"You know how to make Hungarian chicken soup?" "How?"

"First you steal a chicken."

"Okay, let's say somebody stole a chicken." "Took it for a ride in the backseat of Pratt's Caddy." "Would you make that movie?"

"I wouldn't even go see that movie."

"But, okay, just for the halibut, let's say somebody was hungry enough or desperate enough to steal a chicken from a chicken market..." "Do pet shops sell chickens?" "Chicks." "In January?" "Around Easter."

"Anyway, a chick ain't a chicken."

"No, this had to be a chicken market."

"How about a petting zoo? Where they have goats and cows and chickens and ducks ..." "Do people pet chickens?" "They cook chickens."

"So, okay, first you steal a chicken." "They also sacrifice chickens."

"Voodoo." "Mm."

Both men fell silent. It was midnight. Blue Monday. And still snowing.

"Let's ask around," Hawes said.

The technician who had thought vile thoughts about Fat Ollie Weeks nonetheless got back to him just as he was leaving the squad room at a few minutes past midnight. Except for the names on desktop plaques and bulletin-board duty rosters, the squad room here at the Eight-Eight was an almost exact duplicate of the one at the Eight-Seven, or, for that matter, any other police station in the city. Even the newly constructed

buildings began to look shoddy and decrepit time, an apple-green pallor overtaking seemingly at once. Ollie looked at the speckled face the wall clock, remembering that he'd told the tech wanted the stuff by a quarter to, and thinking he'll be lucky Ollie was still here, otherwise it would have been his ass. He ripped open the manila envelope yanked out the report.

No latents at all on the champagne bottles and knife used to slit the estimable Jamal's throat. No latents on any of the bathroom fixtures or any of doorknobs in the apartment, either. Meaning that there hadn't been any other person or persons in the room, then he, she, or they had seen a lot of movies and knew enough to wipe up after themselves. So the only thing they could compare against the corpses fingerprints which the tech had dutifully lifted the two stiffs in the bathroom, copies of which included in the packet was the prints on the patent-leather clutch. The smaller prints on the bag matched the prints of the woman named Yolande Marie Marx, whose Ohio driver's license Ollie found in the red patent-leather clutch. Apparently, Yolande was now lying in the morgue at Hospital; the fingerprints the tech had lifted from the bag identified her as a white, nineteen-year-old shoplifter and prostitute with an arrest record that went back several years. The other prints on the bag matched the late Richie Cooper's. According to the report, Jamal Stone hadn't touched the bag.

Ollie kept reading.

Of hairs, there had been many, and only some of them matched those plucked from the heads of the poor unfortunate victims. Some of the hairs were blond, and they matched samples taken from the head of the dead girl. Fibers vacuumed in the apartment matched fibers from the short black skirt and red fake-fur jacket she'd been wearing at the time of her death.

There were other fibers and other hairs.

There were a significant number of dark blue wool fibers. They did not match any fibers from the clothing of the two victims.

There were red hairs. And black hairs. And blond hairs.

Some of them were head hairs.

Some of them were genital hairs.

All of them were hairs from white human beings. All of them were male hairs.

Three white males, two dead black dudes, and a dead white hooker, Ollie thought, and farted.

El Castillo de Palacios would have been ungrammatical in Spanish if the Palacios hadn't been a person's name, which in this case it happened to be. Palacio meant "palace" in Spanish, and palacios meant "palaces,"

and when you had a plural noun, the article and noun were supposed to correspond, unlike English where everything was so sloppily put together, thank God. El Castillo de los Palacios would have been the proper Spanish for "The Castle of the Palaces," but since Francisco Palacios was a person, El Castillo de Palacios was, in fact, correct even

though it translated as "Palacios's Castle," a play words however you sliced it, English or Spanish. And worth repeating, by the way, as were many things in this friendly universe the good Lord created.

Francisco Palacios was a good-looking man with clean-living habits, now that he'd served three years upstate on a burglary rap. He owned and operated a pleasant little store that sold medicinal herbs, books, religious statues, numbers books, tarot cards and the like. His silent partners were named Gaucho Palacios and Cowboy Palacios, and they ran a store behind the other store, and this one offered for sale such medically approved "marital aids" as dildos. French ticklers, open-crotch panties bra gas sin entrepierna), plastic vibrators (eight-inch and in the white, twelve-inch in the black), leather executioner's masks, chastity belts, whips with leather thongs, leather anklets studded with chrome, extenders, aphrodisiacs, inflatable life-sized dolls, condoms every color of the rainbow including vermilion, books on how to hypnotize and otherwise overcome reluctant women, ben-wa balls in plastic and gold plate, and a highly mechanical device guaranteed to bring satisfaction and imaginatively called Sue-u-lator, in case you missed all this while you were out in the fragrant cloisters reading your vespers.

