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who won what. I didn’t see any future in that. Hod-carrying doesn’t pay much better than it did in 1953, so here I am.”
    “By default.”
    “Not really. I like the job.”
    “You like getting coffee for the deputy mayor?”
    “Tea, usually. And it beats sticking my face in Dick daBruiser’s crotch at Cobo Hall every Friday night.”
    “I’ve got something better than either of those,” Zagreb said. “You know Paul Kubicek?”
    “Not personally. I see his picture.” It was pretty hard not to, unless the TV was broken, the subscription to the paper ran out, and something blew into his eyes every time he passed a newsstand. The scowl and crooked necktie Sergeant Kubicek had worn for his ID photo had appeared in every edition and on all the noon and six P.M. broadcasts since New Year’s Day. The eleven P.M . too, probably, although Battle was usually in bed by then, resting for the six A.M . turnout.
    “Yeah, the pricks in the press are really busting Division’s balls over this one, as if one dead black ex-con more or less made any difference in this town.”
    “I don’t guess it matters what color you are once you’re dead,” Battle pointed out. But the lieutenant went on as if he hadn’t spoken. In his twenty-two years the officer had encountered both extremes, raw uncut racism and white liberal bend-over-backward sympathy, and knew how to respond to both, but the unthinking impersonal bigotry that ran throughout the Detroit Police Department was something he didn’t think he’d ever get used to.
    Zagreb said, “It’s a good shoot any way you stand it up. This Harrison character that went down on the terrace had a record and a gun in his hand. So did the others, Nampula and Potts, but their bullet holes were in front so nobody’s raising any stink over them. This ain’t the fucking Old West. When one of the perps in a robbery makes a break for it with apiece, it’s a cop’s job to put him down.”
    “No one at the party heard him identify himself as a police officer.”
    “He claims he did. There was a lot of screaming and yelling, so who knows what they heard or didn’t? Only this citizen’s group, this Afro-American Congress—”
    “American Ethiopian Congress.”
    “As if any of them could find Ethiopia on a map at gun-point. Anyway, this Junius Harrison turns out to be an office boy or something at the firm where one of the lawyers at Caryn Crownover’s party works and he’s got a message for the lawyer in his pocket, so the Congress says he was there on legitimate business. To me, that makes him the inside man, but they’ve filed a complaint and it looks like the N.A.A.C.P. is backing it up, so we’ve got to run it out. How’d you like a spot on the shooting team?”
    Battle wasn’t expecting anything like the question. Before he could frame a response, Zagreb held up a hand.
    “It’s not a promotion. You’re still assigned to the City Hall Bureau and there’s no raise and no guarantee when it’s over you won’t be right back asking the fire marshal if he likes one lump or two in his orange pekoe. It’s a chance to work with Special Investigations and get out of the blue bag for a while.”
    “Why me? Sir.”
    “You can lay off that ‘sir’ horseshit. Whatever you may think of me and my toy boats, I’m a lieutenant, not an admiral.” He leaned back in his chair, peering at Battle through the rigging. What he saw, or what Battle imagined he saw, was a tall young black man in a crisp uniform with the crudely blocked-out facial features of an ebony carving. His afro was modest even by department standards, an almost grudging acknowledgement of brotherhood with the types who decked themselves out in dashikis and named themselves after rivers in Nairobi. He had inherited his uncle’s musculature but not his bulk; were Zagreb to enter the locker room while the officer was changing into his civvies, he might have been surprised by the hard-planed shapes that combined to