Another Part of the City

3

This goddamn city, a cop spent more time in court trying to make a case stick than he did on the streets making the arrest in the first place. Nine times out of ten, your man plea-bargained, walked away with a Mickey Mouse sentence, and was back on the streets again a few years later, working at the same old stand. Sometimes Reardon felt the courts were more in sympathy with the bad guys than with the guys who were trying to lock them up. Even the goddamn buildings down here were intimidating.

This morning, he had taken the subway to Chambers Street, and walked through City Hall Park, and then past the County Court Building where the words The True Administration of Justice Is the Firmest Pillar of Good Government (bullshit, he’d thought) were chiseled into the huge peristyle on the facade, and then to the Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street, where another chiseled legend seemed to mock further the efforts of law enforcement officers, this time reading Where Law Ends, There Tyranny Begins. So what else is new? he’d thought. What could you call what was happening in the streets today if not tyranny? Sometimes he thought he was in the wrong line of work.

And now, he sat in a wood-paneled courtroom with silvery winter light slanting through the tall windows, the jury box on his left, the judge in his solemn robes of justice on his right, and said again to Jurgens’s defense attorney, because the attorney had repeated the question, “That’s right, I made the arrest.”

The defense attorney’s name was Barrows. He was a rotund little man wearing a brown suit and a cream-colored shirt. His hair was the color of his dun-colored tie. He wore eyeglasses, and he often took them off to make a point, holding them in his hand and wagging them in a witness’s

face.

“On the basis of the girl’s identification,” Barrows said.

“Is that a question?” Reardon said.

“It is a question,” Barrows said. “Did you arrest Harold Jurgens on the basis of Frances Monoghan’s identification?”

“On the basis of her identification and on other evidence,” Reardon said. “His fingerprints were on the girl’s handbag. Before he raped her,

he...”

“Your Honor,” Barrows said, “I move that last be stricken. We are here precisely to determine whether or not...”

“Granted,” Judge Abrahams said.

“May I answer the question as regards evidence?” Reardon said.

“Please,” Abrahams said.

“The handbag was patent leather,” Reardon said, “we got some very good latents from it. The Fingerprint Section identified the prints as belonging to Harold Jurgens, a convicted rapist who’d previously served three years at Attica. On the basis of such evidence, I made application for an arrest warrant with a No-Knock provision...”

“Why the No-Knock?” Abrahams asked.

Reardon looked over to the defense table, where the accused — Harold Jurgens, a sallow-faced man in his mid-thirties — sat listening to every word.

“On information and belief that the man was armed and dangerous,” he said. “Your Honor, when he raped her, he brandished...”

“Your Honor,” Barrows said, looking pained.

“Sustained,” Abrahams said. “Strike that.”

“Mr. Reardon, isn’t it true,” Barrows said, “that you asked for the No-Knock provision so that you could gain an advantage over Mr. Jurgens?”

“Yes, I wanted an advantage,” Reardon said, “that’s right. The man who raped Frances Monoghan...”

“Your Honor...”

“Let him finish,” Abrahams said.

“Thank you,” Reardon said. “The man was armed with a switchblade knife. He cut her across the face with it, disfigured her for life. Yes, I wanted an advantage when I went in there.”

He glanced toward the jury box. Juror number five, an attractive woman in her late twenties, he guessed, was leaning forward intently, listening as carefully as was Harold Jurgens.

“And you fully enjoyed your advantage, didn’t you?” Barrows asked.

“I don’t know what that means,” Reardon said. “What’s the question?”

Barrows walked back to the defense table. He glanced at his client, and then picked up a glossy eight-by-ten photograph lying near his briefcase. “Your Honor,” he said, “I would like this marked as evidence, please.”

“What is it?” Abrahams asked.

“A photograph taken of Harold Jurgens two weeks before the arrest. We’ve had it enlarged from a snapshot. I would like the jury to see it.”

“Let me see it first, please,” Abrahams said. Barrows handed the picture up to the bench. Abrahams looked at it and then turned to the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case. “Mr. Koenig?” he said.

“No objection,” Koenig said.

“Mark it Exhibit One for the defense,” Abrahams said, handing the picture to the clerk of the court.

“Thank you,” Barrows said.

Reardon watched him as he walked to the jury box and handed the photograph to the elderly matron who was the foreman, forewoman, foreperson, whatever the hell they were calling them these days.

“This is what Harold Jurgens looked like two weeks before his arrest,” he said. “Would you please look at it, and pass it on?”

He went back to the defense table and picked up another eight-by-ten.

“Your Honor,” he said, “I would similarly like this marked as evidence, please. It’s a blowup of the mug shot taken at Police Headquarters shortly after Mr. Jurgens was booked there.” He approached the bench and handed the photo up to Abrahams.

“Mr. Koenig?” Abrahams said.

“No objection.”

“Mark it Exhibit Two,” Abrahams said.

