His wedding ring. On the verge of tears, Adam tried to pull it off his finger, but it stuck. Blue-­eyes waved the knife and Adam said hoarsely, “I’ll get it off.” He managed to raise enough saliva to wet his finger and pull the ring free. They passed that around too. Then blue-­eyes opened the briefcase. He found Adam’s bottle of Allerest and pitched it away down the street. Then he turned the case over and the books and papers spilled around them on the sidewalk and into the gutter. The boy bent the top of the case back until the hinges broke and it flopped loose, then he threw it down and picked up the book. It was called Objectivity: New Essays on Epistemology. Adam had been going to assign it for a seminar he was leading. Blue-­eyes showed it to the other boys, but they didn’t react, and he slashed the spine, and tore off the book’s covers.

“That it?” he said to Adam.

For some reason, their brutality made Adam calmer; he looked into the boy’s eyes, which seemed to glow with hatred.

“Thirty lousy dollars and a two-­bit watch. Is that all, Jew?”

“I’m afraid it is,” Adam said quietly. He kept looking at the boy, and that must have annoyed him, because he raised his hand and hit Adam in the face, using the knife handle to make the punch harder. The sound was sickening, and Adam was afraid he would throw up. He knew from the blinding pain and dead-­space feel of his face that the jaw was broken. He wanted to yell at them to stop—that his best friend was Roger Hawkins, Inspector Roger Hawkins who ran this town. And if anything happened to him, Hawkins himself would come after them and make sure they’d pay. But he couldn’t talk, and he knew they wouldn’t care anyway. They hated him, and wanted to kill him—he’d never know why—and his only chance was to run. He opened his hurt mouth as wide as he could and gave a fierce, piercing shriek. It startled blue-eyes so much he jumped back, and Adam smashed past him and ran for Nostrand.