Melendez, round and solid-looking in gray work pants and matching shirt, seemed doubtful. "I don't know. I want to help you out. But don't you got to have a warrant?"

"There's been a kidnapping," Barner said somberly, with just a hint of indignation and even menace. "A man's life may be at stake. Every minute counts. In a life-or-dcath situation, no warrant is required."

"Is that the radio guy?" Melendez asked. "Yeah, Jay Plankton."

"You think they got this Plankton guy up on two?" "Possibly. We have to check it out. If he's in there, he may be injured."

"I never heard no screams."

Barner glanced at his watch and said, "Who owns the building?"

Whoever it was, Melendez looked as if he didn't want to get his employer involved.

"Come on," he said, and led us up a narrow stairwell and along a dim hallway to the rear of the building.

Melendez inserted a key from his jingling ring into the lock at 2R, and then a second key into a second lock. The wooden door swung open to reveal not a kidnapper's torture chamber but merely a messy small apartment. As we edged into the living room, where a table lamp was lit, I could hear Timothy Callahan's voice in the far distance:

"Surely gay people don't live here."

A daybed in the living room was unmade, and clothes had been tossed over a nearby chair. They looked like Thad's. There were a couple of easy chairs and a coffee table against the wall with an old Zenith TV set atop it with wire-coat-hanger rabbit ears.

I stuck my head into the small kitchen. The dishes in the drying rack were clean, and there was a smell of rice-beans-meat takeout coming from the garbage can under the sink.

"That's the bedroom in there," Melendez said.

"Just one?" Barner asked.

"The back apartments, they just got one bedroom."

"Police!" Barner said loudly, and went through the open door. These theatrics were unnecessary, for no one was in the room. The double bed was unmade and more clothes were stacked on makeshift shelves. Barner checked the closet; the clothes inside were neater, hung on hangers above two pieces of luggage. A rear window with a sliding screen stretched into it was open to the warm night air. Outside was a small yard with a single scraggly tree of an unidentifiable type twenty feet below.