Barrows carried the second picture to the jury box, and handed it to the foreman again. She glanced at Reardon as she accepted it. Seemed to be taking his measure. The picture started down the line. As juror number five accepted it, she looked squarely at Reardon.

“That is what Harold Jurgens looked like shortly after his arrest,” Barrows said. “You will notice that his left eye is discolored, his lip is bruised and swollen, and there are cuts and lacerations all over his face.”

He looked at Reardon. Reardon looked at Koenig, sitting at the prosecutor’s table. He was doodling on a lined yellow pad. Barrows came back to the witness box.

“Mr. Reardon,” he said, “have you seen these pictures?”

“I’ve seen the mug shot,” Reardon said.

“Then allow me,” Barrows said, and walked to his briefcase and opened it. “Your Honor, may I show him prints of those photos?”

“Yes, yes,” Abrahams said impatiently.

Barrows took two eight-by-tens from his briefcase and carried them to the witness box. He handed them to Reardon. Reardon looked at them. The identical photos the jury had just seen. Juror number five was staring at him more intently now.

“A remarkable difference, wouldn’t you say?” Barrows asked.

Reardon said nothing.

“Mr. Reardon?” Barrows said. “Would you like to comment on the difference between the photographs? You do see a difference, don’t you?”

“I see a difference, yes.”

“How would you account for the difference, Mr. Reardon?”

“I have no way of accounting for it.”

“Was Mr. Jurgens’s face bruised and lacerated when you broke into his apartment at...?”

“I didn’t break in,” Reardon said at once. “I went there with a warrant.”

“Was his face bruised and lacerated?” Barrows insisted, taking off his glasses and shaking them at Reardon. “Was his eye discolored? Was his lip swollen?”

“No,” Reardon said.

“But the mug shot attests that these bruises, these lacerations, these marks of violence were there after Harold Jurgens was questioned at the Fifth Precinct.”

“If you’re suggesting...”

“I am stating as a fact. Mr. Reardon, that a confession was coerced from the accused.”

“That’s a lie!” Reardon said. “I never touched...”

“Did you not say in the presence of Police Officer Anthony Aiello that prison was too good for Mr. Jurgens?”

“I said that, yes.”

“Did you not say, again in the presence of Officer Aiello, that Mr. Jurgens should be dragged through the street behind wild horses?”

“I said that, too.”

“And when you were alone with Mr. Jurgens, allegedly questioning him, did you not then decide to take the law into your own hands, and...?”

“No, I did not,” Reardon said tightly.

“Did you not. in fact, use in your questioning a back-room, rubber-hose technique forbidden by the very laws you are sworn to uphold?”

“I did not.”

“Then how do you account for the differences in those two photographs?”

“He wasn’t mugged and printed at the Fifth,” Reardon said. “That was done at Headquarters, where he was booked. He was in with a lot of other prisoners there. Most criminals don’t particularly appreciate either rapists or child molesters. I don’t know how he got those bruises, but it’s entirely possible...”

“No further questions, your Honor,” Barrows said.

Koenig rose at once from the prosecutor’s table. “No questions,” he said.

Reardon stepped down from the witness box. Juror number five was still watching him. He sat beside Koenig and whispered, “You could have objected, you know.”

“Why?” Koenig said, and smiled. “He convinced me.”

Not far from where Reardon, on the phone with Lieutenant Farmer, was complaining that Koenig had let their case go down the toilet, two men sat in the corner office of a brokerage firm in the Equitable Building on Broadway, between Cedar and Pine, almost directly across from the huge black Merrill Lynch building at One Liberty Plaza.

Lowell Rothstein was thirty-eight years old, darkly handsome, with wavy black hair and brown eyes he liked to think of as soulful. He was wearing a suit hand-tailored for him at Chipp’s, and smoking a Dunhill cigarette he had just lighted with a gold Dunhill lighter. A gold Rolex watch ticked off minutes on his slender wrist. His partner, Joseph Phelps, was a year older, a plain-looking man going bald at the back of his head, wearing a rumpled gray flannel suit and black shoes that badly needed polish. He looked extremely worried. He sounded worried, too.

“Why does she want to see us?” he asked, and shook his head. “All the way from Arizona?” He shook his head again. “Her brother’s here selling some paintings, isn’t he? Do you think this is just a social visit?”

“The Kidds don’t make social visits,” Rothstein said.

Phelps glanced at the clock on his partner’s desk. “What time did she say?”

“Eleven,” Rothstein said. “Relax, will you?”

“The very rich make me nervous,” Phelps said.

“The very poor make me nervous,” Rothstein said. “Or at least the ones who can’t forget they were poor.”

“I was poor, yes,” Phelps said. “Very.”

“You’re not poor now.”

“I’m not rich, either. I still look at the right-hand side of the menu, do you know that?”

“What?”

“Where the prices are. My fondest wish is that one day I’ll be able to go into a restaurant and order whatever I want — without first having to check the right-hand side of the menu.”

