Criminal Conversation

2: January 11–February 17

He was waiting for her when she came out of the school.

It was a bitterly cold day, the sky overhead a dull gunmetal gray, a blustery wind sweeping ruthlessly eastward from the Hudson. It was only four in the afternoon, but it seemed as if dusk had already fallen.

Sarah pushed through the doors, pulling on her gloves, a red woolen hat yanked down over her ears, a matching muffler wound about her throat. She’d been back on the job for a week already, her tan was virtually gone. She normally walked a block east to the IRT station on Sixtieth and Lex, took the local uptown to Seventy-Seventh, and then walked from there to the apartment on Eighty-First, altogether a fifteen-minute commute. She was starting for Lex now when he cut diagonally across the street toward her, popping up in front of her much as he had on the beach in St. Bart’s.

“Hi,” he said.

In the split second before she recognized him, she thought she was being accosted by one of New York’s loonies. And then she realized who he was, and knew in that moment that his appearance here was not an accident, he had sought her out, he was here by design.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I have to talk to you.”

“Please go away,” she said.

“I want to apologize for...”

“There’s no need to apologize, just go away, please, just leave me alone.”

They started to cross Park Avenue, the light changing just as they reached the center island, where the wind seemed somehow fiercer. They waited in silence until the light changed again. He fell into step beside her, adjusting his longer strides to hers, and they; began walking together toward Lexington Avenue.

“Do you know what movie she said that in?” he asked.

“No. Who? What movie? What are you talking about?”

“Garbo,” he said.

“No, I don’t. Listen, I’m on my way home, I’m a married woman, I have a daughter...”

“Grand Hotel,” he said. “‘I want to be alone.’”

“I do want to be alone,” she said. “I don’t know why you came here...”

“To apologize. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“No. Goodbye, Mr. Farrell.”

“Andrew,” he said.

“Yes, Andrew, goodbye,” she said, and started down the steps into the subway. He fell behind her for just an instant and then immediately caught up, falling in beside her again as she dug into her handbag for a token. She was out of tokens. She was starting for the change booth when he stepped into her path again.

“Please stop doing that!” she said.

“A cup of coffee. So I can explain.”

“No.”

“Please.”

There was on his face the same plaintive look that had been on Mollie’s the night they’d bought the Christmas tree. She was already shaking her head, no, no, no, but the look on his face was so forlorn, so very...

“Listen,” she said, “I really...”

“Please,” he said again. “I’m sorry for what I did that morning. I want to explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain. I accept your apology. It was nice seeing you again.”

“You don’t really mean that,” he said.

“I really don’t,” she said, and stepped around him and up to the booth. The black woman behind the glass looked at her.

“Ten tokens, please,” Sarah said, and took out her wallet and was reaching inside it when he said, “I’ve got it.”

“What?” she said.

He slid a twenty under the glass panel.

“I’m paying for it, miss,” she said at once, and slid a five and a ten under the panel.

“Take it from the twenty,” he told the attendant.

“Who is paying here?” the woman said calmly.

“I am,” they said simultaneously.

“You can’t both be paying,” she said, “and I’m busy here.”

“She never lets me pay for anything,” Andrew said, and grinned and retrieved the twenty.

Sarah picked up her change and the packet of tokens.

“Now I owe you a cup of coffee,” he said.

“How do you figure that?” she asked.

She already knew she would allow him to buy her a cup of coffee.

“Well, you paid for the tokens, didn’t you?” he said.

“The logic escapes me,” she said.

“Is there a place nearby?” he asked.

There was a cluster of restaurants, coffee shops, and delis along Lexington Avenue near the subway station, but she did not want to take him to anyplace frequented by students from the school. She would wonder about that later. Wonder why she had chosen even then not to be seen in his company by any of her students. She walked him down to Second Avenue instead, where she told him she knew a little French place that served terrific croissants and wonderful coffee.

There was a sense of wintry coziness inside the shop, overcoats huddled on wall pegs just inside the enclosed entry, patrons in turtlenecks and tweeds, the aroma of strong coffee and good things baking, the paneled and bellied front window framing pedestrians hurrying past with their heads ducked against the ferocious, wind.

