"Just...sitting here, Captain." The higher rank was safer. It was strange, some part of Aaron's brain, the spectator, remote and removed from events, noted how automatically he had chosen the higher rank even in the middle of his terror.

The face which glared from the window of the precinct patrol car directly beside him was large, broad, topped by unruly red eyebrows. The lips, set into the heavy face, were thin and pulled back, almost animal-like, in tight anger.

"You're from the Twenty-eighth and you're 'just sitting' in my precinct?"

A foreign invader. My God, I'm a foreign invader. Aaron literally could not think of anything to say. For the past fifteen minutes, he had been trying to think up excuses should just such an event occur. But he was not devious. He had failed to come up with a single plausible or even implausible reason for this gross departmental violation and so had let himself lapse into vacuity and magic.

The captain spoke to his driver, then heavily pulled himself from his car and leaned in to examine Aaron's face with a narrow-eyed look of accusation that made guilt roil in the pit of Aaron's stomach.

"Who is it you're driving for?"

The captain's voice had a familiar, baiting quality; the hard grating assurance of a man who knew everything and you'd better not try to kid him.

There must be some accepted and acceptable response besides the truth. But Aaron, his brain racing over the emptiness of his experience, could only search fruitlessly and finally admit the truth.

"For Sergeant O'Malley. Sergeant Brian O'Malley."

Aaron Levine felt the vaporous guilt solidify now. He was now an informer and would be forever marked informer. He had violated a code he did not understand, would never understand, had not been made a party to and did not even know for sure existed.

"Oh, for Christ's sake, that stupid son of a bitch. Did he go up to that nigger whore's apartment?"

The captain's tone changed. There was a definite relaxing of the suspicious belligerence. Still tight, still hard, there was beneath his words a sense of amused scorn. Aaron didn't know what to answer and kept his mouth locked.

The captain, grossly fat, stuck his face close to Aaron's. "He'll never learn to stay away from trouble. Well, maybe it's for the best I go myself."

Aaron nodded dumbly.

The captain considered Aaron for a moment. He was a miserable-looking policeman and hardly could meet his eye. "Take it easy, lad," the captain said. "You only done what your sergeant told you to do. I'll straighten out the sergeant. You just keep your mouth shut about this. Got that now?"

It was what everyone kept telling him: Keep your mouth shut.

"Yes, sir, Captain."

Again the captain regarded him and this time he frowned. "What's your name anyway, officer?"

Aaron felt nailed: identified now. "Patrolman Aaron Levine, sir."

The captain's lips pulled back into what was probably a smile. "Aaron Levine is it? Mother of God, we've got us an Aaron Levine. And driving for Brian. Well, well." He leaned heavily close. "Keep your nose clean and your mouth shut, son."

"I will. Oh, I will," Aaron assured him and the captain, assured, left.

The precinct patrol car backed into the space behind Aaron. The driver had given no sign of friendliness, he was no commiserator. That's okay, Aaron thought; I'm not looking for friends. Just to get out of here. Idly, nervously trying not to think of the moment when he would be alone in the car with Sergeant O'Malley again, he turned the radio up a bit.

The captain's voice, hollow, loud, strange, filled the air. At first, Aaron didn't know where it was coming from; then he got out of the car and looked up.

"Charlie! Charlie, for the love of God, come up here. In a hurry!"

The other policeman ran toward the tenement and Aaron started after him, but a second later, the captain's head reappeared and his voice ordered, "You. You get back in your car and don't leave it!"

That's okay with me, Aaron thought; I don't want any part of it. He nibbled on a piece of cuticle around the edge of his left index finger, bit too deeply, felt a sharp needle of pain. God, he wished they were on their way back to the precinct house. It was nearly time for the tour to end. He never thought that filthy precinct would feel like home, but it was where he wanted to be right now.

The voice from the radio speaker was thin but insistent and caught his attention through the heavy customary static by its urgency. Patrolman Aaron Levine leaned forward and strained to pick out the words.

"Assist patrolman. Armed robbery in progress. All cars in vicinity of Lenox Avenue and 131st Street respond immediately. Approach with caution. Two armed men."

Words penetrated: liquor store; two armed men; patrolman in need of assistance; approach with caution; all cars in vicinity. The call was being repeated as Aaron turned the key, turned over the motor. He left Sergeant O'Malley to the fat captain and the patrolman named Charlie. He gave no thought whatever to what he was riding toward. He knew only that he wanted to get away from whatever O'Malley had become involved in.

