she said. "Go on, they don't sing in those places." "I do."

"You're kidding me."

"No, no. You want to hear me sing, Max?"

"Nah, you don't sing."

"I sing like a bird," Yolande said, but did not demonstrate. Liebowitz was thinking this over, trying to determine whether or not she was putting him on.

"What else do you really do?" he asked. "Besides sing and dance?

Topless."

She was beginning to think it might not be a bad idea to turn another trick on the way home. But not for the six-ninety now on the meter.

How much cash you carrying, Zayde? she wondered. Want a piece of nineteen-year-old Jewish-girl ass you can tell your

grandchildren about next Hanukkah? She thought her father again, decided no. Still, talk old Max into a hundred for a quick blow job, might be worth it. Twice the going price for a street girl, but oh such tender goods, what do you say, Granpa?

"What'd you have in mind?" she asked coyly.

The black man in the black jeans, black leather jacket, black boots, and black watch cap appeared in front of them like an avenging angel of death. They almost all three of them peed on his boots, he was standing that close.

"Now what do you call this?" he asked rhetorically.

"We call it pissing in the gutter," Richard the Second said.

"I call it disrespect for the neighborhood," the black man said. "That what the letter P stand for? Pissing."

"Join us, why don't you?" Richard the Third suggested.

"My name is Richard," Richard the First said,

zipping up and extending his hand to the black man. "So is mine"

Richard the Second said. "Me, too," Richard the Third said.

"As it happens," the black man said, "my name is Richard, too."

Which now made four of them.

Bloody murder was only an hour and sixteen minutes away.

Abdul Sikhar lived in a two-bedroom Calm's Point apartment with five other men from Pakistan. They had all known each other in their native town of

Rawalpindi, and they had all come to the United States at different times over the past three years. Two of the men had wives back home. A third had a girlfriend there. Four of the men worked as cabdrivers and were in constant touch by CB radio all day long. Whenever they babbled in Urdu, they made their passengers feel as if a terrorist act or a kidnapping was being plotted. The four cabbies drove like the wind in a camel's mane. None of them knew it was against the law to blow your horn in this city. They would have blown it anyway. Each and every one of them could not wait till he got out of this fucking city in this fucking United States of America. Abdul Sikhar felt the same way, though he did not drive like the wind. What he did was pump gas and wash cars at Bridge Texaco.

When he answered the door at ten to six that morning, he was wearing long woolen underwear and along-sleeved woolen top. He looked like he needed a shave but he was merely growing a beard. He was twenty years old, give or take, a scrawny kid who hated this country and who would have wet the bed at night if he wasn't sleeping in it with two other guys. The detectives identified themselves. Nodding, Sikhar stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind him, whispering that he did not wish to awaken his "mates," as he called them, an archaic term from the days of British rule back home, those bastards. When he learned what their business here was, he excused himself and went back inside for a moment, stepping into the hallway again a moment later, wearing along black overcoat over his long johns, unlaced black shoes on his feet. They stood now beside a grimy hall

window that sputtered orange neon from outside. Sikhar lighted a cigarette. Neither Carella or Hawes smoked. They both wished they could arrest him.

"So what is this about a pistol?" he asked

"Everyone wishes to know about this pistol." "The feathers, too,"

Carella said. "And the bird shit," Hawes said.

"Such a mess," Sikhar agreed, nodding, puffing the cigarette, holding it the way Peter Lorre did in Maltese Falcon. He himself looked something ofa mess, but perhaps that was because the deveh beard looked like a smudge on his face

"What kind of feathers were they, would you know?" Hawes asked.

"Pigeon feathers, I would say."

"Why would you say that?"

"There are many pigeons near the bridge."

"And you think some of them got in the car somehow, is that it?"

"I think so, yes. And panicked. Which is why shit all over everything."

"Pretty messy in there, huh?" Carella said.

"Oh yes."

"How do you suppose they got out again?" Hawes asked.

"Birds have ways," Sikhar said.

He looked at the men mysteriously.

They looked back mysteriously.

"How about the gun?" Carella said.

"What gun?"

"You know what gun."

Sikhar dropped the cigarette to the floor, ground it out under the sole of one black shoe, and took a crumpled package of Camels from the right-hand pocket of the long black coat. "Cigarette?" he asked, offering the pack first to Carella and next to Hawes, both of whom refused, each shaking his head somewhat violently. Sikhar did not get the subtle message. He fired up at once. Clouds of smoke billowed into the hallway, tinted orange by the sputtering neon outside the window. For some peculiar reason, Carella thought of Dante's inferno.

"The gun," he prompted.

"The famous missing pistol," Sikhar said. "I know nothing about it."

"You spent an hour or so in that car, didn't you? Cleaning up the mess?"

"A terrible mess," Sikhar agreed.

"Did the birds get anywhere near the glove compartment?"

"No, the mess was confined exclusively to the backseat."

"So you spent an hour or so in the backseat of the car." "At least."