Truck bent his bull neck toward Terry's ear. "He just got a call from Upstairs. Somethin's gone wrong. He's hotter 'n a pistol."

"Well, I gotta take this-this young lady home first," Terry said.

"I'd get over there, Terry," Truck said. "If I was you I wouldn' waste no time. Gilly c'n take the little lady home."

"Definitely," Gilly said.

"Look, you tell 'im-tell 'im I'll be over after a while," Terry said.

Truck looked at Gilly, scandalized. "O-kay," he said, the inflection on the last syllable making his meaning unmistakable, "O-kay ..."

The two Johnny Friendly boys shrugged to each other and left Terry standing there.

Katie crossed the threshold into the corridor and watched them walking rapidly toward the lobby. Terry joined her, shifting uncomfortably.

"Who are those ..." she started to ask.

"Aah, just a couple of-fellas around," Terry said, troubled.

"What was that short, thick one whispering to you?" Katie asked. "Why does he have to whisper?"

"Listen, Katie, for your own good," Terry jumped ahead of her questions. "You gotta quit askin' things. You gotta quit askin' so many questions. You gotta quit tryin' to find out things. Lay off. Lay off."

"Who were those two?" Katie said.

"It aint safe," Terry continued. "Now I'm tellin' you for your own good. It just aint safe. I tell you, lay off."

"Why worry about me?" Katie said. "You're the one who was just saying you only look out for yourself."

"Okay, okay," Terry said harshly, feeling some relief from guilt and his frustrated attraction for her in being able to lash out at her. "Go ahead, get in hot water. Just don't come hollerin' to me when you get burned."

"Why should I come hollering to you at all?" Katie asked.

"Because ..." Terry said resentfully, "because...I think you and me are gettin' ..."

He looked at her angrily, and guiltily, and hung his head.

"I won't let myself," Katie warned him. "Not me! "

"That goes for me double," Terry said.

Inside, in the private room, the overhead lights were dimming again. The band swung into a Lombardo version of a Dick Rodgers waltz.

"I'm leaving," Katie said.

"Yeah, let's cut outta here," Terry said. "I'll see ya home."

It had grown colder as the sun ducked behind the massive ridge of factories marking the western outskirts of the city. They no longer had anything to say to each other. They walked rapidly down Dock Street. Approaching Terry's stoop, a half dozen doors down from the Doyles', Katie was just about to tell him there was no need for him to accompany her any farther when a man in a brown tweed overcoat and a dark brown hat stepped quickly out of the front hallway where he had been waiting. "Mr. Malloy?" he called out to Terry.

Terry swung in surprise at the mister. He frowned as he recognized the Crime Commission joker, the tall, broad-shouldered one who had asked him too many questions at the Longdock.

"Yeah, yeah?" Terry said.

Glover approached with a pleasant smile. "I've been waiting for you, Mr. Malloy. You're being served with a subpoena, Mr. Malloy."

He handed the unprepossessing sheet of paper to Terry. Terry didn't look at it. He crumpled it into a ball in his hand.

"Be at the State House. Courtroom Nine, at ten o'clock Monday morning," Glover said.

This was too much for Terry. "Listen, I already told ya. I don't know nuthin'. I don't know nuthin' about that."

"You're entitled to bring a lawyer with you," Glover went on. "And you're privileged under the Constitution to protect yourself against questions that might incriminate you."

"Are you kiddin'?" Terry said, suspended somewhere between anguish and anger. "Y'know what you're askin' me to do?"

"Mister Malloy," Glover said in a practiced voice, as if he had spoken this line a thousand times, "all we're asking you to do is to tell the truth."

"All," Terry said bitterly. "That's all, huh?" He shook his head scornfully. "Boy, what you don' know."

"See you Monday morning," Glover said. "And of course failure to appear means a warrant for you and an automatic contempt of court. Good day, Mr. Malloy."

"Mister Malloy," Terry said with his hands on his hips, disdainfully, as he watched Glover walk away. "Cop!"

