The market was a sprawling complex of indoor and outdoor stalls. On the sidewalk outside the high-windowed arching edifice fishmongers, wearing woolen gloves with the fingers cut off, woolen caps pulled down over their ears, and bloodstained white smocks over layers of sweaters, stood hawking their merchandise while potential customers picked over the fish as if they were inspecting diamonds for flaws.

It was a clear, cold, windy, sunny Monday morning. "Where do we start?" Georgie asked.

He was hoping to discourage her. He did not want her to meet the man who'd dropped off' that key to the bus terminal locker. He did not want her to learn that nobody had been in that locker except him and Tony here, who was backing away from the fish stalls as if his grandmother had cooked fish for him whenever he visited her on a Friday, which she had, and which he'd hated. He learned after her death that she'd hated fish, too. His mother, on the other hand, never had to cook

fish in her entire lifetime because the church changed its rules. His mother was a staunch Catholic practiced birth control and didn't believe in confession. Priscilla looked bewildered.

She had never been to this part of the city certainly never to a fish market here, had never seen much damn fish ever and could not imagine how could even hope to find a tall blond man among these men wearing hats and smocks and gloves. The bitter cold did not help.

Priscilla was wearing a mink, dark and soft supple in contrast to the ratty orange-brown coat her grandmother had been wearing when someone shot her. The fur afforded scant protection against the harsh wind blowing in over the river. Georgie and Tony wearing belted cloth coats and woolen mufflers, fedoras pulled down low on their foreheads, in their pockets, just like movie gangsters. wailing around them, the three walked the dockside blocks, studying the men behind each outdoor stalls and ice bins, searching for telltale sideburns at the rolled edges of ubiquitous woolen

At the end of twenty minutes of close scrutiny, were happy to be entering the long enclosed After the howling wind outside, even the indoor seemed welcoming, fishmongers touting and squid, sea bass and flounder, mackerel shrimp, sole and snapper. They were coming down center aisle, tall windows streaming wintry sunlight stalls of iced fish on either side of them, Georgie blowing on his hands, Tony wearing a pained look in memory of his grandmother, Priscilla holding

the collar of the mink closed with one hand because to tell the truth it was almost as cold inside here as it was outside, when all at once...

Behind the stall on the right... Just ahead... They saw a hatless man with muddy blond hair... Standing some six feet two inches tall...

Wearing a white smock over a blue coat and a red muffler... Bearing a marked resemblance to Robert Redford, and lifting a nice fat halibut off the ice to show to a female customer.

Hawes and Carella were just pulling up outside.

"Blond hair and blue eyes," Hawes said. "Must be from Milan," Carella said. "Or Rome. Rome has blonds, too." Redheads," Carella said.

A gust of wind almost knocked Hawes off his feet.

"Which first?" Carella asked. "Inside or out?" Ask astupid question.

Hawes reached for the doorknob.

At the downtown end of the enclosed market, four city blocks from where the detectives went in, Priscilla was just asking Lorenzo Schiavinato if he knew her grandmother Svetlana.

"Non par lo ingle se Lorenzo said.

Thank God, Georgie thought.

"He doesn't speak English," he translated for Priscilla.

"Ask him if he knew my grandmother."

"I don't speak Italian," Georgie said.

"I do," Tony said, and Georgie wanted to kill him Ask him if he knew my grandmother." Tony's grandmother was from Siciliy, where you did not exactly speak Dante's Italian. The dialect now used was the one he'd heard at Filomena's while she was cooking her abominable fish. First asked Lorenzo his name.

"Mi chiamo Lorenzo Schiavinato," Lorenzo said.

"His name's Lorenzo," Tony translated. "I could make out the last name."

Small wonder, Georgie thought.

"Ask him if he knew my grandmother." "Where are you from?" Tony asked. "Milano," Lorenzo said.

Where they spoke Florentine Italian, and where Sicilian dialect was scarcely understood. Lorenzo in fact, squinting his very blue eyes in an effort to understand Tony's Italian, which itself was bastardization of the dialect his sainted grandmother had spoken.