“That poor you’re not,” Rothstein said.

“The stench lingers,” Phelps said. “I live on Sutton Place now. I’ve got a summer home in the Hamptons, but I can still smell Sheepshead Bay. Money scares me, Lowell. Because it can all disappear in a minute.”

“You’re in the wrong business,” Rothstein said.

“What time did she say? Did you tell me what time?”

“Eleven.”

“It’s already ten past.”

“The privilege of the very rich,” Rothstein said, and shrugged.

The buzzer on his desk sounded. He reached over and stabbed at a button.

“Yes?”

“Miss Kidd to see you,” his secretary said.

“Send her right in, Jenny,” Rothstein said. “Relax,” he told his partner.

The door opened a moment later. Olivia Kidd, wearing her mink coat open over a dark green Chanel suit, came into the office, her hand extended.

“Lowell,” she said, shaking his hand, “Joe,” shaking his, “I’m sorry I’m late, the holiday traffic is impossible.” She tossed her mink onto one of the leather upholstered armchairs, opened her dispatch case without preamble, and removed from it two sheets of paper. Handing one of the sheets to Rothstein, she said, “You’ve already had a quick look at this, Lowell, but you may want to go over it more leisurely now.” She handed the second sheet to Phelps, who gave his partner a puzzled look. “Joe?” she said. “Read this carefully, won’t you?”

She sat in the armchair, the mink spread under her, crossed her legs, and fished a cigarette from her handbag. Rothstein hurried to light it with his gold Dunhill. Phelps was already looking at the sheet of paper in his hand.

Across the top of it, he read:

Beneath this, and stretched out across the page as column-headings, were the words:

The room was silent as both men continued reading.

“What do you think?” Olivia said at last.

“I don’t understand,” Phelps said, looking up.

“What is it you don’t understand. Joe?”

“Is this what you want? What you actually want?”

“Well, of course it is. Why would...?”

“An average of six hundred contracts a day? Between now and Christmas Eve?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s seven working days. You’re talking forty-two hundred lots.”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-one million ounces.”

“Yes.”

“Divided among three accounts.”

“Corporate accounts,” Olivia said.

“Corporate or otherwise, there are rules. Olivia. Both Comex and the CFTC...”

“Yes, Joe, I know the rules.”

“The Comex reportable position level is two hundred and fifty lots...”

“Yes, I know.”

“And the CFTC requires that we file an oh-one form on anything over a hundred lots.”

“So where’s the problem, Joe, would you please tell me? Fourteen hundred lots in each account is well under the overall six-thousand-lot limit for any principal. We’re not doing anything illegal here. It’s all open and aboveboard.”

“Eventually, we’d have to reveal the principals in each account. Comex would insist on that.”

“We’ll reveal them when we’re asked to reveal them. Jessica’s here, Sarge is here, I’m here. I don’t see any problem. We are not going over the six-thousand-lot limit.”

Phelps was silent for a long while.

“I assume there’s a reason for this,” he said at last.

“There’s a reason for everything, isn’t there?” Olivia said.

“May we know what it is?”

“We’re feeling bullish,” Olivia said, and smiled.

“Do you know how much cash we’re talking here? To put up the margin deposits?”

“We already have it.”

“We’re talking three thousand a contract right now.”

“More or less,” Olivia said.

“That’ll come to something like twelve, thirteen million dollars.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Do you plan to take delivery?”

“No.”

“Well, thank God for that.” Phelps said. “But I still don’t like it. We send our man into the pit to buy that many contracts a day, he’ll have a lot of sharp traders looking over his shoulder.”

“Let them look,” Olivia said, and shrugged.

“Lowell?” Phelps said. “Don’t you agree with me?”

“I’d still like to know why,” Rothstein said. “Is this something Joe and I might like to get into personally?”

“How can I possibly answer that, Lowell?”

“Well... when you say we’re feeling bullish, do you mean the Captain is feeling bullish, too?”

“Most decidedly.”

“Then it might be worth looking into, eh, Joe?”

“I don’t like gambling,” Phelps said.

“We’ll talk about it,” Rothstein said.

“Gentlemen,” Olivia said, and looked at her watch. “Hadn’t you better start working on this?”

“Let me ask you something else, may I?” Rothstein said.

“Certainly.”

“Will you be buying contracts only through Comex? Here in New York? Or will you be using foreign exchanges as well?”

“Why do you want to know that, Lowell?”

“Because that might change the whole complexion of it.”

“In what way?”

“In a way that could determine whether Joe and I want to take positions ourselves.”

“The way Mr. Dodge did?” Olivia asked.

Phelps looked from his partner to Olivia, puzzled again.