They found a table near a giant copper espresso machine, and they both ordered cafe filtre and chocolate-filled croissants. He was wearing a blue flannel shirt, a gray tweed sports jacket, darker gray slacks. Sarah was wearing what she called her “schoolmarm threads”: a moss-green sweater, a dark brown wool skirt, opaque green panty hose. Normally, she wore French-heeled shoes to work. Today, because of the rotten weather, she was wearing knee-high brown leather boots. She had taken off the red hat and stuffed it into the pocket of her coat. The red muffler was still draped around her neck. He’d been hatless to begin with. They sat on either side of a small scarred wooden table, blue-eyed and blue-eyed, blond hair and brown hair.

Later, she would tell him they made a good-looking couple.

And would wonder if she’d actually thought it on that first day together in New York.

“So let me explain,” he said, and waited for her nod, and then said, “To begin with, I don’t usually go around kissing married women.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I mean it. I’m usually very... careful that way.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That morning... I don’t know... I just... I couldn’t take my eyes off you the night before, and when...”

“Andrew,” she said, and hesitated, and then said, “I don’t want this, really. I’m not looking for it, I don’t want it, I don’t need it...”

“You want to be alone, I know.”

“I’m not alone. I have a husband.”

“I love you,” he said.

“Oh, Jesus!” she said, and quickly glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone was sitting close enough to hear all this. “Andrew,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, “I don’t think you understand what I’m telling you. I’m not being coy, I’m not in any way trying to encourage...”

“I know.”

“So cut it out, okay? Just stop it!”

There was a long silence.

Awkwardly, they sat across from each other.

The coffee and croissants arrived.

She sipped at the coffee. Cut into the croissant with a fork. The chocolate was rich and dark and delicious.

“Do you like teaching?” he asked.

“I love it.”

“How’d it go today?”

“Fine.”

“Good, I’m glad.”

“How’d your day go?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“I never did learn what you do.”

“I’m a gangster,” he said, and grinned.

“Sure,” she said.

“Actually, I’m what you’d call an opportunity investor,” he said, the grin giving way to the earnest look of someone very young trying to appear very serious and very grown-up. “I look for businesses that need an investment of time and money, and I nurture them along till they bring me a good return.”

“What sort of businesses?”

“Import-export, shipping, real estate, construction, and so on. I’m into a lot of things.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“You’re exciting,” he said.

“Okay, I think it’s time I went home,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because you still don’t under—”

“I’d love to kiss you,” he said.

“Let’s get a check,” she said.

“Do we fight over this one, too?”

“No, you asked me.”

“That’s true. May I kiss you?”

“No.”

“In that case,” he said, and leaned across the table and kissed her full on the mouth.

She would later tell him that she became immediately wet the moment his lips touched hers again.

Now she stood abruptly.

“Goodbye, Andrew,” she said, and left him sitting at the table while she went to the row of pegs and yanked her coat off the wall, and ran outside into the cold without putting it on and without looking back at him.

The two detectives initially assigned by Michael to the surveillance of Andrew Faviola met with him in his office on Tuesday morning, the twelfth of January. They’d been working the case for a week now, ever since Michael got back from the Caribbean, but there wasn’t much to report.

Johnny Regan, the older of the two detectives, and the more experienced, sat in a chair alongside his young partner, Alex Lowndes. The men felt comfortable in this office, they’d been here many times before. Besides, the office encouraged casualness. When Michael was a teenager, his mother had engaged in a constant battle with him to keep his room from resembling a garbage dump. His office wasn’t quite the mess his room had been; he was, after all, a grown man now. But an office told a great deal about the person who lived in it sometimes twelve out of every twenty-four hours, and Michael’s bordered on the edge of neglect. This was not to say that it was either sloppy or untidy. Instead, there was a sense of... well... somewhat orderly clutter.

Stacks of transcripts and other legal documents rested on each of the three desks in the spacious room. Windows facing Centre Street covered one long wall, the area beneath them occupied by bound copies of New York’s Penal Law, Criminal Law, and Criminal Procedure Law. A glassed cabinet held more legal volumes, together with framed photographs of Sarah and Mollie, and several blue peaked caps with the insignias or logos of various law enforcement agencies he’d worked with in the past. A mock, blue-enameled gold detective’s shield — a gift from the DA’s Office Squad after Michael had served as lead attorney on his first OCCA case — was hanging in a small bell jar. His framed B.S. degree from Duke hung on the wall above the cabinet, alongside his Juris Doctor degree from Columbia.

