Criminal Conversation

1: December 21–December 30

Luretta Barnes was the smartest girl Sarah taught. Rap as poetry, poetry as rap was a good concept. Luretta disagreed with it.

“Ice-T ain’t Allen Ginsberg,” she told Sarah. “No way you gonna compare Soul on Ice to Howl. No way, Mrs. Welles.”

A scholarship student, Luretta was the only black girl in the entire sophomore class. The only one now taking a stand against rap as poetry.

“You want to call it doggerel,” she said, “that’s fine by me. But poetry? Come on, Mrs. Welles. Callin’ rap poetry is like callin’ Michael Jackson Pavarotti.”

The other girls all laughed.

Luretta soaked it up.

Gorgeous fourteen-year-old with a smile like starshine, hair done up in ten thousand braids, little colored glass beads strung in them, could have been a model in an instant, wanted to be a lawyer. She’d somehow learned from one of the other girls that Mrs. Welles’s husband was a lawyer in the DA’s Office. One day, she stopped Sarah in the halls, asked if her husband could use a good assistant. Sharpen pencils, empty trash baskets, whatever, it’d beat her after-school job at McDonald’s. Sarah said she was pretty sure all such jobs were civil service, which meant taking an exam and so on. She said she’d ask her husband, though. Michael had confirmed it.

“He’s missin’ out on a future star,” Luretta had said, grinning her celestial smile.

Sarah was now qualifying the comparison, hedging the lesson so that rap could be considered protest poetry, or perhaps poetic commentary, in much the same way that Lennon’s or McCartney’s lyrics for the Beatles could rightfully be considered such.

“‘Eleanor Rigby,’ for example,” she said, “is really a poem of protest, wouldn’t you say? An elegy for the lonely? A cry for pity? And it’s social commentary as well, isn’t it? Eleanor keeping her face in a jar by the door? Father MacKenzie giving his sermon and no one showing up for it?”

Most of these fifteen-year-olds knew “Eleanor Rigby,” but just barely. To many of them, the Beatles might have been a quartet of strolling Elizabethan minstrels. McCartney was in his fifties, after all, an old man in the eyes of these precocious adolescents. Sarah plunged ahead regardless. She’d have brought in some of her own tapes if she’d known she’d be taking this tack — which, by the way, wasn’t a bad one. Instead, she was winging it now only because Luretta had taken her unexpected position.

“Or what’s ‘I Am the Walrus,’” she said, gathering steam, “if not a protest against England’s tax laws? All the graphic references to death and dying? You’ve all heard the expression ‘Nothing’s sure but death and taxes,’ haven’t you?”

No one had heard the expression. Smartest kids in the city of New York here at Greer, none of them had ever heard about death and taxes or, for that matter, “I Am the Walrus.”

Except Luretta.

“Lennon was a poet,” she said. “You’re comparing pigs and pork chops, they’re not the same at all.”

“Excuse me, but who’s Lennon?” one of the girls asked.

“Spare me,” Luretta said, and rolled her lovely brown eyes.

“John Lennon,” Sarah said.

“Wasn’t he the man some nut shot outside the Dakota?” another girl asked.

Good lesson to teach sometime, Sarah thought. The way people are remembered. Would Woody Allen be remembered as a child molester or as the preeminent director of his time? Would Oliver North be remembered as a hero to his country or a traitor to the sacred precepts of democracy? And would John Lennon, after all was said and done, be remembered solely as the man some nut shot outside an apartment building on New York’s Upper West Side?

The bell rang.

“Nuts,” Sarah said, and smiled.

She said this every day at the end of each and every one of her classes. It was an absolutely genuine expression of regret; she really did hate the sound of the bell that signaled the end of a class. But it had become nonetheless something of a signature trademark.

Luretta came up to her.

“That might’ve been condescending,” she said. “Calling them poets just ’cause they’re black.”

“Good point,” Sarah said. “We’ll discuss it next time.”

Michael always sided with their daughter. No matter what the issue, he always came down hard on Mollie’s side. He was doing the same thing now. Sarah thought she’d made her point clearly enough at the dinner table. There was no sense putting up a Christmas tree when they’d be leaving for St. Bart’s on the twenty-sixth. Today was the twenty-first. Even if they managed to get it up and decorated by tomorrow night...

“And by the way,” she said. “Anything taller than six feet is out of the question.”

“Six feet! That’s a shrub, Mom!”

This from Mollie.

Twelve years old, secure in the knowledge that her father was defending her case and the verdict was already in. They had just come down from their apartment. It was close to seven thirty and snow was falling; it made Sarah feel even more like Scrooge attacking the Cratchits.

“Even if it’s decorated by tomorrow night,” she said, picking up her earlier thought, “we’ll be gone on Saturday, and we won’t be back...”

“We can enjoy it while we’re here,” Michael said, grinning like a bribed judge and looking brawny and woodsy in an olive-green loden coat with toggle fasteners, the hood pulled up over his head.

“Sure, for four whole days,” Sarah said. “We won’t be home till the third. By that time, with no one here to water it...”

“We can leave a key with the super.”

“I don’t like him going into the apartment when we’re not here.”

“I’ll give him ten bucks.”

“Give me the ten bucks, Dad,” Mollie said. “I’ll stay home and water it.”

“Sure you will,” Michael said, and Mollie giggled.

“Who’ll put up the lights?” Sarah asked.

Last-ditch stand. Plea bargaining.

“I will,” Michael said.

“No taller than eight feet,” she said.

“Deal,” he said, and took her hand and winked at Mollie.

They walked through the gently drifting flakes, scanning the trees lining the sidewalk, holding hands and deliberately matching strides as if they were still in college together, strolling across campus. At five-eleven, Michael was three inches taller than she was, but her legs were long, and she had no trouble keeping up. She had dressed tonight in jeans and boots and a navy peacoat, a red woolen hat pulled down over her short blond hair. Mollie rushed ahead of them, eager to find a suitable tree, gushing over every huge one that caught her eye.

“Mom!”

Her voice rising on a triumphant note of discovery.

Warily, Sarah went to her.

She was standing beside a stubbled, potbellied man wearing brown woolen gloves with the fingers and thumbs cut off, a green hat with earflaps, baggy brown corduroy trousers, and soggy high-topped workmen’s boots. His row of trees, strung with tiny lights from one end to the other and flanked by a Chinese restaurant on the left and a dry-cleaning shop on the right, leaned against the brick side of the building behind them. One of his gloved hands was buried in a sheaf of branches and wrapped around the slim upper trunk of the tree Mollie had selected. Chewing on the stub of a dead cigar, he raised his eyebrows expectantly, awaiting Sarah’s verdict.

Her daughter stood before the casual cascade of strung lights, proud that she had found such a perfectly formed tree, no taller than the eight feet Sarah had prescribed, full and thick and dense with the bluest green needles. Touched by the faint glow of the lights, Mollie’s hair — cut straight to the shoulders and brushed in casual bangs on her forehead — took on the momentary look of soft beaten gold. Snowflakes fluttered past her face. Her eyes were wide in anticipation. A sudden gust of wind sent tendrils of blond hair drifting across her face, passing over her pale blue eyes like a silken curtain. All the innocence of Christmas seemed to glow in those suddenly revealed eyes, luminous and hopeful, as Mollie stood beside her cherished prize, her ferreted and coveted treasure, her eyes begging approval and acceptance. For one evanescent moment, Sarah felt this would be the last time she ever saw such innocence on the face of her child.

“It’s lovely,” she said, and went to her and held her close.

The message was on the answering machine when they got back to the apartment. The machine’s red message light blinked like a monster’s eye.

“Michael,” the woman’s voice said, “this is Jackie Diaz. Can you get back to me right away? I’m still at the office.”

They both looked up at the clock.

Six forty-seven.

Seconds later, the machine’s metallic voice announced the date and time of the call.

“Monday, December twenty-first, six thirty-one p.m.”

“Who’s Jackie Diaz?” Sarah asked.

“Narcotics, Manhattan South.”

“It can wait till after dinner,” Sarah said.

“Might be important,” Michael said.

He was already reaching for the phone.

“Michael, please,” she said. “I’m about to start...”

“This’ll just take a sec,” he said, and looked through his personal directory for Jackie’s number. Frowning, Sarah went to the freezer. Michael dialed. On the other end, the phone rang and rang and...

“Narcotics.”

“Detective Diaz; please.”

“Who’s calling?”

“ADA Welles.”

“Hold, please.”

Michael waited. Across the room, Sarah was noisily tossing plastic dishes into the microwave. In the television den, Mollie was tuned in to MTV.

“Michael, hi, sorry, I was down the hall. Can you get here right away?”

“What is it?”

“I just ran a routine buy-bust, six ounces of coke from a turd named Dominick Di Nobili. I’ve been questioning him for the past two hours. He’s ready to squeal like a pig.”

“About what?”

“Mob shit, Michael.”

“Be in my office in half an hour.”

The light snow had turned into a full-fledged blizzard.

If no one had mentioned the mob, no one would have been here on a night like tonight; the meeting would have been postponed at least till the snow stopped. But someone had mentioned the mob, and so Detective/Second Grade Jacqueline Diaz and Deputy Unit Chief Michael Welles were here in room 667 at One Hogan Place to hear what Dominick Di Nobili had to say for himself.

Jackie was twenty-three or — four, Michael guessed, a diminutive redhead of Puerto Rican ancestry, born and raised in Brooklyn, and educated at John Jay. She was still wearing the blue jeans and hooded sweatshirt she’d been wearing when the routine buy went down. Michael had worked with her before, when she was an undercover with Street Crime and he was a prosecutor in the Career Criminal program. She liked working with him, and she’d called him now because it looked like she’d stumbled onto real meat in his new bailiwick, which happened to be organized crime.

Di Nobili had begun shaking in his boots the minute she flashed the tin and clapped the cuffs on him and her informant, who’d been taken off in another car, never to be heard from since; good snitches were hard to come by, and she didn’t want to burn him. Di Nobili, on the other hand, was looking at fifteen to life on an A-1 felony, which was the sale of the six ounces of cocaine. Even before she read him his rights, he was begging for mercy, telling her they’d kill him, telling her she had to let him go, this was the first time he’d done anything like this...

“A virgin, huh?”

“No, I mean it, please, you got to listen to me, they’ll kill me, I mean it.”

“Who’s that?”

“All of them!”

“Which narrowed the field a bit,” she told Michael now. “What it turned out...”

What it turned out was that Di Nobili, although a waiter by profession, happened to be an inveterate horseplayer by avocation. Worse than that, he was a gambler who invariably lost, and it seemed he was now into a Manhattan loan shark for some fifteen thousand bucks, and had failed to meet last week’s minimum payment of $750. This oversight had earned him a severe beating, witness his two black eyes and his swollen lip. Moreover, the shy had threatened to kill him if he didn’t come up with the full fifteen K plus two weeks’ interest by Christmas Day, which was arbitrarily chosen as settlement date, little coal in Dom’s stocking this year.

“Now this is where it gets really interesting,” Jackie said. “Di Nobili takes his case to a lady friend of his who’s very well connected, hmm? Her connection, according to Di Nobili, is a capo in Queens, where Di Nobili lives. The Colotti family, do you know the people?”

“I know the people,” Michael said.

“I go uh-huh, because now I’m beginning to smell roses here, even though I know he may be full of shit because he got caught selling six fuckin’ ounces of coke. The capo he’s talking about is the lady friend’s cousin, and he owns a restaurant in Forest Hills. His name is Jimmy Angelli, also known as Jimmy Angels, ring a bell?”

“Vaguely.”

“So the lady friend takes Dom to her cousin, and Dom explains that he can’t possibly come up with fifteen K plus interest before Christmas, at which time this loan shark’ll kill him. He really believes this. Now you know and I know that nobody ever kills anybody who owes him money because then he’ll never get the money back. But Dom doesn’t know this, so he’s wetting his pants because he thinks he’s going to hell for Christmas. Jimmy Angels listens patiently because Dom’s lady friend is his cousin, after all, and he owes at least this much respect to his father’s brother. He asks Dom who this loan shark might be, and Dom tells him it’s a person named Salvatore Bonifacio, also known as Sal the...”

“Sal the Barber,” Michael said. “The Faviola family in Manhattan.”

“The Faviola family,” Jackie said, and nodded. “Who so far, since Anthony went bye-bye, is still on good terms with the Colotti family.”

“That’s what we think, anyway,” Michael said.

“That’s what we think too. Territories nicely divided, nobody killing anybody for stupid reasons. So far.”

“So far,” Michael agreed.

“Anyway... because of his cousin, Jimmy Angels agrees to go see a capo he knows in the Faviola family, to ask if he, the capo, could maybe ask Sal the Barber to take the pressure off this very good friend of Jimmy’s dear cousin. The capo tells Jimmy he’ll see what he can do... this all took place yesterday, by the way. Dom’s latest payment was due Friday, which is when they ran him through the wringer. Saturday he didn’t show up for work because he looked like a steam roller ran over him, and Sunday he went to see his lady friend, who took him to Jimmy Angels and so on.”

“Got it.”

“This morning the Faviola capo...”

“What’s his name?”

“Di Nobili doesn’t know.”

“Okay.”

“... calls Jimmy Angels with a proposition. He goes through all the respect bullshit first — this is a matter of respect, you owe someone money, you don’t pay him it shows a lack of respect, ta-da ta-da ta-da — and then he tells him if his cousin’s friend is willing to work off the debt, they might have an errand he can run for them. And if he does okay the first time, maybe there’ll be other errands in the future, till he works off the debt completely, how does that sound? You understand, this is strictly a favor the Faviola family is doing for the Colotti family, respect, honor, all that bullshit all over again.”

“Let me guess what the errand was,” Michael said.

“You’re ahead of me.”

“Dom is the courier who delivers six ounces of cocaine for them...”

“... and innocently walks into a sting we’ve been setting up for weeks. Neither family knew what Dom was walking into, of course, they still don’t know, for that matter. Which is why this is so sweet, huh? Before, he only owed the Faviola loan shark. But now he also has to worry about the Colottis ’cause they went to bat for him. He’s in terror, Michael, believe me,” Jackie said, and grinned. “He’s ready to sell his mother.”

“You done good,” Michael said, and returned the grin. “Let’s go get him.”

There was neither a video camera nor a tape recorder in the room, no one taking shorthand, no one scribbling notes, no one watching through a one-way mirror. The conversation would be strictly off the record.

Di Nobili was a bear of a man wearing a sports jacket and gray flannel slacks over a blue turtleneck sweater. Brown loafers. Hair thinning a bit. Clean-shaven. Except for the shiners and the fat lip, he looked to Michael like a suburban husband who’d once played college football. According to Jackie, though, the only athletic activity Di Nobili had ever performed — aside from rumored assaults hither and yon — was bodybuilding during the six years he’d spent at Ossining on a B-felony conviction. His record indicated that he was thirty-nine years old, three years older than Michael. Even if he took the minimum fall on the pending charges, he’d be fifty-four when he got out of jail. He wasn’t worried about jail, though; he was worried about getting killed.

“You understand, don’t you,” Michael said, “that you belong to us?”

“I understand that.”

“We’ll relocate you and keep you safe from these people, but that means you’ll do exactly what we tell you to do. Otherwise, you can roll the dice and take your chances with us in court or them on the street.”

“I want to cooperate here,” Di Nobili said.

“Good. I want you to read this and sign it.”

“What is it?”

“A waiver of arraignment,” Michael said, and handed it to him. The paper read:

“Nobody informed me of this,” Di Nobili said.

“You’re being informed now,” Michael said.

“I thought you said you were gonna relocate me.”

“If you’re not shitting us,” Jackie said. “If you are shitting us, we’ve still got the flash as evidence, and all bets...”

“The what?”

“The flash money. The twenty-three grand you accepted for the dope.”

“Oh.”

“If you’re shitting us, all bets are off.”

“I’m not shitting you.”

“Fine. Then sign the fuckin’ waiver,” Jackie said.

“I want to read it all first.”

“What does that mean?” Di Nobili asked.

“It means if we arraign you, they’ll know you were busted.”

“Oh.”

“And you’ll be worthless to us.”

“Oh.”

“So?” Michael said. “You want to sign it?”

“Yeah, okay,” Di Nobili said.

He signed the waiver and dated it. Jackie witnessed it.

“Okay,” Michael said, “where’d you pick up the dope?”

“A butcher shop in Brooklyn.”

“Who gave it to you there?”

“Guy named Artie. I never saw him before in my life. I was supposed to go in and tell him I was Dominick here for the pork chops. He gave me a package wrapped like meat. In like that white paper, you know?”

“Who told you what to say?”

“Sal the Barber. He’s the only one I know in this whole thing.”

“How about Jimmy Angels? You know him too, don’t you?”