Patrolman Charles Gannon could not take it in. He could not make sense of what he saw and he turned his face, mouth opened, to Captain Peter Hennessy.

"Get a blanket," the captain told him, and when he failed to move, the captain's heavy hand shoved him toward a closet or another small room, Gannon couldn't distinguish which. "Look in there, look around, there must be a blanket somewhere. Move, man, move!"

Gannon dragged a thin gray blanket from beneath a cot. The yellow light cast by the single bulb moved and swung in crazy directions as the cord became tangled somehow in the captain's hand. Captain Hennessy reached up to steady it, burned his fingers, cursed. The light cast terrible crazy patterns over the blood-covered body of Brian O'Malley.

"Is he dead?" Gannon asked stupidly. Of course, he knew Brian was dead. Not just the frozen eyes, the heavy pools of blood, but everything about him spelled death.

Captain Hennessy didn't bother to answer. He bent, breathed short heavy gasps, motioned to Gannon. "Get him on the blanket, for God's sake. We've got to get him out of here."

That seemed the necessary and urgent and vital thing. Charlie Gannon, completely unaware of the mess on his own uniform, lifted O'Malley's head and shoulders, felt the captain lift the dead legs. They placed the body on the blanket, which Gannon pulled close and neatly tucked in loose edges. Charlie bit the tip of his tongue in concentration; he wanted to make the bundle firm and secure and tight.

"Stand up now, Charlie. Stand up, man, and listen to me."

Captain Hennessy's face was red with exertion but there was a yellow circle around his mouth and his lips had an almost bluish cast in the peculiar light.

"Did you see what she did to Brian?" Charlie Gannon nodded; he had seen blood. He wasn't sure, exactly, what else he'd seen. "We've got to get him out of here completely. Do you understand what I'm telling you, Charlie?"

Charlie Gannon nodded, then stopped, then slowly shook his head from side to side. He was a slight, wiry man, and when he looked at the captain, he had to lean back somewhat. "What is it that happened here, anyway, Cap?" Some slow and terrible realization of unnamable deeds began to fill him. His small eyes began to rotate as though to encompass the event.

Captain Hennessy cut him off swiftly. His hands grasped the collar of Gannon's jacket and jerked at him so that they stared into each other's eyes.

"We've got to get Brian out of here. The black whore who did this to him is down in the alley. I don't know what went on here and I don't want to find out. The thing is, we've got to get Brian out of here. Whatever happened didn't happen here, Charlie. You got that now, lad? Good boy, good boy." He released Gannon and nodded.

"Yes, Captain, you're right, you're right. Let's get him out."

Gannon was very strong. His small size was deceptive. "I can manage him nicely," he said, speaking to the bundle on the floor. He braced his legs, balanced as the weight was placed across his back and shoulders, swayed a moment, balanced again. Irrationally, Gannon said, "I could have been a fireman had I chosen, Captain. Did you know that? But instead I chose the Department."

Hennessy went first, shielding the patrolman and the dead sergeant with the bulk of his own body. His voice was murderous and he roared at the few dark curious faces which peered from behind slightly opened doors. "Get the fuck back inside, you bastards, or I'll take a club to your skulls." They believed him and doors closed quickly. He slammed the butt of his jack against a door or two, just to be sure they believed him.

He turned once at the sound of a door reopening and Gannon stumbled into him and nearly lost his burden. The sight of the stumbling policeman, the strangeness of the lurchings of the large captain, terrified whoever had ventured to look and the door slammed and locked above them.

They reached street level, and in the dark, the captain leaned against the hall wall for a moment and said to Gannon, though more to himself, "Let me think now, let me think a minute. Oh, Jesus, let me think a minute."

There was no one on the street. The patrol car stood, empty and dark and waiting. He walked quickly to it, opened the back door, scanned the block, signaled to Gannon, then stood back and watched as the patrolman placed the body in the back of the car.

Captain Hennessy settled into the front seat without glancing behind him. He heard a soft hiccupping from Gannon, who grasped the steering wheel with both hands, stared straight ahead and asked him, almost querulously, "What are we to do with him, Captain? Now we've got him, what are we to do with him?"

"Shut up and let me think, will you, just shut up, Charlie."

He stared straight ahead into the empty space before them, then turned to face Gannon and said, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, where the hell is the sheeny?"

