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“Sonsabitches,” Francis said.

“Oh the money,” Helen said, “the money.”

“They hurt you with that stick?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That money ain’t nothin’. Get more tomorrow.”

“It was.”

“Was what?”

“There was fifteen dollars in there besides the other.”

“Fifteen? Where’d you get fifteen dollars?”

“Your son Billy gave it to me. The night he found us at Spanish George’s. You were passed out and he gave us forty-five dollars, all the cash he had. I gave you thirty and kept the fifteen.”

“I went through that pocketbook. I didn’t see it.”

“I pinned it inside the lining so you wouldn’t drink it up. I wanted our suitcase back. I wanted our room for a week so I could rest.”

“Goddamn it, woman, now we ain’t got a penny. You and your sneaky goddamn ways.”

Pee Wee came back from the chase empty-handed.

“Some tough kids around here,” he said. “You okay, Helen?”

“Fine, just fine.”

“You’re not hurt?”

“Not anyplace you could see.”

“Sandra,” Pee Wee said. “She’s dead.”

“She’s more than that,” Francis said. “She’s partly chewed away.”

“We’ll take her inside so they don’t eat no more of her,” Pee Wee said. “I’ll call the police.”

“You think it’s all right to bring her inside?” Francis asked. “She’s still got all that poison in her system.”

Pee Wee said nothing and opened the mission door. Francis picked Sandra up from the dust and carried her inside. He put her down on an old church bench against the wall and covered her face with the scratchy blanket that had become her final gift from the world.

“If I had my rosary I’d say it for her,” Helen said, sitting on a chair beside the bench and looking at Sandra’s corpse. “But it was in my purse. I’ve carried that rosary for twenty years.”

“I’ll check the vacant lots and the garbage cans in the mornin’,” Francis said. “It’ll turn up.”

“I’ll bet Sandra prayed to die,” Helen said.

“Hey,” said Francis.

“I would if I was her. Her life wasn’t human anymore.”

Helen looked at the clock: twelve-ten. Pee Wee was calling the police.

“Today’s a holy day of obligation,” she said. “It’s All Saints’ Day.”

“Yup,” said Francis.

“I want to go to church in the morning.”

“All right, go to church.”

“I will. I want to hear mass.”

“Hear it. That’s tomorrow. What are we gonna do tonight? Where the hell am I gonna put you?”

“You could stay here,” Pee Wee said. “All the beds are full but you can sleep down here on a bench.”

“No,” Helen said. “I’d rather not do that. We can go up to Jack’s. He told me I could come back if I wanted.”

“Jack said that?” Francis asked.

“Those were his words.”

“Then let’s shag ass. Jack’s all right. Clara’s a crazy bitch but I like Jack. Always did. You sure he said that?”

“‘Come back anytime,’ he said as I was going out the door.”

“All right. Then we’ll move along, old buddy,” Francis said to Pee Wee. “You’ll figure it out with Sandra?”

“I’ll do the rest,” Pee Wee said.

“You know her last name?”

“No. Never heard it.”

“Don’t make much difference now.”

“Never did,” Pee Wee said.

o o o

Francis and Helen walked up Pearl Street toward State, the absolute center of the city’s life for two centuries. One trolley car climbed State Street’s violent incline and another came toward them, rocking south on Pearl. A man stepped out of the Waldorf Restaurant and covered his throat with his coat collar, shivered once, and walked on. The cold had numbed Francis’s fingertips, frost was blooming on the roofs of parked cars, and the nightwalkers exhaled dancing plumes of vapor. From a manhole in the middle of State Street steam rose and vanished. Francis imagined the subterranean element at the source of this: a huge human head with pipes screwed into its ears, steam rising from a festering skull wound.

Aldo Campione, walking on the opposite side of North Pearl from Francis and Helen, raised his right hand in the same ambiguous gesture Francis had witnessed at the bar. As Francis speculated on the meaning, the man who had been sitting with Aldo stepped out of the shadows