A television monitor with a VCR sitting on a shelf under it was in one corner of the room. Labeled videotapes from various surveillances were scattered on top of a table alongside the monitor. On that same table were a stacked amplifier and tape deck, together with a CD player. Labeled discs and tapes were fanned helter-skelter on the tabletop, together with Magic Markers and blank labels.

Hanging on the wall right-angled to the window wall, there were framed mug shots of the Lombardi Crew, six gangsters Michael had put away five years ago, when he first moved over to Organized Crime. Standing in the corner of the joining walls was a coatrack that held Michael’s own beige Burberry trench coat and matching muffler, and the black raincoats both Regan and Lowndes had worn to work this morning. A black umbrella was lying on the floor near the coatrack; Michael had carried it to work with him two weeks ago.

“What we did,” Regan was saying, “was run a routine check with Motor Vehicles. Guy lives in New York, chances are he’s either a licensed driver or he owns a car.”

Regan was puffing on a cigar. He looked like a fight manager. Brown trousers, a tan crew-neck sweater, little beer-barrel belly bulging above the waist. Always looked as if he needed a shave. He was left-handed, so he wore his shoulder holster strapped on the right side of his body.

“We got nothing at all in New York or Nassau County, so we hit Connecticut and Jersey. Nothing in Jersey, but Alex came up with something in Connecticut. Well, you tell him,” Regan said, and turned to his partner.

Alex Lowndes looked mean as a pawnbroker’s offer. Long and lank, with stringy dirty-blond hair and eyes that appeared gray although they were actually a pale blue, he sat in blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater with a black leather jacket over it. There was a scar at the tail of his left eyebrow. He told people he’d got it in a knife fight with a crazed junkie. Actually, he’d had the scar since he was ten, when he fell down roller-skating and hit his head on the curb. Michael knew this because Lowndes had confided it to his partner, and Regan had passed the information on. The two men didn’t get along. Everyone in the department knew that. It was amazing neither of them had asked for a new partner. Maybe this was because their arrest record was phenomenal.

“We got an Acura Legend coupe registered to an Andrew Faviola at 24 Cradle Rock Road, Stonington, Connecticut,” Lowndes said.

“Terrific,” Michael said sourly.

“Yeah, his father’s house up there,” Lowndes said.

“Where he don’t live anymore,” Regan said. “The old man.”

“Where he won’t live ever again,” Lowndes said.

“What we figure, the kid doesn’t live there, either,” Regan said. “No sign of the Acura, anyway, the three nights we sat the house.”

“When was this?”

“This past weekend. We figure you live in Connecticut, that’s when you go home, right? For the weekend. Snow, trees, all that shit. But no sign of him.”

“Has he got a driver’s license?” Michael asked.

“I was coming to that,” Regan said. “He did have one, but it got suspended after three consecutive speeding tickets. Far as we can tell, he doesn’t have one now.”

“How does he drive the Acura?”

“Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t go visit his mama on weekends.”

“What was the address on the license he had?”

“No luck there, Michael. It was a California license. From when he was in school out there. An address on Montana. It sounds like the Wild West, I know, but it’s a street in L.A.”

“Suspended in California?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Eight years ago.”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s been driving without a license all that time?”

“Looks that way.”

“No application in New York for a new one?”

“No.”

“Or Connecticut?”

“No.”

“He’s mob-connected,” Lowndes said, “he can buy phony licenses a dime a dozen.”

“What you’re saying is we don’t know where he lives yet.”

“That’s right.”

“And if we don’t know where to find him, we can’t begin tailing him.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Have you checked for any parking violations?”

“I’ve got that call in now,” Regan said, nodding. “If he’s driving the Acura, he has to park it every now and then. And this is a guy with no respect for traffic laws...”

“Three speeding violations out there,” Lowndes said.

“So he’ll park the car wherever he feels like it.”

“When did they say they’d get back?”

“You know those guys. They get thousands of scofflaws, what’s the big deal?”

“Let’s try ’em again now,” Michael suggested.

Regan looked at his watch:

“Be a good time,” he said, and went to the phone. “What’s that extension again, Alex, you remember? At Parking Violations?”

“Three-two-oh,” Lowndes said.