The sound was not as loud as when he practiced shooting targets in the firing range. There the report of his revolver was enlarged by the closed-in area and echoed and re-echoed inside his head. But here the noise was dissipated by the openness of the street and sounded like firecrackers or a car backfiring or a kid's cap gun.

Patrolman Levine held the heavy .38 in his right hand, carefully kept his finger off the trigger. He crouched behind his patrol car, bounced on his long legs just enough to enable him to see into the liquor store. There was one other patrol car beside his and the occupants of that car, two patrolmen, lay sprawled on the sidewalk outside the liquor store. Through the brightly lit window, in his quick bouncing rise and then crouch, Aaron saw another policeman inside the store, on his back. Dead, from what Aaron, in some cool, dispassionate judgment, could determine. With a surprising, shocking sense of recognition, he had a quick glimpse of the two gunmen: the two Negroes who had sat in Horowitz' candy store, hunched over coffee cups. That made it all the more unreal: he recognized them. How could they have caused all this carnage?

Carnage. It was the word that formed inside Aaron's brain. He could see blood, inside the store, where the owner was probably dead or dying; outside, the policemen. One of the Negroes, Aaron observed in a quick bounce, was bleeding from a wounded arm; in one split-second observation, Aaron saw blood oozing between the man's fingers as he held the wound.

There was a soft, low moan, a whimper which drifted from one of the policemen on the sidewalk. He's alive; he needs help. Aaron wanted to stand up, hold up his hands: fins. Hey, guys, fins, time out, let me see to this guy, okay. He's out of it, okay. As though this was all just some kind of game and not real and he would play peacemaker or referee or whatever. But the sense of crazy reality kept him from standing up, from approaching the wounded man.

There were the two Negroes. Aaron wondered why they hadn't thought to turn out the lights in the liquor store. The lights blazed and every time the men moved he could catch a glimpse of them. He tried not to wonder anything at all about them; he slid his long body along the gutter; he became sharply aware of the smell of dog dirt on his clothing. The policeman began to cry now, to mumble and sob the way a confused child would. Aaron felt a new surge of emotion now: anger. Hey, listen, you bastards, this guy is really hurt. Enough is enough.

Suddenly they burst through the front door of the liquor store. They stared down at him; their eyes went wild. One of them, the taller, raised his hand quickly, too quickly and carelessly, for Aaron timed his shot, controlled the aim before he cocked the hammer and squeezed the trigger. He felt the rebound up along his arm. The gunman fell. His shoulder brushed Aaron's leg. His falling gun hit Aaron's foot.

The second man, the one who had been wounded, crouched behind some garbage cans. Instead of running, he crouched behind the garbage cans and shot in Aaron's direction. He had more than one gun and he fired quickly, first one then the other.

There was a loud whistling ping along the sidewalk and a chip of cement must have cut into Aaron Levine's shoulder: he felt a sharp, clean, cutting sensation. Snakelike, with an instinct he'd never tested before, he writhed to take cover behind his patrol car. There were sirens, somewhere in the distance, or close up, he couldn't judge exactly because there was a ringing sensation in his head now. He took quiet, steady and accurate aim at the exact spot where the remaining gunman would appear, and when he did, just as Aaron had calculated, Aaron squeezed the trigger and watched, without emotion and without much understanding, as the second gunman fell dead to the sidewalk.

He stood up, somewhat unsteadily, legs shaky, ice-cold. He held the revolver in the palm of his hand, uncocked it carefully. Another patrol car was on the scene now. It was the fat captain with the hard and penetrating stare.

"That one, over there, Captain, that officer is still alive, I think," Aaron heard himself say.

"Put the revolver in your holster, son," the captain said and he did as he was told.

Other patrol cars arrived. Blue-uniformed men moved all around him. The captain told everyone what to do and Aaron didn't have to think or act anymore. He leaned against the fender of his patrol car and waited. He felt pain along his shoulder and reached up to rub the pain away. He looked with surprise at his fingers; they were wet and sticky with his own blood. Just before he lost consciousness, Aaron Levine thought, Oh, my God. I've been shot I'm going to throw up.

The call had come insistently over the car radio and broke into the consciousness of Captain Peter Hennessy. Without looking at Brian O'Malley's body, in a calm and terrible voice that was not to be denied, he had ordered Patrolman Charlie Gannon to proceed to the scene of the liquor store holdup.

