“What you doing down that hole, kid?” one of the blowzy women seated on the nearby steps asked when he climbed back to the street.

“Blow it out!” he shouted as he ran for the corner followed by their harpy screams. Kid! He was eighteen years old even though he wasn’t so tall, he was no kid. They thought they owned the world.

Until he got to Park Avenue he hurried, he didn’t want to get any of the local gangs after him, then walked uptown with the slow-moving traffic until he reached the Madison Square flea market.

Crowded, hot, filled with a roar of many voices that hammered at the ears and noisome with the smell of old dirt, dust, crowded bodies; a slowly shifting maelstrom of people moving by, stopping at stalls to finger the ancient suits, dresses, chipped crockery, worthless ornaments, argue the price of the small tilapia dead with gaping mouths and startled round eyes. Hawkers shouted the merits of their decaying wares and people streamed along, carefully leaving room for the two hard-eyed policemen who walked side by side watching everything — but keeping to the main pathway that bisected the Square and led to the patched grayness of the old Army pyramidal tents of the long-established temporary tent city. The police stayed out of the narrow paths that twisted away through the jungle of pushcarts, stands and shelters that jammed the Square, the market where anything could be bought, anything sold. Billy stepped over the blind beggar who sprawled across the narrow opening between a concrete bench and the rickety stall of a seaweed vendor and worked his way inward. He looked at the people there, not at what they were selling, and finally stopped before a pushcart loaded with a jumble of ancient plastic containers, mugs, plates and bowls, with their once-bright colors scratched and grayed by time.