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Street—Fifty-Second. Pellam had heard some old wire recordings transcribed onto tape and was impressed with her low voice. For years she’d worked odd jobs, supporting herself and sometimes lovers, while resisting the inevitable proposals of marriage that a beautiful woman living alone in Hell’s Kitchen was flooded with. She finally married, late and incongruously: her husband was an Irishman named Billy Doyle.
    A handsome, restless man, Doyle left her years ago, after only three years of marriage.
    “He was just doing what a man does, my Billy. They got that runaway spirit. May be their nature but it’s hard to forgive ’em for it. Wonder if you’ve got it too, John.”
    Sitting beside the camera as he’d recorded this, Pellam had nodded encouragingly and reminded himself to edit out her last sentence and her accompanying chuckle.
    Her second husband was Harold Washington, who drowned, drunk, in the Hudson River.
    “No love lost there. But he was dependable with the money and never cheated and never raised his voice to me. Sometimes I miss him. If I remember to think about him.”
    Ettie’s youngest son, Frank, had been caught in a cross fire and killed by a man wearing a purple top hatin a drunken shoot-out in Times Square. Her daughter, Elizabeth, of whom Ettie was immensely proud, was a real estate saleswoman in Miami. In a year or two, Ettie would be moving to Florida to live near her. Her oldest son, James—a handsome mulatto—was the only child she had by Doyle. He too caught the wanderlust flu and disappeared out west—California, Ettie assumed. She hadn’t heard from him in twelve years.
    The elderly woman had been, in her youth, sultry and beautiful if somewhat imperious (as evidenced by a hundred photos, all presently burned to gray ash) and was now a handsome woman with youthful, dark skin. She debated often about dying her salt-and-pepper hair back to its original black. Ettie talked like a quick, mid-Atlantic Southerner, drank bad wine and cooked delicious tripe with bacon and onions. And she could unreel stories about her own past and about her mother and grandmother like a natural actress, as if God gave her that gift to make up for others denied.
    And what would happen to her now?
    With a jolt the cab burst across Eighth Avenue, the Maginot Line bordering Hell’s Kitchen.
    Pellam glanced out the window as they passed a storefront, in whose window the word Bakery was painted over, replaced by: Youth Outreach Center—Clinton Branch.
    Clinton.
    This was a raw spot with longtime residents. The neighborhood to them was “Hell’s Kitchen” and would never be anything but. “Clinton” was what the city officials and public relations and real estate people called the ’hood. As if a name change could convince the public this part of town wasn’t a morass of tenements and gangs and smokey bodegas and hookers and pebbles ofcrack vials littering sidewalks but was the New Frontier for corporate headquarters and yuppie lofts.
    Remembering Ettie’s voice: “ You hear the story how this place got its name? The one they tell is a policeman down here, a long time ago, he says to another cop, ‘This place is hell.’ And the other one goes, ‘Hell’s mild compared to here. This’s hell’s kitchen.’ That’s the story, but that’s not how it happened. No sir. Where the name came from was it’s called after this place in London. What else in New York? Even the name of the neighborhood’s stolen from someplace else. ”
    “Look I am saying,” the cabbie broke into Pellam’s thoughts. “Same fucking thing fucking yesterday. And for weeks.”
    He was gesturing furiously at a traffic jam ahead of them. It seemed to be caused by the construction work going on across from the site of the fire—that high-rise nearing completion. Cement trucks pulled in and out through a chain-link gate, holding up traffic.
    “That building. I am wanting them to go fuck themselves. It has ruins fucking