When they arrived, there were just the two cars on the scene: one was that of the two men who were lying outside the store; the other was Brian O'Malley's.

As he opened the door and sniffed the air, which was acrid with spent gunfire and the smell of dead and dying men, Captain Hennessy took a deep breath and saw his way clear.

"Now, just follow what I tell you from here on in, Charlie," he said to Gannon, "and we'll get Brian a hero's funeral out of all this."

FOUR.

AUTOMATICALLY, MARGARET O'MALLEY'S FINGERS counted off the stitches: knit seven, purl two, knit two, slip one, knit one, pass the slipped stitch over. The intricate pattern took shape beneath her touch but her eyes were on some inner vision. Her brain absorbed all the various noises of her household, sorted them, then, satisfied, was able to disregard them. Her sons had quieted down. Kevin finally tossed and lunged himself into restless sleep; Martin had placidly settled in and wouldn't move again until morning.

The soft snoring of her mother-in-law was steady, though God knew, the old woman could awaken at the drop of a stitch. Margaret tried, very hard, not to look at the clock. The radio announcer gave the time, though, softly through the fabric of the speaker. She kept the radio tuned so low she could hardly hear it, but she caught the words: 10 P.M. And Roseanne not home yet.

She held the piece of work before her eyes, sighed, started the next row, then gave it up as a bad job. Her mind was too filled with her oldest daughter, Roseanne.

Mother of God, she intoned silently, let her come home within the minute. An hour over the time her father set for her and he'd kill her if he knew. And me keeping the secret for her. Wrong. It's wrong. Billy Delaney was wrong and that was the whole matter clear and simple. A great strong fair-haired boy, with a strong jaw and clear blue eyes and a way about him: that was all Roseanne cared to see. He'd come to no good, everyone else could see that the boy'd been nothing but trouble from grade school on, and here he was, eighteen years old and put out of St. Simon's in his last year. Well, Father Donlon was not harsh; he'd kept Billy on years more than he should have, if the truth were known. The boy had been arrested when he was twelve, stealing money from a cash register in a drugstore. If it hadn't been for his uncles and Father Donlon, he'd have been sent to reform school right then. There were other things, all along, and Father Donlon had resisted. He knew the boy's aching background. Who didn't? Poor Eileen Murphy got nothing but trouble and kids from Tommy Delaney and him nothing but a thief and a deserter. That was what was the worst thing of all. It wasn't only the men in the neighborhood agreed on that point. The women too: a deserter, left his wife and children to fend for themselves and lose the bail money that friends and relatives and neighbors, including, God knew, the O'Malleys, had put up for him, and him charged with some crime or other. Took himself off and never came back, neither alive nor dead.

But it was Tommy Delaney all over again, for hadn't he been the handsome, wise and charming boy that his oldest son, Billy Delaney, now appeared. And, oh, how could she tell Roseanne how little all that meant, how quickly it disappeared and the ugliness beneath came through.

Brian had turned to stone when first he saw the boy walking down Ryer Avenue with Roseanne. There'll be none of that one, he said; both mother and daughter avoided his cold fierce expression and the girl ran crying to her bed. It was to her that Brian issued his instructions: Keep her away from that bad piece of business, Margaret. You're the mother, that's your job.

There was the soft sound of voices just outside the window. The O'Malley apartment, at street level, opened with its own private door into a little private hallway and Margaret heard the doorknob turn, waited, strained into the strange sound-filled silence. She thanked the Holy Mother that the girl was home and vowed she would try not to say angry things, not to say all the wrong things to the girl. But, oh, sweet Jesus, it was so hard. The girl had become a stranger to her these last few months, someone she'd never known, never laughed with or cried over or rocked in her arms.

"Is that you, Roseanne?"

The door closed softly, there was a stifled cough and then her daughter's voice, sullen, muffled, speaking from behind her hands. "Yeah, Ma." When she came into the room, pretending to be coughing, Margaret knew she was hiding her smeared lipstick. Her eyes blazed defiance and she said, before she could be accused, "Look, I know I'm late, I'm sorry. My watch is slow or something. I'm tired, Ma, I'm going to bed."

"You'll stay here and let me look at you." It wasn't the tone of voice she'd intended, but this wasn't the girl she wanted desperately to see. This was a taut, angry young girl, with blazing eyes confronting her as though she was an enemy.