"What are you going to do?" Katie said.

Terry had forgotten she was still there. "Tell you one thing," he said viciously. "I aint gonna eat cheese for no cops, and that's for sure."

It was hoodlum talking, pure hoodlum and it aroused a sharp, pure reaction in Katie. "It was Johnny Friendly who killed Joey, wasn't it?" she said.

Terry clenched his fingers around the subpoena. He looked down at his feet. He felt like running, as if he just swiped some stuff off a pushcart and should be getting out of there in a hurry. "Katie ..." he started to say.

But now Katie was pressing. "He had him killed or had something to do with it, didn't he? He and your brother Charley? Isn't that true?"

"Katie, listen ..."

"You can't tell me, can you? Because you're part of it. And as bad as the worst of them. Just as bad. Aren't you? Tell me the truth, Terry. Aren't you?"

She was raising her voice, on the verge of tears, and Terry took a step backward and put a hand out as if to calm her.

"Shhh, take it easy, take it easy. You better go back to that school out in daisyland. You're drivin' yourself nuts. You're drivin' me nuts. You're drivin' everybody nuts. Quit worryin' about the truth all the time. Worry about yourself."

Katie lowered her voice, so as not to scream at him. "I should have known you wouldn't tell me. Pop said Johnny Friendly used to own you. I think he still owns you."

"Please. Don't say that to me, Katie ..."

Katie looked at him and wanted to cry. Then she said, as gently as she could, "No wonder everybody calls you a bum."

"Don't say that to me, Katie. Don't say that to me now."

"No wonder ... no wonder ..." Katie kept repeating softly.

"I'm-I'm tryin' t' keep ya from bein' hurt. Don't you see? What more d'ya want?"

"Much more, Terry," Katie said. "Much much much more."

She turned away abruptly and ran up the street toward her tenement stoop so as not to let him see her crying.

Terry watched her hurry up the steps into her hallway. Then he looked at the crumpled paper in his hand. "Son of a bitch," he said fervently, "son of a wall-eyed bitch. Son of a lousy joint-chewing wall-eyed bitch."

Then he remembered Johnny Friendly. He must be getting light in the head to follow a broad like this and disobey a direct order from Johnny Friendly. With his head down, trying to think, and the stinking subpoena burning a hole in his pocket, he turned the corner toward the docks and the back room of the Friendly Bar on River Street where Union Brother John Friendly was waiting for him.

Sixteen.

BIG MAC AND GILLY and Truck and Sonny and Specs and "J.P." and the rest of them stared at Terry when he entered the back room of Johnny Friendly's bar. They looked at him as if they had never seen him before. Even Charley barely mumbled "Hiya, kid." They were waiting for Johnny Friendly to make the move.

"Well, it's nice of you to drop around," Johnny said as Terry approached. Friendly's eyes were feared around here for their cold-blue dead-pan stare when he was crossed. His lips barely moved when he talked. There was more than anger in him.

There was a studied withdrawal that made men who incurred his enmity come close to collapse when he fixed them with this look. It was known and dreaded on River Street as "The Friendly freeze."

Terry was on his guard because he could feel all their eyes watching him for sign of geezer. How tough was the tough kid now? their eyes were asking.

"I was comin' over," Terry said carefully. He glanced at Charley, who was standing near Johnny. Charley was with him, but he kept a stern face on him so as not to weaken himself with Johnny. These were make-or-break moments in this business. Johnny's was a terrible authority, beyond appeal. There was no hedging, no uncertainty. Mercy or punishment was dealt from the top of the deck, slapped on the table for all to see, irrevocable.

"Just comin' over here," Johnny said mincingly. Then he made his voice coarser and louder. "How? By way of Chicago?"

Big Mac and one or two others laughed obligingly. Terry tightened his mouth at them and tried to stop Johnny from jabbing him silly with words.

"No kiddin', Johnny, I was ..."

