BACK ON THE ROOF tending his birds again, Terry was able to sidestep his troubles for a while. He went into the loft and busied himself cleaning out the nest boxes. One wall of the coop was lined with orange-crates, with each pair of birds occupying one compartment. Terry liked to watch the mates building their nests from the clean straw and he enjoyed the regular way the cocks and hens took turns sitting on the two small white eggs, the males by day, the females by night, in well-regulated shifts. He liked to watch the growth of the grotesque, featherless, Durante-beaked, one-day-old squabs into plump, fluttery, thirty-day-old adolescents ready to leave the nest. Boy, how they hated to get their fannies out of that nest! They were squawkingly scared of the big, open world beyond their nest box and they hung on for dear life when their old man and old lady tried to push them out over the edge. It used to make Terry laugh and feel sorta sad at the same time-all that flapping of wings and squealing commotion. Then the full-grown rejected squabs, big enough to fly, but still too dumb to know they had it in them, would flop heavily to the floor of the loft. For a few days they'd go through hell, unweaned and unwanted, miserably suspended between their old nest-box dependence and an independence they hadn't latched onto yet. Each time Mr. and Mrs. Pigeon flew down to the scratch-grain feeder the dispossessed kids would rush over to them with their beaks wide open, their wings flapping, clamoring for a hand-out It was pitiful, the way the old birds pecked them away. Just a couple of days earlier this same mom and pop had been on the nursing shift, regurgitating the soupy, digested grain into these waiting twenty-eight-day-old throats.

Hundreds of times he had watched those squabs, confused, more and more frantic, finally driven so nuts they'd turn to other adult birds and cry to cadge a meal, only to be pecked and bullied away. Terry would look in at night to see the disappointed waifs huddled together on the floor, starved, abandoned, demoralized. But they never starved to death. Sure, they were more confused than an Irishman caught in Liverpool on Paddy's Day. Finally the homeless birds, without knowing what they were doing, would pick up a grain of cracked corn. The food filled a hole in the empty crop. The squab went for repeats. Eureka! He had learned the old lesson of the empty belly. You've got to get out and get it yourself.

Strengthened by the food, the little guy would be ready to try the self-serving watering can. Then his wings. Many a time Terry and Billy watched them hurl into the air, up a few feet, flap, flap, and then down they'd go. And try again. A week later the poor little bastard would be air-borne, able to make short, practice hops, a little unsteady yet, but each day learning some new wrinkle about his new-found stunt In one of the nests was a fuzz-yellow, ungainly squab nearly ready for its ordeal of joining the flock. It was a fat, oversized fledgling because its twin had died after a few days and this one had doubled up on the regurgitated grub. Terry put his finger toward it and it fluttered its undeveloped wings and tried to peck him with its not-yet-hardened ludicrously large brown beak. It takes a pigeon a couple of months to grow into its beak. At first he looks all nose, like that infant from the old comics, Bunker Hill, Jr. Terry laughed at the futile pecking rage of the big squab. Then he put his hands carefully down over its wings and picked it up. It looked at him with frightened eyes.

"Kid, you got it made for another day or two and then out you go. No more ..."

Christ, he thought suddenly, it almost seems to fit, the bull voice of Johnny Friendly, roaring, "No more cushy days in the loft."

Gently, he put the squab back in the nest of dirty straw, held together with a mortar of pigeon dung.

Young Billy Conley came up the skylight steps, jumped out on the roof and looked around for Terry.

"Hey, Terry, guess who's here." He hurried over to the coop.

"Rose La Rose? Sorry, I'm too busy," Terry said through the chicken wire.

"Listen, Terry," the boy said. "It's that joker from the Crime Commission. He's comin' up the stairs."

Terry shook his head, dazed. "What? Lookin' for me?"

Billy nodded. "I heard him askin' the super on the first floor. He's got his nerve gum-shoein' around here. I hear you really blistered him in the Longdock."

"Yeah, yeah ..." Terry said absently. He came out of the coop wiping his hands on his dark corduroy trousers. Suddenly he grabbed his sweet-looking, foul-mouthed young friend. "Billy, listen. Suppose you know something, like a job some fellas did on a certain fella. You don't think you should turn 'im in?"