“Let me say this,” Olivia said. “The exchanges we use are none of your business. But further, let me say this. Since Kidd International owns twelve percent of Rothstein-Phelps, and since you’ve served us exceptionally well over the years. I would suggest that it might not be remiss for you to take a flyer.” She smiled. “If the price went up to forty dollars an ounce by next December, for example, you’d stand to make a great deal of money on a six-dollar-an-ounce investment.” She smiled beatifically. “Use your own judgment, gentlemen.”

Rothstein looked at Phelps.

“But be discreet, won’t you?” she said.

Rothstein smiled.

Phelps frowned.

“Is everything understood then?” Olivia said. “You have the schedule, I want it implemented by the close on Christmas Eve.” She smiled briefly. “Lowell?” she said. “Joe? Good day, gentlemen.”

The restaurant on Fell Street was rather drab-looking in contrast to the gaudier neon-festooned places surrounding it. The front plate glass window, steamed over now and decorated with beaded curtains, was lettered in black with the words the rice bowl. The entrance door was on the right, similarly beaded, a menu Scotch-taped to the inside of the glass. The street, at twenty minutes to twelve, was already beginning to fill with people on their lunch hours.

A bell over the door tinkled as Reardon entered, but none of the waiters or diners so much as glanced at him as he closed the door behind him, cutting off the sharp wind that blew for an instant through the small room. A dozen tables, more or less, all of them without tablecloths. The overwhelming aroma of succulent food frying. A singsong babble of voices; most of the diners and all of the waiters were Chinese. He went immediately to the counter on his left, where a harried young Chinese was tallying a bill — on an abacus, he noticed — for a waitress who stood looking into the room, her back to the counter. Reardon said nothing until the man had finished his calculations, and handed the bill to the waitress. The man looked up at him.

“Benny Wong,” Reardon said.

The man behind the counter said something in Chinese to the departing waitress. The waitress nodded. He turned to Reardon again, and in clipped English, said, “Who you, please?”

“Detective Reardon.”

“Mr. Wong know you?” the counterman asked.

“He knows me.”

The counterman picked up a telephone and dialed a single number. Into the phone, he said something in Chinese. He listened, and then spoke again. Reardon heard his name in an otherwise unintelligible rush of Chinese words. “Okay,” the counterman said in English, and then put the receiver back on its cradle. “Someone be here,” he said. “You wait.”

Reardon nodded, reached into his pocket for a package of cigarettes, and was about to light one when the counterman said, “No smoke, please. Mr. Wong no smoke.”

Reardon dropped the unlighted cigarette into a bowl on the countertop. A door opened at the far end of the room, to the right of the kitchen. A small Chinese man wearing dark trousers and a black tunic came to where Reardon was standing near the door.

“Mr. Reardon?” he said in virtually unaccented English. “I’m Gilbert Chan. This way, please.”

Reardon followed him to the rear of the restaurant. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and as he sniffed the savory aromas from the kitchen, closer now, he realized all at once just how hungry he was. Chan opened the same door through which he’d entered the restaurant, and allowed Reardon to precede him into a small unfurnished anteroom. Another door was at the far end of this room. He opened it, and with a slight bow, said. “Please.”

The room beyond would have come as a mild surprise to anyone who hadn’t been in it before. It was furnished in what Reardon would have called British Barrister — book-lined walls, a leather-topped desk, two leather armchairs, one behind the desk, one in front of it. Benny Wong sat in the chair behind the desk. With one fluid motion of his right hand, he offered the other chair to Reardon and dismissed Chan. Wong was, Reardon guessed, a man in his late sixties, looking much younger, though — the way affluent Chinese tended to — and dressed in a dark blue business suit, gold cuff links showing at his wrists. Black mustache over his lip. Slightly balding. No smile on his face. Deadly as a cobra.

He waited until Chan closed the door behind him.

“Don’t tell me,” he said to Reardon, “let me guess.” Voice slightly singsong, but no pidgin English here, not for a man who’d been in America since 1926. “The restaurant on Mulberry, right? Last night, right?”

“You’ve got it,” Reardon said.

“So naturally, you think back to 1982.”

“Naturally.”

“The Golden Star,” Wong said. “Fifty-one East Broadway. Two, three o’clock in the morning. They march in with ski masks, stockings, paper bags over their heads, kill three people and wound eight others, including a very dear friend of mine,” Wong said, and clucked his tongue. “This is not the same thing, Reardon.”

“It’s not, huh?”

“Positively not. That was gang shit back then. There were Free Masons and White Tigers in the bar. It was a fight over turf, that’s all.”

“How about now? Were any of the gangs putting the muscle on Ralph D’Annunzio?”

“How would I know?” Wong said.

“I think you would know.” Reardon said.

There were two principal tongs in Chinatown. Originally offshoots of the secret societies in Guangdong Province, they now called themselves “businessmen’s associations,” but Reardon knew that between them the An Liang Shang Tsung Hui and the Hip Sing T’ang controlled all of the area’s gambling parlors. The youth gangs, like sucker fish hanging on the underbellies of sharks, protected the parlors from hoods who might one fine night decide to hold them up. In addition, the gangs extorted protection money from the honest merchants in Chinatown — the Ghost Shadows working Mott Street, the Flying Dragons working Pell — for a reputed $5,000–510,000 weekly take. If one of the gangs had decided to spill over onto Mulberry Street...

