"Me."

Friday, the juicy brunette took a cab to Chinatown at lunchtime. She got out, and the crowd swallowed her up. When she caught another cab, she didn't have her pocketbook with her.

I WAS AT Mama's when a call came in. Julio. I called the old gangster back at the social club he uses for headquarters. His dry snakeskin voice sounded like a cancer ward.

"You did me a service once, I don't forget. So this is a favor, Burke. You stung Rosnak. He went crying to the boys. I squared it, okay? There's no comeback on this one. But give it a rest- stay out of our business."

I let him feel my silence. The phone line hummed.

"You hear what I'm telling you?"

"Sure."

"You found out some things. Okay, a man's entitled to make some money, he finds out some things. You made enough money. Stick to citizens."

I hung up.

THERE WAS money out there. The city was a boom town. Drugs, not oil. The prospectors drove triple-black Jeeps, wore paper-thin Italian leather, mobile cellular telephones in holsters over their shoulders. Music in their brain-dead heads: Gotta Get Paid. Gold on their bodies, paid for with bodies on the ground. Babies got killed in the crossfire. Children did the shooting. Cocaine was the crop, in countries whose names they couldn't spell. And here, crack was the cash. Named for the sound it made when it hit the streets.

"Gold on their wrist, a pistol in your fist," the Prof rapped, trying to pull me in. Easy pickings. It wasn't for me.

I couldn't let it go. I read a copy of the Penal Law Davidson gave me. Incest. The legislature put it in the same class as adultery. I guess they thought a kid should Just Say No.

I MET MICHELLE in Bryant Park, next to the Public Library right off Times Square.

"I'm going away for a while," she said.

"Okay."

"To Denmark, Burke. I'm going to have it done."

"You got enough cash?"

"Yes. I've been saving for a long time. You impressed?"

I nodded.

"It has to be. I'm not having my boy grow up an outlaw, Burke."

"You're going to take him from the Mole?"

"I wouldn't do that. He's ours, not just mine. I know that. But that's no life for him. I want him to be something."

"The Mole's something."

Her hand on my forearm, lacquered nails shining in the late autumn sun. "I know, baby."

I lit a cigarette.

"I won't be any different," she said.

"I know."

"But you are."

I didn't say anything.

"You don't want me to go, say the word."

"Go."

"You can get me the papers?"

"A passport?"

"And… later…I want to adopt Terry. Make it legal."

"Why?"

"Why? You know what I am. Trapped all my life in this body. I can change that. Be myself. The boy…I don't want him to grow up like…"

"Like me?"

"I love you, Burke. You know that. I'd never walk away from you." She kissed my cheek, walked away.

ONCE I COULD always find something on the sweet side of the edge I lived on. It was gone. Even in prison, there were some things you could laugh at. That was then. The Plymouth drifted back to Mama's. I pushed a cassette into the slot. Janis Joplin. Pure estrogen filtered through sandpaper. Begging some man to take her pain, twist it into love. Throwing her soul at a barbed-wire screen until it diced.

I heard Belle's little-girl voice. "Rescue me."

She'd asked the wrong man.

"SHE CALL AGAIN," Mama greeted me.

I looked a question at her.

"Woman say her name Candy, remember? Little Candy from Hudson Street. Very important."

"Nothing's so important."

Mama's eyes were black, small hard dots in her smooth round face. "Baby important, okay? Baby safe now."

"I thought…"

"Yes. You think, you think what is right. Big girl, you love her, she's gone. High price."

"Too high."

"No. Babies die first, soon no people, okay?"

I put my fingers on each side of my head, holding it like an eggshell with cracks. I wanted to howl like Pansy, grieve for my woman. For myself. Nothing came.

Mama stayed with me. One of the waiters came over, said something in Cantonese. Mama ignored him. He went away. I felt the trembling inside me, but it wasn't my old pal this time. Not fear. I wasn't afraid. Too sad to cry. Nothing left alive to hate.

I looked over at the only woman I had ever called Mama. "Max could have beaten him."

"Maybe."

"I didn't know the answer, Mama."

She tapped my hand to make me watch her face. See the truth. "You don't know the answer, you must be the answer."

"Who said that? Confucius?"

"I say that," she said.

When she got up, she left a piece of paper in front of me.

I USED A pay phone off Sutton Place. Not my neighborhood, but the best place to call from. The feds wouldn't tap these phones- they might net somebody they knew. I looked at the slip of paper Mama gave me. Seven numbers, a local call. I pushed the buttons, working backward from the last digit. Mama writes all numbers backwards- she says it's Chinese bookkeeping.

She answered on the third ring. In a throaty low purr sweet enough to kill a diabetic.

"Hello, baby."

"You called me?"

"Burke? Is that really you?"

"It's me."

"You know who this is?"

"Yeah."

"Can I see you?"

"Why?"

"I have something for you."

"Nothing I want."

"You remember me?"

"Yes."

"Then you know I've got something you want."

"Not anymore."

"Yes, yes I do. I got something you want. Love or money. One way or the other."

"No."

"Yes. You wouldn't have called otherwise. I know you. I know you better than anyone."

"You don't know me."

"Come over and listen to me. I won't bite you. Unless you want me to. Friday afternoon."

I didn't say anything.

She gave me an address.

I hung up.

I DROVE BACK to my office. My home. Let Pansy out onto her roof. Lit a cigarette and looked out the window, feeling the airborne sewage the yuppies called a river breeze.

I think her real name was Renée. Or Irene. She always called herself Candy. I couldn't bring her face into my mind but I'd never forget her. She was just a kid then. Maybe thirteen years old. But you could run Con Ed for a year on what she wanted.

She didn't have what she wanted then. None of us did. So we fought young animals just like us- fighting over what we'd never own. We called things ours. Our turf. Our women. The street forked at the end. Where we found what was really ours. Mine was prison.

Girls like Candy were always around. We didn't have pistols or shotguns then. Just half-ass zip guns that would blow up in your hand when you pulled the trigger. But you could break a glass bottle into a pile of flesh-ripping shards. Squeeze a thick glob of white Elmer's Glue into your palm. Twirl a rope through it until it was coated end to end. Then twirl it again, through the glass. Wait for it to dry and you had a glass rope. When you got real close, you could use half a raw potato, its face studded with double-edged razor blades. Car antennas. Lead pipes. Cut-down baseball bats with nails poking through them. Sit around in some abandoned apartment, drink some cheap wine, pour a few of the red drops on the ground in tribute to your brothers who got to the jailhouse or the graveyard before you did. Toke on throat-searing marijuana. Wait for the buzz. Then you meet the other losers. In a playground if they knew you were coming. In an alley if they didn't. The newspapers called it gang wars. If you made it back to the club, the girls were there. If you got too broken to run, you got busted. And if you stayed on the concrete, maybe you got your name in the papers.