“I never met him. He’s my friend’s cousin.”

“What’s your friend’s name?”

“I want to leave her out of this.”

“Listen,” Jackie said sharply. “Maybe you didn’t understand the man. You want to play golf here or you want to fuck around?”

“Huh?” Di Nobili said.

“Tell him your girlfriend’s name. The man’s deputy chief of the Organized Crime Unit, we’re wasting his fucking time here.”

“Her name is Lucy.”

“Lucy what?”

“Angelli. She’s Jimmy’s cousin.”

“Sal told you where to pick up the stuff, is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“And where to deliver it.”

“Yeah, he gave me the name Anna Garcia, I was supposed to meet her outside this take-out joint in Chinatown.”

“That’s the name I was going by,” Jackie said, and smiled. “I went with another undercover, guy weighs two hundred pounds, case old Dom here decided to hit me on the head and steal the dope.”

“Yeah,” Di Nobili said glumly.

“What else?” Michael asked.

“He said I should expect twenty-three grand in exchange for the coke.”

“Sal did?”

“Yeah.”

“Who were you supposed to deliver the money to?”

“Sal.”

“Where?”

“A restaurant named La Luna.”

“Where’s that?”

“Fifty-Eighth Street.”

“You’ve met him there before?”

“Yeah. To make payments on the loan.”

“What was he charging you?”

“Five points a week.”

“Not exactly Chase Manhattan,” Jackie said.

“When were you supposed to meet him?”

“You mean today?”

“Today, yes.”

“Right after it went down.”

“That was six o’clock,” Jackie said. “That makes you a little late, Dom.”

“Yeah, it makes me a little late,” Di Nobili said, and started looking very worried again.

“I want you to call him,” Michael said. “Have you got a number for him?”

“Yeah.”

Michael went to a file cabinet across the room, opened a drawer, and took from it a wrapped telephone pickup the tech unit had bought at Radio Shack. Attaching the suction cup to the earpiece of his phone, he said, “This is what I want you to say to him. Tell him everything went down the way it was supposed to, but you had a flat tire, and you had to have it fixed, which the garage just finished doing. You got that so far?”

“No, I’m a fucking moron,” Di Nobili said.

Michael looked at him.

“Mister,” he said, “you want me to go home, is that it?”

“I’m sorry,” Di Nobili said.

“Just keep on being an asshole,” Michael said, “and I’m out of here in a minute. Capeesh?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Good,” he said, and plugged the cable into his taping and monitoring deck. “If he asks you what took so long to get a flat fixed, you tell him it’s the holidays and the weather is bad.”

“Will he buy that?” Jackie asked.

“I think so,” Di Nobili said.

“Make sure he does,” Michael said. “Tell him you’ll bring the money to him now, but it might take a while, the streets haven’t been plowed yet, traffic’s backed up, whatever you want to say. I want to buy a few hours,” Michael said, turning to Jackie, “give us time to wire him, set up the excuse for...”

“What do you mean?” Di Nobili said. “You’re gonna wire me?”

“He still doesn’t understand,” Jackie said, shaking her head.

“You’ll be going in wired, yes,” Michael said. “Any problems with that?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Call him.”

Di Nobili fished a slip of paper from his wallet, consulted it, and then, holding it in his left hand, punched out the number with his right hand. The equipment was set up so that everything being taped could be monitored simultaneously; Michael and Jackie both put on earphones. The phone rang once, twice, three times...

“La Luna,” a man’s voice said.

“Let me talk to Sal,” Di Nobili said.

“Who’s this?”

“Dominick Di Nobili.”

“He knows you?”

“He knows me.”

“Hold on.”

Michael nodded approval. He noticed that Di Nobili had broken out in a cold sweat.

“Hello?”

A man’s voice. Gruff.

“Sal?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Dom.”

“Where the fuck are you, Dom?”

“I’m in a garage on Canal Street. I just had a flat tire fixed.”

“You know what time it is?”

“Yeah, it’s late, I know.”

“I been waitin’ for your call since six o’clock.”

“I was lookin’ for a phone booth when I got the flat.”

“How’d it go?”

“Fine.”

“Any problems?”

“No problems.”

“And you’re where now?”

“The garage that fixed the flat. I got to pay my bill, and then I’m out of here.”

“What took you all this time to get a flat fixed?”

“It’s the holidays. Also the traffic’s terrible. And I don’t know this fuckin’ part of the city,” he said, improvising. “Time I found an open garage...”

“So is it fixed now?”

“Yeah, I told you.”

“So when can you get here? I been waitin’ here two fuckin’ hours for you.”

“I can come there right now, you want me to.”

“Yeah, do it.”

“But I got to warn you, the roads are really terrible, Sal, it’s a fuckin’ blizzard out there. It might take me a while t’get uptown, I mean it.”

“You’re on Canal, what the fuck’s gonna take you so long to get to Fifty-Eighth?”

“You should see it out there, Sal. There’s cars stuck all over the place...”

“I don’t give...”

“... slippin’ and slidin’, I never seen anything like this in my life.”

“So get a dogsled. I don’t give a shit it takes you till midnight, I’ll be here waitin’ for you.”

“Okay, but it might be a long wait, is all I’m sayin’.”

“I got nothin’ else planned,” Sal said, and hung up.

Di Nobili looked at Michael.

“Good,” Michael said.

It was close to ten o’clock when Di Nobili walked into La Luna Restaurant on Fifty-Eighth Street and Eighth Avenue. Di Nobili was wearing under his clothing two pieces of equipment: a JBird digital disc recorder and a KEL transmitter. An empty car had been parked across the street from the restaurant. It was equipped with a repeater that would receive the signal from Di Nobili’s transmitter and send it out again, at a much higher frequency, to the unmarked sedan in which Jackie and Michael were parked three blocks away. There would be two recordings made, one on the JBird’s microchips, the other on the monitoring tape. They had warned Di Nobili not to sit too close to the clatter of silverware or china, or anywhere near a jukebox or a speaker. He had told them Sal usually conducted business in a quiet corner booth near the kitchen. Also, at this hour on a Monday night, there shouldn’t be too many customers in the restaurant. They were hoping there wouldn’t be.

Jackie had previously signed out for the twenty-three thousand they’d used in the buy-bust, but this was a whole new operation, and if Di Nobili’s information proved useless, they would need the flash as evidence when they brought him to trial on the Section 220. Michael personally signed out for a fresh wad of cash — which happened to be five grand short. The shortage was what Dom would attempt to explain to Sal the Barber in the next ten minutes. This was why they’d needed to buy the extra time, so that Dom could reasonably account for how he’d happened to come up with eighteen thousand dollars instead of the twenty-three he’d got for the dope. They were hoping the cash discrepancy, and Dom’s explanation for it, would lead to the next step in the escalation.

Neither of them was wearing earphones, which would have been noticeable from the sidewalk. Instead, the monitoring and recording equipment sat on the floor of the car, the volume control turned up. They waited expectantly now, a man and a woman who looked like a loving couple with eyes only for each other, but who were instead two law enforcement officers who were all ears. Softly, silently, the snow fell relentlessly on the car, covering it in white.

“Took you long enough,” Sal said.

Sal Bonifacio, he of the gruff voice, the short temper, and the quick fists. Sal the Barber.

“Yeah, well, I told you,” Dom said.

“Where’s the money?”

“Right here.”

Silence. Dom undoubtedly taking the envelope of cash out of his pocket, handing it over to Sal.

“She test it?”

“No.”

“I’m surprised. Must be she trusts us, huh?”

Sal laughing. Dom joining in. Honor among thieves. Good cause for laughter.

“What’d she look like?”

“Who?”

“The cunt. Anna Garcia.”

“Good-looking redhead.”

In the car, Jackie whispered, “Thanks, Dom.”

“What I hear, I wouldn’t mind boffin’ her.”

“Me neither,” Dom said, and both men laughed again.

“Regular fan club,” Jackie whispered.

“But she didn’t test it, huh?” Sal said.

“She didn’t say nothin’ about it, so I didn’t say nothin’, either.”

“Good thinking. Did you count this money?”

“I counted it.”

“Then why’s there only eighteen here?”

Michael held his breath.

“Well... that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Dom said.

“I’m listenin’.”

“You see...”

“This better be good, Dominick. ’Cause if you think what happened to you Friday was bad, then you don’t know what can really happen when I’m pissed off. Where’s the other fuckin’ five grand?”

“You see, on the way here...”

“Two fuckin’ hours to get here, Dominick. You call me eight o’clock, you get here ten o’clock. What are you, the Two-Hour Man, Dominick? You get the cash at six, you call me at eight, you get here at ten, and you’re five grand short? Where’s the rest of the fuckin’ money, Dominick?”

“I lost it in a crap game.”

“You what?”

“I...”

“You’re dead, Dominick.”

“Listen, Sal, I...”

“No, no, you’re dead.”

“Please, Sal, I can ex—”

“This is how you repay a favor? I’m supposed to go to Frankie, tell him you bet it?”

“Frankie who?” Michael whispered.

“You think you can just steal money from...”

“I didn’t steal it, Sal. I borrowed it. To get in this...”

“You borrowed it from who, Dominick?”

“From you. Temporarily.”

“Dominick, you already owe me fifteen grand plus interest. By Friday, when it comes due, that’ll be sixteen thousand five hundred fuckin’ dollars you owe me, Dominick. Are you saying you borrowed another five grand from me? Without first asking for it?”

“I was gonna tell you when I saw you. Which is what I’m doing now.”

“You’re telling me you borrowed another five grand from me, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“You dumb fuckin’ shit, this ain’t me you’re jerkin around, this is Frankie Palumbo whose money you bet!”

“O-kay!” Michael said.

“Frankie does a favor for that shithead Angelli in Queens whose ugly cousin you’re fuckin’, you think the whole world don’t know it, a married man? Does Angelli know he asked Frankie a favor for a married man fuckin’ his cousin? And this is the way you pay Frankie back? This is the respect you show for a man whose ass you should be kissing in Macy’s window? You know what’s going to happen to you now? First...”

“Sal...”

“First, I’m gonna personally beat the shit out of you for embarrassing me in front of Frankie, and then I’m gonna turn you over to him, and he’s gonna make sure you never steal money from nobody in the Faviola family ever again. You think you understand that, Dominick?”

“Let me talk to Jimmy again, okay?” Dom said. “Let me explain to him what...”

“You don’t have to talk to Jimmy no more, Jimmy done everything he could for you. This ain’t Colotti business no more, this is Faviola business. Where’s your fuckin’ respect?”

“Jimmy can explain it to him.”

“There’s nothin’ to explain. You stole five fuckin’ grand from Frankie Palumbo after he done a favor for you. What’s there to explain?”

“I thought I was borrowin’ it from you, Sal.”

“You mean you thought you were stealin’ it from me.”

“No, no. I was gonna pay you interest, same as before.”

“What? Pay me interest? You fuckin’ piece of shit, you can’t meet your payments now, how’d you expect to pay me on another five grand?”

“I figured the same arrangement as before.”

“Without askin’ me first?”

“I figured I’d tell you later.”

“You’re a dumb fuck, Dominick.”

“I realize that now. I shoulda ast you first. But I really thought this was your money, Sal, I didn’t know...”

“Yeah, well it ain’t.”

“I’m really sorry I done this, Sal, embarrassin’ the two families this way, I’m really sorry, Sal.”

“You shoulda thought about that before doin’ something so stupid.”

“I thought I was borrowin’ it.”

“Stupid fuck,” Sal said, and Michael visualized him shaking his head. There was a long silence. Jackie looked at Michael. Michael shrugged. They waited.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” Sal said, “this is already out of my hands, Dom. You really stepped out of line this time. I call Frankie about this, he’ll tell me to break both your fuckin’ legs and throw you in the river.”

“Maybe when you call him, you can ask him to talk to...”

“I call him, I can tell you what his response is gonna be. He’s gonna say don’t bother me with this shit, take care of it.”

“Maybe Jimmy’d be willing to guarantee the loan...”

“Why would...”

“... while I work it off.”

“Work it off how? You mean deliver some more coke and get paid for it and then go lose the money in some other crap game, is that what you had in mind, you stupid shit?”

“He’s getting mad all over again,” Jackie said.

“Could you at least ask him?” Dom said.

“Ask him what?”

“To sit down with Jimmy, talk it over.”

“He’ll say fuck Jimmy and fuck you too. He already went out of his way, and this is how you show your gratitude? That’s what he’ll say, I’m tellin’ you right now.”

“Just ask him, Sal. Please.”

“A sitdown, huh?”

“Please.”

“If I call Frankie... and I’m only sayin’ if... he’s gonna want this on his terms and at his convenience, I can promise you that. You caused a lot of fuckin’ trouble here, Dom, the two families, and now you want a sitdown, which is bringing two important people together to discuss your fuckin’ fuckup. That takes balls, I gotta tell you. How do you know Angelli’ll guarantee the loan? How do you...??”

“Well, I don’t know. My friend’ll have to ask him.”

“Who you’re fuckin’.”

“Well.”

“I better be some kind of diplomat,” Sal said.

“You’re gonna call him?”

“Wait right here. You move out of this booth, you better run all the way to Yugoslavia.”

There was the sound of footsteps retreating. And now that the two men were no longer talking, Michael could hear other sounds in the restaurant, the muted voices of busboys and waiters as they began closing down for the night, the clink of silverware as the tables were set for tomorrow’s lunch crowd, the sound of a radio being tuned to a talk show. They waited. The snow kept falling.

“Okay.”

Sal’s voice again.

Closer as he slid into the booth.

“You’re a very lucky man, Dominick. He said Jimmy should call him, they’ll set something up for after Christmas.”

“Thank you,” Dominick said.

“You better fuck his cousin good between now and then,” Sal said.

It was still early enough in the afternoon for the beach to be unbearably hot. Even in the shade of the striped umbrella, Sarah felt uncomfortable, but she suspected this had less to do with the heat than with her sister’s conversation. Heather was telling her that she’d wanted to kill her husband the moment she’d found out. The island was French, women went topless on the beaches here. Heather sat bare-breasted on the blanket under the umbrella, saying she’d wanted to smash in his face with a hatchet. Her sister sitting topless made Sarah feel yet more uncomfortable, people walking by. She herself had not yet found the courage to take off her bikini top. Probably never would.

“Like when he was sleeping,” Heather said. “I wanted to pick up a hatchet and smash in his face.”

“Oh come on,” Sarah said.

“I mean it. Smash his face in. Then leave the house, fly somewhere out of the country, disappear from sight.”

The beach was on the southern side of the island, in an isolated cove far from the many hotels clustered on St. Bart’s Atlantic side. The house their parents owned was on a small verdant hill overlooking the beach, a good thousand yards from the nearest house, a twenty-minute Mini-Moke ride to the nearest good hotel in Morne Lurin. Mollie was inside the house, napping. Yolande, her mother’s housekeeper, was sweeping off the wooden verandah that ran around the house on three sides. The sound of her broom swished a whispered counterpoint to their conversation, such as it was. The tide was going out. Lazy wavelets lapped the shore. All was tranquil and serene, but her sister was telling her she’d felt like doing murder. Sarah didn’t want to hear any of this. She felt trapped on the sweltering beach.

“This was after I found out about his little bimbo,” Heather said. “He used to come home late from the office, tell me he was working after hours on this important account, that important account, I believed him. Her name was Felicity, I wanted to kill her, too. I kept wishing I’d come home and find him in bed with her, kill them both with the same hatchet, chop up their faces, disappear from sight. Come down here afterward, but this’d be the first place the police would look, am I right?”

“Probably,” Sarah said.

“This was right after Halloween, when I found out. It was a Sunday night, a woman in the building was giving a Halloween party. I went dressed as a sexy witch. Doug went dressed as a hairy warlock. Some guy supposed to be Dracula kept chasing me all over the place, telling me he wanted to bite me on the neck. Doug had the gall later to tell me it made him jealous, the count wanting to bite me on the neck. He’s screwing little Felicity blind two, three nights a week, he pretends to be jealous of some drunken jackass with fake fangs.”

She shook her head in wonder. A drop of sweat rolled down between her naked breasts.

“He called her later that night,” she said. “That’s how I found out.”

“How?” Sarah asked.