“You‘re thinking wrong,” Wong said. “Believe me, you’re thinking wrong. This was not Chinese.”

“Ask around, will you?” Reardon said.

“Do I owe you something?” Wong asked, looking genuinely puzzled.

“No, just do me the favor, Benny.”

“I’ll ask,” Wong said, “but believe me, I already know the answer. These were not Chinese.”

Robert Sargent Kidd did not awaken until noon that Tuesday. The waiter who brought him his breakfast at the Park Lane Hotel advised him that the temperature outside was twenty-two degrees, and then told him to have a nice day. A copy of the New York Times was on the breakfast tray. The two-column story in the lower right-hand corner of the front page immediately caught his eye. The headline read:

Sipping at his coffee. Sarge read the story.

A hundred and one paintings in all had gone under the hammer at Sotheby’s last night, bringing prices ranging from $55,000 for an admittedly minor Monet to $4,600,000 for a truly superb Modigliani nude. A collection that had taken him years to assemble — Matisse, Van Gogh, Renoir. Seurat, Cezanne, Degas, Braque. Corot — gone in what now seemed an instant, though last night in that crowded room it had taken a painful eternity.

Sarge, you’ve got to get rid of those pictures.

His father talking.

I need the money they’ll bring.

Andrew Kidd. They called him “The Captain.” And, of course, the Captain had given his Sargent — or more appropriately his sergeant — an order. No simple request, this, oh no. an order. And when the Captain barked an order, you snapped to. by Christ, or there’d be hell to pay.

All of them gone now.

For thirty-six million and some change.

Gone.

For money.

To earn yet more money if the Captain’s scheme worked. It would work, of course. His schemes always worked. And the Kidds would be richer. Much richer. All of them but Sarge, who would forever consider himself poverty-stricken now that his precious paintings were no longer in his possession.

He sipped at his coffee.

He looked out the window to the naked branches of the trees in Central Park.

Someday, he thought, I’d like to...

He did not know what he would like to do someday.

He knew only that his paintings were gone.

The D’Annunzio apartment was on Broome Street, in a redbrick building next door to the Arfi & Mazzola Pharmacy. Directly across the street was the Church of the Most Holy Crucifix, which advised on a sign to the left of the entrance door that masses were given in English and in Spanish. To the right of the church, the Chia Sheung Food Products Company had set up shop. To Reardon, the ethnic mix on this single short street was representative of what was happening all over the precinct

He took the steps up two at a time — a habit from when he was a teenager — walked down a narrow hallway on the third-floor landing, and knocked on the door to apartment 31. Mark D’Annunzio opened the door.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Reardon said. “Lieutenant Farmer told me you’d called...”

“Yes, come in,” D’Annunzio said.

The front door opened into a small kitchen. Sink, stove, and refrigerator opposite the door. Frost-rimed, curtained window above the sink. Round table with an oilcloth cover nestled in the angle of the corner wall. Dust motes rising in a shaft of wintry sunlight. The house seemed empty and still.

“What I called about,” D’Annunzio said, “sit down, would you like some coffee?”

“Thank you,” Reardon said.

D’Annunzio went to the stove, where a coffee pot sat on a low gas flame. He took two cups from the cabinet, poured into each of them, and carried them to the table. “You take milk, sugar?” he asked.

“Black,” Reardon said.

D’Annunzio sat opposite him. Both men sipped coffee as the dust motes climbed tirelessly in the silent house. Somewhere a clock ticked emptily.

“What I wanted to know,” D’Annunzio said, “is how much longer they’ll be. I mean... we have to make funeral arrangements...”

“I understand,” Reardon said.

“I know it’s the law, I know they have to do the autopsy, but you don’t realize how upsetting this has been to my mother.”

“I called the Medical Examiner’s office before I came up here,” Reardon said, nodding. “They’ll be ready with their report sometime today. You can feel free to make whatever arrangements you have to, Mr. D’Annunzio. I’ll see that the bod... that your father... have you chosen a funeral home?”

D’Annunzio nodded bleakly. “Riverside,” he said. “On Canal Street.”

“I’ll have them contact the morgue. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

“The relatives, you know, they keep phoning, wanting to know when it’ll be.”

“Tell them it’ll be tomorrow.”

“So many relatives.” D’Annunzio said. “And friends. He had a lot of friends, my father. When something like this happens...”

He let the sentence trail.

Reardon listened to the ticking clock.

“How about enemies?” he said. “I know this was a robbery, on the face of it we’ve got a robbery here, but sometimes things aren’t exactly what they seem. And I keep thinking of what you said. That one of them asked you your name.”

“My father’s name, too.”