Regan dialed. Michael hit the speaker button. They listened to the phone ringing on the other end, once, twice, three times, again, again...

“Gone home already,” Lowndes said.

“At four-thirty?” Regan said.

“Parking Violations, Cantori.”

“Sergeant Henderson, please.”

“Who’s this?”

“Detective Regan, DA’s Office Squad.”

“Second.”

Regan shrugged.

They waited.

“Henderson,” a voice said.

“Sergeant, this is Detective Regan, I called you yesterday about this Acura we’re trying to trace for the Organized Crime Unit? Connecticut plate on it?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sitting here with the deputy unit chief, and he’s wondering if you’ve made any progress on this.”

There was a silence on the line.

“He’s on the speaker now, in fact,” Regan said.

“Hello, Sergeant,” Michael said. “This is ADA Welles, how’s it going?”

“We’ve been jammed here,” Henderson said. “The holidays.”

“I can imagine,” Michael said. “And. we hate to push you on this, but it’s a matter of some urgency.”

“They’re all a matter of some urgency,” Henderson said drily.

“I’m sure they are. But do you think you can kick up your computer, see if you’ve got anything on this particular car? We really would appreciate it.”

“Give me the number there,” Henderson said.

He called back in ten minutes.

“Blue 1991 Acura Legend coupe, Connecticut registration, vanity plate FAV-TWO, registered owner Andrew Faviola, address 24 Cradle Rock Road, Stonington, Connecticut.

“That’s the car,” Regan said.

“I’ve got fourteen parking violations since September of last year. What do you need?”

“Locations,” Michael said.

“Four of them are outside a restaurant called La Luna on Fifty-Eighth and Eighth.”

Michael nodded.

“What about the other eight?”

“Various locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

“How are they listed?”

“By building.”

“Where the car was parked?” Regan asked.

“Yeah, the address it was in front of.”

“Any other repeaters?” Michael asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Any other places he parked more than once?”

“No, these are all different addresses.”

“Any streets repeated?”

“Let me see.”

There was a long silence.

“Yeah, we got three addresses on the same street.”

“What street is that?” Michael asked.

“It’s an avenue, actually.”

“Which one?”

“Bowery. In Manhattan. But the addresses are pretty far apart.”

“Can you let us have them, please?”

“What’s your fax number?” Henderson said.

The apartment was above a tailor shop on Broome Street, just two blocks off Bowery. The tailor shop was on the ground floor of the building: The upper three stories had been remodeled as a triplex. From the outside, you saw a four-story brick tenement covered with the soot and grime of at least a century. On the inside, the apartment consisted of an entry and living room on the floor above the tailor shop, a kitchen and dining room on the second floor, and a bedroom on the third floor. There was a lot of expensive cabinetry and hardware in the apartment. Andrew’s father had contracted the remodeling to one of his own construction companies, and they’d done a quality job because they’d realized exactly for whom they were working.

The building was a corner building. The entrance to the tailor shop was on Broome Street, but its large plate-glass windows wrapped around the corner to Mott Street as well. There was a wooden door painted blue on the Mott Street side of the building. The blue door had a Mott Street address on it, and a black mailbox with the name “Carter-Goldsmith Investments” lettered on it in gold was affixed to the jamb beside the door. Inside the door, there was a staircase that led to the first-floor entry of the apartment. There was one other entrance to the apartment. This was through the back of the tailor shop, where a door opened onto another staircase that led to the rear of the apartment’s living room, adjacent to the wood-burning fireplace. The upstairs and downstairs doors to the apartment were fitted with identical deadbolt locks. Andrew was the only one who had a key that opened each lock.

He always parked his car wherever he could find a spot. The side streets in Little Italy and Chinatown were usually impossible, but he’d been lucky finding spaces on Bowery, where all the lighting and appliance stores were. He then walked the two, three, sometimes six blocks or more to the Broome Street tailor shop. The gilt lettering on both the Broome Street and Mott Street windows of the shop read:

A little bell over the door rang whenever anyone entered the shop. On this rainy, wet, and dismal Friday the fifteenth, the bell sounded particularly welcoming, a harbinger of the steamy embrace of the shop. As he entered, Andrew was greeted with the familiar sounds of the bell tinkling, and the pressing machine hissing in the back room, and the sewing machine humming. Louis sat working in the Broome Street window, squinting at a piece of cloth he was running under the feed dog, chewing on an unlit guinea stinker, his rimless glasses shoved up onto his forehead, his foot on the machine’s treadle. To his left and deeper inside the shop was a double-tiered row of hangered garments awaiting pickup.

