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By Root 1640 0

relieved that her recitation would cost her nothing, Scotch Ann gave forth with the story of Fatima, originally Ali ibn-Ghazi, a fourteen-year-old Syrian boy who had been in America just over a year. Ali’s mother had died within weeks of the family’s arrival in New York, after picking up a lethal disease down in the Syrian ghetto near Washington Market. The boy’s father, an unskilled laborer, had subsequently been unable to find any work at all, and took to begging. He put his children on display in order to spur the generosity of passersby, and it was while Ali was serving in this capacity, on a corner near the Golden Rule, that Scotch Ann first caught sight of him. The boy’s delicate Near Eastern features made him, as Ann put it, “a natural for my place.” She quickly “came to terms” with the father, terms that closely resembled indenture or perhaps even slavery. Thus was born “Fatima,” at the mention of which absurd appellation I discovered that I was rapidly losing patience with the practice of renaming young boys so that they could be proferred to adult men who either had inane scruples about who they molested or were aroused by particularly ridiculous perversions. “She was a real moneymaker,” Scotch Ann told us. I felt like belting the woman, but Marcus pursued the investigation calmly and professionally. Ann could provide us with few other particulars about Ali, and became concerned when we said we wanted to both see the room out of which he’d worked and interview any boys who were particularly friendly with him.

“I suppose there weren’t many,” Marcus said casually. “He was probably a difficult young man.”

“Fatima?” Ann said, pulling her head back. “If she was, I never knew about it. Oh, she could play the hellcat with the customers—you’d be surprised how many of them like that kind of thing—but she never complained, and the other girls seemed to dote on her.”

Marcus and I exchanged a quick, puzzled look. The statement didn’t match the pattern we’d come to expect concerning the victims. As we followed Ann down a dirty little corridor that ran among the partitioned rooms in the back, Marcus puzzled with this apparent inconsistency, then nodded and murmured to me, “Wouldn’t you mind your manners around someone you’d been sold in bondage to? Let’s wait and see what the rest of the girls say. Boys, I mean.” He shook his head. “Damn it, now they’ve got me doing it.”

The other boys who worked in the Golden Rule, however, provided no information that substantially contradicted their whoremistress. Standing in the narrow corridor and individually interviewing over a dozen painted youths as they exited from their partitioned rooms (forced, all the while, to listen to the obscene grunts, groans, and declarations of lust that emerged from those confines), Marcus and I were consistently presented with a portrait of Ali ibn-Ghazi that lacked any angry or obstreperous details. It was disturbing, but we had no time to dwell on it, for the last rays of daylight were fading and we needed to examine the outside of the building. As soon as the room Ali had regularly used, which faced an alleyway behind the club, had been vacated by a furtive pair of men and an exhausted-looking boy, we entered it, braving the warm, humid atmosphere and the smell of sweat in order to check Marcus’s theory about the killer’s method of movement.

Here, at least, we found what we were looking for: a filthy window that could be opened, above which were four stories of sheer, unencumbered brick wall leading to the roof of the building. We would need to get a look at that roof before the sun set fully; nevertheless, as we left the little chamber, I paused long enough to ask one momentarily idle boy in a neighboring room what time Ali had left the Golden Rule on the night of his death. The young man frowned and struggled with the question a bit as he stared in a cheap slab of decaying mirror.

“Damn me—that’s peculiar, ain’t it?” he said, in a tone that seemed too jaded to be coming from so young a mouth. “Now that you mention it, I don’t remember ever seeing