The boy looked at him in amazement. "You mean holler cop? Are you kiddin'?"

Billy stared at him. His young lips pressed together in a tough-neighborhood sneer. "You off your rocker?"

Terry felt the hook. The code held for the teen-age gang just as it did for the outfits on the dock. He tapped Billy's dimpled try-to-be-hard jaw affectionately. "You're a good kid, Billy. A good, tough kid. A couple of Golden Warriors." He hugged the kid's head roughly. "We got to stick together, huh, kid?"

"You was our first ace-man," Billy said. "You in some kind of a jam?"

"Kid, I got the bases loaded, no outs, and Dusty Rhodes is comin' in to bat," Terry said.

"He's on his way up," Billy said, nodding toward the covered stairway leading onto the roof. "Duck behind the coop and I'll tell 'im you're gone."

"But I aint gone!" Terry said loudly. "I'm here. I'm here. Who'm I kiddin'?"

"It's a good thing you aint boxin' no more," Billy said. "You'd get a sixty-day suspension for talkin' double."

The tall, well-built investigator in the tweed overcoat stepped out on the roof with his brief case. "Mr. Malloy?"

"See ya later," Terry dismissed his young side-kick. Then he walked across the rooftop to where Glover was sitting on a low-walled partition rubbing his feet. "You lookin' for me?" Terry asked. His voice had a chip on its shoulder.

"Oh, not exactly," Glover said, rubbing his ankles. "I was just resting my dogs a minute." He took off his hat and rubbed the line where his hat-band had been. "Next investigation we get into, I hope it's buildings with elevators in them. So far this one has been nothing but climbing stairs."

"What d'ya climb 'em for?" Terry said.

Glover smiled. "I'm what they call a public servant. They tell me the taxpayers have a right to know what's going on down here."

"Politics," Terry shrugged it off.

Gene Glover knew enough about his job not to press the point. He had been trained as a Treasury investigator and there were definite techniques for these interviews. He had been studying Terry's record and he had discussed with his colleague, Ray Gillette, the best approach. Terry's mind would be shut. Any waterfront question would put him on guard. Now, let's see ... They had talked it over together in Glover's kitchen over some beer the night before. Terry used to be a fighter. Ex-fighters like to talk about their lives in the ring. For a lot of them it was the biggest they'd ever be. Headlines. Back-stoppers. Money. A sense of achievement. When he was no longer sport-page copy, every fighter who ever hung up his gloves knew the let-down.

So now Glover tried to make his question sound spontaneous, but it was rehearsed: "Didn't I see you in the Garden three four years ago with a fellow called Wilson?"

"Wilson? Yeah. I boxed Wilson."

Terry walked away, back toward his coop. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen Swifty flying into the coop and he wanted to check his beak. He had noticed some dampness around the nostril holes. It could be a slight cold.

Glover followed Terry, moving casually. He knew his business. He stood outside the coop looking in as Terry grabbed Swifty and felt his beak.

Glover hadn't seen the Malloy-Wilson match, but had gone to the trouble of checking on it with a boxing writer he knew.

"I thought you were going to take him that night," Glover said. "You won the first two rounds by a mile. But he sure caught up with you. Man, he really dumped you."

Terry let Swifty fly back to his perch and came closer to the wire netting.

"He dumped me, huh? What would you say if I told you I hadda hold that bum up for half a round?"

"I see. I see. You mean he was hurt?"

"Whatta you think I was doin' with them combinations, pettin' 'im?"

"You mean you had him, but you just couldn't finish him off, huh?" Glover asked.

"Finish him off," Terry said scornfully. "Hell, I could feel him goin'. I coulda finished 'im off."

"The record book shows he finished you off," Glover reminded him. "Fifth round, wasn't it?"

"Who the hell cares?" Terry said. The truth boiled up in him. "I was doin' a favor for a couple of fellas ..."

"Favor! " Glover said. "I'm glad I didn't bet on that one. So that's the way it was."

