Lawrence Block - A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

"No."

" 'I envy you,' Father Joyner said. 'I envy you, I wish to God I could quit myself.' Afterward I thought, well, Buster, that was a pretty well calculated way to get me to stay. That was pretty crafty. But I don't think so. I think he meant it, I think it was the literal truth. Because it's true for me. I wish to God I could quit."

"I know what you mean."

"Do you?" She looked at the sketches again. "I could have seen them here, the boys. I don't recognize them but it's possible."

"You wouldn't have seen the older one. You said you've been here ten months, and I think they'd already made their picture by then."

She asked me if I'd wait for a moment and disappeared into the building. I stood there while a couple of kids entered the building and a few others left. They just looked like ordinary kids, not streetwise like the ones on Forty-second, not as woebegone as their circumstances would warrant. I wondered what had driven them out of their homes and into this crumbling city. Maggie Hillstrom probably could have told me, but I didn't much want to hear it.

Brutal fathers, negligent mothers. Drunken violence. Incest. I didn't have to hear it, I could figure it all out for myself. Nobody walked out of The Brady Bunch and wound up here.

I was reading the rules again when she returned. No one recognized either of the sketches. She offered to keep them and show them around later. I told her that would be good, and gave her extra copies of both. "My number's on the back," I said. "Call anytime. And let me give you some copies of the third sketch, the older man. You might want to show those around and tell your kids not to go anywhere with a man who looks like that."

"We tell them not to go with any men," she said. "But they don't listen."

"Father Michael Joyner," Gordie Keltner said. "I get mail from him, I suppose most of the free world gets mail from him, but I'll receive his newsletters forever because I sent him money once. 'I can save a boy for twenty-five dollars'- that was the headline of one of his fund-raisers. 'Here's fifty,' I wrote. 'Save two of them for me, won't you?' And I sent it back with my check for fifty dollars. Have you met the good father?"

"No."

"Neither have I, but I caught his act on the tube. He was telling Phil or Geraldo or Oprah all about the danger of adult males who prey on lost youth, and the nasty role of pornography in inflaming all concerned and creating an industry that exploits the kids. All of which may well be true, but I thought, Oh, Michael, aren't you playing it the least bit heavy? Because I swear the good padre's as gay as a jay."

"Really?"

"Well, you know what Tallulah Bankhead said. 'All I know is he never sucked my cock, dahling.' I haven't heard any stories and I haven't seen him around the bars, and he may be perfectly celibate, although you don't have to be when you're Episcopalian, do you? But he looks gay and his energy is gay. It must be hell for him, living among all those hot kids and making sure he keeps his pants zipped. No wonder he doesn't have too many kind words for those of us who aren't such good little boys."

I first met Gordie years ago when I was a detective attached to the Sixth Precinct in the Village. The station house was on Charles Street then- it's long since moved to West Tenth- and Gordie was working part time behind the bar at Sinthia's. Sinthia's was gone now- Kenny Banks, who'd owned it, had sold out and moved to Key West. Before that happened, Gordie and a partner had moved to my neighborhood and opened Kid Gloves in the room on Ninth Avenue where Skip Devoe and John Kasabian had had Miss Kitty's. Kid Gloves didn't last too long, and now Gordie was working in a joint that had been warehouse space back when I was carrying a gold shield. It was down in the southwest corner of the Village at Clarkson and Greenwich, and it had called itself Uncle Bill's when it opened a few years ago. Since then it had been reborn as Calamity Jack's, with a western motif.

It was late afternoon and Gordie had plenty of time to spend with me. I was one of three customers in the place. An older man in a suit was drinking Irish coffee and reading a newspaper at the end of the bar, and a stocky man in jeans and square-toed black boots was playing bumper pool. I showed Gordie my sketches, as I'd shown them in other Village bars, and he shook his head.

"They're cute, though," he said. "But I never had a taste for chicken, my campy remarks to Father Mike notwithstanding."

"Kenny liked them young," I remembered.

"Kenny was incorrigible. I was a sweet young thing myself when I worked for him, and I was already too old to catch his eye. But you won't find much chicken around the bars, Matt. Not the way you used to, not since the drinking age went from eighteen to twenty-one. A fourteen-year-old could pass for eighteen in dim lighting, especially if he was tall for his age or could show some convincing fake ID. But you'd have to be seventeen to pass for twenty-one, and by that time you're past your prime."

"What a world."

"I know. I decided years ago not to be judgmental, and I know most young boys are eager participants in their own seduction. Sometimes they even initiate it. But I don't care. I'm turning into a moralist in my old age. I think it's wrong for a grown-up to have sex with a child. I don't care if the kid wants it. I think it's wrong."

"I don't know what's right and wrong anymore."

"I thought cops always know."

"They're supposed to. And that might have been one of the reasons I stopped being a cop."

"I certainly hope this doesn't mean I'm going to have to stop being a faggot," he said. "It's all I know." He picked up one of the sketches and tugged his lower lip as he looked at it. "The boys who hustle older men are mostly on the street these days, from what I hear. Lexington Avenue in the low Fifties. Times Square, of course. And the Hudson piers from Morton Street on up. The kids hang out on the river side of West Street and the johns drive up in their cars."

"I was in a few of the West Street bars before I came here."

He shook his head. "They don't let the young stuff in those places. And the hawks don't gather there, either. They're mostly bridge and tunnel types, cruising in their cars, then going home to their wives and kiddies." He put a fresh squirt of seltzer in my glass. "There is one bar you should try, but not until later on in the day. Not before nine-thirty or ten, I wouldn't think. You won't find boys there, but you might run into some dirty old men with an interest in them. That's at the Eighth Square. On Tenth Street just off Greenwich Avenue."

"I know it," I said. "I've passed it, but I never knew it was gay."

"You wouldn't necessarily know from the outside. But it's where all the most dedicated chickenhawks do their drinking. The name says it all, doesn't it?" I must have looked puzzled. "Chess," he explained. "The Eighth Square. That's where a pawn becomes a queen."

I had called Elaine earlier and she'd begged out of our dinner date. She had either flu or the worst cold ever and it had knocked out her energy, her appetite, and her ability to make sense out of what she was reading. All she could manage was naps in front of the TV. I stayed downtown and had spinach pie and a baked potato at a Sheridan Square coffee shop and went to a meeting at a storefront clubhouse on Perry Street. I ran into a woman I'd known at St. Paul 's. She'd sobered up there, then moved in with her boyfriend on Bleecker Street. She was married now, and visibly pregnant.

After the meeting I walked over to the Eighth Square. The bartender wore a tanktop with a German eagle on it and looked as though he spent a lot of time at the gym. I told him Gordie at Calamity Jack's had suggested I ask him for help, and I showed him the sketches of the boys.