So the summer flew by without a hint of disaster. That is, not until late one Saturday night in early August.

“Can we do something tomorrow?” Glenna asked, sounding as irritated as a bored child.

“There’s a demonstration in the Village I could write up for the paper.”

“Like wow.” Glenna’s sarcasm stung me. Ever since coming to night court, Glenna had said that she wanted to join me on another assignment, but we could never arrange our schedules to do it. Last week, Mack Grunch had asked me to cover the Friday opening of Woodstock. The three-day concert would start on August 15, and Glenna was supposed to come upstate with me for the weekend.

“What else you wanna do?”

“The Village is fine,” she said, switching off the lamp on the apple crate.

A minute later, her voice cut through the darkness. “The guys don’t come with them. They knock them up and send them to us like they’re having their teeth cleaned.”

“Do they know their girlfriends might be pregnant?”

“They’re so fucking insensitive.”

I said, “Could the guys get past your security?”

“That’s not the point.”

“What’s the point?”

“I don’t know,” Glenna said, and I felt her turn over on the mattress, and shortly, much to my relief, she was asleep.

Chapter 21

THE NEXT DAY Glenna and I took the train into Grand Central and a subway to Greenwich Village. Coming up from the darkness of the station into the hot afternoon light, we were swept along by a wide, ragged column of demonstrators marching to Washington Square. In front, some of the marchers were holding up banners, which seemed to be powering us forward like the sails of an armada, while all along that rambunctious column demonstrators were chanting, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war.”

The neighborhood was predominately working-class Italians, and the men and women sitting on the stoops and the lawn chairs along the sidewalk were eyeing the demonstrators with the same hatred with which the colonists must have eyed the redcoats. Farther up MacDougal Street, under an OPTIMO CIGAR sign outside a candy store, men with the knotted, muscled arms of laborers were cursing at the column, and as Glenna and I went by, the guy with the loudest mouth spit an oyster of phlegm near my sandals.

“Filthy fuckin’ queers!” he shouted. “Go back to Saint Mark’s Place where ya belong. Look at dis. Ya can’t tell de boys from de girls. Hey, honey,” he said to Glenna. “Y’ain’t gonna have no fun wid your girlfriend there. And you, wid de faggy hair,” he yelled at me. “Vaffanculo!”

The laughter of the men was fierce, like concrete being sledgehammered to dust, and a stab of fear twisted through me as Glenna said to Loud Mouth, “Stick it.”

“Stick it where, honey?” he said.

Glenna said, “Even a cretin like you could figure that out.”

The bane of civilian life is that you almost never have an automatic weapon around when you need one, and if Glenna didn’t shut up, I was going to be in need. Loud Mouth was leering at Glenna in her skimpy peach sundress, but he was glaring at me, and evidently Glenna didn’t comprehend Loud Mouth’s perverse brand of chivalry. He’d mess with her, but when he and his buddies got fed up with her ragging, the ambulance crew would be scraping me off the curb.