"Yeah. Yeah, that's the way it was. Ya know if I had copped that one I'd 've been in line fer the title? Wilson was rated third and I was right behind him and the two bums ahead of us didn't have the connections." Terry shook his head a moment, remembering the road work, the rata-ta-tatta of the light bag, the strategy. "I was real sharp that night."

"You sure looked it, those first few rounds. I figured you started too fast and that counter-punching of his took it out of you."

"Hah!" Terry snorted. The Wilson fight was a crimp in his mind he could never work out. "Them sports writers said the same thing, but it was a lousy bet took it out of me."

"You don't say?" Glover said quietly and stretched. "Well, guess I better get going. Hit those stairs again. It's been nice talking to you. I watch the fights on TV twice a week. I think you could clean up on these middleweights they got messing around today."

"Once in a while I get thinkin' I could make it back," Terry said. "I'm only twenty-eight. I still got my legs."

"And you could punch," Glover said. "By the way, a friend of mine and I were arguing about the Wilson fight the other night. Was that a hook or a bolo you caught him with in the third round?"

"Bolo," Terry said contemptuously. "That's for the birds. Some writer made that up to give Gavilan some color. A bolo is just a telegraphed uppercut." He burlesqued one. "A big nothing." The stance of shadow boxing and a whiff of the old flattery excited him. "I was strictly a short puncher," he said proudly, and came out of the coop. "Look, you put your left out and I'll show you somethin'." He maneuvered Glover into an awkward semblance of a boxer's pose.

"I had that bum all figured out, see. He had a good left hand, ya know what I mean? Okay, so I let him slap me with the left for a couple of rounds. Build up his confidence, see? And all the time I'm watchin' how he drops his right. So just when he thinks he's gettin' cute and can tag me whenever he wants me, I step inside the jab-whop, with a right!"-he threw his right hand viciously-"whop with a left, then when his hand comes down I bring up the uppercut-six inches, but I know how to throw it-WHOP! He falls into my arms. He don' know if he's in the Garden or in Roseland and from there on we're just dancin', dancin' ... That Wilson couldn't fight too much."

"I believe you," Glover said, apparently interested.

"Well, that's a fact! That's a fact," Terry said excitedly. "Jesus, how I wanted to put him away. But no dice. All for a lousy bet. Hell, my own bro ..."

Terry heard himself and stopped short.

"Your own who?" Glover encouraged him.

"Aah, it's ancient history," Terry subsided. "Who'n hell cares about me 'n Wilson?"

"Well, I better get going," Glover said. "Sorry to hear they wouldn't let you win it. Better luck next time."

"Hah, hah," Terry said bitterly. "With my luck and a subway token I couldn't get to Times Square."

"See you soon," Glover smiled. "I'd like to hear the whole story some time." He disappeared into the rooftop stairway.

An hour later Terry was still up there, sitting on an upturned box, watching his birds. He heard someone come up on the roof three houses away. It was Katie. She was wearing a blue scarf around her head to keep her hair from blowing. It was windy on the rooftop, although the sun was filtering through the cold marble sky. When she lingered at Joey's coop, Terry didn't know whether to call over to her or not. He had tried to avoid her on the dock at Runty's impromptu send-off the day before and he was resigned to the fact that his chance was one to fifty that she would ever speak to him again. Well, he'd settle for that. Bohegan was a fishbowl and sooner than later it would get back to Johnny. Things were tough enough now.

"Don't see her no more," Johnny had ordered.

"You owe it to Katie to tell her the truth," Father Barry had insisted.

Terry felt like a one-man tug of war with his body on both ends and his head in the middle. "Kee-rist," he said out loud.

Katie turned from the coop on the other roof and came toward Terry. When she was close enough for him to see her face clearly, he felt panicky. She was so damned fresh-looking. When you looked at her you liked her, you trusted her, you wanted to take care of her. Christ! She was the kind of girl a hood like him had no right to be in the same room with. The same world. She wanted too much.

"I was hoping I'd find you up here," she said.

"Yeah, I-got a sick bird."

"I was thinking about Joey's birds," she said. "We have got to get rid of them. Pop says the butcher will take them, but I ..." She paused and he was very close to her and again he felt the urge to touch her cheek, put his arms around her, but of course he wouldn't dare. In his whole tenement-roof, pool-hall and street-corner life he had never been unsure of himself with any girl before. "But I-I thought maybe you could take them in with yours," she continued. "At least they'd have a nice life. I know you'd take good care of them. I could trust you for that."