“They wanted his name, too?”

“Yes. Then they told him to move over near the bar, and while he was going they... they shot him in the back.”

“Would you know if your father ever received any threatening letters or phone calls?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Any trouble with the waiters? Or anybody else working for him? Anyone who might have been bearing a grudge?”

“No.”

“Did he owe money to anyone?”

“Paid all his bills on the dime,” D’Annunzio said. “Food and beverage suppliers, garbage collection, linen, all on the dime.”

“Who handled that for him, would you know?” Reardon asked. “Garbage collection and linens.”

“Why? Are you thinking the mob?”

“I’m just trying to touch all the bases.”

“No. I don’t think this was anything like that.” D’Annunzio said. “They used to come eat in the restaurant all the time, ever since we opened. There’s no reason the boys would’ve wanted to hurt my father, believe me.”

“Mr. D’Annunzio, I have to ask this, please forgive me.”

“What is it?”

“Were your mother and father happily married? Would there have been another man, or another woman, anyone who...”

“They’ve been married for almost forty years. My father never looked at another woman from the day he met her.” He shook his head. He lifted his coffee cup, seemed about to drink, and then put it down on the table again. “It doesn’t make sense, none of it. It was a robbery, like you say; on the face of it we had two guys coming in to stick us up. But then why didn’t they take anything? And why did they kill him? I was the one reaching for the gun under the bar, why did they...?”

“You had a gun on the premises?”

“A shotgun, I keep it under the bar. So when I’m reaching for it, the guy just says, ‘No.’ But when my father’s coming over to the bar, they shoot him. The guy tells him to move over there, go there, whatever he said, and my father starts over to the bar, he’s got his back to them, and they gun him down. It just doesn’t make sense, does it?”

No, Reardon thought, it doesn’t make sense at all.

“I’d like to take another look at the restaurant,” he said.

By two o’clock that Tuesday afternoon, it was snowing heavily, and the lights in the ground-floor living room of the Seventy-first Street brown-stone were on in defense against the gloom. The woman pacing the Bokharra was wearing high-heeled sandals and ruby-red, satin lounging pajamas that echoed the reds in the rug. The woman was angry. Her brown eyes flashed, and she tossed her long black hair with each stride she took. She was extraordinarily beautiful, but her fury contorted her face and her voice now was high and strident.

“I don’t give a damn what you want!” she shouted.

Olivia was not surprised by her half-sister’s tantrum. Although Jessica was twenty-four years old, she frequently behaved like a thirteen-year-old. Sitting calmly in a wingback chair near the fireplace, the fire crackling and spitting, Olivia watched her and said nothing.

“The suite is booked for the seventeenth!” Jessica said. “That’s tomorrow, and that’s when I’m leaving!”

“Postpone it,” Olivia said.

“No, I won’t postpone it!” Jessica shouted. “My plane leaves Kennedy at eight in the morning, I’ll be in Zurich late tomorrow night, and on the slopes in St. Moritz by Thursday — the same as I am every year!”

“Not this year, darling,” Olivia said.

“Yes, this year, and next year, and the year after that, and whenever I want to!” Jessica said, and stopped dead before Olivia’s chair, her hands on her hips, her lower lip thrust out challengingly.

Olivia shook her head.

“How’d you ever gel to be such a spoiled brat?” she said.

“It runs in the blood.” Jessica said.

“On your mother’s side, maybe.”

“Is it true that your mother was a barroom hooker?” Jessica said.

“Don’t press your luck, Jessie,” Olivia said. “We may share the same father...”

“Call him, go ahead, call him,” Jessica said. “Tell him you’re trying to get me to postpone my ski trip. See what he has to say about it.”

“I’m here on his instructions,” Olivia said.

“He wants me to postpone?”

“Or cancel entirely, you can take your choice.”

“I don’t believe it,” Jessica said. “You’re lying.”

“I’d allow you to call him. but he may be napping. You’ll have to take my word for it.”

“Your word!” Jessica said, rolling her eyes.

“Yes. Which, incidentally, has never...”

“I had your word that this apartment was mine.”

“It is yours.”

“A lovely townhouse in the Seventies,” Jessica said, trying to mimic Olivia’s deeper voice. “Three whole floors of your own, here’s the key, Jessica. Just stay out of our hair in Phoenix.”

“I never said that,” Olivia said calmly.

“It’s what you meant,” Jessica said. “And I don’t consider something mine if you and Sarge have keys to it, and can walk in whenever you like, no matter who’s here with me. That’s not mine. Olivia, that’s only another holding in the fucking Kidd empire!”

“I stay at a hotel whenever I’m in New York,” Olivia said. “You know that. And I’ve never...”

“You walked in this afternoon, didn’t you?”

“I knocked first. Your privacy is sacrosanct, Jessie, you needn’t worry. You can entertain...”

“Only my friends call me Jessie.”