“I got up to pee — I always pee the whole night through when I’ve had too much wine, don’t you? Doug wasn’t in bed. This is three in the morning, I think, ‘Where’s Doug?’ Reasonably, no? Three in the morning? Is Doug in the bathroom? Is Doug also peeing? Will I have to wait in line? Or shall I go use the bathroom down the hall, off the study? But no, Doug is not in the bathroom, the bathroom is empty. So I relieve myself, as they say, and I go back into the bedroom, and Doug still isn’t in bed, so where is Doug? Overwhelmed by curiosity — as who wouldn’t be, my dear, it’s three in the morning — I go out in the hall, and I see a light burning in the study, and I call out ‘Doug?’ and I hear a click. Click. Just a tiny little click but I know it’s somebody hanging up a phone. Three o’clock in the morning, and my husband’s making a phone call down the hall. Well, he comes out of the study wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a shit-eating grin, and he tells me he had to look up a word in the dictionary. A word? I say. Driving me crazy, he says. Couldn’t sleep. A word? I say again. What word? I’m still believing him, you see. I’m still thinking I must be mistaken about that click, it couldn’t have been him hanging up the phone, it had to be something else, maybe he was just closing the dictionary. Eohippus, he tells me. That’s the word he was looking up, three o’clock in the morning. Eohippus. You mean like the horse? I say. He says, ‘Yes, exactly, but how do you spell it? That’s what was driving me crazy.’

“Well, that’s reasonable, too, no? I mean, that’s something a person can understand, am I right? The burning question of whether it’s i-o or e-o? Three o’clock in the morning, we’re standing in the hall; and he’s telling me he got out of bed to go look up eohippus and it’s e-o, and now he can go back to sleep, which he promptly does, snoring, with his hand tucked between my legs. The next night, when I get home from work and he’s still at the office with one of his important accounts, the bastard, I look up eohippus. It’s e-o, all right. I figure, ‘Listen, there are stranger things than a man looking up eohippus three o’clock in the morning.’ But then the phone bill comes on November seventh.”

“Uh-oh,” Sarah said.

“Indeed. Listed under long-distance calls for the first day of November at two forty-eight in the morning is a call to Wilton, Connecticut. Twelve-minute call, so maybe I wasn’t wrong about that click, hmm? Gives the phone number and all, lo and behold. I call the phone company and tell them the number is unfamiliar to me, can they please let me know to whom it is listed? Very cool and very calm, to whom, mind you, even though my hand is shaking on the phone. The operator tells me the phone is listed to one Felicity Cooperman, who is a junior copywriter at the agency, who by the way curtsies me half to death every time I go up there. Nineteen years old if she’s a day, and my husband is calling her at two forty-eight in the morning on All Saints’ Day. That was when I decided to smash in his head with a hatchet the very first opportunity I got.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Sarah said.

“Cooler heads prevailed,” Heather said, and smiled.

She herself looked nineteen when she smiled. Big girlish grin cracking her face, blue eyes squinching shut. Thirty-two years old, still looked like a teenager, firm cupcake breasts, flat tummy, the long legs and lithe body of a team swimmer — which she’d been in high school. Well, no children. Which, considering her present situation, was a blessing, Sarah guessed.

“I called a lawyer recommended to me by the woman who threw the Halloween party who’s herself been divorced three times. I told her a friend of mine was having trouble with her husband, and so on and so forth, lying in my teeth, I don’t think she believed me for a minute. Anyway, the lawyer tells me I should put a tail on Mr. Douglas Rowell, which I agree to do, and it turns out I was mistaken in my surmise, he isn’t screwing young Felicity blind two, three times a week, he’s screwing her deaf, dumb, and blind every day on his lunch hour, plus the two, three times a week he has to work late on all those important accounts of his. You should hear the tapes, Sarah, they’re...”

“You’ve got tapes?”

“Well, a tape, actually. I’ll play it for you some night.”

“Here? With you?”

“No, no. Actually, it’s in the lawyer’s office. Strictly X-rated, not for the kiddies. Doug’s Delicious Dick, starring nineteen-year-old Felicity Cooperman in the role she made famous, delivering the unforgettable line, ‘I just adore sucking your gweat big dick, golly gee, I can just come heaps sucking that big bee-yoo-ti-ful dick of yours,’ the little bitch!” Heather said, and flicked angrily at a sand fly. “I could kill them both,” she said. “With a hatchet!”

“Don’t tell that to Michael when he gets here.”

“When will that be, anyway?”

“As soon as he can get away. Something important came up.”

This was the twenty-eighth of December. Sarah had taken Mollie down on the day after Christmas. Michael was still up north; apparently some sort of big meeting was to take place today, and the DA had insisted he stay in town for it. Heather hadn’t yet told her parents that she and Doug were separated. Wait till she dropped that bombshell. Little Dougie? Sweet little Dougie? Yes, Mom, sweet little Dougie with the big bee-yoo-ti-ful dick little Felicity just adores sucking. They were in London at the moment, at Claridge’s, where they went every year at this time. Stay as long as you like, darlings. We won’t be back till the middle of January.

“And when he does get here...”

“Yeah?”

“Put on your top.”

“Mom?”

Twelve-year-old Mollie, standing on the verandah looking as sleepy-eyed as an eight-year-old and wearing only white cotton panties in possible emulation of her aunt. Brown as a pudding after only two days in the Caribbean sun, she blinked into the glare and said, “Can I go in the water now?”

“Come on down, sweetie,” Sarah called.

Her sister shot her a look. She wasn’t yet finished with her one-sided conversation, and she didn’t need a child intruding. Impatiently, silently scowling, she watched as Sarah hugged her daughter close and asked if she’d had a good nap, and why didn’t she ask Yolande to give her some cookies and milk, and then she could put on her bathing suit and maybe Mommy and Aunt Heather would go in the water with her. Aunt Heather sat frowning through all of this. There were more important conversations than those with a twelve-year-old child. Besides, why did Sarah persist on calling herself Mommy and talking virtual baby talk to a twelve-year-old with perceptibly budding breasts? All this was on Heather’s face as Mollie walked flat-footed back into the house.

“I wanted to go to bed with every man in sight,” Heather said. “Have you ever felt that way?”

“No,” Sarah said.

“Kill him first, then go to bed with every construction worker in New York,” Heather said.

Sarah glanced toward the verandah. Her daughter had already gone into the house.

“I mean, this was a violent need for revenge. This wasn’t your garden-variety urge to stray — which I never did, by the way, fool that I was, and more’s the pity. Have you ever?”

“Ever what?” Sarah asked.

“Strayed.”

“Cheat on Michael, do you mean?”

“Well, who else would you cheat on? He’s your husband, isn’t he?”

“I’ve never cheated on him, no.”

“I’ve gone to bed with sixteen men since I found out about Doug. That was on the day after Halloween, less than two months ago. Sixteen men in less than two months, that comes to a different man every four days, give or take a few percentage points. If my lawyer knew, he’d kill me.”

“I think you ought to be careful,” Sarah said.

“Not with that tape in our hands.”

“I’m not talking about a divorce settlement. I’m talking about...”

“Fuck safe sex, I don’t care anymore,” Heather said. “Was Michael your first one?”

“No,” Sarah said.

“Who was?”

“A boy at Duke.”

“You never told me.”

“I feel funny telling you now.”

“I was a virgin when I married Doug,” Heather said, and suddenly her voice broke. “Shit!” she said, and reached for her handbag, and yanked a lace-edged handkerchief from it just as the tears welled in her eyes. “I hate that bastard,” she said, “I really hate him. I can forgive her, she’s just a dumb impressionable... no, goddamn it, I hate them both!” she said, and covered her face with the handkerchief and began sobbing uncontrollably into it.

“Did you see that?” Andrew asked.

“Very healthy girl,” Willie said.

They were walking up the beach together, back toward where Andrew had parked the VW. Half an hour earlier, there hadn’t been anyone on the beach here in front of the big house, just the blanket and the striped umbrella and a paperback novel lying open on a towel. Andrew noticed details like that. The paperback novel. A romance novel. He’d wondered at the time who was reading it. Now he wondered which of the two blondes the book belonged to. The topless one who was crying, or the one trying to comfort her. He wondered if they were sisters. He wondered if they lived together in the house there.

“I meant did you notice she was crying?” he said.

“No. Who?”

“The one without the top.”

“No, I didn’t notice. If you want my opinion, they’re asking for it when they parade around naked like that. Even if that’s the custom with the French here.”

“Those two weren’t French,” Andrew said.

“How do you know?”

“The book was in English. I saw the title.”

“What book?”

“The one on the towel.”

When Andrew was a child, he’d been as blond as either of the two women they’d just passed. His hair had turned first a muddy blond and then the sort of chestnut brown it now was. His eyes, too, were a darker blue than they’d been when he was a boy, and whereas his ears were still a bit large for his face, they were not quite as prominent as they’d been then. He’d eventually grown into them, all kids with big ears do, but he still wore his hair somewhat long, perhaps as a reminder that he’d once worn it that way deliberately, to hide the big ears.

The beach ahead of them was empty now. The striped umbrella was some hundred yards behind them. It was a good half-mile to the car, perhaps a bit more than that. Their conversation turned to business again.

“How much are they asking?” Andrew said.

“You have to understand these people are amateurs,” Willie said.

“Worst kind of people to deal with. Did you explain the exchange to them?”

“They understand all that. Andrew, let me tell you something,” Willie said, and looked around to make sure they weren’t being overheard, even though the beach ahead and behind was empty.

Andrew admired the way Willie looked. He had to be at least sixty, some thirty years older than Andrew, but he had the well-toned, tanned appearance of a man who spent a lot of time swimming and sunning in the Caribbean. Andrew figured they were about the same height and weight — six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, give or take — but Willie seemed in much better shape. Both men were wearing swimming briefs. Andrew was still relatively white; he’d flown down only yesterday.

“They don’t care,” Willie said. “They just don’t have the vision. They think what they’ve got going’ll last forever, the demand’ll never dry up. What they’re saying is they don’t need what we can provide, they’re doing fine, they’ll keep on doing fine. If nothing’s broken, why fix it, you follow? So they just aren’t interested. I told them we’d be doing all the work, we’d do the spadework with the Chinese, we’d provide the ships, load and unload on both ends, this doesn’t matter to them. Since they don’t think they need us, the swap doesn’t interest them. They’re dumb amateurs, they can’t see the beauty of this thing.”

“Who’ve you been talking to?” Andrew asked.

“Alonso Moreno.”

“Does he know I’m here?”

“He knows you’re here.”

“Does he know we want an answer?”

“He knows that, too. Andrew, I told you, they don’t care.”

“Where’s he staying?”

“He’s got houses all over these islands. He stays where he wants to stay.”

“Where’s his house on this island?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you’ve been talking to him.”

“I have.”

“And you don’t know where he’s staying?”

“If you’re Alonso Moreno, you don’t send out cards with your address on them.”

“How do you get in touch with him?”

“Through a waiter at the hotel. I tell him I want a meet, he phones Moreno, sets it up.”

“Where have you been meeting?”

“On a boat. They pick me up on the dock in Gustavia.”

“Tell your waiter friend I want to see Moreno personally.”

“He’ll tell you to go fuck yourself, Andrew.”

“Tell him, anyway,” Andrew said, and smiled.

There was something chilling about that smile. It reminded Willie of Andrew’s father when he was young.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “When do you want this?”

Because Frankie Palumbo of the Faviola family in Manhattan was out of the goodness of his heart willing to listen to still further bullshit about this deadbeat thief who was somehow related to Jimmy Angelli of the Colotti family in Queens, he was the one who chose the location for the sitdown.

Lucy Angelli got the information from her cousin and immediately called Dom Di Nobili to tell him when and where the meeting would take place. She also told him that his presence was not called for; his fate would be determined privately by the two capos. Dom immediately reported the time and place to Michael.

It was bad news that they didn’t want Dom there when they talked; this meant they couldn’t send him in wired. But the DA’s Office, the FBI, and the NYPD conducted routine, long-standing surveillance on a day-by-day basis, and there were bugs already in place at many wiseguy hangouts where business was conducted. Michael made some calls to see if the Ristorante Romano on MacDougal Street was one of them. It was not. This meant they had to start from scratch.

Costumed as a quartet of New York’s Bravest, wearing firemen’s gear and carrying hoses and axes and all the other paraphernalia, four detectives from the DA’s Office Squad honored the place with a visit on Christmas Eve, ostensibly to extinguish a small electrical fire that had mysteriously started in the restaurant’s basement. During all their chopping and hacking and spritzing and shouting and swearing down there, they incidentally managed to tap into the restaurant’s telephone lines to provide a power source for the Brady bug they buried in the basement’s ceiling — and consequently the floor of the room above. This self-contained transmitter was the size of a half-dollar, and it was now positioned directly under the prestigious corner table Frankie Palumbo favored on his visits to the place. The owner of the Ristorante Romano tipped the “firemen” four hundred dollars when they left, this because he knew firemen were bigger thieves than anybody who came to the place, and he considered himself lucky they hadn’t helped themselves to the stolen twenty-year-old Scotch stacked in cases along the wall opposite the fuse boxes and telephone panels.

At three thirty on the afternoon of December twenty-eighth, while Sarah and Heather and Mollie splashed in the warm lucid waters off the house on St. Bart’s, Michael sat in a parked car with an ADA named Georgie Giardino, the Rackets Bureau’s most ardent mob-watcher.

Georgie’s grandfather had been born in Italy, and lived in America for five years before he got his citizenship papers, at which time he could rightfully be called an Italian-American. In Georgie’s eyes, this was the only time the hyphenate could be used properly. His parents had been born here of Italian-American parents, but this did not make them similarly Italian-Americans, it made them simply Americans. The two men meeting in the restaurant today had also been born in America, and despite their Italian-sounding names, they too were American. In fact, neither Frankie Palumbo nor Jimmy Angelli felt the slightest allegiance to a country that was as foreign to them as Saudi Arabia. Even their parents, similarly born in the good old U.S. of A., had little concern for what went on in Italy. Most of them would never visit Italy in their lifetime. Italy was a foreign country where, they’d been told, the food wasn’t as good as you could get in any Italian restaurant in New York. This was not like the Irish or the Jews, whose ferocious ties to Northern Ireland and Israel would have been considered seditious in a less tolerant land. The irony was that although these hoods called themselves “Italians,” they were no more Italian than Michael himself was. Or, for that matter, Georgie Giardino.

Frankie Palumbo and Jimmy Angelli were Americans, take it or leave it, like it or not. And like any other good Americans, they believed in a free society wherein someone who worked hard and played by the rules could prosper and be happy. The rules they played by were not necessarily the same rules most other Americans played by, but they did obey them. And they did prosper. Georgie despised them and their fucking rules. It was, in fact, his firm belief that until every last Mafioso son of a bitch was in jail, any American of Italian descent would suffer through association. That was why he was sitting alongside Michael today, freezing his ass off in a parked car two blocks from the Ristorante Romano, waiting to hear and record the conversation that would take place between two or more American gangsters in an Italian restaurant.

The first of them to arrive was Jimmy Angelli, one of the caporegimi of the Colotti family in Queens.

“Hey, Mr. Angelli, long time no see, what’s the matter you don’t come to the city no more.”

The restaurant owner, they surmised.

The city was Manhattan.

Anyone who lived in New York knew that there was the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island — and the City.

There was another man with Angelli.

They didn’t get his name till Angelli said, “Danny, sit over there.”

This was while the two men were still alone. Angelli was probably indicating that his goon sit with his back to the wall, where he could see anyone coming in the front door. It did not take too many restaurant rubouts before you learned where to sit.

Frank Palumbo and his goon arrived some ten minutes later, fashionably tardy as befitted the offended capo of Manhattan’s Faviola family. After all, some stupid cocksucker thief guaranteed by the Colotti family had shortchanged him five grand after he’d done them a favor. He could afford to play this one like the boss himself instead of one of a hundred lieutenants in the Faviola family.

At the recent trial of Anthony Faviola, convicted and sentenced boss of the notorious Manhattan family, the U.S. Attorney had introduced in evidence the taped conversations that were the result of a yearlong wiretap surveillance. On those tapes, a man identified as Anthony Faviola had, among other things, ordered two hit men to do several murders in New Jersey. The defense called his younger brother, Rudy, as a witness and he was the first to testify that on the night his brother had allegedly made the call from his mother’s house in Oyster Bay, Long Island, he was instead at his own palatial home in Stonington, Connecticut, playing poker with six legitimate businessmen. The six men were each called in turn, and each corroborated the fact that at eight twenty-seven that night — the time at which the incriminating interstate call was allegedly made — Anthony was laying a full house on the table, aces up. The jury didn’t believe any of them.

Anthony was now serving five consecutive lifetime sentences in the maximum-security prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. Four of these sentences were for the murders he’d ordered. The fifth had been tacked on under the federal Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute — familiarly known as the RICO statute — under which murders committed in the furtherance of criminal enterprise were punishable by lifetime sentences.

Anthony was locked in his cell for twenty-three hours every day, and his visiting privileges were severely limited as well because he’d been deliberately sent to a federal prison far from family, friends, and former associates. Some diehard followers insisted that he was still running the mob from inside, but from everything the DA’s Office had been able to learn, his underboss brother, Rudy, next in line and loyal to the end, was now boss — with Anthony’s blessings. Rudy was affectionately known as “the Accountant,” a nickname that had nothing to do with balancing books. When both brothers were coming along as soldiers in the Tortocello family, Rudy had built a reputation as an enforcer, a man to whom you had better account or else.

