“The invitation stands. Tonight, tomorrow night. Any night you say.” Her voice was gruff but full of kindness. Then she turned to Hawkins. “You’ll be glad to hear I threw all that crap out. There was enough salt in that fish to pickle your balls.”

He got the door open.

“They put out a coffee urn, and some Danish,” she was saying to Rachel, “and they spilled coffee on your bubbe’s§ lace cloth. I put seltzer on it, but you can see the stain. We’ll try vinegar.”

Hawkins went out into the hall and closed the door.

Hawkins ordered coffee in a cup, not in the glass they usually served at the Union Dairy. Pinchik did, too, then took out the bottle and in plain sight of everyone poured vodka in the coffee. The cream curdled instantly.

Pinchik tried it. “Awful,” he said.

“Awful,” Hawkins agreed.

“Roger, we’re moving.”

Pinchik and Levy were moving; Adam was dead. Hawkins looked out of the window at the street. It was almost ten, but it was warm and clear, and the street was crowded with people. Fat Spanish women in flowered cotton dresses and men in shirt-­sleeves passed the window. Some kids had opened a hydrant, and the water ran slowly in the gutter carrying leaves and litter with it. Jewish men in wide-­brimmed black hats and long coats stepped carefully across the river the hydrant water made, then walked on, arm in arm. Pinchik followed Hawkins’s eyes, and he looked through the window, too, as he talked.

“I don’t want to go,” Pinchik said softly. “I was born two blocks from here; I was bar mitzvahed at Shaare Tikvah, and married at the Candlelight; I was gonna die here.” He smiled wanly. “. . . to die in Brooklyn, in Beth Israel a few miles from here. In a semiprivate room with a view of the bay. A good room to die in . . . color TV, phone. In the morning I watch the tankers come in, in the afternoon I watch As the World Turns, at night, the stars, the ceiling, The Rockford Files . . . then die.”

He turned his head away. “This was my hometown, Roger, as surely as if I’d come from Cairo, Illinois, or Ames, Iowa. People forget that when you say you’re from Brooklyn. But it’s true. My hometown. Now I gotta go.”

“Just because of Adam . . .”

“Just because of Adam? Are you crazy?”

“No. Adam could have been murdered in Cairo, Illinois, or Ames, Iowa.”