“Feh!” Garfield shouted. Carver opened the door. “They killed forty of us an hour, a minute.” He looked very disgusted. Then he asked, “What does thirty dead Krauts in Belzec mean to you?”

Hawkins shook his head.

“Ah,” Garfield cried, unwrapping one of the Hersheys. “A secret. Wonderful. Maybe Chaim knows a cabalist. Chaim knows everybody. A most respected and loved man is my brother. He’ll help you.”

Hawkins tried to call Chaim Garfield from service areas in Ossining, Tarrytown, and Dobbs Ferry; the line was always busy. The rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the sun started to set. When he called from the Riverdale service area, the line was still busy.

He came out of the phone booth and through the trees he saw a little yellow house that looked like it had been there since the Saw Mill was a coach road. On impulse he walked toward it. Behind him cars went by, the pump rang, gas fumes collected under the trees. But ahead the little house looked peaceful. The undergrowth scratched his shoes and caught at his trousers. The house was empty but there was still a semblance of a garden. Crocuses were up, and he thought he recognized lilac and azalea, not yet in bloom. The house was small but well built. He walked across the lot, which was just starting to go wild, and into the trees on the other side. The woods were dense. The highway noise receded and he could hear birds and smell wild onions. There was a ridge ahead and he thought that over it he would see a valley divided into ploughed squares of cold dirt, and out over the valley, to the west, the river.

But he came out of the trees and faced a Cyclone fence that stretched as far as he could see. There was no open valley, no ploughed earth, only hundreds of small houses painted yellow, green, and pink. Asphalt shingled roofs spread solidly to the top of an enormous factory-­office complex in the distance. He knew that if he went down there he would find new cement walks and squared off streets with fresh signs that read Enterprise Avenue, Industry Row. There would be baby birches that grew fast—and died fast—and creeping juniper planted in gravel. He wondered what they’d torn down and dug up to make this ugly, dismal place. He could almost hear Pinchik, drunk and declaiming at Vinnie’s. “It’s over,” Pinchik cried, “the Nazis weren’t Martians, they were Europeans. Christians out of Jews. Us. Western man is dead . . .”

Hawkins went back to the parkway. He didn’t try Garfield again, he called Pinchik instead.

“Yeah . . .” Pinchik answered.

“Hello, Eli. It’s Roger.”

“Roger fucking Hawkins! Where have you been?”

“Queens,” Roger answered.