'No.'
'Neither have I, but I caught his act on the tube. He was telling Phil or Geraldo or Oprah all about the danger of adult males who prey on lost youth, and the nasty role of pornography in inflaming all concerned and creating an industry that exploits the kids. All of which may well be true, but I thought, Oh, Michael, aren't you playing it the least bit heavy? Because I swear the good padre's as gay as a jay.'
'Really?'
'Well, you know what Tallulah Bankhead said. 'All I know is he never sucked my cock, dahling.' I haven't heard any stories and I haven't seen him around the bars, and he may be perfectly celibate, although you don't have to be when you're Episcopalian, do you? But he looks gay and his energy is gay. It must be hell for him, living among all those hot kids and making sure he keeps his pants zipped. No wonder he doesn't have too many kind words for those of us who aren't such good little boys.'
I first met Gordie years ago when I was a detective attached to the Sixth Precinct in the Village. The station house was on Charles Street then- it's long since moved to West Tenth- and Gordie was working part time behind the bar at Sinthia's. Sinthia's was gone now- Kenny Banks, who'd owned it, had sold out and moved to Key West. Before that happened, Gordie and a partner had moved to my neighborhood and opened Kid Gloves in the room on Ninth Avenue where Skip Devoe and John Kasabian had had Miss Kitty's. Kid Gloves didn't last too long, and now Gordie was working in a joint that had been warehouse space back when I was carrying a gold shield. It was down in the southwest corner of the Village at Clarkson and Greenwich, and it had called itself Uncle Bill's when it opened a few years ago. Since then it had been reborn as Calamity Jack's, with a western motif.
It was late afternoon and Gordie had plenty of time to spend with me. I was one of three customers in the place. An older man in a suit was drinking Irish coffee and reading a newspaper at the end of the bar, and a stocky man in jeans and square-toed black boots was playing bumper pool. I showed Gordie my sketches, as I'd shown them in other Village bars, and he shook his head.
'They're cute, though,' he said. 'But I never had a taste for chicken, my campy remarks to Father Mike notwithstanding.'
'Kenny liked them young,' I remembered.
'Kenny was incorrigible. I was a sweet young thing myself when I worked for him, and I was already too old to catch his eye. But you won't find much chicken around the bars, Matt. Not the way you used to, not since the drinking age went from eighteen to twenty-one. A fourteen-year-old could pass for eighteen in dim lighting, especially if he was tall for his age or could show some convincing fake ID. But you'd have to be seventeen to pass for twenty-one, and by that time you're past your prime.'
'What a world.'
'I know. I decided years ago not to be judgmental, and I know most young boys are eager participants in their own seduction. Sometimes they even initiate it. But I don't care. I'm turning into a moralist in my old age. I think it's wrong for a grown-up to have sex with a child. I don't care if the kid wants it. I think it's wrong.'
'I don't know what's right and wrong anymore.'
'I thought cops always know.'
'They're supposed to. And that might have been one of the reasons I stopped being a cop.'
'I certainly hope this doesn't mean I'm going to have to stop being a faggot,' he said. 'It's all I know.' He picked up one of the sketches and tugged his lower lip as he looked at it. 'The boys who hustle older men are mostly on the street these days, from what I hear. Lexington Avenue in the low Fifties. Times Square, of course. And the Hudson piers from Morton Street on up. The kids hang out on the river side of West Street and the johns drive up in their cars.'
'I was in a few of the West Street bars before I came here.'
He shook his head. 'They don't let the young stuff in those places. And the hawks don't gather there, either. They're mostly bridge and tunnel types, cruising in their cars, then going home to their wives and kiddies.' He put a fresh squirt of seltzer in my glass. 'There is one bar you should try, but not until later on in the day. Not before nine-thirty or ten, I wouldn't think. You won't find boys there, but you might run into some dirty old men with an interest in them. That's at the Eighth Square. On Tenth Street just off Greenwich Avenue.'
'I know it,' I said. 'I've passed it, but I never knew it was gay.'
'You wouldn't necessarily know from the outside. But it's where all the most dedicated chickenhawks do their drinking. The name says it all, doesn't it?' I must have looked puzzled. 'Chess,' he explained. 'The Eighth Square. That's where a pawn becomes a queen.'
I had called Elaine earlier and she'd begged out of our dinner date. She had either flu or the worst cold ever and it had knocked out her energy, her appetite, and her ability to make sense out of what she was reading. All she could manage was naps in front of the TV. I stayed downtown and had spinach pie and a baked potato at a Sheridan Square coffee shop and went to a meeting at a storefront clubhouse on Perry Street. I ran into a woman I'd known at St. Paul 's. She'd sobered up there, then moved in with her boyfriend on Bleecker Street. She was married now, and visibly pregnant.
After the meeting I walked over to the Eighth Square. The bartender wore a tanktop with a German eagle on it and looked as though he spent a lot of time at the gym. I told him Gordie at Calamity Jack's had suggested I ask him for help, and I showed him the sketches of the boys.
'Look around,' he said. 'See anyone like that here? You won't, either. Didn't you see the sign? 'Be twenty-one or be gone.' It's not purely decorative. It means what it says.'
'Julius's used to have a sign,' I said. ' 'If you're gay please stay away.' '
'I remember!' he said, brightening. 'As if anyone who wasn't a little light on his feet would ever darken their door. But what would you expect from those Ivy League queens?' He leaned on an elbow. 'But you're going way back. Before Gay Pride, before Stonewall.'
'True.'
'Let me have another look. Are they brothers? No, they don't really look alike, it's more attitude, isn't it? You look at them and you think of wholesome things, Scout hikes and skinny-dipping. A paper route. Playing catch on the back lawn with Dad. Listen to me, will you, I sound like The Donna Reed Show.'
He didn't recognize the boys, and neither did the few customers he showed the sketches to. 'We really don't allow the sandbox set in here,' he said. 'We come here to complain about how cruel they are, or how much it costs to keep them happy. Wait a minute, now. Who's this?' He was studying the third sketch, the one of Rubber Man. 'I think I've seen him,' he said. 'I can't swear to it, but I think I've seen him.'
A couple of other men came over and leaned over me to examine the sketch. 'Of course you've seen him,' one said. 'You've seen him in the movies. It's Gene Hackman.'
'It does look like him,' another said.
'On the worst day of his life,' the bartender said. 'I see what you mean, but it's not him, is it?' I said it wasn't. 'Why use drawings, though? Isn't it easier to identify someone with a photograph?'
'Photographs are so common,' one of the others said. 'I'm all for drawings, I think they're a very fresh idea.'
'We're not thinking of redecorating, Jon. This is about identification, not redoing the breakfast nook.'
Another man, his face wasted with AIDS, said, 'I've seen this man. I've seen him in here and I've seen him on West Street. Maybe half a dozen times over the past two years. On a couple of occasions he was with a woman.'
'What did she look like?'
'Like a Doberman pinscher. Black leather from the toes up, high-heeled boots, and I think she was wearing spiked cuffs on her wrists.'
'Probably his mother,' someone said.
'They were definitely hunting,' the man with AIDS said. 'They were on the prowl for a playmate. Did he kill those boys? Is that why you're looking for him?'
The question startled me into an unguarded response. 'One of them,' I said. 'How did you know?'
'They looked like killers,' he said simply. 'I had that thought the first time I saw them together. She was Diana, goddess of the hunt. I don't know who he was.'
'Cronus,' I suggested.
'Cronus? Well, that would fit, wouldn't it, but it's not the thought I had. I remember he was wearing a floor- length leather coat and he looked like a Gestapo agent, somebody who'd come knocking on your door at three in