“Andrew, hello,” he said, and rose immediately and put the stogie in a small ashtray near the machine’s bobbin. Turning to Andrew, his arms wide, he said, “Come vai?”

“Good, thank you,” Andrew said, and went to the old man and embraced him.

Louis was wearing a sleeveless sweater over a white shirt and trousers with a faint stripe. He had made the trousers himself. He had also made the sports jacket Andrew was wearing under an overcoat he’d had tailored at Chipp. Louis had picket-fence white hair, and he always looked a bit grizzled. Andrew guessed he shaved once or twice a week, and then under duress.

“I found a nice cloth for you,” he said. “For a suit. You want to see it?”

“Not now, I’m expecting Uncle Rudy,” Andrew said, and looked at his watch. “Send him right up when he gets here, okay?”

“Sure. What weather, huh?”

“Terrible,” Andrew said.

“Is the jacket warm enough?”

“The jacket is warm enough,” Andrew said, smiling and unbuttoning his coat. Opening it wide to show Louis, he said, “And beautiful, too.”

“Yes, it is,” Louis said modestly.

“I’ll be upstairs.”

“I’ll send him up.”

“How’s Benny doing?”

“Ask him,” Louis said, and shrugged.

His son was pressing in the back room.

“I hate this fuckin’ job,” was the first thing he said.

“You’re a good presser,” Andrew said.

“Can’t you get me something?” Benny said.

Tall and rake-thin, with his father’s unruly hair — coal black as opposed to the old man’s white — he, too, wore glasses, misted now by the steam rising from the pressing machine. He worked in a tank-top white undershirt and dark trousers. White socks and black shoes. He, too, needed a shave. Like father, like son, Andrew thought.

“I’ll take anything you can find me,” Benny said. “Construction, the docks, anything, driving a truck, whatever. I’m stronger than I look, Andrew, I mean it.”

“I know you are. But...”

“I’m skinny, but I’m strong.”

“I know that. But what would your father do without you?”

“It’s just I hate pressing. I hate it.”

“Does he know that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Talk to him. See what he says. If he agrees to let you go, I may have something in the Fulton Market.”

“Jesus, I hate fish,” Benny said.

“Or something else, we’ll see. But talk to him first.”

“I can’t even stand the smell of fish,” Benny said.

“Talk to him,” Andrew said, and walked back to the door on the rear wall. Fastened to the jamb was a speaker with a buzzer button under it. He fished out his keys and unlocked the deadbolt. Flicking on the light switch in the stairwell, he climbed to the apartment’s first floor. The stairwell walls were painted white to match the back of the tailor shop. The door to the apartment was also painted white on this side. He unlocked the deadbolt on the upstairs door, opened it, stepped into the apartment, and closed and locked the door behind him, using the deadbolt’s thumb latch. The inside of the door was paneled in walnut, as was the rest of the living room. He checked the thermostat, nodded when he saw it was set for seventy degrees, and then sat down to wait for his uncle.

In the newspaper office on the fifth floor of the school, Luretta and Sarah were working on next week’s issue of the Greer Gazette, a name both of them despised. The clock on the wall read eleven forty. Sarah and the girl both had free periods, and whatever they could accomplish now would save time for the rest of the newspaper staff after classes today. Luretta was better at headlines than most of the other girls; she had a mind that cut instantly to the chase. The one she was working on now was for a story that detailed the school’s visit last week to the Matisse exhibit at MOMA. She’d tried two ideas on Sarah...

... and...

... and then agreed with her when she suggested that the word “misses” sounded like what someone would expect at a school for girls somewhere in the Berkshires, but not here in the heart of New York, in a place full of sophisticated, smart...

“Gee, thanks,” Luretta said, and flashed her wonderful smile.

Alone in the office, the two tossed around several new approaches, all of them rotten. The wind outside rattled the windowpanes, whistled and howled in a hairline crack where the window didn’t quite meet the frame. It was Luretta who finally came up with the notion of telling what impact the exhibit had had on the girls; the story, after all, wasn’t announcing future outing, it was reporting on a past excursion.