Sitting in the parked car now, Michael and Georgie were hoping to hear something that would connect Rudy Faviola to the dope deal that had gone down outside a takee-outee restaurant in Chinatown. Six ounces of cocaine was an A-l felony. If they could tie this to an additional felony and a misdemeanor, each committed within the past three years, then under Section 460.20 — defined as the Organized Crime Control Act — they might be able to send the new boss out to Kansas, too, Toto. Well, not quite. Anthony Faviola was serving federal time; an OCCA offender would be sent to a state prison.

“How you doin’, Jim?” Palumbo said. “You been waitin’ long?”

“Just a few minutes,” Angelli said. “You’re lookin’ good, Frank.”

“I could stand to lose a few pounds,” Palumbo said. “Over there, Joey.”

Indicating a chair for his goon, no doubt.

The men ordered wine.

The bug recorded the ritual Mafia foreplay.

The inquiring after one’s health and one’s family, the show of respect, esteem, and admiration.

Ta-da ta-da ta-da, as Jackie Diaz had put it.

The men did not order lunch.

Palumbo got down to brass tacks almost immediately.

“What do you suggest we do with this asshole you sent us?” he asked.

“I never even met the stupid fuck,” Angelli said.

“So that’s who you recommended me? Somebody you never met?”

“I was doing a favor for my cousin.”

“Some favor you done me, he fucks me out of five grand.”

“You’ll get the money back, Frankie.”

“When? How?”

“That’s what I want to work out with you.”

“You work it out with me, you think it’s gonna fly, huh?”

Advertising-agency talk.

“I’m hoping it will.”

“I still ain’t heard what you plan to do. All I know is somebody’s got five thousand bucks of my money. And from what Sal tells me, there’s another fifteen grand kickin’ around out there, plus interest. So who is this jih-drool, you’re goin’ out on a limb for him? We got good relations, this asshole’s gonna fuck them up, we ain’t careful.”

“Which is why we’re here,” Angelli said. “To make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Anybody else, it’d already be too late for talk. The man would be gone.”

“I know that.”

“We go back a long way, Jim...”

“I know that, too. That’s why I’m here today, Frank. To ask that we don’t let this thing get out of hand. We don’t do anything foolish could cause trouble between the families. We don’t want that, and we’re sure you don’t want that, either.”

“Who is this asshole, anyway, the fuckin’ Pope you’re defendin’ him this way?”

“My cousin’s in love with him, what the fuck can I do?” Angelli said.

“Does she know he’s married?”

“She knows. But he’s gettin’ a divorce.”

“Yeah, divorce my ass.”

“That’s what he told her.”

“How we gonna make this right, Jimmy?”

“How do you want it to go, Frank? You’re the one got hurt here, you tell me.”

“I’m glad to hear you talking this way.”

“What’s right is right,” Angelli said.

“I don’t know what to tell you. This is money that was stolen, you understand? I go higher with this, I know just what I’m gonna hear. Stolen money? Hey, come on. You know what to do, why you even bothering me with this? That’s what I’ll hear.”

“I thought,” Angelli said, and sighed heavily. “I thought... we all go back a long way. You, me... Rudy. Other families, there’s been trouble, but us, never. That’s ’cause there’s always been the proper respect, am I right, Frank?”

“Till now.”

“No. No, Frankie, don’t say that, please. This isn’t a matter of disrespect Colotti to Faviola, it ain’t that at all. This is a jerk we’re dealin’ with here, a man with no sense. Di Nobili’s a fuckin’ jerk, I admit it, I told my cousin what she sees in this jerk is beyond me. Women, what can I tell you? He’s a jerk, he’s a loser, he’s a fuckin’ thief, he’s all these things, I agree with you. But he’s also somebody not worth botherin’ with, you follow me, Frank? We can settle this without goin’ the whole nine yards. It don’t have to be that drastic, you understand what I’m sayin’? It ain’t even worth Rudy’s time to be thinkin’ of something so drastic. What I thought is if you talked to him, he might find it in his heart to give this jerk a break. That’s all I’m askin’. Figure out a way for this jackass to work it off. The fifteen, the additional five, take it out of his fuckin’ ass, work his ass off till he pays it all back.”

“You gonna guarantee it, Jimmy?”

“That’s askin’ a lot, Frank. I don’t even know the man. He’s a jerk my cousin’s involved with, I’m pleadin’ this for her, not for him. She’s flesh and blood, Frankie. She’s my first cousin. We were kids together, we grew up together. Like you and me. And Rudy.”

“Rudy, huh?”

“If you could talk to him...”

“Where you been, Jim?”

“What?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Palumbo said, but there was a note of finality in his voice. “I’ll talk it over with Le—”

There was the sound of his chair being shoved back, thunderously close to the bug.

“... and get back to you. That’s the best I can say right now. No promises.”

“Who?” Michael asked.

“Shhhh!”

The men were still talking, exchanging farewells, sending regards, thanking each other for having given the time to this important matter. But the business was finished, there was really nothing more to say. Now there was the sound of more chairs being shoved back, registering like an avalanche on the bug. Then footsteps. And the distant voice of the restaurant owner calling his farewells. And the sound of a door closing. And then only the restaurant’s background noises.

“Who did he say?” Michael asked.

“It sounded like ‘Lena.’”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Who the hell is Lena?”

“I don’t know.”

“That name mean anything to you? Lena?”

“Maybe it’s his wife’s name. Maybe Palumbo’s gonna talk it over with her.”

Michael looked at him.

“Well,” Georgie said, and shrugged.

“This is a terrible connection,” Sarah said. “Where are you?”

“At the office,” Michael said. “Shall I try it again?”

“Maybe I should call you back.”

“It’s cheaper from here, isn’t it?”

“Let me call you back, anyway.”

“Okay, good,” Michael said, and hung up.

She’d been dressing for dinner when he called, and she stood now in bra and panties in the largest guest room, hers through seniority whenever she and her sister were visiting together. There were four bedrooms in the house, all of them on the second floor, all with glorious views of the ocean. The master bedroom in particular, with its French doors opening on the sea, offered a vista to the south that encompassed miles of open water to Statia and St. Kitts. Behind the house, to the northwest, you could see all the way up the mountain to the houses surrounding the hotel on Morne Lurin, a spectacularly twinkling view at night. Sitting at the dressing table facing the window wall, Sarah dialed Michael’s office directly. Beyond the open French doors, the sun was beginning to dip toward the water, staining the sky in its wake.

“Organized Crime, Welles.”

“How do you do, Mr. Welles,” she said, “I wish to report a crime, please.”

“What is the crime, ma’am?” he asked, recognizing her voice at once.

“Reckless Abandonment,” Sarah said.

“No such crime, ma’am. We’ve got Abandonment of a Child, that’s Section Two-Six-Oh of the...”

“This is an adult,” she said. “The person abandoned.”

“An adult, yes, ma’am. Male or female?”

“Female, Mr. Welles. Very. Michael, I’m beginning to feel neglected. When are you...?”

“Ahhh, yes, Criminal Negligence, ma’am, Section One-Two...”

“When are you coming down here?”

“As soon as I can, honey.”

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. But I’ve got to keep at this. I may be onto something, Sarah. I won’t know till I dig a little deeper. Anyway, however this goes, I’ll be down for sure on New Year’s Eve.”

“That means we’ll only be together a day or so before we have to head home.”

“Two full days and three nights.”

“I still don’t see what’s so important about this. Did Scanlon cancel anyone else’s vacation?”

“Georgie had to postpone till tomorrow.”

“Then why don’t you leave tomorrow?”

“Then no one’d be here working the case.”

“What case?”

“That’s a secret.”

“Even from me.”

“Even from you.”

“Withholding Evidence from a Spouse, class E felony punishable by...”

“Move you,” he said.

“I love you, too. Please hurry down here.”

“As soon as I can, honey. What are your plans for tonight?”

“It’s my sister’s last night...”

“I know.”

“Yolande’s feeding Mollie right this minute. Heather and I are going into Gustavia for dinner, like grown-ups.”

“What are you wearing?”

“Later? Or right this minute?”

“Which would I like better?”

“Right this minute. But I haven’t got time.”

“Tell me, anyway.”

“Lacy white bra and panties.”

“Mmmm. High heels?”

“Not yet. Call me later, we’ll talk dirty.”

“What time?”

“Everyone should be asleep by eleven or so.”

“Why don’t you call me?”

“Okay. You’d better be alone.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

“Me too.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too,” she said.

“Later,” he said, and hung up.

There was laughter down the hall.

The place was so empty, it seemed to echo. About all that was happening in the criminal courts this week were a handful of arraignments in AR One and AR Two, and the processing of new arrests in the Complaint Room. Aside from a skeleton staff necessary to keep the wheels of justice barely grinding, the big gray complex on Centre Street was virtually devoid of personnel. Michael sat alone before the computer in the sixth-floor office. The calendar on the wall read December 28, the digital clock on his desk read 6:37 p.m. He’d give it a few more hours and then quit for the day, take a taxi uptown to Spark’s for a good steak. He felt as if he were the last man alive in a city demolished by the bomb. The laughter down the hall was gone now. There was the click of high-heeled shoes on the marble floor outside, fading. He turned back to the screen again.

Not all of the Faviola tapes had been computerized. There were more than eight thousand hours of conversation, and of these only a bit more than half had been transferred to computer disks since the trial ended this past August. The process was somewhat lackadaisical. Before the trial, the U.S. Attorney had incessantly sifted and resifted each and every conversation. The accumulated evidence had been used to send Anthony Faviola away forever, but there was nothing more that could be done to him. In fact, when Michael made his call to the Feds, they’d asked him what the hell he wanted with all that stuff? He told them he was doing background research, and they’d let it go at that. No one had expected any real explanation; everyone in law enforcement was well aware of the keen competition among agencies. Which was one of the reasons Sarah was in the Caribbean and Michael was here in New York looking for any reference to a person named Lena.

I’ll see what I can do, Palumbo had said. I’ll talk it over with Lena, and get back to you. That’s the best I can say right now. No promises.

Everyone in the DA’s Office felt certain that the moment Anthony Faviola got sent west, his younger brother, Rudy, took over as the new boss of the family. But Palumbo hadn’t said he’d talk it over with Rudy. In fact...

Michael switched on the tape again.

“Rudy, huh?”

“If you could talk to him...”

“Where you been, Jim?”

“What?”

Something derisive in Palumbo’s voice.

Where you been, Jim?

And then saying he’d talk it over with Lena.

So who the hell was Lena?

Frankie Palumbo was married to a woman named Grace. He had two daughters, one of them named Filomena — after his mother — and the other named Firenze, after his grandfather’s birthplace in Italy. Frankie was fifty-two years old and had never been to Italy, big surprise. There was no one named Lena in Anthony Faviola’s family. Nor in Rudy’s. Not a Lena in the carload.

So who is Lena, what is she? Michael wondered. And what the hell am I doing here in New York three days after Christmas, chasing Mafia ghosts on a computer, because my boss, my own personal boss of all bosses, thinks that if Rudy Faviola is not currently running the show, then we’d better learn damn fast who is.

Lena.

Michael fantasized a voluptuous dark-haired woman of indeterminate Mediterranean origin. Lena. And the swan? Oh? No kidding? In college, before he’d met Sarah, his taste had run to poetry and to dark-haired women... well, even though he’d known better, he’d still thought of them as girls, actually. He was now thirty-six, this was back during the seventies; Betty Friedan had published her Feminine Mystique a decade earlier, and Erica Jong had just begun telling the world about her ten thousand and one orgasms.

Michael was twenty-one when he met the first blonde he’d ever dated, the last girl — or even woman — he’d ever date again because that blonde happened to be a nineteen-year-old junior named Sarah Fitch whom he married a year later, after he’d graduated with his B.S. degree, and while she was still in her senior year. His parents helped him through law school — it was a matter of pride that he’d later repaid them every cent — until Sarah herself graduated with a B.A. and got a license to teach English, which she’d done here and there all over New York while he trudged uptown to Columbia. She still taught at the Greer Academy, where she’d settled in some eight years ago, after getting her master’s from NYU. He was always surprised when a woman obviously in her late twenties stopped “Mrs. Welles” on the street and told her how much she’d enjoyed being in her class. Well, Sarah was thirty-four now. She’d started teaching when she was twenty-three; those sixteen-year-olds back then were now in their late twenties.

Lena.

Maybe it wasn’t a woman’s name at all. No woman behind the throne here, no woman whose advice was earnestly sought. Maybe it was a man’s family name, maybe the Lena with whom Palumbo had to talk it over was a Johnny Lena or a Joey Lena or a Foonzie Lena. If so, had his name ever cropped up in the hundreds of conversations between the Brothers Faviola at all hours of the day and night? Many of these conversations were in crude code. The mob was ever alert to the marvels of electronic surveillance. When they weren’t talking what sounded totally innocuous to anyone listening but which obviously had great import to the chatterers themselves, they were turning on record players or water taps or showers or television sets to obscure whatever they were saying in plain English laced with a few bastardized Italian expressions like boff-on-gool and stroon-zeh and mah-nedge and jih-drool and mool-een-yahn. The U.S. Attorney had nailed Faviola on four murders because he’d been stupid enough to believe the place he was calling from was inordinately safe: his mother’s house in Oyster Bay. Who would have thought those sfasciumi could have got into Stella Faviola’s fortresslike, fenced-in, gray stone mansion on the North Shore, there to install their insidious listening devices?

Lena.

Earlier this evening, Michael had kicked up FAVIOLA, RUDY on the computer, and then he’d typed in LENA and hit the SEARCH key, and lo and behold there was not a single LENA, uppercase or lower, to be found. As a lark, he’d typed in LEDA and hit the same search key, and got nothing there, either, small surprise. This meant that in none of Rudy’s conversations with his brother had the name Lena, or for that matter Leda, been uttered — at least not on the tapes that had already been computerized.

Michael was praying there’d be something on the computer. He did not relish wading through thousands of pages of typed transcript, reading the remainder of the conversations word for word.

He decided to go straight for the jugular, do a wider search of the entire file, which was broken down into month-by-month folders starting in September of 1991, when the federal surveillance had begun in earnest. He called up each folder in turn, scanning them for the name Lena. Nothing for September or October of ’91. Zilch for November. Lots of Christmas talk in December, and a few near misses when the computer gave him first polenta, and then lenona, both of which contained the letters l-e-n-a in succession — close but no cigar. He went back to the drawing board, clicked the little box for Exact Match, and typed in the name with a capital L followed by the letters e, n, and a in lowercase. Lena. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

Nothing for January of 1992.

Nothing in February, either.

The computerized stuff ended with the conversations taped in March.

There was no Lena mentioned in that month, either.

With a mountain of transcripts looming before him, Michael went back to the little box he’d earlier clicked for an exact match, and canceled the command. He started again with the folder for January of ’92, searching for the letters l, e, n, and a in any combination in either upper or lower case.

In January, he got Anthony talking to someone about a new calendar for the year, obviously a code. Calendar. Later that month, he got him asking about a dry-cleaning delivery, probably another code, the letters coming up in the sequence l-e-a-n this time. Still later in the month, Anthony inquired about the price of a Macintosh Ilsi from a store called Computerland. In March, the last folder in the computer file, there was only a single l-e-n-a combination, in the name Leonard, whoever the hell he might have been. Michael still didn’t want to tackle those forbidding transcripts. In the possibility that he or Georgie had heard the name wrong, he widened the search so that the computer would call up anything even closely resembling the name Lena. If, for example, a transcribing typist had misspelled Lena as Lexna or even Leyna or Lina or Lema, chances are the computer would yank out the word unless it was really too preposterously distant.

He hit the SEARCH key.

In the folder for December of last year, Anthony had told his dear Rudy that he still hadn’t bought Leno anything for Christmas.

Leno.

Not Lena.

Leno with an o.

There were no other mentions of the name Leno in any of the conversations already computerized. Michael would have to hit the transcripts, after all.

Sighing heavily, he shut down for the night and looked at his watch. Quarter past eight — my, how the time does fly when you’re having a good time. He was ravenously hungry.

Heather had chosen the spot, a hotel restaurant with a poolside piano bar and a terrific view of the harbor. When they walked in, Heather in pink, Sarah in white, the piano player was doing a medley of Cole Porter tunes. He nodded in their direction and immediately segued into “I Get a Kick out of You,” which seemed a bit obvious to Sarah but which her sister seemed to appreciate nonetheless. They were shown to a table on the terrace, overlooking a wide curve of harbor with twinkling dockside lights and bobbing boats and beyond the dark water a cluster of softer yellow lights in the rolling hills. The night was soft. There was the sweet scent of frangipani on the air.

