The station was a local stop, the platform deserted. The attendant sat in the bulletproof token booth, locked in. I wondered if she felt secure in there. New York taxis have thick Plexiglas partitions to protect the drivers, but the cabbies I’d hailed weren’t willing to go uptown, partition or no.

Not long ago an attendant had had a heart attack in one of those token booths. The CPR team couldn’t get into the locked booth to revive him and so the poor bastard had died in there. Still, I suppose they protect more people than they kill.

Of course they hadn’t protected the two women at the Broad Channel stop on the A train. A couple of kids had a grudge against an attendant who’d reported them for turnstile jumping, so they’d filled a fire extinguisher with gasoline, pumped it into the booth, and lit a match. The whole booth exploded, incinerated both women. One more way to die.

That had been in the paper a year ago. Of course there was no law saying I had to read the papers.

I bought tokens. When my train came I rode it uptown. I worked Kelvin Small’s and a few other places on Lenox Avenue. I ran into Royal Waldron at a rib joint, had the same conversation with him I’d been having with everybody else. I drank a cop of coffee on 125th Street, walked the rest of the way to St. Nicholas, had a glass of ginger ale at the bar of Club Cameroon.

The statue in Mary Lou’s apartment was from Cameroun. An ancestor statue, encrusted with cowry shells.

I found no one at the bar I knew well enough to talk to. I looked at my watch. It was getting late. On Saturday night the bars in New York close an hour early, at three instead of four. I’ve never understood why. Perhaps so that the heavy hitters can sober up in time for church.

I motioned to the bartender, asked about after-hours joints. He just looked at me, his face impassive. I found myself laying my rap on him, telling him I was looking for information about Kim’s boyfriend. I knew I wasn’t going to get an answer from him, knew I wouldn’t get the time of day from him, but I was getting the message across all the same. He’d hear me and so would the men on either side of me, and they’d all talk to people, and that was how it worked.

“ ‘Fraid I can’t help you,” he said. “Whatever you lookin’ for, you lookin’ awful far uptown for it.”

I suppose the boy followed me out of the bar. I didn’t notice, and I should have. You have to pay attention to that sort of thing.