“Well, what impact did it have?” Sarah asked.

“I personally found it awesome,” Luretta said. “And I don’t mean awesome as in Valley Girl, I mean goddamn awesome!”

“In what way?”

Get them to think, get them to explore, get them to...

“The way all his life he kept finding new ways of doing things,” Luretta said. “Even when he was an old man, he was still saying, ‘Look at me! I’m alive!’”

“Can you put that in a headline?”

“Wouldn’t work,” Luretta said.

They both fell silent.

Out of the blue, Luretta said, “Matisse Lives!”

“Good,” Sarah said, and nodded.

“’Cause he does, you know,” Luretta said. “He still lives, that’s the thing of it.”

“Yes,” Sarah said.

They worked silently for several minutes, each bent over their separate pasteups, the clock on the wall ticking, the wind rushing the window.

“I wish some of the kids where I live could see that show,” Luretta said. “Make them want to live, too.”

“Why can’t they?”

“They’re too busy dyin’,” Luretta said.

Sarah looked up.

Their eyes met.

“Dope, I mean,” Luretta said. “It’s all over the streets up there. They make it so easy.”

Sarah kept looking at her.

“No, not me,” Luretta said. “You don’t have to worry about that. I don’t need that shit, excuse me.”

“I’m glad,” Sarah said.

“But it’s tempting, I’ll tell you that, Mrs. Welles. It bein’ there all the time. Easy to get, cheap as dirt. Makes you want to try it, you know? Everybody else up there is doin’ it, you say to yourself, ‘Why not me? Why not go fly with all the others?’”

Sarah said nothing.

“But you know, you go see this work the man did, and you realize he didn’t need crack to get high, did he? Matisse. He found all the high he needed right inside himself.”

“Yes,” Sarah said.

“Right in here,” Luretta said, and tapped her clenched fist over her heart. “Right in here.”

The bell sounded, shattering the silence.

“We got a lot done here, didn’t we?” Luretta said.

“Yes, we did. Will you be back this afternoon?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Look for you then.”

“Matisse Lives!” Luretta said, grinning, and threw a black power salute as she went out the door.

The clock on the wall read twelve ten.

Time for lunch.

Sarah didn’t feel like the teachers’ lunchroom today.

Despite the weather, she thought she might walk over to the coffee shop on Lex and Fif—

She thought suddenly of Andrew Farrell.

Of not wanting to take him to the coffee shop so close to the school.

Went instead...

The smell of strong coffee...

The taste of rich chocolate on her lips.

Andrew leaning over the table to kiss her.

Quickly, she put the thought of him out of her mind.

His uncle looked worse each time Andrew saw him.

He would always wonder if Uncle Rudy had turned down the job because he truly hadn’t wanted it, or because he knew he had such a short time to live. He was next in line, everyone knew that. But cancer was in line ahead of him.

Best-kept secret in the family.

Never act from a position of weakness, his father had told him. Never let anyone know weakness is the reason for any decision. Always move through strength. Or make it seem that way.

Succeeding his father merely because his uncle was sick would have been taken by others as assuming control by default. Andrew did not have his uncle’s seniority, was not a made man like his uncle, in fact had none of his uncle’s experience or training. But when Rudy Faviola, moving through strength, said he did not want the job and named his nephew as rightful successor, the announcement had all the force of an irrefutable royal command.

Whether Andrew would in the long run be accepted was another matter. His own father had taken control of the Tortocello family by eliminating its leader. Andrew was well aware of this. He had read all the newspaper accounts of Ralph Tortocello’s murder, and he knew the same thing could easily happen to him if someone disputed his assumption of power. He was hoping the Sino-Colombian deal would go a long way toward dispelling any such doubts. He and his uncle were here to discuss that today.

“Willie’s been in touch with Moreno again,” Rudy said. “I got to tell you, Andrew, he’s shitting his pants down there, Willie. Moreno can do him in a minute and he knows it. He likes the Caribbean, he doesn’t want to come back up north to live. But if this thing we’re attempting doesn’t work, then we have to yank him out of there or he’s shark meat.”

“I realize that.”