“I want something tall and dark and very strong,” Heather said to the waiter, and smiled and added, “To drink, that is,” compounding the felony. At his suggestion, she ordered a concoction called “Pirate’s Flagon,” which he said had seven different kinds of rum in it. Sarah ordered a Beefeater martini, on the rocks, couple of olives, what the hell. After two of those, she felt like calling Michael straight from the restaurant, tell him she’d taken off her lacy white panties in the ladies’ room and was now standing in white, high-heeled, ankle-strapped sandals at the wall phone, naked under her white pleated dress, what did he intend doing about it, huh? Instead, she ordered the fish special of the day, a red snapper papillote. Heather was looking a bit glassy-eyed after her seven kinds of rum times two. She ordered the curried goat and avocado in Antilles sauce. The waiter suggested a dry white wine — French, of course, what else? — and they were halfway through the bottle when the two men they’d seen on the beach earlier today walked in.

“I’ll take the young one,” Heather said.

“I’ll take Michael,” Sarah said.

“Michael’s ten thousand miles away.”

“Then I’ll take the young one,” Sarah said, and both women giggled like schoolgirls.

“Actually, the one with the white hair is better looking,” Heather said, looking over toward where the men were being seated at the other end of the curved terrace.

“Gray hair,” Sarah said.

“Looks white to me. Handsome as sin.”

“How’s the curried goat?” Sarah asked.

“Much better than the shrimp fricassee I had the other night,” Heather said, and glanced again toward where the men were now ordering drinks. “Do you think the white-haired one would like to fricassee me? I sure would like to fricassee him.”

“Gray-haired,” Sarah corrected again.

“The young one has big ears,” Heather said.

“The better to hear you,” Sarah said, lowering her voice and raising her eyebrows in warning.

“Clark Gable had big ears, you know. He was famous for his big ears,” Heather said. “Did you know that men with big ears are supposed to have big dicks, too?”

Sarah almost choked on her fish.

“That’s the truth,” Heather said.

“Anyway, it’s noses,” Sarah whispered.

“What is?”

“If you have a big nose, you’re supposed to have a big penis.”

“Did Pinocchio have a big penis?”

“Did Dumbo?” Sarah asked, and both women burst out laughing again.

“They’ll throw us out of here,” Heather said, covering her mouth with her napkin, trying to stifle the laughter.

“I wouldn’t blame them,” Sarah said.

“I think I’ll go ask him to dance.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Sarah said.

“Why not? My last night here? Kiss me my sweet, for tomorrow I die.”

“No one else is dancing.”

“Break the ice, what the hell.”

“Your goat’ll get cold.”

“Better my goat than something else,” Heather said, and grinned mischievously. “Why is it that whenever I feel like dancing, the goddamn band is playing something Latin?”

Actually, it seemed to Sarah that the piano player was still playing Cole Porter. Something from Kiss Me, Kate, in fact. Something that sounded very much like “So in Love with You Am I,” but maybe the beat was Latin, it was difficult to tell. She looked at her watch. If they got out of here by nine thirty, ten, she could call Michael by...

“Taxi waiting?” Heather asked.

“No, no. Sorry, I didn’t...”

“Am I boring you, sis?” Heather said.

“Of course not. I promised to call Michael again, that’s all.”

“But do I bore you? Tell me the truth, Sarah. I’m your sister, do you find me boring?”

“No, I find you very interesting, in fact.”

“But am I a boring person, Sarah? Tell me. Please.”

“No, you’re a fascinating person.”

“Then why did Doug find me boring?”

“I never got the impression he did.”

“Then why’d he start up with a nineteen-year-old twit?”

“I have no idea.”

“What do nineteen-year-olds talk about, anyway? Their trips to the record shop in the mall? Who do you think is more boring, Michael or Douglas?”

“I don’t think either one of them is boring.”

“I think Michael is boring.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that.”

“And put on my top when he gets here, I know, I know.”

“You’ll be gone when he gets here,” Sarah said. “If he gets here.”

“Don’t you find him boring?”

“No, I find him very interesting.”

“Don’t you find him too... lawyerly? I find lawyers very boring, Sarah. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. Lawyers are very boring. At least advertising isn’t boring. I think Michael is attractive, but very boring. Is he any good in bed?”

“Yes, he’s very good.”

“I don’t see how he can be. A boring person like that.”

“Well...”

“Really, sis. How can a boring person like Michael be any good in bed? At least Douglas isn’t boring. Wasn’t.”

“Well...”

“You don’t like me talking this way, do you?”

“Well, no, I don’t.”

“Have you ever noticed that if we put our husbands together, we get Michael Douglas?”

“What?”

“Michael and Douglas. Put them together you get a handsome movie star who’s definitely not boring, that’s for sure. Do you remember him with his pants down in Fatal Attraction? Tripping all over the room with what’s her name? Meryl Streep. Have you ever made passionate love like that with Michael? Where you can’t wait to take off your clothes?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“You just answered the question, sis.”

“No, I didn’t. It’s simply none of your business, what Michael and I do together.”

“Glenn Close, it was,” Heather said.

In fact, Sarah thought, when I get back to the house tonight, Michael and I are going to have a glorious phone phuck, how about that, sis?

“Why doesn’t that guy play something slow and romantic?” Heather said. “I want to go dance with Whitey. See if I can talk him into a little fricassee or two. Curried goat makes a person horny, did you know that?”

“Stop it, he’s looking this way,” Sarah whispered.

“Whitey?”

“No, the young one.”

“Those are the two from the beach today,” Andrew said.

“Which one had her top off?” Willie asked.

“The one in pink, I think.”

“The other one’s better looking,” Willie said.

Andrew was thinking that women sometimes looked better when they were dressed to kill than when they were naked or even half-naked. The one who’d been topless on the beach this afternoon, for example, was now wearing a short pink sort of T-shirt dress with a gold belt and gold high-heeled sandals, no bra under the dress, and somehow this was sexier than her sitting there in just her bikini bottom this afternoon, he didn’t know why.

“You think they’re twins?” Willie asked.

“No, the one in white looks older,” Andrew said.

“What do you think? Thirty, thirty-five?”

“In there.”

“Good-looking women, though. Both of them.”

“Mm,” Andrew said, and looked over at them again.

The one in white was definitely the older sister. Flaring white pleated skirt, white scoop-neck top, gold chain and pendant, white high-heeled sandals, all tan and white and golden. The sister was younger and fresher looking, but there was something more sophisticated about the one in white, the way she lifted her wine glass, the way she tilted her head at just the right angle. Sexier somehow. Given his choice, he’d take the one in white, too.

The waiter came with their drinks just then. Canadian on the rocks for Andrew, a planter’s punch for Willie. Willie raised his glass in a toast to the two women sitting across the room. The one in the pink dress looked at him and then turned away in seeming disdain.

“Bingo,” Willie said.

“So what do you think, sis?” Heather asked. “Can you find your way back alone tonight?”

“You’re not serious,” Sarah said.

“I seem to have caught Whitey’s eye.”

“You may catch more than that...”

“Who cares?”

“... picking up strangers in a bar.”

“A restaurant, please. And only one stranger. Unless the one with the big ears wants to join us.”

“I think you are serious.”

“You just watch me, kid.”

“Your plane leaves at nine.”

“Plenty of time.”

“The man’s in his sixties!”

“Good, I’ll give him a heart attack.”

“Whatever you do, leave me out of it,” Sarah said.

“Who invited you?”

“I mean it.”

“Watch him melt,” Heather said, and turned toward where the two men were sitting, and leveled a long, lingering, blue-eyed gaze at the white-haired one.

“What time is the boat meeting me?” Andrew asked.

“Did you see that?”

“No. What?”

“The one in pink. She just invited me to her room.”

“They’re not staying here,” Andrew said. “They live in that house on the beach.”

“Better yet.”

“The boat,” Andrew reminded him.

“They’ll send a dinghy to the dock at ten tomorrow morning. They’re very prompt, so be on time. I told them you’d be alone, the way you wanted it. I prefer the one in white, but I’m willing to settle,” Willie said. “You want the one in white?”

“No,” Andrew said. “I want a good night’s sleep. This meeting tomorrow is important.”

“Always mix business with pleasure,” Willie said. “That’s a rule here in the islands.”

“Whose rule?”

“Mine. You sure you don’t want the one in white?”

“Positive.”

“Then I’ll take both of them.”

“Do you plan to eat first, or are you going to jump them right here in the dining room?” Andrew asked.

“Maybe both,” Willie said, and grinned like a shark.

The one with the white hair approached their table while they were having coffee and dessert.

“Good evening, ladies,” he said.

Heather looked up at him.

Nothing in her eyes. No hint that she had noticed him earlier, had in fact blatantly flirted with him across the room. Sarah had to admire her sister’s cool.

“My name is Willie Isetti,” he said. “I was wondering if you’d like to join my friend and I for an after-dinner drink. There are some quiet tables in the bar area...”

“Thank you, no,” Heather said, her voice only a few degrees icier than the glare in her pale blue eyes.

“Sorry to have bothered you,” he said, and smiled weakly, and walked back across the room to where the young one was sitting alone at the table.

Sarah looked at her sister.

“He doesn’t know grammar,” Heather said, and shrugged.

“I thought I was the English teacher.”

“Besides, my plane is at nine.”

“Um-huh.”

“And he is in his sixties.”

“Um-huh.”

“And he’s not as good-looking now that I’m sober.”

“Then let’s go home,” Sarah said.

She left Heather touching up her lipstick at the mirror in the ladies’ room while she went outside to get the car from the valet. She was waiting under the hibiscus-covered trellis at the front of the hotel, the side away from the harbor and the spectacular view, when the young one with the ears came outside.

He said nothing to her.

They stood at opposite ends of the small curved entryway to the hotel, the strong heavy aroma of angel’s-trumpet suffusing the night air. The silence lengthened until it became too obviously awkward.

“Nice night,” she said.

“Lovely,” he said.

The valet arrived just then, pulling the car up to a squealing stop, leaping out, leaving the driver-side door open for her, and then running around to open the passenger-side door. Thinking they were together, he looked surprised when Sarah and not the man tipped him four francs.

“Did you have a car too, sir?” he asked.

“Red VW,” he said, and handed him the keys.

“The license plate?”

“Sorry, I don’t know.”

The valet shook his head.

“They like you to remember the license plate number,” Sarah told him. “These rental cars from the airport all look alike.”

“I should have realized that,” he said, and turned to the valet. “I parked it under the big tree there,” he told him, and pointed it out.

“You should have let me park it, sir,” the valet said, looking offended.

“Sorry about that,” he said, and smiled.

“I’ll get it for you, sir.”

“Thank you.”

Heather came out of the hotel just then.

“Well, good night,” Sarah said.

“Good night,” he said.

Heather looked at him briefly and then got into the car. As they pulled away from the hotel, she arched a brow and said, “Fast work, sis.”

Sarah was thinking she’d be talking to Michael in less than twenty minutes.

The phone rang some ten times before he picked up.

“Hullo?”

His voice sounded sleep-sodden, almost drugged.

“Michael?”

“Mm.”

“It’s me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wake up, darling.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“Wake up, it’s me.”

“Mm.”

“Wake up, Michael.”

“Mm.”

“Michael?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s me,” she said. “Sarah.”

“Okay, g’night,” he said.

There was a click on the line.

“Michael?” she said.

Silence.

“Michael?”

She looked at the phone receiver, so startled that she burst out laughing. Shaking her head, the laughter subsiding, she put the receiver back on its cradle, lay back against the pillows again, and visualized Michael at home all tangled in the bedclothes, dead asleep, not knowing whether she was lying there beside him or calling from the moon, having forgotten completely the promises of long-distance sex they’d made earlier tonight.

It was too bad, actually.

She’d really been ready for him.

Looking out at the star-drenched night, she lay silent and still for a long, long while before finally she fell asleep.

The computerized tapes had brought Michael current to April of 1992. From there on, it was either listening to the tapes themselves or reading the typed transcripts of them. It was simpler to read transcripts than to listen to tapes, which were often hard to understand. He decided to read.

This was now nine thirty on Tuesday morning, the twenty-ninth. He had phoned Sarah before leaving for work, vaguely remembering a call from her in the middle of the night, and apologizing for having drunk a bit too much at Spark’s, which restaurant always made him feel like a gangster himself; maybe that’s why he went there. Sarah had graciously allowed that perhaps she and her sister — who’d be leaving for the airport in about twenty minutes, she informed him — had also drunk a bit too much, so maybe they should try it another time, like how about right now, she’d suggested. He’d told her he was on his way to the office, but he’d call her later.

The people who’d typed the transcripts had worked very closely with the actual investigative team. Through long association, the detectives who’d done the wiretap surveillance knew each of the voices on the tape intimately and could instantly clear up any confusion the typists may have had when a voice sounded too similar to another one. Anthony Faviola had a deep, sonorous voice, cultivated over the years to disguise a faintly lingering Brooklyn accent; someone named Tony might have used “deses” or “doses,” but not someone named Anthony, if you please. Anthony had once been quoted as saying that he thought the nickname Tony sounded like “some kind of ignorant wop.” Anthony, on the other hand (although he’d never said anything to that effect), must have sounded to him like a British prime minister. Michael couldn’t blame him. He himself hated anyone calling him Mike, which sounded to him like a bartender. Office rumor had it that Faviola had once taken speech lessons from a teacher on Park Avenue, but this was unsubstantiated. Whatever the case, he didn’t sound quite like a mobster, but neither did he sound like Professor Higgins.

His brother was something else again. There was no mistaking Rudy whenever he opened his mouth. His voice was rumbling and gravelly, and he mangled the English language as brutally as he’d once mangled recalcitrant debtors. Even when he was in a room with other gangsters whose disrespect for English rivaled his own, he was completely identifiable, preferring to shout every word he uttered, a habit that had caused the investigating detectives innumerable problems with their gain controls. On the typed transcripts, there was no problem with voices. Anthony was identified by the initials AF. Rudy was RF. PB was Peter Bardo. These were the three key players. At the time of the surveillance AF was still boss. RF was underboss. PB was consigliere, third in command.

Presumably, when AF went out to Kansas, RF became boss, PB became underboss, and the man presumed to have organized the mob’s entire narcotics operation back when they were just beginning to dabble in dope — an elderly thug named Louis “Fat Nickie” Nicoletta — had taken over as consigliere. But back in the spring of 1992, they might have been talking about someone like Dominick Di Nobili, small world.

AF: The way I see this, Rude, it’s not going to be fruitful to lean on this man. We’re discussing a large sum of money, which it’s clear he doesn’t have.

RF: Smack him real good, he’ll find the fuckin’ money in a hurry, take it from me.

AF: And if he doesn’t? How does that make us look?

RF: It makes us look like a guy doesn’t pay one way he pays another fuckin’ way.

AF: But we still won’t have the money, will we? What if we give him a grace period, say a week, to come up with what he owe? No interest for a week. We...

RF: That sets an example for every fuckin’ deadbeat in town.

AF: This is fifty grand we’re talking, Rude, a man can’t just...

RF: This is also a matter of principle we’re talkin’.

AF: Agreed. But if a man is broke, he can’t come up with...

RF: He’s broke ’cause he bets the fuckin’ ponies with money we lent him.

AF: Even so...

RF: Besides, it was only twenty when he borrowed it. It’s ’cause he ain’t payin’ it back, it goes through the fuckin’ roof.

AF: Go talk to him, okay? Tell him your brother’s giving him a week free, out of the goodness of his heart. Tell him once the week’s up, I won’t be able to control the animals who work for me.

RF: (Laughing) Fuckin’ animals, yeah.

On and on. The daily routine of running a vast business empire, coupled with the more mundane matters confronting a busy chief executive officer...

AF: Petey, what do you think?

PB: I think a gift is appropriate. But a modest one.

AF: How modest?

PB: Three bills. No more than that.

AF: Isn’t that kind of cheap for a christening? What’d we spend on Giannino when his kid was christened?

PB: I can check.

AF: Check, would you? And send Danielli the same. He hears we sent Giannino’s kid something more expensive, he’ll take offense.

RF: Fuckin’ hardheaded wop.

AF: What is it, anyway? A boy or a girl?

PB: A girl.

GL: Grows up lookin’ like Terry, she’ll be a winner.

GL. Identified in the transcript’s index as the capo in charge of the Gerald Lacizzare Crew, which at the time of the surveillance operated a loan-sharking business that took in thousands of dollars a week in interest, charging rates of between 156 and 312 percent a year.

Danielli was Felix Danielli, who at the time of the surveillance was running an illegal horse betting parlor that did business in excess of twenty thousand dollars a week. His wife, Teresa, was purported to be an extravagantly beautiful woman.

