'Gaudy tried to turn the Chevrolet and only ran into the back end of Bradley's La Salle. That was really the end of em right there, son. The Chevrolet's front bumper locked with the La Salle's back one and there went any chance they might have had to make a run for it.

'Joe Conklin got out of the back seat and just stood there in the middle of the intersectio n, a pistol in each hand, and started to pour it on. He was shooting at Jake Pinnette and Andy Criss. The two of them fell off the bench they'd been sitting on and landed in the grass, Andy Criss shouting "I'm killed! I'm killed!" over and over again, alth ough he was never so much as touched; neither of them were.

'Joe Conklin, he had time to fire both his guns empty before anything so much as touched him. His coat flew back and his pants twitched like some woman you couldn't see was stitching on them. He was wearing a straw hat, and it flew off his head so you could see how he'd center-parted his hair. He had one of his guns under his arm and was trying to reload the other when someone cut the legs out from under him and he went down. Kenny Borton claimed him later, but there was really no way to tell. Could have been anybody.

'Conklin's brother Cal came out after him soon's Joe fell and down he went like a ton of bricks with a hole in his head.

'Marie Hauser came out. Maybe she was trying to sur render, I dunno. She still had the compact she'd been using to powder her nose in her right hand. She was screaming, I believe, but by then it was hard to hear. Bullets was flying all around them. That compact mirror was blown right out of her hand. She started back to the car then but she took one in the hip. She made it somehow and managed to crawl inside again.

'Al Bradley revved the La Salle up just as high as it would go, and managed to get it moving again. He dragged the Chevrolet maybe ten feet before the bumper tore right off 'n it.

'The boys poured lead into it. All the windows was busted. One of the mudguards was laying in the street. Malloy was dead hanging out the window, but both of the Bradley brothers were still alive. George was firing from the back seat. His woman was dead beside him with one of her eyes shot out.

'Al Bradley got to the big intersection, then his auto mounted the curb and stopped there. He got out from behind the wheel and started running up Canal Street. He was riddled.

'Patrick Gaudy got out of the Chevrolet, looked as if he was going to surrender for a minute, then he grabbed a.38 from a cheater-holster under his armpit. He triggered it off maybe three times, just firing wild, and then his shirt blew back fr om his chest in flames. He slid down the side of the Chevy until he was sitting on the running board. He shot one more time, and so far as I know that was the only bullet that hit anyone; it ricocheted off something and then grazed across the back of Greg Cole's hand. Left a scar he used to show off when he was drunk until someone — Al Nell, maybe — took him aside and told him it might be a good idea to shut up about what happened to the Bradley Gang.

'The Hauser woman came out and that time wasn't any doubt she was trying to surrender — she had her hands up. Maybe no one really meant to kill her, but by then there was a crossfire and she walked right into it.

'George Bradley run as far as that bench by the War Memorial, then someone pulped the back of his head with a shotgun blast. He fell down dead with his pants full of piss . . . '

Hardly aware I was doing it, I took a licorice whip from the jar.

'They went on pouring rounds into those cars for another minute or so before it began to taper off,' Mr Keene said. 'When men get then: blood up, it doesn't go down easy. That was when I looked around and saw Sheriff Sullivan behind Nell and the others on the courthouse steps, putting rounds through that dead Chevy with a Remington pump. Don't let anyone tell you he wasn't there; Norbert Keene is sitting in front of you and telling you he was.

'By the time the firing stopped, those cars didn't look like cars at all anymore, just hunks of junk with glass around them. Men started to walk over to them. No one talked. All you could hear was the wind and feet gritting over broken glass. That's when the picture-taking started. And you ought to know this, sonny: when the picture-taking starts, the story is over.'

Mr Keene rocked in his chair, his slippers bumping placidly on the floor, looking at me.

'There's nothing like that in the Derry News,' was all I could think of to say. The headline for that day had read STATE POLICE , FBI GUN DOWN BRADLEY GANG IN PITCHED BATTLE . W i t h the subhead 'Local Police Lend Support.'

'Course not,' Mr Keene said, laughing delightedly. 'I seen the publisher, Mack Laughlin, put two rounds into Joe Conklin himself.'

'Christ,' I muttered.

'Get enough licorice, sonny?'

'I got enough,' I said. I licked my lips. 'Mr Keene, how could a thing of that . . . that magnitude . . . be covered up?'

'Wasn't no cover-up,' he said, looking honestly surprised. 'It was just that no one talked about it much. And really, who cared? It wasn't President and Mrs Hoover that went down that day. It was no worse than shooting mad dogs that would kill you with a bite if you give them half a chance.'

'But the women?'

'Couple of whores,' he said indifferently. 'Besides, it happened in Derry, not in New York or Chicago. Th e place makes it news as much as what happened in the place, sonny. That's why there are bigger headlines when an earthquake kills twelve people in Los Angeles than there are when one kills three thousand in some heathen country in the Mideast.'

Besid es, it happened in Derry.

I've heard it before, and I suppose if I continue to pursue this I'll hear it again . . . and again . . . and again. They say it as if speaking patiently to a mental defective. They say it the way they would say Because of gravity if you asked them how come you stick to the ground when you walk. They say it as if it were a natural law any natural man should understand. And, of course, the worst of that is I do understand.

I had one more question for Norbert Keene.

'Did you see anyone at all that day that you didn't recognize once the shooting started?'

Mr Keene's answer was quick enough to drop my blood temperature ten degrees — or so it felt. 'The clown, you mean? How did you find out about him, sonny?'

'Oh, I heard it somewhere,' I said.

'I only caught a glimpse of him. Once things got hot, I tended pretty much to my own knittin. I glanced around just once and saw him upstreet beyond them Swedes under the Bijou's marquee,' Mr Keene said. 'He wasn't wearing a clown suit or nothing like that. He was dressed in a pair of farmer's biballs and a cotton shirt underneath. But his face was covered with that white grease-paint they use, and he had a big red clown smile painted on. Also had these tufts of fake hair, you know. Orange. Sorta comical.

'Lal Machen never saw that fellow, but Biff did. Only Biff must have been confused, because he thought he saw him in one of the windows of an apartment over somewhere to the left, and once when I asked Jimmy Gordon — he wa s killed in Pearl Harbor, you know, went down with his ship, the California, I think it was — he said he saw the guy behind the War Memorial.'

Mr Keene shook his head, smiling a little.

'It's funny how people get during a thing like that, and even funnier what they remember after it's all over. You can listen to sixteen different tales and no two of them will jibe together. Take the gun that clown fellow had, for instance — '

'Gun?' I asked. 'He was shooting, too?'

'Ayuh,' Mr Keene said. The one glimpse I caught of him, it looked like he had a Winchester bolt-action, and it wasn't until later that I figured out I must have thought that because that's what I had. Biff Marlow thought he had a Remington, because that was what he had. And when I asked Jimmy about it, he said that guy was shooting an old Springfield, just like his. Funny, huh?'