Hard News

houseboat for the first time, riding in the Hudson, fifty miles north of here.
    And now, a Viking burial.
    She sighed, then waved to the patrolman in the front seat of a blue-and-white. He was a friend of Healy’s from the Sixth Precinct, the station where the Bomb Squad was housed.
    “Look at this,” she called.
    “Sorry about it, honey. Some of us’ll drive by once in a while, check up on things, just till you get your stuff moved out.”
    “Yeah, if there’s anything left.”
    There was, but the stink and smoke damage were so bad she didn’t have the heart to go through it. Anyway, Courtney was restless and kept climbing on the pilings.
    Rune took her by the hand and led her back up Christopher Street.
    “What’s that?” Courtney asked, pointing at a storefront sign encouraging safe sex. It showed a condom.
    “Balloon,” said Rune.
    “I want one.”
    “When you’re older,” Rune answered. The words came automatically and she decided she was really getting into this kid bit. They continued on Christopher then along the tail end of Greenwich and finally onto Eighth Street. It had become a lot shabbier in the past year. More graffiti, more garbage, more obnoxious kids. But, God, the shoe stores—more places to buy cheap shoes than anywhere else in the world.
    They walked down to University Place, past dozens of chic, black-clad NYU students. Rune made a detour. She stopped in front of an empty storefront. Above the door was a sign,
Washington Square Video
.
    “I used to work there,” she told Courtney. The little girl peered inside.
    In the window was another sign, on yellow cardboard:
For Rent Net Lease
.
    Just like my life, she thought. For rent net lease.
    They walked to Washington Square Park and bought hot dogs then kept walking south through SoHo and into Chinatown.
    “Hey,” Rune said suddenly, “want to see something neat?”
    “Yeah, neat.”
    “Let’s go look at some octopuses.”
    “Yeah!”
    Rune led her across the street to a huge outdoor fish market on Canal Street. “It’s like the zoo, only the thing is the animals don’t move so much.”
    Courtney didn’t buy it, though. “Pukey,” she said about the octopus then got yelled at by the owner of the stand when she poked a grouper.
    Rune looked around and said, “Oh, hey, I know where we are. Come on—I’ll show you something totally excellent. I’ll teach you some history and when you start school you can blow everybody away with how much you already know.”
    “Yeah. I like history.”
    They walked down Centre Street past the black Family Court Building. (Rune, glancing across the square at the Criminal Courts Building and thinking of Randy Boggs. She felt the anger sear her and looked away quickly.) In a few minutes they were in front of the New York Supreme Court at 60 Centre Street.
    “This is it,” Rune announced.
    “Yeah.” Courtney looked around.
    “This used to be called Five Points. A hundred years ago it was the worst area in all of Manhattan. This is where the Whyos hung out.”
    “What’s a Whyo?”
    “A gang, the worst gang that ever was. I’ll read you a bedtime story about them some night.”
    “Yeah!”
    Rune remembered, though, that her present copy of
New York Gangs
was now just a cinder and wondered where she could get a new one. She said, “The Whyos were really tough. You couldn’t join them unless you were a murderer. They even printed up a price list—you know, like a menu, for how much it cost to stab somebody or shoot him in the leg or kill him.”
    “Yuck,” said Courtney.
    “You hear all about Al Capone and Dutch Schultz, right?”
    Courtney said agreeably, “Uh-huh.”
    “But they weren’t anything compared with the Whyos. Danny Driscoll was the leader. There’s this great story about him. He was in love with a girl named Beezy Garrity—isn’t that a great name? I’d like to be named Beezy.”
    “Beezy.”
    “And this rival gang dude, Johnny somebody or another, fell in love with her too. Danny and him had this duel in a dance hall up the street. They pulled out guns and blasted away.” Rune fired a couple shots with her finger. “Blam, blam! And guess who got shot?”
    “Beezy.”
    Rune was impressed. “You got it.” Then she frowned. “Danny was pretty bummed by that, I’d guess, but it got worse because they hanged
him
for killing his girlfriend. Right over there,” Rune pointed. “That’s where the Tombs were. The old criminal building. Hanged him