Hells Kitchen

save? The one you think you have this connection with? The minute he realizes you’re no good to him alive, he’d knife you in the back, steal your wallet and have the money spent by the time you died. . . . Oh, you look so placid, staring at the grass there. But you’re pretty horrified to hear me say things like that, aren’t you? Well, I’m not a monster. I’m realistic. I see what’s around me. Nothing’s going to change. I thought it might, once. But, no. The only answer’s to get out. Get as far away with money or with miles as you can.”
    “The tapes you stole? Why’d you give them back to me?”
    “I thought by confessing to the smaller crime youwouldn’t suspect me of the bigger one.” She moved her hand within a millimeter of Pellam’s. Didn’t touch him. “I didn’t want anybody to die. But it happened that way. It always happens that way, at least in places like Hell’s Kitchen it does. Can’t you just let it go?”
    Pellam said nothing, moved his hand and touched the point of his Nokona, lifted off a dry, curled leaf.
    “Please,” she said.
    Pellam was silent.
    She said, “I’ve never had a home. All I’ve had are the wrong men and the wrong women.” Her whisper was desperate. When she saw Pellam rise Carol too stood. “No, don’t go! Please!”
    Then she glanced toward the highway, where the three police cars were parked. She smiled faintly, almost relieved, it seemed—as if she’d finally received bad news long anticipated.
    “I had to,” Pellam said. He nodded at the cars.
    Carol slowly turned back to him. “You know poetry? Yeats?”
    “Some, I guess.”
    “‘Easter 1916’?”
    Pellam shook his head.
    She said, “There’s a line in it. ‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.’ It’s my theme song.” Carol laughed hollowly.
    The Circle-Line was long out of sight, hooking past Battery Park.
    Carol suddenly tensed and swayed closer, as if about to embrace and kiss him.
    For an instant compassion stirred in John Pellam and it occurred to him that perhaps the harms Carol had endured were just as deep and numerous as those shehad inflicted. But then he saw Ettie Washington, betrayed by Billy Doyle, and by so many others just like Carol Wyandotte. He stepped coldly away.
    A horn brayed over the water, resonating from the Moran tug that pushed a barge as long as a football field through the roiling current. Pellam glanced at the sunlight shattered on the waves. The horn blared again. The pilot was signaling to a fellow sailor steaming upriver.
    Carol whispered something Pellam didn’t hear—a single word, it seemed—and her pale eyes turned to the skyline, remaining on this vista as she stepped backward so placidly that she tumbled into the gray-green water and was swept deep into the barge’s undertow before he could take a single step toward her.

TWENTY-EIGHT
    The story was big.
    The suicide of the youth center director who’d hired the mad pyromaniac . . . This was the classic stuff of the New York Post and Geraldo.
    The Live at Five broadcast showed the Coast Guard cutters and the tiny blue police boats searching New York Harbor for Carol Wyandotte’s body. The Associated Press got the most dramatic shot, which featured Ellis and Liberty Islands in the background as they lifted the woman’s body from the water. Pellam saw the picture in the New York Times. Her eyes were closed. He remembered how pale they were, as pale as her skin after all those hours in the cold water.
    Wolf eyes . . .
    The charges against Ettie were dropped. That part of the story was almost nonnews, except for a bite that brought the tabloids into play: Roger McKennah owned a piece of property right next to the building she’d lived in, the one that had burned. Everybody was eager to developer-bash, of course, but even the most zealous scoop-hog couldn’t find any tie linking him and thearson. One network even ran a glowing story about McKennah’s installing a high-tech day care facility in the neighborhood (the news account featuring a lurid videotape of an illegal day care center on Twelfth Avenue—dramatic footage that McKennah himself had somehow procured).
    The bulk of the reporting devoted itself to the gala topping-off ceremony at McKennah Tower on Saturday. Good news: although former President Bush, Michael Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio would be unable to attend, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudolph Guiliani, Madonna, Geena Davis, Barbara Walters and