Selling these things in this city was not illegal; the Gaucho and the Cowboy were breaking no laws. This was not why they ran their store behind the store owned and operated by Francisco. Rather, they did so out of a sense of responsibility to the Puerto Rican

community of which they were a part. They did not, for example, want a little old lady in a black shawl to wander into the back store shop and faint dead away at the sight of playing cards featuring men, women, police dogs and midgets in fifty-two marital-aid positions, fifty-four if you counted the jokers. Both the Gaucho and the Cowboy had community pride to match that of Francisco himself. Francisco, the Gaucho, and the Cowboy were, in fact, all one and the same person, and they were collectively a police informer, a stoolie, a snitch, or even in some quarters a rat.

El Castillo de Palacios was in a ratty quarter of the Eight-Seven known as El Infierno, which, until the recent influx of Jamaicans, Koreans, Haitians, Vietnamese and Martians had been almost exclusively Puerto Rican, or if you preferred "of Spanish origin," which was both clumsy and cumbersome but favored over the completely phony "Latino." On the politically correct highway, both of these categorizing expressions fell far behind the ever-popular (by fifty-eight percent) simple descriptive term "Hispanic." Ten percent of the Hispanics queried didn't care what they were called, so long as it wasn't "spic" or late for dinner.

El Infierno meant guess what? The Inferno. It was.

Palacios was just closing up when they got there at about twenty past midnight after a snowy fifteen-minute ride cross town which under ordinary circumstances would have taken five minutes. Palacios wore his black hair in a high pompadour, the

way kids used to wear it back in the fifties. Dark eyes. Matinee-idol teeth. It was rumored in the town that Palacios had three wives, which like the violation the police held dangling over his head against the law. All of which Hawes and Carella and every other cop in the precinct (and every other being in the world) already knew, but so what? Nobo was counting, and nobody was sending anyone to just yet--provided the information was good.

It was.

Symbiosis, Hawes thought.

A nice word and a cozy arrangement.

Hawes sometimes felt the entire world ran on arrangements.

"Ai, mari cones Palacios said, "quO pasa?" He knew the cops could send him up anytime they felt like it. Meanwhile, he could be friendly with them, no? Besides, mar icon meant "homosexual," mari cones was the plural of that, which he didn't think they knew. They did know, but they also knew it was a friendly form of greeting among Hispanic men, knew why, and God protect any non-Hispanic if they used it in greeting.

They got straight to the point.

"Voodoo."

"Mm, voodoo," Palacios said, nodding. "Anything go down this past Friday night?" "Like what?"

"Any Papa Legbas sitting on the gate?" "Any Maitresse Ezilis tossing their hips?" "Any Damballahs?" "Any Baron Samedis?"

"Any chickens getting their throats slit?" "You know some voodoo, huh?" "Un poquito," Hawes said.

"No, no, muchisimo," Palacios said, praising him as extravagantly as if he'd just translated Cervantes.

"So," Carella said, cutting through the bullshit, "anything at all this past Friday?"

"Talk to Clotilde Prouteau," Palacios said. "She's a mamaloi .. ."

"A what?"

"A priestess. Well, sometimes. She also conjures. I sell her War Water and Four Thieves Vinegar, Guinea Paradise and Guinea Pepper, Three Jacks and a King, Lucky Dog, jasmine and narcisse, white rose and essence of van van whatever she needs to conjure. Tell her Francois sent you. Le Cowboy Espagnol, tell her."

The three of them were sitting at a table somewhat removed from the piano and the bar, Priscilla trying to control her anger while simultaneously venting it, Georgie and Tony trying to catch her whispered words. This was Sunday night well, Monday morning already and Priscilla's night off, but the bar was open and the drinks were free and this was a good quiet place to talk on a Sunday, especially when it was snowing like mad outside and the place was almost empty.

Priscilla was steamed, no doubt about it.