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cars lined the sidewalks left and right, along with several police scooters and an array of unmarked cars, usually dark blue or dark green, all of them bearing a police code on their license plates which identified them almost as clearly as their dusty, unwashed blackwall tires.
    A long wooden desk stretched for nearly the entire width of the front room, and several people stood at various points along its length, some staring sourly at the bleak world which surrounded them, their hands cuffed behind their backs, their upper arms grasped loosely by the cops who stood next to them. To the right, a continuous stream of people moved in and out of the building, cops, witnesses, complainants, women with black eyes and broken arms, pimps, and gamblers in bright-colored jackets, chubby, middle-aged detectives who ponderously mounted the stairs toward the separate units of Vice, Narcotics, and Homicide.
    To his right, Frank could see several wooden benches, and as he stood waiting to get the desk sergeant’s attention, he allowed his eyes to move over the people who occupied them. A skinny junkie nodded half-consciously at the far end of the bench, her pale, washed-out face slumping more and more deeply forward until she finally caught herself and jerked backward abruptly. An old woman sat next to her, obliviously riffling through a suitcase at her feet. It was filled with a thick pile of sodden magazines, and the woman was carefully going through them, slowly peeling back one page at a time. Down the line a well-dressed man stared vacantly toward the opposite wall. The collar of his shirt was torn, as well as the left knee of his trousers, and he looked as if the street mugging he’d just suffered had irrevocably changed the way he saw the world, invested it with a capacity of unimaginably sudden danger.
    â€œHello, Clemons.”
    Frank turned toward the desk sergeant. His name was Calvino, and he ran the desk like a ringmaster, moving frantically from one knot of people to the next, answering the phone, screaming commands through the small brown speakers that hung here and there throughout the building.
    â€œIs Tannenbaum in?” Frank asked.
    â€œYeah, upstairs.”
    â€œHe still working the Hannah Karlsberg case?”
    â€œFar as I know,” Calvino said. His eyes scanned the scarred double doors of the precinct. Three men had just slammed through them, followed closely by three times as many cops.
    â€œShit,” Calvino hissed. “It’s a paper storm today.” His eyes shot over to Frank. “Upstairs,” he said hastily. “Tannenbaum’s up there somewhere.”
    Frank made his way up the creaking wooden staircase which led to the second floor. The railing had been smoothed down by the thousands of hands that had grasped it, and the steps sloped downward at the center. A steady stream of people had moved up and down this single staircase, and as he made his way toward the top, Frank could feel an odd kinship with all of them, not only the weary cops who had tramped up to their desks, but the people they’d pushed ahead of them or pulled up from behind, murderers and arsonists, drunks and thieves, that sea of felons whose murky depths, it seemed to him, knew no restraining tide, but whose disordered lives struck him as deeply interwoven with his own, part of some thin, tenuous connection which still drew him to the world.
    Tannenbaum was sitting at his desk in the Homicide bullpen, a Daily News spread out before him. He wore an expensive jacket and shiny leather shoes, and because of them, Frank assumed that the Internal Affairs Division had been over his books more than once, found nothing, and so now assumed that he was simply one of those people who preferred a suit from Paul Stuart and shoes from Botticelli to a week in the Bahamas or a narrow little house on Staten Island.
    â€œHello, Leo,” Frank said as he stepped up to the desk.
    Tannenbaum glanced up from his