RF: Love to boff that broad.

Rudy Faviola again, the underboss, undoubtedly licking his lips while professing his desire, this despite strict mob rules against hitting on any family member’s wife or daughter.

On and on. From the mundane to the ridiculous...

RF: I’m dancing, right, when all of the sudden I hear this broad cut a giant fart, it’s the first time I ever heard a broad I wasn’t fucking fart.

AF: (Laughing) This is the girl you’re dancing with?

RF: Yea, right on the dance floor. A fart like an explosion. And, oh Jesus, what a stink!

LN: People probably thought it was you made the fart.

LN. Louis “Fat Nickie” Nicoletta. Presumably the new consigliere, but at the time of the surveillance, the man directing much of the family’s narcotics activities.

RF: That’s what I was afraid of, Nick! They’d think I’m the one stinkin’ up Vinny’s fuckin’ wedding. Big fat cunt stinkin’ like a New Jersey sewer.

LN: I never had a woman fart while I was fuckin’ her.

RF: Maybe you ain’t fuckin’ them right.

LN: Kick her right out of bed, she farts on me.

Conversation upon conversation, from the ridiculous to the sublime...

BT: This is supposed to be a realistic movie, you understand?

Bobby Triani, identified in the index as Rudy Faviola’s son-in-law, and a capo overseeing the family’s vast stolen property operation, including a “theft to order” scheme that utilized the services of corrupt United Parcel Service employees.

LN: I don’t go to the movies no more. I always get in trouble I got to the movies.

AF: What kind of trouble? You want some more of this, Nick?

LN: No, thanks. I’m always tellin’ people shut up. The ones behind me talkin’.

RF: I almost did shoot some cocksucker talkin’ behind me, he was givin’ away the whole fuckin’ movie.

BT: You shoulda shot him.

RF: I mean it, the whole fuckin’ movie. Here’s where he jumps out the window, here’s where she catches him with the blonde, here’s where the fuckin’ tiger gets loose, here’s...

LN: The whole fuckin’ movie.

RF: I turned around and shoved the piece in his fuckin’ face, I told him shut up or I’ll blow off your nose. He tells me he’s gonna go get the usher. I tell him go ahead go get the fuckin’ usher, I’ll blow off his nose, too.

BT: You should shot the cocksucker.

LN: Did he shut up? I’ll be he didn’t.

RF: No, he didn’t, they got not fuckin’ manners. This is good sauce, Anth.

AF: Thank you.

RF: I mean it. This is superb sauce.

BT: You shoulda shot the cocksucker.

And then back to business again.

AF: We can’t relate this to what they do in Harlem. That’s a whole different family there in Harlem, and they’ve got their own way of dealing with the spics.

PB: I’m only suggesting we discuss it with them...

RF: They’re fuckin’ hardheads in Harlem. We go in there to talk there’s gonna be war.

AF: Discuss what with them, Petey?

PB: A proper piece of action.

RF: You’re not talkin’ nigger Harlem, are you?

PB: No, no.

RF: ’Cause that’s entirely out of the question. Fuckin’ niggers won’t listen to shit.

PB: I’m talkin about East Harlem.

AF: East Harlem, Rudy.

RF: ’Cause the niggers are out of the question.

AF: I still don’t know what you have in mind, Petey.

PB: The Colombians run the coffee up through Mexico...

A transparent code word for cocaine. Never knew who might be listening. In this case, an absolutely correct assumption, but little did they really know...

PB:... and a lot of it ends up in East Harlem. So we’re supposed to have an agreement with them, am I right? But we’re not getting a piece on the coffee goes in there.

AF: I have something more important in mind down the line, Petey. I don’t want to rock the boat just now.

PB: This wouldn’t be boosting the Colombians, you understand...

AF: I know that. But the balance is pretty shaky right now, and I don’t want anything upsetting it further.

RF: You want my opinion, the fuckin’ spics are gonna do away with the people in Harlem entirely. Who the fuck needs a middleman? They got their own distribution setup, the Harlem people are like a fuckin’ fifth wheel.

AF: I think so, yes. That’s all part of it.

Michael kept reading the transcript.

On another day, in another month, there was a philosophical discussion about the very real services these noble gangsters provided. Present at this lofty seminar were Anthony Faviola and his laureate brother, Rudy, “Fat Nickie” Nicoletta, who never went to the movies anymore, Peter Bardo, the consigliere, and Felix Danielli, who had the gorgeous wife Rudy would have loved to boff.

AF: When you think of it, what are we doing that’s so terrible?

RF: What are we doing, right?

AF: Why is gambling against the law? Is it such a sin to gamble?

LN: They gambled in the Bible, even. I saw a movie, they were gambling for Jesus’s robe.

PB: You’re right, Anthony, gambling should be legal.

AF: It should. But meanwhile, it’s against the law. So what do we do? We provide what the people want. They want to gamble, we give them the means to gamble.

LN: His robe they were shooting dice for. The robe he was wearing.

AF: What’s the lottery, if not legal gambling?

RF: What’s OTB?

AF: It’s all legal gambling. But when we run it, it’s against the law. Why? We’re giving the same odds, no? We’re not rigging anything, we run a fair game. We take our vig, sure, but doesn’t the state take a vig?

The vigorish, or the percentage, or the house cut, the edge that made any gambling a winning proposition for the mob. Even when they lost; they won. Bet a hundred bucks on a football game, the bookie paid you the hundred if you won, but if you lost he collected a hundred and ten.

PB: How about lending money? You know what the banks are getting legally now? The interest rate on a legal loan?

RF: Through the fuckin’ roof, I bet.

PB: Close to what we’re asking, that’s for sure.

AF: But what’s a man supposed to do when a bank turns him down? Is it a sin to have bad credit?

RF: Make a guy feel like a fuckin’ scumbag, the banks.

LN: Turn you down no reason at all.

AF: They come to us, their credit is always good.

At three to five percent a week, compounded, Michael thought. Put that on your calculator, see what the interest on a ten-thousand-dollar loan comes to after a few months of five-percent interest.

RF: It’s a service, plain and simple. Like you said, Anth.

AF: Sure, but they make it illegal.

LN: A service we provide!

RF: Where else can a guy needs money go? Temporary.

LN: Who’s gonna lend it to him?

RF: Also, they say we bust a guy’s head he don’t pay. So what does a bank do? A bank takes the fuckin’ guy’s house away, is what the bank does.

AF: One way or another, they’re out to get us.

RF: Make our fuckin’ lives miserable.

LN: The cocksuckers.

Michael almost missed the first mention. It came during the second week in June. It was in a monitored two-way telephone conversation between Anthony and his brother. Michael’s eyes passed right over the word because it wasn’t an exact match. The transcript read:

AF: What bothers me, Rude, is they may really have something this time. They’re acting as if they’ve got something.

RF: It’s the same old shit, Anth. They always come in blowin’ wind, they ain’t got a fuckin’ thing on you and they know it.

AF: All those indictments.

RF: They ain’t got shit.

AF: Murder, Rudy. That’s heavy.

RF: You never murdered anybody your whole life.

AF: Never let up.

RF: Cocksuckers.

AF: Mick-a-lino’s worried, too.

RF: I’ll go talk to him.

AF: Calm him down, tell him I’ll be okay. He’s worried.

RF: Sure he is. But don’t you worry, huh, Anth? Nobody’s gonna hurt you.

AF: Yeah.

RF: You hear me?

AF: Yeah, thanks, Rudy.

RF: I’ll go talk t’ Lino.

There it was again. Mick-a-lino the first time around, just plain Lino, with the L capitalized, the second time. The capitalization was the typist’s choice, Michael guessed, guided by the detective who’d actually listened to the conversations as they were being recorded. Listening to the sitdown talk between Frankie Palumbo and Jimmy Angels in the Ristorante Romano, Michael and Georgie had thought they’d heard the name Lena. The typist who’d transferred the Faviola tapes to the computer disk had spelled the name L-E-N-O when the matter of the Christmas gift had been mentioned in December of 1991. And now the typist doing the transcript had spelled it L–I-N-O, as in Mick-a-lino and Lino. How had this been pronounced on the original tapes? As in “wino”? If so, this couldn’t possibly be related to Lena. Michael debated consulting the tapes themselves at this point. Instead, he kept reading the transcript.

The next time the letters L–I-N-O came up in sequence was during another telephone conversation, this time between Anthony Faviola and his wife, Tessie, during the month of August, shortly before the start of Faviola’s trial. Faviola was calling from Club Sorrento, where several bugs had been planted, and to which he referred simply as “the club.” Tessie was on the bug-free house phone in Stonington. Before the investigating detectives tuned out on this privileged husband-wife communication, they’d recorded:

AF: I have a few more things to take care of here at the club, then I’ll be coming home.

TF: Be careful, the weekend traffic.

AF: Yeah, don’t worry.

TF: What time do you think you’ll be?

AF: Six, six thirty. For supper, anyway.

Supper. A holdover from the Brooklyn days, when the evening meal at Stella Faviola’s table was always called “supper” and never “dinner.”

AF: Is Lino still coming up?

TF: He’s already here.

AF: Oh? Good. Tell him I’ll see him later, okay?

TF: Drive careful.

Lino again. An apparent guest in Faviola’s impregnable Connecticut fortress. Lino. Short for Mick-a-lino? Or had this been Michelino on the tapes? The diminutive of Michele? Transmogrified by a tone-deaf WASP typist to some sort of bastardized English? Michele. Pronounced “Mee-kiy-lay” in Italian. Michael knew because “Michael” just happened to be his name, and that’s what he’d been called the one and only time he’d been, to Italy, Michele, with a hard ch as opposed to the soft one in the French “Michel.”

Michele.

Michael.

Michelino.

Little Michael.

Anthony Faviola had no children or grandchildren named Michael. Nor had the name figured prominently in any of the trial material, any of the volumes of transcripts the U.S. Attorney’s office had studied and restudied in its successful bid to put Faviola away forever. If anyone had noticed mention of a Michael or a Little Michael, no significance had been given to the names. Until now.

Now a Queens waiter who owed money to a Manhattan loan shark had agreed to courier some dope and had walked into a sting set up by Narcotics. And during a conversation between a pair of capos trying to save his ass, a Faviola lieutenant had said he’d talk it over with Lena — or so they’d thought. But Lena had become Leno, and from there it was a hop, skip, and jump to Mick-a-lino to Michelino to Little Michael.

He checked the tapes.

The name had, in fact, been pronounced in the Italian way, Michelino, and transcribed by the typist in phonetic English. Which meant that Lino didn’t rhyme with wino, it rhymed with dean-o.

Michelino.

Little Michael.

Once more unto the breach, Michael thought, and plunged into the transcript yet another time.

Alonso Moreno was known in some circles as La Culebra, which meant the Snake. Andrew guessed this had more to do with his business practices than with his looks. He was, in fact, quite a handsome man.

Sitting on the foredeck of a forty-eight-foot Grand Banks — not particularly known for speed, but no one was trying to outrace anyone today — Moreno offered Andrew a cigarette, shrugged when he declined it, and then lighted his own and turned politely away to exhale a stream of smoke. Turning back to Andrew, his dark glasses reflecting bright morning sunlight, he said, “I already told your people no,” and then snapped his fingers at a man wearing knee-length white cotton shorts and a white cotton sweater, and pointed immediately to the pitcher of lemonade sitting on a low table fastened to the deck with cleats. The man in white poured their glasses full again. The cigarette in one hand, the glass of lemonade in the other, Moreno alternately sipped and puffed.

“So why are you here?” he asked.

Andrew figured Moreno had a good ten years on him, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, in there. Rudolph Valentino looks, black hair slicked back from a pronounced widow’s peak, aquiline nose a trifle too long for his face, androgynous Mick Jagger lips, puffing and sipping, calmly waiting for a reply. Too polite to say you’re wasting my fucking time here. But wise enough to realize Andrew had come all the way from New York and was not to be summarily dismissed.

“I’m here because I don’t think this was explained properly to you.”

“It was explained,” Moreno said, and suddenly took off the sunglasses.

Eyes so brown they looked black.

Maybe that’s where he’d got the Snake nickname.

Black eyes reflecting sunlight.

Out on the water, a speedboat towing a skier behind it appeared suddenly on the horizon.

“Mr. Isetti explained it to me fully.”

Slight Spanish accent. Andrew had heard someplace that Moreno was college-educated, had been studying to be a doctor, in fact. He imagined Moreno with a scalpel in his hand. The thought was frightening.

“The business aspects,” Andrew said.

“Every aspect,” Moreno said. “We’re not interested.”

“We consider this a very rich deal.”

“We’re rich enough,” Moreno said, and smiled.

“We’re not,” Andrew said, and returned the smile.

“Que pena,” Moreno said.

“We figure a person can always get richer than he is.”

Moreno said nothing. Bored, he puffed on his cigarette and sipped at his lemonade. Out on the water, the speedboat cut a wider arc. The skier behind it let out an exuberant yell.

“We figure that a person who doesn’t want to get richer runs the risk of getting poorer,” Andrew said.

“I don’t see that risk.”

“Do you know how Columbus happened to discover America?”

“What?” Moreno said.

“I said, ‘Do you...?’”

“I heard you. What does it mean?”

“He was looking for China.”

“So?”

“We’re bringing China right to your doorstep. You don’t have to go looking for it.”

“I’m not looking for it. You’re the one who’s looking for it.”

“No, we’re looking for an expanded market that’ll...”

“Good, you go look for it. We’re happy with America.”

“I don’t think you’re hearing me,” Andrew said.

“I’m hearing you fine, thank you very much,” Moreno said. “That’s just a child out there, you know? The skier.”

Andrew glanced briefly over the water and then turned his attention back to Moreno.

“You supply your product,” he said, “the Chinese supply theirs. Our European associates turn it over, and we distribute all over America and Europe.”

“We already distribute in America and Europe,” Moreno said.

“Not the new product.”

“We don’t need any new products.”

“We think you do.”

“Hey, really, who the fuck cares what you think?” Moreno said.

“Mr. Moreno, I think you’d better...”

“No, don’t ‘Mr. Moreno’ me, and don’t tell me what I better do, I do what I want to do, never mind what I better do. I told Isetti we’re not interested, he says I think you owe us the courtesy of hearing what Andrew has to say, he came all the way down here from New York. Okay, I just listened to what Andrew has to say, and we’re still not interested. I don’t know who sent you...”

“Nobody sent me, Mr. Moreno.”

“But whoever it was...”

“I came on my own.”

“Fine. Go back on your own. Tell whoever sent you...”

“This is the last time I’ll explain it,” Andrew said, and sighed wearily, as if trying to instruct a particularly recalcitrant child. “We’re working out a three-way deal with the Chinese. If you’d like to join us, you’re more than welcome. That’s why I’m here. But if you refuse to see the merits, we’ll have to go ahead without you. I think you can understand how difficult we can make things...”

“Listen, get off my boat, okay?” Moreno said, and then, in Spanish, to the man in the white cotton shorts and sweater, “Llevarlo de vuelta a la costa, no hay nada más que discutir aquí.” He extended his hand to Andrew, said, “Our business is finished, Alberico will take you...” and then stopped in midsentence and got to his feet and pointed out over the water, and said, “That child’s in trouble.”

From where Sarah sat at the wheel of the speedboat, her head craned over her shoulder, she knew only that Mollie had suddenly gone under. Spills were common, though, and Mollie had been water-skiing ever since she was seven, when her grandfather added a speedboat to his other Caribbean possessions. She was skilled and daring, and until this moment, Sarah had never felt the slightest qualms about allowing her daughter to rip up the ocean behind a boat doing twenty miles an hour over open water. In fact, for the past year now, Mollie had been skiing without a life vest, pleading greater freedom of movement and a thorough knowledge of what she was doing, and Sarah hadn’t seen any danger to it.

She swung the boat around in a tight turn now, opened the throttle full, and headed back toward where she’d last seen Mollie. There was a moderate chop today, the boat skidded and thudded over the waves as she closed the distance, waiting for her daughter to surface, avoiding the tow-rope, the last thing she wanted now was to get the rope tangled in the boat’s... there! Mollie’s blond head popping to the surface. Mouth opening wide to suck in air, waves breaking under her chin. Some twenty yards beyond her, a man was standing at the railing of a big Grand Banks, yelling in Spanish. And then another man climbed onto the rail, hung there against the sky for just a moment, dove overboard, and began swimming toward Mollie just as she went under again.

Sarah silently willed the speedboat forward, urging it to go faster than it possibly could, pushing it against wind and chop, the towline safely behind her, aware now of the swimmer in the water, plowing against the waves in a fast crawl to where Mollie’s head broke the surface again. Another mouthful of air, Sarah was close enough to see her face now, panic in those blue eyes. She clawed at the sky, and went under for the third time, and the swimmer dove down after her.

