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Police Headquarters. But the cemetery of the honored dead! Words of protest gushed out of his mouth, shredding themselves through the ivory sluice.
    “Shut up, Blacky! Do as I told you.”
    “But lemme...”
    Pearly Soames locked his eyes onto Blacky’s. For Blacky, it was like looking through the peephole of a Bessemer furnace. Any more resistance from him, as well he knew, and out would pour rivers of orange flame flaring into hot golden tongues to lash at the newly burning world.
    Meekly, Blacky asked how many were to be at the meeting.
    Pearly had cooled somewhat, and answered straight. “Our full complement, the hundred.”
    Loyal Blacky Womble collapsed in fear.

    I T WAS indeed an honor to be buried in the cemetery of the honored dead. Pearly had decided that a dead Short Tail deserved to be interred as close to hell as possible, and that the burial should entail as much risk to life and limb as could be imagined (the ultimate honor to the fallen). Thus, all Short Tails killed in service were transported to crypts at the bottom of the Harlem River siphon.
    To get Croton water into Manhattan, the city had built a monumental siphon. On both sides of the Harlem River, two shafts led straight down for a thousand feet to a quarter-mile pressure tunnel hewn through the rock. Halfway between the shafts was a silt chamber twenty-five feet square and twenty-five feet high. Here, one summer when a drought had rendered the siphon inoperable from July to September, the Short Tails had placed one hundred watertight crypts. It had been difficult enough at that time to ride on a tiny platform for ten minutes, holding your elbows at your sides so that they would not scrape the rock walls of the narrow shaft, and then to crawl at a mossy slitherous pace through 650 feet of tunnel so narrow that you felt as if you were being ramrodded into the barrel of a gun, until you broke out into the pitch-dark silt chamber, lit the candle, and listened to the rats scream in fright. It was bad to be a quarter of a mile and an hour away from the surface, from air, from the open; and straight up there was nothing but six hundred feet of solid rock and a hundred feet of mud, rubble, and filthy water. The two round openings in the silt chamber were exactly the size of the tunnel, smaller than a manhole. The sandhogs who worked on the crypts did so only because, had they not, Pearly would have killed their families. They finished quickly, and were grateful to be done, for it was frightening to go there even in a drought.
    But when the water was flowing, and could be released at any time whatsoever from the Jerome Park Storage Reservoir to charge through the tunnels faster than a horse could run, then it was considerably worse, and a great honor for the deceased to have two Short Tails pull his corpse through the tunnel, hurriedly slam it into a crypt while they listened breathlessly for the rush of approaching water, and then lope prone through the tube of green moss, mad for breaking into the air, speeding along like wild jittery whipcords.
    When E. E. Henry (for a time Peter Lake’s partner, and one of the Short Tails’ best woola boys) had been ground into small smithereens by a speeding engine on the El during an unsuccessful attempt at urbanizing train robbery, two Short Tails—Romeo Tan and Bat Charney—had volunteered to take what was left down into the crypt. Brave they were, for E. E. Henry had departed from this world one crystal-clear day in October after two solid weeks of rain. Upstate dams were overflowing as steadily as power looms vomiting out silver brocade, and the pressure tunnel was much in use as Jerome Park periodically disgorged inflowing lakes of freezing water.
    Entering in bright moonlight late one night, they struggled through the shafts, carrying E. E. Henry in small sacks that they dragged after them with cords held between their teeth. Several inches of cold water lay on the bottom of the horizontal tunnel. As they