I could still feel the trigger of the .32 trembling beneath my finger.

I ordered another cup of coffee and turned to a story about a young soldier home on furlough, playing pickup basketball at a sandlot game in the Bronx. A gun had apparently fallen out of some bystander’s pocket, discharging on impact, and the bullet had struck this young serviceman and killed him instantly. I read the story through a second time and sat there shaking my head at it.

One more way to die. Jesus, there really were eight million of them, weren’t there?

At twenty to nine that evening I slipped into the basement of a church on Prince Street in SoHo. I got myself a cup of coffee, and while I looked for a seat I scanned the room for Jan. She was near the front on the right-hand side. I sat further back near the coffee.

The speaker was a woman in her thirties who drank for ten years and spent the last three of them on the Bowery, panhandling and wiping windshields to get money for wine. “Even on the Bowery,” she said, “there are some people who know how to take care of themselves. Some of the men down there always carry a razor and a bar of soap. I gravitated straight to the other kind, the ones who don’t shave and don’t wash and don’t change their clothes. A little voice in my head said, ‘Rita, you’re right where you belong.’ “

During the break I ran into Jan on her way to the coffee urn. She seemed pleased to see me. “I was in the neighborhood,” I explained, “and it got to be meeting time. It occurred to me I might see you here.”

“Oh, this is one of my regular meetings,” she said. “We’ll go for coffee after, okay?”

“Sure.”

A dozen of us wound up around a couple of tables in a coffee shop on West Broadway. I didn’t take a very active part in the conversation, or pay too much attention to it. Eventually the waiter distributed separate checks. Jan paid hers and I paid mine and the two of us headed downtown toward her place.

I said, “I didn’t just happen to be in the neighborhood.”

“There’s a big surprise.”

“I wanted to talk to you. I don’t know if you read today’s paper—”

“About the killing in Queens? Yes, I did.”

“I was out there. I’m all wound up and I feel the need to talk about it.”