Eddie closed his own hand over the key and turned away with his tears still drying on his face. “Let’s go,” he said, and they began to move down the long hill toward the plain which stretched beyond.

16

JAKE WALKED SLOWLY ALONG Castle Avenue, past pizza shops and bars and bodegas where old women with suspicious faces poked the potatoes and squeezed the tomatoes. The straps of his pack had chafed the skin beneath his arms, and his feet hurt. He passed beneath a digital thermometer which announced it was eighty-five. It felt more like a hundred and five to Jake.

Up ahead, a police car turned onto the Avenue. Jake at once became extremely interested in a display of gardening supplies in the window of a hardware store. He watched the reflection of the blue-and-white pass in the window and didn’t move until it was gone.

Hey, Jake, old buddy—where, exactly, are you going?

He hadn’t the slightest idea. He felt positive that the boy he was looking for—the boy in the green bandanna and the yellow T-shirt that said NEVER A DULL MOMENT IN MID-WORLD—was somewhere close by, but so what? To Jake he was still nothing but a needle hiding in the haystack which was Brooklyn.

He passed an alley which had been decorated with a tangle of spray-painted graffiti. Mostly they were names—EL TIANTE 91, SPEEDY GONZALES, MOTORVAN MIKE—but a few mottos and words to the wise had been dropped in here and there, and Jake’s eyes fixed on two of these.

A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE

had been written across the bricks in spray-paint which had weathered to the same dusky-pink shade of the rose which grew in the vacant lot where Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli had once stood. Below it, in a blue so dark it was almost black, someone had spray-painted this oddity:

I CRY YOUR PARDON.

What does that mean? Jake wondered. He didn’t know—something from the Bible, maybe—but it held like the eye of a snake is reputed to hold a bird. At last he walked on, slowly and thoughtfully. It was almost two-thirty, and his shadow was beginning to grow longer.

Just ahead, he saw an old man walking down the street, keeping to the shade as much as possible and leaning on a gnarled cane. Behind the thick glasses he wore, his brown eyes swam like oversized eggs.

“I cry your pardon, sir,” Jake said without thinking or even really hearing himself.

The old man turned to look at him, blinking in surprise and fear. “Liff me alone, boy,” he said. He raised his walking-stick and brandished it clumsily in Jake’s direction.

“Would you know if there’s a place called Markey Academy anyplace around here, sir?” This was utter desperation, but it was the only thing he could think to ask.

The old man slowly lowered his stick—it was the sir that had done it. He looked at Jake with the slightly lunatic interest of the old and almost senile. “How come you not in school, boy?”