I went back to my hotel. I had a pocket atlas for the five boroughs in my room and I looked up Barnett Avenue in the Queens index, turned to the appropriate page and hunted until I found it. It was in Woodside. I studied the map and wondered what a Hispanic rooming house was doing in an Irish neighborhood.

Barnett Avenue extended only ten or twelve blocks, running east from Forty-third Street and ending at Woodside Avenue. I had my choice of trains. I could take either the E or F on the Independent line or the IRT Flushing Line.

Assuming I wanted to go there at all.

I called again from my room. Once again the phone rang for a long time. This time a man answered it. I said, “Octavio Calderón, por favor.”

“Momento,” he said. Then there was a thumping sound, as if he let the receiver hang from its cord and it was knocking against the wall. Then there was no sound at all except that of a radio in the background tuned to a Latin broadcast. I was thinking about hanging up by the time he came back on the line.

“No está aquí,” he said, and rang off before I could say anything in any language.

I looked in the pocket atlas again and tried to think of a way to avoid a trip to Woodside. It was rush hour already. If I went now I’d have to stand up all the way out there. And what was I going to accomplish? I’d have a long ride jammed into a subway car like a sardine in a can so that someone could tell me No está aquí face to face. What was the point? Either he was taking a drug-assisted vacation or he was really sick, and either way I didn’t stand much chance of getting anything out of him. If I actually managed to run him down, I’d be rewarded with No lo se instead of No está aquí. I don’t know, he’s not here, I don’t know, he’s not here—

Shit.

Joe Durkin had done a follow-up interrogation of Calderón on Saturday night, around the time that I was passing the word to every snitch and hanger-on I could find. That same night I took a gun away from a mugger and Sunny Hendryx washed down a load of pills with vodka and orange juice.

The very next day, Calderón called in sick. And the day after that a man in a lumber jacket followed me in and out of an AA meeting and warned me off Kim Dakkinen’s trail.

The phone rang. It was Chance. There’d been a message that he’d called, but evidently he’d decided not to wait for me to get back to him.

“Just checking,” he said. “You getting anywhere?”

“I must be. Last night I got a warning.”