“Stop licking him, Lucy—you don’t even know him!” the colonel said. This time, he spoke sharply.

“You see? That’s what she does—she don’t know what she means, she don’t know she’s bein’ encouragin’,” Fernando said.

“You can’t lick men and not encourage them, Lucy,” Colonel Zimmermann advised her, more gently.

“It’s disgusting, Lucy,” Elmira added.

“She don’t mean nothin’ by it,” Fernando tried to assure us. Lucy smiled. Nothing was meant by her smile, I was thinking, but her lips were parted. I could see the gaps where her teeth had been.

“He’s publishing a first novel,” the professor was saying to himself; he was shuffling away from us, leaving the alley. Lucy’s licking was of no more concern to him than the humping.

“It’s a historical novel—I don’t think anyone will read it. It was just a small advance!” I called after the old academic, but he’d already reached the sidewalk.

“The professor has written some books, but I don’t believe he’s been published,” the colonel confided to me quietly. It would have been best, I imagined, if the professor had walked into the traffic on Park Avenue, where he could have been instantly killed by a car, but he turned south on the sidewalk, where he was lost from our sight.

A strained silence and a loss of concentration seemed to unhinge the soup line. We could all hear what Talib whispered to Ayla, and what she whispered (more loudly) back to him.

“It wasn’t Reggie, was it?” Talib had whispered.

“What must you think of me?” Ayla whispered, harshly. “I would sooner have sex with a dog than with Reggie!”

“Let it go, Talib, let it go,” Colonel Zimmermann said, so softly he was almost whispering.

“There’s lots more soup,” Elmira said. Mary, Felix, Fernando, and Talib had the most soup. Even Ayla had a little, her morning sickness notwithstanding. Mr. Barlow and I were disinclined to return to the gathering in the Zimmermanns’ upstairs apartment; we felt more at home in the alley with the castoffs Zim had helped.

Talib was the first to pay his respects to Zim, specifically; he spoke directly to Colonel Zimmermann as we were leaving the alley. “I know I speak for all of us—Colonel, sir—when I say how sorry we were to hear about your Matthew.”

“Thank you, Talib,” the colonel said. He would not let anyone carry the soup pot for him; he would not let Elmira persuade him to take the service elevator, either.

“They don’t like us to carry food through the lobby, Colonel—not even you,” Elmira reminded him.

“Then we’ll forgive them for not liking us when we do it,” the colonel told her.

We were a strange assortment of vagabonds—we looked decidedly out of place on Park Avenue. Not a single taxi, whizzing by, slowed down to take an inquiring look at us. Not even Colonel Zimmermann—elegantly dressed in funereal attire, and with half a chest of medals—caught the cabbies’ eyes. To the taxi drivers, the colonel was just a crazy old man carrying a soup pot.