He nodded. “Should be in here now, but maybe this is one of his prayer times. I’ll find him. Wait here.”

He trotted out of the room, light on his feet as a dancer. After a couple of minutes, I put my briefcase down in a corner and picked up a basketball. My first shot caromed off the backboard at a crazy angle, but after that I sank five in a row before the priest returned, jerking his head at me to follow him back to the hall.

“He’s gone. Girl came for him thirty, forty minutes ago. Had to be the girl-one arm bound up inside her clothes. She asked the guard for Benji bold as brass-said he was her cousin from Morocco. Guard sent her to the principal, principal called Benji in, says kid was thrilled to see the girl, walked off with her. Idiots all, principal, guard, the lot. None of them sent for me.”

His Popeye cheeks swelled larger with anger, but I felt only cold. If Catherine had taken Benji back to her grandmother-as I’d counseled this morning-if Renee had put Marc Whitby in the Larchmont Pond, he was as good as dead.

Dully, I followed Father Lou to the principal’s office. I went through the motions with the guard and the principal: Had either of them seen how the kids left? Taxi? Bus? They didn’t know-the school was an old building, put up when windows were built high off the ground to keep you from looking at the street.

Father Lou ordered the principal to summon any teachers or staff still in the building to her office. One of the janitors, moving cartons in from a supply truck, had seen a girl with one arm bound up inside her jacket leave with an older student. He was pretty sure they’d gotten into a white SUV, but he hadn’t been paying close attention.

The old priest was furious. After having the FBI in yesterday looking for Benji, he couldn’t believe the principal would let the youth leave without even trying to discuss the matter with Father Lou.

“We’re trying to make a safe place here. If anyone can come in this school, ask for any kid without you blinking an eye, what’s to stop gangbangers, kidnappers, the whole lot from destroying our peace?”

The principal turned red, angry in her turn: Was she supposed to know that a girl Benji was thrilled to see constituted a menace? If Father Lou wanted to run the school, he should take over-she’d be glad to resign on the spot.

The principal’s red face broke into wavy lines, her mouth moving up and down, as if she was a puppet. The cabinets behind her began moving, too, in the same unsteady waves. It seemed so funny that I started to laugh. The floor began moving, which seemed funny, too, and I was still laughing when I fell over.

My head was wet. Father Lou was wiping water from my neck and face with a rough gym towel.