Hells Kitchen

looked where Carol was pointing.
    Ismail and his tricolor windbreaker had mysteriously returned. He now played in the cab of the bulldozer that had been leveling the lot beside Ettie’s building. “Yo, my man, careful up there,” Pellam called. He explained to Carol about Ismail, his mother and sister.
    “The shelter in the school? It’s one of the better ones,” Carol said. “They’ll probably get them into an SRO in a month or so. Single room occupancy—a residence hotel. At least if they’re lucky.”
    “So, you know the neighborhood pretty well?” he asked.
    “Cut my social work teeth here.”
    “You’d know the good stuff then. The stuff that we touristas never find out.”
    “Try me.” Carol glanced at the tooling on Pellam’s battered black Nokona cowboy boots.
    “The gangs,” he said.
    “The crews? Sure, I know about them. But I don’t deal much with them. See, if a kid’s in a set he’s gonna get all the support he needs. Believe it or not, they’re better adjusted than the lone wolves.”
    “Yo,” Ismail called to Carol. “I going back to L.A. with my homie there,” he said, pointing at Pellam.
    “I don’t recall that being on the agenda, young man.” He raised his eyebrows to Carol.
    “No, no, it’s cool, cuz. I come with you. Hook up with a Blood or Crip crew. I get myself jumped in with them. Be cool. You know what I’m saying.” He vanished down the alley.
    “Give me a lesson,” Pellam said. “Gangs 101 in Hell’s Kitchen.”
    Carol’s glasses had reappeared. He wanted to tell her she looked better without them. He knew better than that.
    “Gangs, huh? Where do I start? All the way back to the Gophers?” Carol smiled coyly. Then she laughed in surprise when Pellam said, “I heard One-Lung Curran’s outa business now.”
    “You know more than you’re letting on.”
    Pellam remembered an interview with Ettie Washington.
    “. . . Battle Row, Thirty-ninth Street, the turn of the century. Grandma Ledbetter told me what a dreadful place it was. That’s where One-Lung Curran and his gang, the Gophers, hung out—in Mallet Murphy’s tavern. Grandma’d go to dig in bins for scraps of gabardine, or maybe look for knuckle bones and she had to be careful ’cause the gang was always shooting it out with the police. That’s where it got the name. They had real battles. Sometimes it was the Gophers that won, believe it or not, and the cops wouldn’t come back for weeks, until things’d settled down.”
    He now said to Carol, “How ’bout the gangs now?”
    She thought for a moment. “The Westies used to be the gang here and there’re still some around but the Justice Department and the cops broke their back a few years ago. Jimmy Corcoran’s gang’s pretty much replaced them—they’re the dregs of the old Irish. The Cubano Lords’re the biggest now. Mostly Cuban but some Puerto Rican and Dominican. No black gangs to speak of. They’re in Harlem and Brooklyn. TheJamaicans and Koreans are in Queens. The tongs in Chinatown. The Russians in Brighton Beach.”
    The director within Pellam stirred momentarily at the thought of a story about the gangs. Then he thought, Been done. Two words that are pure strychnine in Tinseltown.
    Carol stretched and her breast brushed Pellam’s shoulder. Accidentally or otherwise.
    It had been a remarkable evening, that night eight months ago. The snow hitting the side of the camper, the wind rocking it, the blonde assistant director gripping Pellam’s earlobe between very sharp teeth.
    Eight months is an incredibly long time. It’s three quarters of a year. Practically gestation.
    “Where’s Corcoran’s kickback?” he asked.
    “His headquarters?” Carol asked, shaking her head. “Those boys’re a step away from caves. They hang out in an old bar north of here.”
    “Which one?”
    Carol shrugged. “I don’t know exactly.”
    She was lying.
    He glanced at her pale eyes. He was letting her know she’d been nabbed.
    She continued, unapologetically. “Look, you gotta understand about Corcoran . . . it’s not like the gangs on TV. He’s psycho. One of his boys killed this guy’d tried to extort them. Jimmy and some of his buddies cut up the body with a hacksaw. Then they sunk the parts in Spuyten Duyvil. But Jimmy kept one of the hands as a souvenir and tossed it into a toll basket on the Jersey pike. That’s the kind of crew you’re dealing with here.”
    “I’ll take my chances.”
    “You think he’ll