"Sure, sure. Anything you say," Terry mumbled. Then he took a small step forward, a big step inwardly. The tar-paper floor of the roof was vibrating from the concussion of the pile-driver at the river bank a block away.

"Katie, listen to me," Terry said. "I"-he reached back for Father Barry's words-"owe it to ya to tell ya somethin'."

"You do?"

"It's been jabbin', jabbin' in my mind ever since that night in the church," he said.

"I'm sorry I lost my temper with you," she said. "It's a sin not to forgive people, even when you want them to be better."

"I wish you wouldn't keep sayin' stuff like that," he said.

"Why?"

"Because it makes me feel like even more of a louse. It makes me feel like I'm crawlin' in snakes. That's why I gotta tell ya, Katie. You'll hate my guts all your life, but I can't keep it from comin' out no more. It's-it's like-forgive the expression-like puke. Once ya feel it comin' up in your throat ya've got to let it out."

"Then do," Katie said. "Let it come out."

With a terrible panic he looked at her a moment from across the gulf. Then he plunged in.

"Katie, I-I just told the Father what I did-what I did to Joey."

She put her face in her hands and shook her head into them. "No ..."

"What I did to Joey," he raised his voice to overcome the insistent pounding of the pile-driver. Unconsciously Katie moved her hands from her face until they were pressing against her ears. Terry went on shouting, the guilt pouring out of him in a relieving purge-lissen-lissen-my brother Charley-and Johnny-good to me-a favor-the pigeon-got Joey to the roof-Specs and Sonny-the guilt and filth of it pouring out of him into Katie's innocent, no longer trusting face and her horrified whisper "No ... no ..."

A mighty ship swinging into mid-channel on its way to the Narrows let out a harbor-shattering blast with rows of earsplitting Zs and Ns in its BZZZZZNNNNN ... but nothing could stop Terry from spewing it forth. It had to come out to the last shred of gagged-up phlegm. His voice rose hysterically to make itself heard above the giant thumping of the pile-driver and the violent intrusion of the ship's whistle. "Katie, I'm tellin' the truth. I'm not holdin' nuthin' back. I set Joey up for 'em. But, Katie, honest to God, I didn' look to see 'im killed. I didn' know. I DIDN' KNOW ..." The blast from the ship had suddenly stopped and Terry's voice was so loud it sounded as if it could have been heard all over Bohegan. A moment later the pile-driver paused too, as if to catch its steam-engine breath. It was suddenly still. Terry lowered his voice almost to a whisper now. "Katie ... Katie ... I never thought they'd ..."

"You never thought anything-except how to stuff your mouth or your pockets," Katie said with a fierceness that lashed Terry with a steel tip because it was so unexpected in her. "You weren't killing him or not killing him. You were just looking out as usual for number one."

He put his hand out, tentatively to restrain her, but she turned and ran across the roof, dodging the skylights and ducking through the steel branches of the TV forest that had spread from house to house.

Okay, he did it, he did it, he was thinking. Now what? What's the deal? He had felt a kind of crazy exhilaration to get the thing off his chest to Katie. And now-nothing. He felt tired and just wanted to stretch out and be quiet-like after a hard ten-round fight. The pile-driver began its pounding again. Goddamn it, would it never quit? Was there never gonna be no peace nowhere? He envied Runty Nolan, wherever he was. At least he didn't have to make any more moves. It was this having to decide things one way or another that drove pointed sticks into your head.

"Jesus, Mary 'n Joseph ..." Terry said, meaning to curse. But his mind was so battered and his spirit so torn that it issued from him softly, more like a prayer.

Twenty-one.

