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as far as possible from Roger Morris Park. He called the police from the pay phone in the back, not troubling to share his name. He had a drink, but everybody seemed to be looking at him. Maybe because he did not belong. Maybe because he was trembling and sweaty. Maybe nobody was looking, but Eddie took no chances. He threw money down without counting: it must have been enough, because the bartender thanked him and even said “sir.”
    Home was a narrow walk-up on 123rd Street, noisy and airless, an address he seldom admitted outside his tiny circle, for the Valley, as it was called by the cognoscenti, was far from the most desirable corner of Harlem. For letters from his relatives he had invested prudently in a post-office box. Two flights up, in his claustrophobic flat, Eddie sweated the night away, perched on his lumpy but carefully made bed, journal in his lap, baseball bat by his side, watching the fetid alley they would use to gain entry to the side door when they came for him.
    (II)
    B Y MORNING, the city was abuzz. The dead man was a lawyer named Castle. Eddie had never heard of him but read every obituary he could get his hands on. Philmont Castle was evidently a titan of Wall Street. Corporations across the country issued condoling statements. So did several film actors. Eddie turned the pages. It seemed there was nobody the lawyer had not befriended. President Eisenhower said the whole nation would miss Phil Castle. He promised federal assistance in tracking down whoever had committed this loathsome outrage—or words to that effect. The lawyer had been a major Republican fund-raiser. And a devoted husband and father. And a pillar of his church. And a guest last night at “an engagement party in Harlem.”
    Eddie put the newspaper down with a snap.
    Try as he might, he could not correlate the smiling face on every front page with any of the Caucasian faces from last night. But there had been so many, and Eddie, if the truth were told, had stared mainly at the bride-to-be. He turned more pages. No mention of the cause of death, except that it was murder. Castle’s wallet was missing. The police called it a robbery, not exactly an unknown event in Harlem, although the white newspapers seemed unaware that crime of any kind was relatively rare in those days along the nicer blocks. No speculation anywhere on exactly what a Wall Street lawyer might have been doing on the grounds of Jumel Mansion. Nothing about a cross clutched in Castle’s dead hands, whether right side up or upside down. And no whisper of anybody’s having noticed an angry, half-drunk Negro writer leaving the party around the same time the dead man did.
    The authorities never questioned Eddie. Days passed. He could not get the cross out of his mind. He wished he had had time to read the rest of the inscription. He risked a rare letter to Wesley Senior, inquiring but not saying why. The pastor answered by return post. His tone for once was patient. He enjoyed being didactic. The upside-down cross was often called the Cross of Saint Peter, because tradition held that the leader of the Apostles had been crucified that way. The Roman Catholic Church considered the symbol sacred. Over the centuries, he added, the upside-down cross had been adopted as an object of veneration by the worshipers of Satan, or, as Wesley Senior put it, quoting Scripture, the followers of “the devil and his angels.”
    Eddie decided it was just coincidence.

CHAPTER 3
    Emil and Belt
    (I)
    P ROBABLY E DDIE SHOULD HAVE FORGOTTEN the whole thing. The cross might have been a mystery, but it was in no sense his mystery. He did not know the family; none of the responsibility rested on his shoulders. He had a career to pursue, a father to impress, and a relationship to mourn. He should have and very likely he would have forgotten the whole thing, but for three events, seemingly disconnected, which only with the benefit of hindsight fell into a