Sarah pulled back on the throttle, began circling the area where her daughter and the swimmer had gone under. There was only the sound of the idling engine now, the boat lazily circling the spot where they’d disappeared, the sky so blue overhead, the seconds lengthening, and lengthening and lengthening, and...

She was on the edge of screaming when first Mollie’s head broke the surface of the water, and then her narrow shoulders, and then the swimmer’s hands clutching her waist. His own head broke the surface at last, brown hair flattened against his skull. He sucked in a deep breath of air, pushed aside Mollie’s flailing hands, and rolled her onto her back. Cupping her chin with one hand, he swam her over to where Sarah leaned over the gunwales and lifted her daughter into the boat.

Two weeks before he was arrested and charged with four counts of second-degree murder, Anthony Faviola’s thoughts — and his conversation — turned to matters merely mortal. It was almost as if he knew what was coming. Knew that he’d soon be looking not only at the four counts, each of which carried lifetime sentences under the federal guidelines, but also at another possible lifetime sentence on a RICO charge.

The conversation had taken place at the bugged corner table in Club Sorrento. The boss’s table. Reserved for Faviola and his closest cronies whenever they dropped in, which was often. In the transcript, Anthony and his brother, Rudy, were identified by the now-familiar initials AF and RF. Apparently the men were drinking; perhaps Anthony might not have been so candid were he not somewhat in his cups. And whereas Michael had never held a soft spot in his heart for anyone who broke the law, he felt something like sympathy as he read the words of this man who did not know he was being taped and could not have known what the future held in store for him, and yet who was predicting it quite sadly and accurately:

AF: I keep thinking they’re closing in on me.

RF: Come on, come on.

AF: I mean it, Rude. Everywhere I go, everything I do, they’re on top of me. It’s like they won’t let me breathe.

RF: Fuck ’em, that’s just the way they are. They got nothin’ better to do than break people’s balls.

AF: Have some more of this.

RF: Just a little.

AF: Say when.

RF: That’s enough, ay, hold it.

AF: I don’t care for myself, you understand. I’ve had a good life.

RF: Don’t let them fucks bother you, Anth. They’re nothin’.

AF: It’s not me I care about. It’s Tessie, the kids. What kind of life can it be for them, these bums coming around all the time?

RF: They’re nothin’, don’t let them get to you.

AF: Angela and Carol, I don’t think it bothers them as much as...

RF: They’re beautiful girls, Anth. You got beautiful daughters.

AF: They love their Uncle Rudy, I can tell you that.

RF: I’d breath their heads, they didn’t.

(Laughter)

AF: But a son. It’s different for a son. How many kids like him get to go to college? But he fucked up, right? I think because he liked Vegas too much.

RF: Well, yeah, Vegas.

AF: Tessie was so proud of him. So he gets himself kicked out for drinkin’ an’ fightin’. Have some more of this.

RF: Thanks. Watch how you’re pouring, you son of a bitch, you’ll get me drunk.

AF: You know how much I paid for this?

RF: How much?

AF: Six ninety-five a bottle.

RF: Come on.

AF: I’m serious. I bought six cases.

RF: Where’d you get this, six ninety-five a bottle?

AF: The guy around the corner.

RF: What is it, Spanish? They make cheap wine, the Spanish.

AF: No, no, it’s Italian.

RF: Six fuckin’ ninety-five? I can’t believe it.

AF: It’s delicious, I think.

RF: It’s fuckin’ superb.

AF: Six ninety-five.

RF: But, you know, Anth, when it comes to kids...

AF: It should all be as simple as wine.

RF: Nothin’s simple, Anth. Forget anything bein’ simple, there’s nothin’ simple.

AF: Girls are different.

RF: Also, they’re both married. You got to remember that. It makes a difference.

AF: Oh, sure. Nice boys, too, they married. You like them?

RF: Oh, sure. Well, not Sam so much. He’s a fuckin’ know-it-all. But the other one...

AF: Larry.

RF: Yeah, Larry.

AF: Larry, yeah. He’s okay.

RF: He’s very nice. A good kid. He likes me, too, I can tell. His fuckin’ Uncle Rudy. He calls me Uncle Rudy.

AF: You know what I wish. This is if God forbid they ever send me away, what I wish...

RF: Come on, stop it. Have some more wine. Come on. I don’t like to hear this shit.

Back to the good cheap wine again, Michael thought. Six ninety-five a bottle from the guy around the corner. Italian wine. It should all be as simple as wine. He wished they’d mentioned the label. At six ninety-five a bottle, he’d buy six cases himself.

AF: But if they do put me away Rude...

RF: That’s never gonna happen, so don’t even think it.

AF: But if they do, you know who I want to take over for me?

RF: I hope you’re not gonna say me, ’cause I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t want the fuckin’ job.

AF: Listen, you’d be terrific, Rudy, but...

RF: Thanks, I don’t want it. Anyway, you’re not going no place, so forget it. Have some more wine, you jackass, stop talkin’ stupid.

Little more vino? Michael thought. Little more vino, bro? We’ll both go home in a wheelbarrow, you push, I’ll ride. Say when. Plop, plop, plink, plink, plop, plop, plop.

RF: And I hope you ain’t thinkin’ of Petey Bardo, neither. I got nothin’ against him, I promise you, but he’s got the personality of a fuckin’ rivet. Salute! Jesus, this is truly superb. He’s excellent at what he does ’cause he looks like a fuckin’ judge, those brown suits he wears, I never met nobody likes brown the way Petey does, I swear to God. But can you imagine him sittin’ down with some of the people from Harlem, f’ example, havin’ a few drinks with that bunch? Can you imagine him ever loosenin’ up that way? He’s a fuckin’ stiff, Anth, even if he is married to Josie. It takes more than just brains to keep this thing of ours together, this this we got.

AF: So who do you think? If I ever had to retire, you know.

RF: Probably who you were gonna say yourself.

AF: Who do you think I was about to say?

RF: If he wants it, that is.

AF: Who?

RF: He may like Vegas too much. Atlantic City too much. This is responsibility here. Girls, he likes girls too much. And gambling. He takes over for you, he’s got to have his head here, Anth, and not up some snatch. His head and his heart got to be here.

AF: I think we have the same person in mind.

RF: Sure. Lino, am I right?

AF: Lino, yes.

And there it was.

It had been her own fault, allowing Mollie to go out there without a life jacket, but she’d been doing that forever, and there’d been no reason to believe...

No, there was no excuse.

What was she supposed to tell Michael? That she’d almost allowed their daughter to drown? That if it hadn’t been for the bravery of a total stranger, Mollie might now be...

Well, not entirely a total stranger.

This was the man she’d said hello to last night outside the restaurant, the one Heather thought had big ears. Standing on the deck of the small boat, dripping wet and out of breath, hands on his hips, head bent, he watched silently as Sarah knelt over her daughter. Mollie was coughing and sputtering and spitting, but she seemed otherwise fine, if totally shaken.

“Thank you,” Sarah had whispered, more to God than to the tall stranger.

He nodded, still gasping for breath after the exertion of his hard swim against the chop.

He introduced himself as Andrew Farrell.

Said he was here in St. Bart’s on business, staying at the Guanahani.

She said she didn’t know how to thank him.

She would later remember all this in minute detail.

He said all he asked was a ride back to the yacht so he could pick up his shoes. She realized then that he’d dived overboard fully clothed, except for the shoes. White long-sleeved shirt plastered to his arms and chest, pale pastel-blue cotton trousers soaking wet.

She thanked him again as he climbed the ladder onto the Grand Banks. In a small voice, Mollie piped, “Thank you, Mr. Farrell.”

It wasn’t until later that afternoon that Sarah called the Guanahani and asked for Andrew Farrell, please. When he answered the phone, she told him who she was...

“Sarah Welles, you saved my daughter’s life...”

... as if there were a dozen Sarah Welleses whose daughters’ lives he’d saved, and then said she really felt they owed him more than a boat ride back to retrieve his shoes...

No, don’t be silly, he said, I was happy to be of assistance.

She would remember all this later.

Well, she said, my daughter and I feel we haven’t truly expressed our gratitude. Mr. Farrell... if you have no other plans, could we possibly take you to dinner tonight? Mollie suggested that you choose anyplace you like on the island...

Only if it’s my treat, he said.

She would remember all this.

No, no, she said, of course not, that’s not the idea at all.

My treat, he said. I’ll pick you up at seven thirty. I know where the house is.

Later, she would wonder how he knew.

Seven thirty is fine, she said, but I insist that...

See you later, he said, and hung up.

Michael caught Georgie at home at four that afternoon, packing for his trip to Vail.

“Few questions,” he said.

“I’m on vacation,” Georgie said.

“Regarding Anthony Faviola,” Michael said.

“I’m still on vacation.”

“One quick question, then.”

“Better make it very quick. I’m almost out the door.”

“Who’s Lino?”

“You asked me yesterday, and I still don’t know.”

“Not Lena, Lino. Or Mick-a-lino.”

“I haven’t the foggiest.”

“Never came across that name, huh?”

“Never.”

“I thought if anyone would know...”

“No, I don’t. Michael, I’m sorry, but my plane...”

“Can I come over there now?”

“No.”

“I want to look at your scrapbooks.”

“No. I’ll be back in the office on the eleventh. We can talk then.”

“Georgie...”

“Georgie me not. The slopes are calling.”

“I need to look at your clippings on Faviola.”

“Go to the library. Look up F-A-V...”

“Georgie, please. I think I’m onto something, but I have to...”

“Whatever it is, it can wait till the eleventh.”

“How about whoever took over for him?”

“His brother did. Everybody knows that.”

“Maybe not.”

There was a long silence on the line.

“Then who?”

“Somebody named Lino.”

“I still don’t know him.”

“Let me look at the scrapbooks.”

“No.”

“I can be there in twenty minutes...”

“I’m leaving here in an hour.”

“I’ll take them with me. I’ll bring a suitcase...”

“You’d better bring a trunk.”

“Can I come?”

“Come already,” Georgie said, and hung up.

The place he’d chosen was on one of the island’s highest mountains, an aerie that offered stunning views from the terrace and the restaurant. They had drinks first on the terrace, Mollie ordering a club soda with lime and then launching into a long discourse on how it felt to be drowning and to have your whole life — all twelve years of it — flashing before your eyes like a music video.

“I’ll never forget the exact minute and hour,” she said, sipping through a straw and batting her lashes at Andrew over the rim of her glass, obviously already madly in love with the man who’d saved her life at twenty minutes to eleven this morning...

“But how do you know what time it was?” he said.

“I asked Mom. Did I try to drown you?”

“No, no.”

“If I’d tried to drown you, would you have knocked me unconscious?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’ve seen them do that in movies.”

“I didn’t have to. You were very cooperative.”

They sat on the terrace sipping their drinks, reliving the morning’s experience, Sarah admitting she got really frightened the moment she saw Mollie go under for the second time...

“Is it true about the third time being the last one?” Mollie interrupted.

“I think so,” Andrew said. “Unless you’re twelve. Then you get five times.”

... and then virtually panicking, when she went under for the third time.

“What happened was I think when I hit the water the breath got knocked out of me and I was a little stunned for a few seconds, which is why I sucked in water. Then I started choking and coughing, and I sucked in even more water and all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe! I was never so scared in my life. Well, once before actually. When Luis yanked me out of the way of that taxi.”

“Who’s Luis?” Andrew asked.

“The doorman at our building.”

“Where’s that?”

“East Eighty-First. I was crossing the street when this cab zoomed around the corner and almost ran me over. If it wasn’t for Luis, I wouldn’t have been, alive today for you to save me.”

“I think you ought to send Mr. Farrell a dozen roses every year at this time,” Sarah said.

“Andrew,” he corrected. “And I think the opposite would be better. This is the first time I’ve ever saved anyone’s life.”

“My hero!” Mollie said broadly, and rolled her eyes in a mock swoon.

“Mrs. Welles? Another drink?”

“Sarah,” she corrected. “Are you having one?”

“I am,” Mollie said.

“Let’s all have another,” Andrew said.

“Let’s,” Sarah said.

“Does anyone call you Sadie?” he asked.

“Sadie? Oh my God, no.”

“Isn’t that a nickname for Sarah?”

“I suppose so. But Sadie?” she said, and turned to Mollie. “Can you visualize me as a Sadie?”

“Sounds like a shopping-bag lady,” Mollie said.

“How about Sassy?” Andrew asked.

“Me? Sassy?”

“That’s Sarah Vaughan’s nickname.”

“Who’s Sarah Vaughan?” Mollie asked.

“A singer,” Andrew said.

“Sounds like a stripper,” Mollie said. “Sassy.”

“Does anyone ever call you Andy?” Sarah asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess it just doesn’t fit.”

“Sometimes Mom calls me Millicent,” Mollie said, and pulled a face. “When she’s mad at me.”

“Why?”

“Because Mollie’s a nickname for Millicent.”

“But is that your full name? Millicent?”

“Hell, no,” Mollie said. “I know,” she said at once to Sarah, “that’s a dime.” And then, to Andrew, “When I was little, they used to charge me a dime every time I cursed.”

“Didn’t work, though,” Sarah said. “As you can see.”

They went in to dinner at a quarter past eight. Mollie and Sarah ordered the lobster medallions with kiwi fruit and Andrew asked the waiter what the coulommier was, and ordered it when he learned it was cheese in puff pastry. For her main course, Mollie ordered the lamb in green pepper sauce — “Medium rare, please” — and both Sarah and Michael ordered the grouper fricassee. For no good reason, Sarah suddenly remembered her sister’s running gag about wanting to fricassee the one with the white hair. Unconsciously, she looked at Andrew’s ears to see if they really were big, and then turned away when he noticed her studying him.

As if reading her mind, he said, “I should have asked your sister to join us.”

“She’s gone,” Sarah said. “How’d you know...?”

“You look a lot...”

“Aunt Heather’s getting a divorce,” Mollie said.

“Too bad,” Andrew said.

“Uncle Doug’s got a bimbo.”

“Mollie’s had too many drinks,” Sarah said, and smiled.

Andrew smiled back.

“They don’t have any alcohol in them, Mom,” Mollie said.

“Good thing.”

“Anyway, he knows what a bimbo is.”

“Sure,” Andrew said. “It’s a tropical drink.”

“Mr. Farr-ell!”

“Cross between the limbo and the marimba.”

“Maybe I’m drinking one,” Mollie said, and peered into her glass, and then looked up sharply and said, “Those aren’t drinks.”

“Really?” Andrew said, and winked again.

Mollie winked back.

“So what are you guys doing down here?” Andrew asked. “Besides drowning.”

“We’re all on vacation. That’s Grandma’s house we’re staying in. Daddy couldn’t come ’cause he had work to do.”

“That’s a shame.”

“He’ll be down on New Year’s Eve.”

“Or maybe sooner,” Sarah said. “I hope.”

“What does he do?”

In the early days of their marriage, when Michael was a rookie ADA, she had learned quickly enough that it was frequently best not to broadcast the fact that he worked for the District Attorney’s office. As an example, they would often be at parties where pot was being passed around. This wasn’t even a crime, it was a mere violation, but what was an ADA to do in such circumstances? Walk away from it? In which case, people would mutter, “Some District Attorney’s office we’ve got!” Make an arrest at the scene? “Some chicken-shit jackass Michael Welles is!” When asked, she’d learned simply to say, “Michael’s a lawyer.” If pressed, she would say, “He works downtown.” If pressed further, she would say, “He works for the city.” And if forced against the wall, she would say, “He’s the city’s corporate counsel on civil suits,” an outright lie. Later on, when Michael began investigating criminals who would as soon shoot you as blink at you, he’d cautioned her specifically against the danger of mentioning he was an ADA. Mollie knew the routine. Together, they went through the drill now.

“He’s a lawyer,” Sarah said.

“Works downtown,” Mollie said.

“For the city,” Sarah said.

“Mom’s a teacher,” Mollie said, changing the subject.

“Where do you teach?” Andrew asked.

“The Greer Academy,” Sarah said.

“That’s a preppie school for girl nerds,” Mollie said.

“Where do you go to school?”

“Hanover.”

“That’s what you get if you drink too many bimbos,” he said. “A hanover.”

Mollie giggled.

“What subject do you teach?” he asked.

“Me?” Mollie asked.

“English,” Sarah said.

“Where’s that? The Greer Academy?”

“Sixtieth and Park.”

“Near Christ Church,” Mollie said.

“I thought you were an actress,” Andrew said. “Or a model.”

“Me?” Mollie asked.

“You, too,” Andrew said, and smiled.

Sarah wondered if she was blushing.

“Are you here on vacation, too?” she asked.

“Business,” he said. “I leave tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, nooo,” Mollie said, and grimaced.

