The chubby young male cop was standing in the doorway to Sam Day's building. "Is Detective Barner still up there?" I asked.

"Yeah, go on up."

"I don't need to. Did a young woman go in who was wearing a red skirt and skimpy orange top?"

"No, nobody went in."

"Did you notice a young woman fitting that description stop here at all, or just go by?"

The cop thought about this. "Not that I noticed."

"Thanks."

I walked to the end of the block, peered around, then backtracked to the subway. I waited for a time at the top of the station stairs on Lorimer, hoping I might spot Charm, or Thad and his companions. Or-though I could make no sense of this one-all of them together. But I saw no familiar faces at all, and after several minutes I descended into the overheated tunnel and rejoined the Manhattan-bound stream of party-goers.

During the ride, I struggled to recall Kurt Zinsser's boyfriend Darren's description of Charm's Brooklyn friends that Darren said she visited once a week. There had been no last names given, just one first name, a second first name-Sharon?-and, more memorably, somebody referred to as Strawberry Swirl. I figured I could find a phone book, but it seemed unlikely that I would come upon a listing for "Swirl, S." and a Brooklyn street address.

My ears popped as the train hurtled westward under the East River, and I thought of Leo Moyle's underground transits, one going and one coming back, during his twenty-four hours of captivity. His ears had popped too, he had told Barner, indicating transit via tunnel to Brooklyn, Queens, or New Jersey. Who among all the people I knew with FFF connections were bridge-and-tunnel people? Just Sam Day, plus Charm's Brooklyn friends. Simple coincidence? Could be. Lots of Manhattan-loving nonrich young people actually lived in the once hopelessly unfashionable outer boroughs now. And no connections between any of the assorted known FFF cast of characters made any sense I could begin to imagine. I was missing something, or just way off the beam. Beam me up, Thaddie, I thought-if, unlikely as it seemed, Thad really did know more than he was telling me-Thaddie, beam me up.

I got off the train at the Fourteenth Street-Seventh Avenue station and made my way along the pedestrian tunnel to the platform for the 1 and 9 trains heading up the West Side. This Manhattan station was even hotter than the Brooklyn stations, and it stank of something, too- something pungent that was both off-putting and at the same time had vaguely pleasant associations.

What was it? Not diesel fumes. Years earlier, when I quit smoking, I had loved standing behind buses as they pulled away and sucking up the carbon monoxide fumes they belched into city streets. It was both sickening and at the same time the source of a swell little high of a type I had lost forever.

The stench on the 1 and 9 platform was like that, but both sharper and more indoorsy. What was it? It smelled somewhat medicinal, a bit like cleaning fluid. Oven cleaner? This was Timmy's household-chore-cum-martyrdom, and I knew the smell only from distant corners of our Albany house.

I turned to the bench that was behind me against the station's old worn tile wall, and the odor was even stronger back there. I noticed a small pool of fluid on the wooden bench and an open vial on its side. A popper, that's what it was, that must have fallen out of someone's pocket or backpack. Amyl nitrite-heart medicine originally, and in recent decades a drug inhaled by some gay men, like Lyle Barner's friend Dave and his buddies, to heighten sexual excitement. It hit me that poppers smelled not just hospitallike but also a lot like-where had I just heard someone complaining about the smell?-nail polish.

Chapter 19

It was almost 1:30 by the time I climbed the stairs to Broadway and Seventy-ninth into a steady warm rain shower. It hadn't been raining in Brooklyn, but meteorologically New York was a vast continent, and I had moved underground from the Cote d'lvoire to Ethiopia.

Rainwear or an umbrella would have been nice, but haste was going to have to do.

Where were the Bumber-shoot people when you needed them most? Whenever Timmy and I had visited European cities in warm weather-Amsterdam, Paris, Florence-we had marveled at the way in which, whenever rain began to fall, tall Africans suddenly materialized selling umbrellas. We had concluded that the umbrella merchants were all members of a West African tribe called the Bumbershoot people. But either the Bumbershoots had not yet made it to New York, or Giuliani had had them all rounded up and shipped back to Europe.

Most of the Upper West Side coffee shops and Chinese and Greek restaurants were shut down by now, but the bars were still open, and there were still plenty of people on Broadway hurrying home or to whatever or whoever was next on their Saturday night dance cards. Just below Seventy-seventh, Big Nick's burger joint, open twenty-four hours, was lively, with people at tables out on the sidewalk under the scaffolding of a building that had been under renovation since early in the Abe Beame administration.

I found an open newsstand and picked up an early-edition Sunday Times, a News and a Post. Plankton's kidnapping was front-page but below the fold in the Times – Jay Plankton Abducted Outside Apartment -and full-page on the fronts of both the News -

Plankton Kidnapped -and the Post – Gay Radicals Snatch J-Bird.

I seated myself at a scuffed plastic table under the scaffolding at Nick's, the Upper West Side version of a cafe on the Champs-Elysees, and ordered black coffee from the harried middle-aged waitress, who looked Cambodian. I ordered the coffee because I had realized back on the platform of the Fourteenth and Seventh subway station that I was going to be up for a while, probably all night and into the next day. I wanted a shower first, and to make some phone calls, but I expected to be back in Brooklyn before the night was through, and then even farther out on Long Island.

While I worked at Nick's coffee, I read the news accounts of the two kidnappings and of Leo Moyle's release. Both the News and the Post had front-paged the "I V Ricky Martin" and "Kiss Me, Elton" tattoo pix, while the Times had chosen to forgo the lurid graphics and let a file photo of Plankton suffice. In the picture he looked far from wholesome, not a figure any self-respecting kidnapper would want to lay hands on, it seemed to me.

The stories on the abductions and Moyle's release were straightforward accounts from police sources and from those few eyewitnesses to the events Saturday afternoon outside the J-Bird's apartment. The FFF figured in all the stories, but the police said they could not be sure that the few vague but ominous communications they had received from the supposed kidnappers were legitimate.

Leo Moyle, all three papers said, remained under police protection in his East Side apartment and had not made himself available to reporters. Jerry Jeris, speaking for Moyle, said that Moyle had weathered his captivity "as well as could be expected," that he was praying for the safe release of his friend, and that he would be filling in for the J-Bird on his show, starting Monday at

6 AM.

The rain was coming down steadier now, but I needed to get moving. Using the bulky classified section of the Times as an umbrella, I headed west on Seventy-seventh and let myself into one of the older, well-kept brick apartment buildings interspersed among the brownstones on the leafy block just east of Riverside. Two friends, Susan and Liza, who lived in the building, let me keep not only a set of spare keys but a toothbrush and a change of clothes in a closet near their foldout couch.