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there was the religious situation to consider. If he took this offer, he’d spend an hour a week explaining Catholic theology over the air. What would they do to him if he didn’t get it right? The Bronx? Worse? He’d never been popular with his bishop. They were from different backgrounds and didn’t get along. That’s what he was doing in New Haven.
    He was successful and he was safe. That should have been all that mattered to him. Unfortunately, the idea of this project kept making him high.
    If he did it right, he could be the next Fulton J. Sheen.
    Ambition.
    He folded the letter and stuck it in his letter holder. He trusted Dan Murphy as much as he trusted anyone. Murphy had more to lose than he did. The Church might send renegade auxiliary bishops to the Bronx, but she didn’t throw them out on the street.
    “Look,” he said, “let’s be intelligent. Before I agree to this thing, let’s you and me figure out what Victor Coletti wants.”

Chapter Five
1
    For the longest time, the Congo was the only name he had for it. It was only later he realized that it must have been built for something better. It was a wide street, lined by tall buildings that had once been handsome, or at least imposing. In the period before this present incarnation, it had been the place where “good” black people lived. Now the quietly decorated apartments of quietly industrious Baptists had been handed over to the connoisseurs of neon. The small stores that hung back from the curb were called Silver Balls and Passion Pit. Every once in a while, two or three of them had been knocked together to make a movie theater. In the dark like this, with the lights flashing and the fuck meat picking its way over the bodies of bums, it seemed impossible that the Congo had ever been anything but what it was.
    He had a newspaper in the pocket of his new jacket, the one he had boosted out of Macy’s on the afternoon after the morning he had killed Margaret Mary McVann. The jacket was long and warm and stodgy. He knew better than to boost anything with style—or to wear anything with style either, at least down here, where style usually translated into the announcement of a drug deal successfully completed. It was like the man said: this was not his place and these were not his people. When he had a lot of luck, they thought he was invisible. When he had less, they thought he was harmless. He didn’t want to know what would happen to him on a day when he didn’t have any luck at all.
    Harmless.
    The street sign above his head was bent, tilted, and out of true. When the lights flashed the right way, he could just see the words CONGRESS AVENUE in black letters on a white background. They were filmed over by electric-blue paint.
    He started walking into the light, up the street toward the Stick Up Theater and the crowds of girls who hung out in front of the laundromat. It was cold and he was colder. The knife was colder still. He had stuck it under his clothes, deep into his underwear, caught by the waistband of his jeans.
    Every time he moved, it pricked him in the hip.

2
    At the place where Congress Avenue intersected with Duval Street, he stopped. There was a street lamp there that was actually working, and a garbage can, and a little bump in the sidewalk where a newsstand had once been. The newsstand had disappeared around the time the Baptists did. The garbage can was empty, although the gutters around it were full of trash. He took the newspaper out of his pocket and dropped it neatly into the can. He was getting into dangerous territory here. Even the girls refused to go this far out.
    He had been searching for something about Margaret Mary McVann for five days, but until today there had been nothing. It had made him very nervous. Margaret Mary had lived alone. She had had few friends. She had talked to nobody at all in the building where she lived. Even so, she hadn’t been a hermit. There were the people at the soup kitchen where she