“Jessica then, fine. You can use this place to entertain as many of your adolescent disco pals as you care to, Jessica, provided you don’t frighten the horses. The Captain’s tired of bailing you out of trouble.”

“I haven’t heard any complaints,” Jessica said.

“You’re hearing them now. Stay out of the papers. Keep a low profile while you’re in New York.”

“Why can’t I go to Switzerland?” Jessica asked.

“Because the Captain needs you here.”

“Okay, let’s call him, okay? Let’s find out if he really...”

“If you want to risk his anger, go ahead.” She nodded toward a desk across the room. “There’s the phone.”

Jessica hesitated, weighing this. She went to the bar and poured two fingers of cognac into a snifter. She came back to the fire, stood staring into the flames for a moment, her left hand on her hip, the cognac snifter in her right hand, a model’s pose. Olivia could almost see the wheels spinning inside her gorgeous head. When she turned from the fire, her face was in repose. The anger was gone. Her voice was mildly beseeching, almost childlike.

“It’s just that all my friends are there at Christmastime,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” Olivia said.

“I’ll be missing all the parties.”

“Give a party here.”

“The parties are better in Switzerland.”

“Enough, Jessie. If I have to tie you to that playpen...”

“Playpen?”

“Yes, that eternally reverberating four-poster bed upstairs, your playpen, darling sister. If I have to tie you to it to keep you here, I will, believe me.”

She rose, walked to where her mink was draped over one arm of the sofa, and picked it up. Casually, she said, “And I’ll also put someone outside your door to break both your legs if you try to walk out of here with a suitcase.”

She smiled.

“Got it, Jessica?” she said.

Jessica scowled.

“Good,” Olivia said, and shrugged into her mink.

A sign on the door of the Luna Mare restaurant read:

A small black wreath hung on the doorknob under the sign. Inside the restaurant, Mark D’Annunzio sat at one of the tables, an open bottle of Chianti before him, a glass of wine in his hand. Reardon’s wine glass was on the bartop. He was crouched behind the bar, looking at the safe. A clock on the wall read five-thirty. Outside, it was snowing fiercely. D’Annunzio had turned on very few lights, but the place seemed cozy and warm in contrast to the tundra beyond the plate glass windows.

“Before they shot your father,” Reardon said, “did they take any money from the cash register?”

“No,” D’Annunzio said. “Well, wait. I’m trying to remember. This was still early, there wasn’t much cash in the register, anyway. But they didn’t even go anywhere near it. They told us to keep quiet, and to put our hands up, and then they asked me what my name was, and they asked my father what his name was, and they shot him. That was it. And ran out.”

“You were standing about where I am now?” Reardon asked. “When they shot him?”

“Right about there.”

“Did they know there was a safe behind the bar? Did they seem to know it?”

“I don’t think so. How could they?”

He seemed on the verge of tears again. Reardon came around the bar, the wine glass in his hand, and sat at the table opposite him.

“You don’t know what this restaurant meant to him,” D’Annunzio said. “My grandfather came to this country in 1901, after the grape crop failed in Italy. He was a common laborer, didn’t even speak the language, but he worked his fingers to the bone to raise a family and to make sure they never wanted for anything. Even during the Depression, my grandfather made sure his kids had clothes on their backs and food in their bellies.”

Reardon nodded. D’Annunzio poured more wine for him.

“There are people, you know,” he said, “they come to this country, they only want to dump on it. Not my grandfather. He wanted to be a Yankee Doodle Dandy, applied for his citizenship papers practically the minute he got off the boat. Raised his kids to be Americans, never mind the other side.”

He sipped at his wine. His eyes had a faraway look in them now. He seemed to be recalling a distant time, a less complicated time, a safer time.

“My father was the youngest,” he said. “There are three older sisters and a brother in Washington.”

He nodded. He said nothing for what seemed a very long time.

“This restaurant was his dream,” he said at last. “He’d been saving for it all his life.”

Another silence, longer this time.

“When he found this place, it was a dump, you shoulda seen the stove in back, you couldn’t cut the grease on it with a machete.”

He shook his head, a small smile on his lips.

“His dream. Put all his savings into fixing it up, got himself a mortgage, borrowed the rest he still needed. So now this happens. A man finally realizes his dream, and this happens.”

He shook his head again. The smile was gone now.

“Mr. D’Annunzio,” Reardon said, “you told me earlier that your father didn’t owe anybody money.”

“That’s right.”

“But you just said — unless I misunderstood you — that he borrowed the rest he needed.”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean privately?”

“I guess so. Because he got all he could from the bank, you know, and it just wouldn’t stretch.”

“How much did he borrow?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it a sizable sum?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who’d he borrow it from?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, what difference does it make? Did the money do him any good? He got his restaurant, he got his dream, but he...”

And suddenly he was crying again. Reardon put his hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” D’Annunzio said, sobbing.

“That’s okay,” Reardon said. “That’s okay.”