THE GATHERING OF JOHNNY Friendly's "pistol local" officials in the weather-beaten office on the wharf was only one of a chain of meetings going on in the longshoremen's union offices all along the Jersey waterfront and around the harbor from Staten Island, the West, South and East Sides of Manhattan and far out into Brooklyn. There had been emergency sessions of the District Council. High-up members of the syndicate like Jerry Benasio's dreaded brother Alky, who had Brooklyn and most of Jersey, and Wally "Slicker" McGhee, a big dealer from the Lower West Side, had flown up from hideouts in Miami and Hollywood, Florida, to help work out a common strategy for the dock bosses who were being subpoenaed.

In other words, the heat was on. The Crime Commission had an order to call in and examine all the union books. Company records were being subpoenaed too, and the scuttlebutt was that shipping executives were being asked tough questions in private about the practice of keeping "phantoms" on the payroll to line the pockets of local officers and of systematically paying off the union leaders at Christmas for "keeping peace on the docks." There were rumors that stevedore officials, faced with proof in canceled checks or confiscated payrolls-or a telltale absence of records-were talking in order to shift the blame away from the "respectable" shipping associations and onto the muscular shoulders of the crime boys who had been running the longshore locals as private mobs.

Sure, there had been investigations before, at least a dozen of them, producing a week of headlines, but usually with no result more serious than the conviction of a hapless loan shark or two, or a loud-mouthed hoodlum the mob was ready to slough off anyway.

But this time the dreaded tide of waterfront reform seemed to be on the rise. Metropolitan papers had begun to editorialize against a whitewash. An underground of rebel longshoremen seemed ready to erupt. There were even rumors that the Commission had the goods on Willie Givens, who had quietly appointed Sing Sing and Dannemora boys as union organizers, or had handed them charters to start new locals they could run as their own. But Willie himself was a civic leader. Willie was a vice-president of a state labor organization. Willie's florid bulk was a familiar sight on the platform at political rallies in the Garden.

The annual banquet of the Willie Givens Association boasted a guest list of political brass that rivaled anything in the State. And side by side with the mayors, borough presidents, councilmen, senators and judges you would find the Benasios, the McGhees, the pride of the Brooklyn Mafia, the social register of the narcotics trade and the gunmen and shakedown artists who had made the docks their own. At last year's dinner Johnny Friendly had reserved Table 17 for himself, Charley, Big Mac McGown, Police Commissioner Donnelly, Bohegan Mayor Bobby Burke and assorted councilmen, local judges and body- guards. Now Bobby Burke, who was about to run for re-election and was a crumb-picker from the Keegan table in Jersey City, was panicky. He and Donnelly had a piece of the numbers in Bohegan, as well as something coming in from the docks. All he was looking for was to get out with his take without a Grand Jury or a State investigation.

Johnny Friendly was the strength in the Bohegan sector. Now he was ready to show what he had that had put him up where he was. The thing to do was to close ranks and hang on, hard. "Tough it out" was Johnny's motto. Admit nothing. Bull it through. The men around him could feel the bull, animal strength, not so much in the muscles but in his mind. In his mind he was right, he was justified. The way he ran the docks not only paid off for him, but kept the ships moving in and out. Not only had he mastered the larceny side, but he prided himself on knowing all the technical tricks of loading. He could spot a mistake quicker than old Captain Schlegel. He belonged down here. He had come up out of the hold. He knew everyone's job. This was all his, and his mission in life was to keep it that way.

Sitting with him was Charley and Truck and Gilly and "J.P." Morgan and his hiring bosses, Big Mac, Socks Thomas and Flat-top Karger who had just been paroled on a manslaughter rap. Specs and Sonny had beat it to Florida as soon as Father Barry raised his stink on the dock. Johnny would have to stake them until the heat was taken off.

There was no gavel here and no solemn oaths, but everybody knew that a court was in session, with Johnny as judge, jury and prosecutor, Terry Malloy on trial in absentia and his glib brother Charley on the anxious seat for the first time. The groundswell of resentment against Terry for hanging around the Doyle girl had mounted with reports of his having gone back to the church to see Barry. And from a rooftop across the street, where he had been instructed to maintain a lookout, the ubiquitous "J.P." had seen plenty.

"I couldn't hear what they was sayin', boss, but Terry and this bum from the Commission was nose to nose for ten fifteen minutes. Terry was doin' a lot of talkin', that's for sure, and this flatfoot looked like he was eatin' it up."