“ ‘Ah, fuck that,’ he says, ‘everyone winks at that bullshit. What do you say, Donnie? You’re a good man. And I got an idea you could do a little more than buck furniture up on the truck. You want to think about it tonight?’

“I thought about it, and thinking led back to drinking, as it always did that summer. As it always does for those of the alcoholic persuasion. Back to me sitting in some little bar across from the Empire State Building, listening to Elton John on the juke-box. ‘Almost had your hooks in me, din’tcha, dear?’ And when I went back to work, I checked in with a different day-labor company, one that had never heard of the fucking Brother Outfit.”

Callahan spat out the word fucking in a kind of desperate snarl, as men do when vulgarity has become for them a kind of linguistic court of last resort.

“You drank, you drifted, you worked,” Roland said. “But you had at least one other piece of business that summer, did you not?”

“Yes. It took me a little while to get going. I saw several of them—the woman feeding the squirrels in the park was only the first—but they weren’t doing anything. I mean, I knew what they were, but it was still hard to kill them in cold blood. Then, one night in Battery Park, I saw another one feeding. I had a fold-out knife in my pocket by then, carried it everywhere. I walked up behind him while he was eating and stabbed him four times: once in the kidneys, once between the ribs, once high up in the back, once in the neck. I put all my strength into the last one. The knife came out the other side with the thing’s Adam’s apple skewered on it like a piece of steak on a shish kebab. Made a kind of ripping sound.”

Callahan spoke matter-of-factly, but his face had grown very pale.

“What had happened in the alley behind Home happened again—the guy disappeared right out of his clothes. I’d expected it, but of course I couldn’t be sure until it actually happened.”

“One swallow does not make a summer,” Susannah said.