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“And you just told him to meet you even though you knew they planned to kill him.”

Burns turned his head to face me. His eyes were still crying while the smile had subsided into a wry grin.

“Yeah.”

“And you say you did this more than once?”

“A few times they had me steer people their way, and once I had to help them carry Maurice Chapman down there.”

“Show me.”

It was a long walk for the junkie, but he made it in his own fashion. At times he’d stagger, and now and then he came to a complete halt. He didn’t talk much. I got the feeling that this mission was more serious than just the one hit of aitch could handle.

There was an abandoned church a block north of Christopher on the West Side Highway. This made me think of Mel and the evil where only good was supposed to exist.

There was a metal door behind a stand of holly at the north wall of the defunct house of prayer.

“See that brick with the black spot over the door?” Burns asked.

“Yeah.”

“Reach up an’ pull that suckah out.”

The iron door was tall and wide. I could barely reach but finally managed to tease out the loose stone. On the inside plane of the brick there was taped a sophisticated key that fit the lock set in the corroded but still strong metal door.

I pulled the door open and was about to step through when Burns said, “Hold up, ex-cop.”

He reached inside the doorway and flipped a switch to turn on a spotlight that illuminated a brick courtyard. The inner square was teeming with rats of all shades and sizes. There were hundreds of the rodents disturbed by the sudden flash of intense light.

In the meanwhile Burns found a handful of Ping-Pong–ball size rocks that he threw in among the swarming carpet of fur.

The rats scattered then. Dozens flooded through the doorway, over my feet and between my ankles. They skittered and screeched loudly, decrying the invasion of their nest.

“Come on quick,” Burns said, hurrying through the doorway. “You know street people can smell it when a door’s open somewhere.”

We made our way into the spotlit courtyard. Burns pushed the iron door shut and threw the bolt to secure it. I noticed that the hinges were well oiled for such an ancient entrance.

“You still got that key?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“It’s that green door across the way.”

Maybe fifteen feet away was another metal door; this one was made of copper and had turned the green of scum atop a stagnant pond.

“Hurry up an’ get it open,” Burns said. “We don’t want no cops seein’ the light.”

Using the same key, I unlocked the door, pulled it open, and immediately Burns turned off the anti-rat spotlight. He moved around me, turned on another light in the vestibule we’d entered, and closed the door behind us.

It was only then that I noticed the acrid-sweet scent of death. It was mild considering what a human corpse might be.

We descended a long stone staircase and came into a room piled with the corpses of at least a dozen souls. It was like my solitary cell, or the cellar in Queens where assassins meant to bury me, or the underground apartment that Melquarth had gifted for my time on the run.

Most of the dead had been that way for quite some time. They were desiccated and shorn of almost all flesh by meat-eating rats.

But the topmost corpse, a smallish body, was still decomposing. There were two of the rodents in the hollow of the rib cage tearing at the rotted flesh. Without thinking I took out my revolver and shot them.

The reports were quite loud, but we were underground and in an abandoned building.