“He was such a good father to me,” D’Annunzio said, fumbling for his handkerchief, “such a good man. Why’d they have to do this, those bastards!”

He blew his nose, and then looked directly across the table at Reardon.

“We’ll never find them, will we?” he asked. “We don’t know what they look like, we don’t even...”

“I’ll find them,” Reardon said. “I promise you.”

But he wasn’t at all sure.

In a wine bar in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, Rothstein and Phelps sat drinking a more expensive vintage than the one Reardon and D’Annunzio were sharing. Rothstein had ordered the wine, a 1969 Lafite-Rothschild Pouliac; Phelps would never have dared. Phelps seemed nervous sipping something so costly. He kept looking into the glass after each sip, as though mourning the loss of the dollars the vanishing liquid represented.

“Relax,” Rothstein told him.

“I’m just afraid of taking such a big plunge,” Phelps said. “I mean, personally. I mean, this would be our money, Lowell. This isn’t the same as investing someone else’s money.”

“I think we can consider it a relatively safe investment,” Rothstein said.

“Because the Kidds are taking such a heavy position?”

“Yes. And undoubtedly others as well.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Things she said.”

“Like what?”

“When we were discussing disclosure, she mentioned that the family was here in New York. I’m assuming she meant they’d be available to sign any documents required by the CFTC.”

“Well. yes. but...”

“At the same time, she said there’d be purchases abroad. So I’m assuming those purchases are being made by others, with the Kidds in for varying percentages.”

“You think the Captain is masterminding this?”

“Anything the Kidds do is masterminded by the Captain.”

“Because it seems reckless, don’t you think? All it takes is one smart guy at the exchange to realize...”

“They’re not doing anything illegal. Joe. They’re just trying to pick up some loose change between now and Christmas, that’s all.”

“Loose change! Forty-two hundred contracts? With a three thousand dollar deposit on each contract? Do you know what that comes to? It comes to an outlay of twelve million, six hundred thousand dollars!”

“That’s right.”

“Five thousand ounces in each contract is twenty-one million ounces, Lowell. If it really goes to forty dollars an ounce, those contracts will be worth eight hundred and forty million dollars. That’s a profit of more than three quarters of a billion! In New York alone.”

“To the Kidds, that’s loose change. The question, Joe, is whether we want to follow their lead. That’s the question.”

“How much would you want to risk, Lowell?”

“Whatever we can raise. I personally would be m favor of hocking everything we’ve got. That’s how sure I am.”

“We could lose it all, you know.”

“I know.”

“All of it,” Phelps said. “Back to Sheepshead Bay.”

“Worse for me,” Rothstein said.

“How so?”

“If you start with nothing, and you go back to nothing, you haven’t lost anything. If you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, Lowell Rothstein. son of Jacob Rothstein the financier, and you suddenly end up without a penny... that can hurt, my friend, that can really hurt.”

Phelps sipped at his wine.

“Chance of a lifetime here,” he said softly.

“Both come out of it multimillionaires,” Rothstein said. “We have to risk it, you know.”

“I know that.”

“Your glass is empty,” Rothstein said, and signalled to the waiter. The waiter lifted the bottle from the wine cooler. He poured into both men’s glasses.

“Thank you.” Phelps said.

The waiter padded off.

“What’d she mean?” he asked.

“What’d who mean?” Rothstein said.

“Olivia. When she said you’d already seen the purchasing schedule.”

“Did she say that?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Lots on her mind, who knows?” Rothstein said, shrugging. He swallowed a long draught of the wine. “Ahhhh,” he said.

“And who’s Dodge?” Phelps asked.

“I don’t know, who’s Dodge?”

“Someone taking a position, isn’t that what she said?”

“Who can follow- Olivia?” Rothstein said, and shrugged. “Are we going into this or not?”

“I guess so,” Phelps said. “I guess we’ve got to hope they know what they’re doing...”

“Can’t go wrong trusting the Kidds,” Rothstein said.

“God, we could make a fortune!”

“Millions and millions and millions.”

Phelps suddenly giggled.

“I’m going to ask for mine in silver dollars,” he said.

“Be appropriate,” Rothstein said.

“No, I mean so I can make a tremendous pile of them, and jump up and down on the pile, and pick up the coins, and let them trickle down on my head.”

“All those coins, yeah.”

“I love the smell of money. Do you love the smell of money?”

“I love it.”

“But it scares me,” Phelps said.

“No, don’t be scared,” Rothstein said, and raised his glass. “Joseph, my friend,” he said, “Mr. Inside...”

“Lowell, my friend,” Phelps said, raising his glass, “Mr. Outside...”

“Here’s to us. In a week’s time, we’ll either be flat on our asses in the gutter...”

“Or we’ll own the world,” Phelps said.

“We’ll own the world,” Rothstein said, nodding. “Or at least a goodly part of it.”

Solemnly, silently, the men clinked their glasses together.