“Shall we order some wine?” Andrew asked. “Would anyone...?”

“How stupid of me,” Sarah said, and signaled to the waiter. “I meant what I said, you know. You’re our guest tonight.”

“No way,” he said.

“Please let us, Andrew.”

This was the first time she’d used his name. She would remember later that the first time she used his name was when they were discussing who would pay the check.

“Well... okay,” he said.

“Good,” Sarah said, and signaled to the waiter.

“A Chardonnay might be nice,” Mollie suggested, and grinned at Andrew and batted her lashes again.

The scrapbooks went back some fifteen years.

It was then that Anthony Faviola emerged as a powerful figure in the hierarchy of organized crime, and it was then that Georgie Giardino passed his bar exams and entered the Manhattan District Attorney’s office as a rookie in one of the five trial bureaus.

Michael sat in bed now with a ham sandwich and a bottle of beer, Georgia’s scrapbooks spread on the covers around him, the wind howling outside, the television going in the background for company.

The first item in the scrapbooks was an article that had been printed in the Daily News when Faviola’s only son was born. There had been two daughters before then, and now a male child, which was apparent reason for rejoicing in Staten Island. The News headlined the piece A FAMILY MAN.

The pun was not lost on Michael. He remembered a front-page headline in the News, announcing the fact that NASA had lost radio contact with a space rocket containing experimental white mice. The headline had read:

So it was no surprise to him that an article purporting to be about the wife, daughters, and newborn son of a man who was a multimillionaire building contractor in New York City hinted in its headline and in the following heavily slanted story that Mr. Anthony Faviola was “a family man” of quite another sort, the family being a Mafia family in Manhattan, the head of which was none other than the proud papa himself. The article was liberally illustrated with photographs of Faviola and his wife, Faviola and his two daughters, aged respectively four and two, and Faviola and the newborn son, three months old at the time of publication. All of the pictures had been taken in front of a modest development house on Staten Island; apparently, Faviola had not yet moved his family to the mansion in Stonington.

There were later articles that showed the palatial estate Faviola built in Connecticut, articles in newspapers and magazines charting the rise, one might have thought, of a respectable businessman instead of a cutthroat racketeer who had bludgeoned his way to the number-one position in the mob. And because Americans were endlessly fascinated by stories about gangsters, the comings and goings of the Faviola family — but especially those of the don himself, in and out of court — were recorded with all the solemnity accorded to royalty of a sort.

Here was the older daughter at a lavish sixteenth birthday party her father threw for her, and here was the boychild on his first pair of skis at Stowe, and here was the younger daughter graduating from Choate-Rosemary Hall, and here was the elder daughter again, this time getting married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to a man named Samuel Caglieri, and here was the son at seventeen, wearing a Kent football uniform. Even though the infrequent pictures of Faviola’s wife, Tessie, showed a good-looking blond woman with pale eyes and an attractive smile, she was obviously somewhat camera shy — perhaps because her husband’s appearances in court were making bigger and bigger headlines each time he was charged with a crime and exonerated by yet another jury. The boy and the elder daughter obviously favored the wife, with the same light eyes and fair hair. The second daughter had Faviola’s dark hair and brown eyes.

The most recent mention of Faviola’s son was in an article in People magazine, no less, some nine or ten years back. The article was headlined in typical People style:

The subtitle beneath this read:

Beneath this was an almost-full-page black-and-white photograph of a rather good-looking young man in swimming trunks, standing at the edge of a Vegas swimming pool with his legs apart, his arms above his head like spread wings, and a huge grin on his tanned face. The article, like the magazine itself, was long on style and heavy on folksy content.

When the piece was published, the only son of Anthony Faviola was in attendance at UCLA, but it seemed his studies didn’t deter him from popping up to Vegas every other weekend or so, where he was a favorite of the town’s chorus girls and a high roller at all of the casinos. The article implied, in fact, that his frequent visits to Vegas had more to do with his father’s business interests than with sheer pleasure. Described as “quick-witted and quick-fisted,” young Andrew, though ostensibly a student, was — according to the magazine’s innuendo — actually supervising his father’s vast Las Vegas gambling operation.

A montage of photos on the second page of the piece showed the son in a variety of poses at various ages, each with an appropriate caption. The little blond boy playing with a pail and shovel on a beach someplace was captioned TWO-YEAR-OLD FUTURE CONTRACTOR. There was a picture of him at Disneyland, wearing Mickey Mouse ears and looking up gravely at his father. This was captioned ALL EARS FOR PAPA’S ADVICE. Another picture showed him as a darker-haired gangly twelve-year-old in a tuxedo, dancing with his blond sister in a ball gown. This one was captioned AT THE COPA WITH SWEET-SIXTEEN ANGELA. There was yet another picture, a recent one and obviously posed, of him sitting alone on a bench in Central Park, his nose buried in a book. This one was captioned STUDYING FOR FINALS.

The picture with the Mickey Mouse ears caught Michael’s attention. The kid did look a bit jug-eared in some of his earlier photos, and Michael wondered whether People was calling attention to his aural appurtenances while supposedly commenting on the Mickey Mouse getup. Nor had Michael forgotten the tape’s several references to Michelino, which was why he was here in the first place. The typist had transcribed the taped word as “Mick-a-lino,” which he’d assumed was a WASP error in a wop environment. But was it possible that the typist had been correct, after all? Had Faviola said Mick-a-lino? Little Mickey? Was he making reference to a photograph taken at Disneyland when his son was... what? Michael could only guess because neither the caption nor the article itself gave a date. The kid, ears and all, looked to be about three or four.

The paper trail seemed suddenly overwhelming.

He went out into the kitchen for a glass of milk and a Famous Amos cookie, and then went back to the bedroom to stack the scrapbooks and call it a night.

It was close to eleven when they got back to her mother’s house on the beach. Andrew parked the VW in the oval on the side of the house away from the ocean and then walked them to the front door. In the tall grass under the palms, there was the incessant sound of busy insects. It was a balmy night. Only the faintest breeze stirred in the palm fronds, rippling them with silver from the full moon above.

“Thank you for a wonderful night,” he said.

“Thank you,” Mollie said. “For saving my entire life.”

Sarah extended her hand to him. “Thank you again,” she said.

“For everything,” Mollie said.

“I enjoyed every minute,” he said.

“Good night,” Sarah said, and released his hand.

“Have a good flight home,” Mollie said, and reached up to kiss him on the cheek and then went hastily into the house. Sarah watched Andrew walk to his car. He started it, waved farewell, and backed out of the driveway.

Yolande was sitting in the kitchen, reading the newspaper and simultaneously listening to the news on the radio. Mollie had already gone upstairs.

“Any calls?” Sarah asked.

“No calls, madame,” Yolande said. “Shall I leave this on?”

“No, thanks.”

Yolande rose, snapped off the radio, said, “Alors, à demain. Bonne nuit, madame.”

“Good night, Yolande.”

Yolande picked up her newspaper from the table and went into her room just off the kitchen, closing the door behind her. Sarah went upstairs to where Mollie was already in bed, waiting for her goodnight kiss.

“He’s cool,” she said.

“Yes,” Sarah said. “Good night, honey.”

“Good night, Mom.”

Sarah kissed her on the cheek, tucked the sheet up under her chin, and turned off the light. As she was starting out of the room, Mollie asked, “Do you think he liked me?”

“I think you were adorable,” Sarah said.

“Yeah, but did he think so?”

“How could he not?” she said, and smiled. “Good night,” she said again.

“He really is cool,” Mollie murmured, beginning to drift off.

Downstairs, Yolande was already snoring gently. Sarah turned off the kitchen lights, opened the French doors in the living room, and stood looking silently at the ocean for several moments.

The scent of angel’s-trumpet was overpowering.

She poured herself a somewhat hefty cognac, stepped out onto the deck, and wondered if she should call Michael. Her watch read eleven-fifteen, he was probably asleep by now. She took off her sandals and went down the steps onto the beach.

The waves whispered in against the sand.

The water was warm where it touched her naked feet.

This was a scene from a movie, she forgot which one, the woman in white standing at the water’s edge with a brandy snifter in her right hand, the mild breeze riffling her blond hair, what was the name of that movie?

Out on the water, a cruise ship ablaze with light moved slowly through the darkness. She heard the distant sound of the ship’s orchestra, visualized beautiful women in gossamer gowns drifting over a polished parquet floor. She wondered where the ship was headed, wondered why they always moved at night. A woman’s lilting laughter rose to the stars, faded, vanished. The beach was utterly still. She watched the ship a moment longer, and then she finished the cognac, and looked up at the moon one last time, and went back into the house.

She was on the beach again at seven the next morning, eager for a long fast walk, wearing a brief lime-green bikini, her hair held with a matching band. She walked with her head bent, skirting the edge of the water like a sandpiper, the wavelets nudging the shore, the soft wind gently touching her hair. Last night had been a revelation in many respects, and she wanted nothing more than to be alone with her thoughts this morning.

She hadn’t believed, before last night, that she could ever possibly be attracted to any man but her husband. Then again, before last night she’d never met a man like Andrew Farrell, whom she’d found altogether charming and delightful, and who’d been wonderful with Mollie, besides. There were times, in fact, when Sarah felt she was serving primarily as interlocutor-chaperone for Hero and Smitten Daughter. But whenever the spotlight veered to her, she’d... well... she’d actually basked in it, feeling, well, flattered by his attention and, well, complimented and... interested, actually.

She still didn’t know whether he’d been deliberately reluctant to reveal anything about himself, or whether he was simply inordinately shy. She’d detected that whenever the conversation drifted toward the personal, he diverted it either to Mollie or to herself, seemingly fascinated by her daughter’s prepubescent chatter or the everyday details of her own life. She guessed his age had contributed somewhat to these several awkward moments. He was, after all, only twenty-eight — one of the few facts he’d readily revealed about himself — but he seemed younger still, truly closer in spirit to Mollie than to a woman just this side of forty. Well, only thirty-four, sister, let’s not exaggerate. Well, going on thirty-five, sister.

Twenty-eight was so very young.

In fact...

In fact, somewhere along around ten, ten-thirty last night, she’d begun wondering what possibly could have possessed her, asking a boy... well, actually an attractive young man... but nonetheless someone she didn’t know at all, a man she didn’t know at all, asking him to have dinner with her and her daughter, when a cocktail might have suff—

“Sarah?”

She turned sharply, startled by the voice behind her.

Andrew.

Here.

As if materializing, from her thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to...”

“That’s all right,” she said. But her heart was pounding, startling her that way. “You surprised me is all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no.”

“I should’ve coughed or something, let you know I was coming up behind...”

“That’s okay, really.”

He fell into step beside her. Barefooted, his trouser cuffs rolled up, he matched his strides to her smaller ones and began walking silently along with her. His hulking silence beside her magnified the sense of intrusion she felt, even though — and she realized this with an odd sense of surprise — she’d been thinking exclusively about him when he’d come up so suddenly behind her.

“I’m sorry I was so tongue-tied at dinner,” he said.

She turned to look at him.

“Last night,” he said.

“But you weren’t,” she said.

His eyes would not meet hers. His head was lowered, his gaze directed at the sand ahead of them. Up the beach, the wreck of a small dinghy on the sand gleamed blue in the sunshine.

“It’s just...” he said, and hesitated, and then said, “Well, it doesn’t matter. I just hope I didn’t spoil your evening. Or Mollie’s.”

“Nothing could have spoiled Mollie’s evening,” she said.

“And yours?”

“I had a lovely time,” she said.

“Well, I hope so,” he said dubiously.

They were almost to the dinghy now. It lay skeletal and bleached, the sunlight tinting tattered gunwales and thwarts, the ocean gently lapping the damaged prow. The boat was just a mile from the house. She always clocked her morning walks on it. She turned back now, as she did every morning.

“It’s exactly a mile,” she said. “The boat.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“From the house,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Do you like champagne?”

“Not particularly.”

“Oh.”

End of conversation.

“I left some on your doorstep,” he said. “To make up for last night.”

“You didn’t have to...”

“I didn’t know you hated champagne.”

“Well, I don’t hate it, I’m just not particularly fond of it.”

“I’m on my way to the airport,” he said, “I thought I’d just drop it off, I didn’t expect to see you, it’s so early. Then I spotted you walking, so I thought I’d... just say goodbye.”

She said nothing. She could see the house up ahead, Yolande setting breakfast on the terrace.

“The reason I was so quiet last night...” he said.

“You weren’t quiet at all,” she said, and turned to look at him. His eyes were very blue in the sun.

“It’s just... I’ve never met anyone as beautiful as you in my life.”

“Well... thank you,” she said. “That’s very ki—” and suddenly he pulled her into his arms.

She thought Hey, stop it, and said out loud, “What the hell do you...?” but never got the rest of the sentence past her lips because all at once his mouth was on hers. She pushed out against him, struggling in his embrace, his arms tight around her, his mouth on hers, trying to twist away from him, wondering if they could be seen from the house, the beach empty in the early morning sunlight. His tongue was in her mouth now, insinuating its presence, tangling her silenced words, Please don’t do this, his cock hard against her, please, she could feel him through the flimsy bikini, his arms binding her to him, his mouth relentless, please, please...

And suddenly he released her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Forgive me.”

And turned and ran up the beach.

She saw him stopping at the end of the path beside the house, saw him picking up his shoes. He looked back toward her once more and then vanished around the side of the house.

Her lips burning, her thighs quivering, she heard his car starting and listened to the sound of its small engine fading in the distance.

The card on the bottle of Moët Chandon read:

Michael found what he was looking for that morning, in an Italian-language newspaper called Il Corriere della Sera. The paper on his desk was yellowed and fraying; the date on it indicated that it was almost twenty-nine years old. Accompanying the article, in a plastic pocket fastened to the scrapbook page, was a typewritten English translation attributed to someone named Jenny Weinstein, more than likely a Bureau secretary.

Oddly, the article wasn’t about Anthony Faviola — who was mentioned in it only once, and then as a rising young building contractor — but was instead about his father Andrew, the American-born son of Andreo Antonio Faviola and Marcella Donofrio Faviola, both immigrants from the town of Ruvo del Monte, Provincia di Potenza, Italy. Michael had no idea where this town might be. He continued reading.

The article celebrated two concurrent and virtually simultaneous events. The first of these was the fiftieth anniversary of the bakery Andrew Faviola had owned and operated on the same street in Coney Island ever since the death of his father some twelve years earlier. The second event, occurring three days after the bakery’s anniversary, was the birth of Andrew’s third grandchild, the first grandson presented to him by his son Anthony, “a rising young building contractor.” The child had been named Andrew, after the subject of the article, his proud grandfather.

There was a picture of Andrew holding the infant namesake in his arms. It was summertime and the grandfather — fifty-two years old at the time, according to the article — was standing in his shirtsleeves before the plate-glass window of a shop called Marcella’s Bakery. The baby was wearing a white unisex shift and little white booties. Even at that tender age, the kid’s jug ears were clearly visible.

The article explained that the shop had been named by Andreo Faviola in honor of his wife, who — at the time the article was written — was eighty-four years old, “God bless her,” Andrew told the reporter. This meant that Topolino was a great-grandson of the woman who...

Topolino?

Michael almost spilled his morning coffee.

... woman who sixty-five years earlier had made the long and arduous journey from a mountaintop village midway between Bari on the Adriatic and Naples on the Tyrrhenian. The elder Andrew...

Which translated into English as “But he looks like Mickey Mouse, isn’t that true? With those big ears!” The article went on to explain that Mickey Mouse was as popular in Italy as he was here in the United States, and that the old lady was using the name affectionately, since — as anyone could plainly see — the child was extraordinarily beautiful with the same blond hair and blue eyes as many of the region’s mountain people.

Topolino, Michael thought.

Mickey Mouse.

Later Anglicized and bastardized to Mick-a-lino.

Lino.

What goes around comes around, he thought.

Poor but honest Italian immigrant comes to America around the turn of the century, opens a bakery shop which his native-born son, Andrew, inherits when he dies. Andrew in turn has a son named Anthony, who becomes “a rising young building contractor,” and in turn sires two daughters and a son, subsequently named Andrew after his grandfather and nicknamed Topolino by his great-grandmother.

Andrew Faviola.

The “Lino” his father had chosen to succeed him if/when he ever fell from power.

Andrew Faviola.

The student who’d made weekend visits from UCLA to Las Vegas, where he supervised his father’s gambling operations when he wasn’t being “a favorite of the town’s chorus girls and a big roller at all of the casinos.”

Andrew Faviola.

Who nowadays had to be consulted before a jackass gambler could be let off the hook.

Andrew Faviola.

Who was maybe running the whole damn show now that his father was locked away in Kansas.

It was nine a.m. on the thirtieth of December, two days before the new year. Michael picked up the phone and dialed his boss’s extension.