"Shut up, you shlagoom," Johnny said. The seventy-five-cent H. Uppmann clenched in his mouth was like the muzzle of a .45 fixing Terry at point-blank range. "How many times you been knocked out, Terry?"

There was scattered laughter again, but this time Terry didn't turn away from Johnny's ice-blue eyes.

"Knocked out? Uh ..." Terry thought back, over the good nights and the tough ones. "Only two times. And one was on cuts that night ..."

"Shut up," Johnny said. "Two times. That must've been once too often. Your brains must be rattling. What you got up there, Chinese bells? Huh? You got a bunch o' Chinese bells up there where your brains useta be?"

There was another claque-like chuckle, and Johnny said over his shoulder, "All right, turn it off. This aint no comedy hour. Because of this-genius here, we're in a squeeze."

"What's a matter?" Terry said. "What I done wrong?"

Johnny turned to Charley the Gent who was trying to play it cool. "I thought he was gonna keep an eye on that church meeting? I thought you said he could do the job?"

Charley said nothing.

"Johnny, I was there," Terry said. "I cased the whole thing. There was nothin' happened."

Johnny turned to Charley again. Charley managed an expression for his face that was no expression. Johnny Friendly pushed the needle in deeper. "Nothing happened, the kid says. Some operator you got yourself there, Charley. One more like him and we'll all be wearing striped pajamas."

This time nobody laughed. The silence in the room was like a sudden lack of oxygen. Behind him in the front room Terry could hear the indistinct buzz of bartalk and the senseless laughter from the television. He longed to be out there, tanking up and shooting the breeze. He touched his forehead with his fingers and the skin was cold and wet. He hated to give himself away in front of these other punks. You could hold on to yourself inside, but those sweat glands kept pumping fear onto your face.

Terry turned to Charley for solace, for support. "I told ya, Charley, it was a big nothin'. The Father did all the talkin'."

Johnny looked around at the group whose indignation was a barefaced copy of his own. "All right, you fellas, beat it," he said. "Everybody but Charley. I want to talk to this shlagoom alone."

They filed out dutifully. Johnny chewed forcefully on the end of his cigar.

"The Father did all the talking," Johnny kept taking Terry's words, crumpling them into hard balls and throwing them back in Terry's face. "Well, this afternoon your goddamn priest took a certain Timothy J. Nolan into a secret session with the Crime Commission and Nolan did all the talking. Now whaddya think of that?"

"You mean little Runty Nolan? The oldtimer? Half gassed alla time?" Terry shrugged. "He don't know much."

"He don't, huh?" Johnny said. Reaching into his inside pocket he pulled out a thick manuscript bent lengthwise, and slammed it down on the table.

"You know what this is?"

Terry shook his head, worried.

"Just thirty-nine pages on the way we operate, that's all."

"How'd you get that?" Terry was impressed.

Johnny gestured with his thumb in the direction of some higher connection. "None of your goddamn business. I got it."

"Never mind, he got it," Charley seconded. "The complete works of Timothy J. Nolan. Hot off the press. Thank Christ it was an executive session and can't be used against us until he testifies in public."

"Charley," Johnny said, "you got the brains to talk, but sometimes you haven't got the brains not to talk. You know what I mean?"

Charley knew what he meant. When the pupils of Johnny's eyes were the size and hardness of buckshot even his intimate friends were cowed.

"Nolan!" Terry couldn't get over it. "I knew he had the guts, but ..."

"Guts!" Johnny stood up with both fists shaking. Charley had seen him like this perhaps a dozen times and each time it had signaled an execution. "A crummy pigeon who's lookin' to get his neck wrung."

He turned his back on Terry, whose face was an expressive composite of fear, resistance and resignation.

"Charley, you should've known better than to trust this punched-out kid brother of yours. He was all right hanging around for laughs. But this is business, important business.

We're chopping up ten G's a week. I can't afford to have goof-offs messing in my business."

"Now listen, Johnny, how could I tell ..." Terry tried to cut in.