It occurred to Georgie that the so-called conversation between them was taking place in a market reputedly run by the mob, whose Italian limited to a few basic words like "Boffon gool," itself was a bastardization of the time-honored "Va in culo," better left uninterpreted in the presence of a fine lady like Priscilla Stetson.

Who now said, rather impatiently this time, ask him if he knew my goddamn grandmother."

In Sicilian Italian, Tony asked if Lorenzo had known Priscilla's grandmother.

In Florentine Italian, Lorenzo asked who perchance her grandmother might have been.

"Svetlana Dyalovich," Tony said.

And Lorenzo began running.

From where the detectives were coming down the center aisle of the indoor market, checking out the men selling fish from stalls and barrels and bins and ice chests on either side of them, they saw a tall blond man running toward them, chased by Svetlana's grand daughter and the two goons who'd braced them at the club on Saturday night.

If the tall runner was, in fact, Lorenzo Schiavinato, then he was the one who'd bought the gun that killed Priscilla's grandmother. Despite what was known in the trade as "background" the number of innocent bystanders at any given scene the fact that Lorenzo had purchased the murder weapon was justification within the guidelines for Carella and Hawes to draw their own guns. Besides, the man was running. In this city, unless you were running to catch a bus, the very act was suspicious.

The guns came out.

"Stop!" Hawes shouted. "Police!" "Police!" Carella shouted. "Stop!"

Lorenzo wasn't stopping.

A hundred and eighty pounds of muscle and bone plowed right through them, knocking Hawes off his feet, tossing Carella back onto a stall of very nice iced salmon, and causing a mustached man in a brown derby to throw his hands over his head in fright. Both

detectives recovered at once, Carella first, Hawes an instant later.

"Stop!" they shouted simultaneously.

Hawes was in a crouch, pistol levered, holding gun steady in both hands.

Carella was standing beside him, gun extended both hands, ready to fire.

"Stop!" he shouted. Lorenzo kept running.

Hawes fired first. Carella fired an instant later Carella missed. Hawes did, too. He fired again. This time, his shot took Lorenzo in the left leg, sending him tumbling. Everywhere around them, the back was screaming. The mustached man in the derby was running in the opposite direction, from the shooting, waving his hands hysterically in the air. He tripped over Georgie, who had thrown himself flat on the floor the moment he'd heard shots, the way his uncle Dominick had taught him to do. Lorenzo trying to crawl away, dragging his wounded leg behind him. Hawes kicked him and then stepped on his back, holding him down while Carella cuffed him.

"Ask him if he knew my grandmother," Priscilla said. "Few things we'd like to ask you, too," Carella said. Everyone was breathing very hard.

Fat Ollie Weeks was asking the computer for tri-state area high school, prep school, parochial: school, Christian academy or so-called alternative school whose name began with the letter P. There were fifteen such private schools in the metropolitan area alone.

Thirty-eight in the entire state.

Of the public schools, there were a hundred and forty-six, thirty of them beginning with the word "Port." Port This, Port That, more damn coastal towns than Ollie knew existed.

In the two neighboring states combined, there were thirty-nine private schools and a hundred and ninety eight public schools that began with the letter P. All of the public schools in this city were designated with the letters P.S. before the name, and so the computer belched out what looked to Ollie like more high schools than he could possibly cover in ten years of investigation. He limited the search to proper names alone and came up with sixty-three schools that had the letter P in their names.

Some of these schools were named for areas of the city, like Parkhurst or Pineview or Paley Hills. Others had been named after people. The computer did not differentiate between given names and surnames. The letter P appeared in Peter Lowell High, but it also appeared in Luis Perez High. But Ollie had been born and raised in this fair city, and he knew that kids never said they went to Harry High or Abraham High, but instead said they went to Truman High or Lincoln High. So he figured if the letter on those parkas stood for a person after whom a school had been named, then it sure as hell was the surname. Running down the printed list by hand, he limited the city's sixty-three public schools to a mere seventeen. He was making progress.

By the time he was ready to begin making his calls, his trimmed-down list seemed like a one... Sort of.