Even at the flowery vaudeville of the Gotti funeral, the dark new world was present. We spent a few hours wandering along the edges of the crowd near the funeral home in Maspeth, under a low gray sky that suggested the colors of purgatory. People talked of all that had changed.

"It's nice in one way, the funeral, and God forgive me for what I'm saying," said a middle-age Irish woman named Mary, who didn't want her last name in a newspaper. "This Gotti thing, it gets your mind off all the other stuff, the really bad stuff."

She glanced at the sky, where hired helicopters were ferrying photographers above the line of Gotti's procession.

"I wake up sometimes," Mary said, "and there's a plane coming down in the yard. All burning and people screaming. You know, the planes come over here, going to LaGuardia ... and when I'm awake, I think, 'They could hit them with a missile, they could hit them with a rifle.'"

A few others said similar things. They keep hearing bulletins from John Ashcroft's Ministry of Fear: high-level alerts, dirty bombs, sleepers.

'It Could Be Like Israel'

In most of Queens, people use the subways almost every day. They go to "the city" to work and to shop. The young go off on dates by subway, or to seek each other out in noisy midnight weekend saloons. And they have been instructed by the Ministry of Fear that more terrorist acts are certain, and the subway is the most likely New York target.

"Hey, look," said a 26-year-old man named Guillermo Morales, "It's easy to cause incredible trouble. There's no metal detectors on the subways. You walk on with a bomb in a shopping bag, you get off at the next stop, and boom! One bomb, then goodbye, subway, for a long, long time. The same with buses. It could be like Israel very fast."

From parts of that Queens neighborhood, people who live there could see on any given day the distant skyline of New York, and the towers of the World Trade Center. The blank where the towers once stood is a daily reminder of Sept. 11.

"You can't, uh, let it get you crazy," Morales said. "But it's there. It's always there."

Perhaps that explained some of the attention paid to the farewell to Gotti. Very few people honored his myth; he was, after all, a convicted killer, and his debased associates were happy to peddle heroin. But there was about his funeral, and his persona, and his dreadful career, a peculiar kind of innocence, too.

For Gotti was out of that New York past where people were murdered one or two at a time. They were shot in the dark in parking lots. They were shot outside steakhouses.

They were ice-picked in cars.

'We Only Kill Each Other'

In their way, of course, mob guys were terrorists, too. But their terrorism was usually specific and local. "We only kill each other," was one of their slogans. They certainly had no ideology. They had no religion. Their use of terror was driven by one engine: money.

The Mafia myth has a few examples of multiple murders. The most famous was the so-called Night of the Sicilian Vespers in 1931, when the forces of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky won a mob primary against the remnants of the old Moustache Petes. Estimates of the dead or disappeared rose through myth to about 40. The St. Valentine's Day massacre, two years earlier, took six lives in a Chicago garage. But on Sept. 11, more people were murdered in a single horrific morning than were killed by the mob in the entire 20th century.

"It's like an old movie, here," one man in his 70s said on Grand St., facing the silver hearse that would bear Gotti's corpse to its final destination. "You know what I keep doing? I keep humming the tune from 'The Godfather.'"

Honor: An Elusive Ideal

He began to hum the old theme by Nino Rota, a small smile on his face. It was asif he could see Al Pacino coming out on the sidewalk, bearing his tragic burdens of fate and family honor, while knowing that, after all, that was only a movie. In art, as in life, honor is an illusive ideal.

There was, of course, no soundtrack in Maspeth, except the beating of the rotor blades. The helicopters hovered like dark metal birds, as if on a search-and-destroy mission, and gave off the sound of emergency.

"I keep thinking they'll bump into each other, and land insome poor guy's areaway," said a middle-age man named Joseph. He pronounced the word, in the New York style, "airyway."

"You know, they could kill somebody."

On Saturday in Maspeth, nobody died of accident or hostile fire. When the hearse departed, followed by its caravan of flowers and mourners, and its escort of choppers, ordinary people returned to their lives in the troubled world.

They had seen part of a gangster funeral, perhaps the last of its kind, fact not fiction, and it was as if they'd had a final contact with one of the eternal New York verities.

Almost certainly, they would talk across the day about Sunday dinners with family and relatives. They would talk about their children and their schools and the high cost of sneakers. They would putter in small gardens. They would wash their cars. They would argue about the Mets and the Yankees.

A few would glance at the sky. Some would gaze at the hole in the skyline of the distant city. They would wait for new bulletins from the Ministry of Fear. But they would live, they would live.