"Roseanne," she tried in a softer voice, "if your dad knew what you've been up to-"

Quickly, as though she'd been waiting to attack, Roseanne said, "I haven't been 'up to' anything. For Pete's sake, I went for a walk. I'm not a child anymore. Can't I even go for a walk?"

"You've been out with Billy Delaney, haven't you?"

The deep-blue eyes, shimmering, closed; the pale full lips tightened; the girl turned her face toward the ceiling with an insulting glance of supplication.

She was so filled with herself and her own newly discovered feelings. The anger made the girl's delicate beauty intensify; the fine bones of her high cheeks showed through the stretched white skin, her delicate nostrils dilated, her dark eyes sought her mother's and held the glare without the slightest awareness or concern for the pain she could inflict "Oh, Roseanne," Margaret said wearily, unable to speak to the girl the way she wanted to. "You've truly time, Roseanne. You've the whole of your life before you. Billy Delaney is just one boy in all this whole wide world."

"You were married at seventeen." It was an accusation and a challenge and a justification. The seventeen-year-old girl shifted her weight, her hand went to a thin sharp hipbone, her chin went up.

"Yes," Margaret said sharply. "I married at seventeen but not to the likes of Billy Delaney."

"You don't know anything about Billy. You don't. Everyone's always been down on him because of his father."

"Everyone's down on him because of his own sweet self now, Roseanne. He's not living on his father's bad name anymore. He's doing just fine making his own bad name."

"It's not fair, Ma, it's not! Everyone always picked on Billy. In the street, at school. Brother Andrew was beating him up. What did anyone expect him to do anyway?"

Margaret held her hand up and lowered her own voice. "For the love of God, Roseanne, if you don't care about the neighbors, at least let your young brothers and sister and poor old grandmother sleep undisturbed." She pretended not to see the quickly wiped at tears and choking swallow back of sobs: all this for a great thug of a boy not worth her daughter's thumbnail. She'd have to be careful; Brian didn't understand it wasn't all that easy. "Well, would you like a cup of hot tea with me and some poundcake I baked fresh this afternoon? It's a bit heavy but the flavor's nice."

"I'm not hungry."

"Ah, you're falling away to skin and bone." She bit her lip, tried to be light and casual. "But I guess that's fashionable these days, isn't it?"

The girl seemed to be turning words over in her mind; her mouth worked for a moment, then finally she said, "You might as well know, Ma. He wants to marry me. And I want to marry him."

Margaret shook her head and felt a little more sure of herself. That was such nonsense she could deal with it. "No, no," she said. "We'll hear no such talk in this house. Why, you're a mere slip of a girl and you've just the year to finish at St. Simon's and you've a chance to get out into the world a little bit. Why, you're the champion in your typing class. Think of the nice office you can work in. Ah, Roseanne, you're a silly little girl still, sometimes. Off to bed now and mind you don't wake your sister."

The tears spilled down Roseanne's face now and she rubbed at them so hard with the back of her hand it seemed she was trying to jam them back into her eyes. "Oh, Ma, I love him. I love him. Have you forgotten what it's like to be young and in love?" Through the tears, there was a hard glint in Roseanne's eyes; a woman's smile flashed on her child lips, mean and unpleasant, and her voice was small and unfamiliar. "Have you forgotten what it's like to be loved?"

Margaret's hands held the knitting; her fingers trembled over the wool and she spoke very softly, aware that the old woman's snores had taken a false, uneven turn. "It's a quickly passing thing, Roseanne, and seventeen is a quickly passing age. It isn't just Billy Delaney, though God knows your dad wouldn't let him in this house." She looked up sharply. "Now, just hold your tongue and don't give me one of your killing looks. You stay away from him for he's a boy with no future and nothing good in mind for you. A kiss feels nice for a short time, Roseanne, and then it's gone."

Roseanne stood before her mother, filled with explosive emotions which she could not convey. How could she describe the sudden strange unfamiliar surge of feeling that kept her in a constant state of excitement and alarm? How could she risk having everything she was experiencing being discounted with a shrug, a sigh, an "Oh, Roseanne"? She looked about the room wildly, needing to find some way of inflicting pain on this maddeningly ignorant woman, her mother. Her eyes found the letter on top of the radio, wedged under the cut-glass vase, where her father had put it the day it arrived.

"What about Brian, Ma? Has Dad decided to let him come back?"