“Moreno now has the message that he won’t be able to do business anywhere in the U.S., he don’t play ball with us. New York, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, San Diego, he’s fucked wherever he tries to sell the shit ’cause our people will be knockin’ off dealers like they’re rats in a sewer. The message’ll be, you do business with Moreno, you have to answer to us. He don’t particularly like being threatened, Andrew, but fuck him, we made him a good offer, he’s playin’ hardball. He knows you’re runnin’ this now, you weren’t just an office boy went down there to do some fishin’. He also knows you’re your father’s son, and there’s no fuckin’ with Anthony Faviola wherever he may be, Kansas or wherever the fuck. He knows all this. What he’s holdin’ out for I don’t know.”

“What do you think it might be?”

“A bigger slice. He knows we’ve got him by the balls, he can’t deal with people who are scared we’ll be comin’ after them, it’s simple as that. He can shove his cocaine up his ass, he can’t sell it to the people who put it on the streets. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s letting us into his action in return for a third of what may turn out to be a tremendous market. But it ain’t a true market yet, Andrew, it’s what your father would call a perceived market, a prospective market. It’s nothing certain yet, you follow?”

“Of course it isn’t.”

“Well, Moreno knows that, you think he’s a fuckin’ dope? He’s figurin’ I throw my fuckin’ coke in the pot, I may get a third of nothing in return. Which, in a way, he’s right.”

“He’s got to be convinced otherwise, Uncle Rudy. This isn’t pie in the sky here, this is a cartel taking shape. In time, his third’ll be worth millions more than what he’s putting up.”

“Sure, in time,” Rudy said. “Tell that to a fuckin’ spic with his dick in his hand.”

“Well, as I see it, he’s got no choice.”

“Let me put Petey Bardo on this,” Rudy said, “get him to work up some figures. In the long run, it might be worth giving this jih-drool a little more on his end, keep him aboard. There’s no deal at all without his coke, you know.”

“I know. But there’s no deal without the Chinese, either, and they’re beginning to get itchy. I can’t wait forever for Moreno to see the light.”

“Let me see what Petey thinks we can afford, okay?”

“What if Moreno turns it down?”

“Then we got to think of some other way to convince him, huh?”

“Mm,” Andrew, said.

The men were silent for a moment.

Andrew looked at his watch.

“You expecting somebody?” Rudy asked.

“One o’clock,” Andrew said, nodding.

“Just a few more things I have to tell you.”

“No hurry, I can make a call.”

“The word’s out all over that nothing’s changed. Your father’s partners are your partners, capeesh? Same deals everywhere. Just in case somebody got it in his head, Hey, I’m on my own now Faviola’s in the slammer. Wrong. One or two guys we still have to talk to, make sure they understand completely, but otherwise I don’t see any trouble.”

“Okay.”

“One last thing. Some stupid fuck gambler in Queens stiffed Sal the Barber for fifteen grand plus the vig. Then he had the fuckin’ nerve to steal another five grand of cash he got for deliverin’ some coke for Frankie Palumbo. Frankie had a sitdown with Jimmy Angels, you know him?”

“No.”

“Angelli, Jimmy Angelli, he owns a shitty restaurant in Forest Hills, he’s a capo in the Colotti family. Anyway, his cousin’s involved with this fuckin’ thief, and now Angelli’s askin’ yet another favor.”

“What was the first favor?”

“Lettin’ that asshole deliver the coke, for which he paid back Frankie by stealing five grand from him.”

“Tell Frankie to take care of him,” Andrew said. “So it won’t happen again.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing,” Rudy said, “I’ll leave you to your pleasure.”

He rose, embraced his nephew, kissed him on both cheeks, said, “Ciao, Lino,” and left the apartment through the door that led to the tailor shop downstairs.

The girl rang the doorbell on the Mott Street side of the building. The gold lettering on the black mailbox read “Carter-Goldsmith Investments.” She wondered who Carter-Goldsmith was. He hadn’t told her he was in the investment business. A voice came over the speaker set into the doorjamb.

“Who is it, please?”

His voice. Andrew’s.

“Me,” she said. “Oona.”

“Come on up, Oona,” he said.

A buzzer sounded. She turned the knob, opened the door, closed it again behind her. The buzzer kept sounding as she climbed the stairs, stopped when she was about midway up. The staircase was paneled with wood on either side. There was a lovely wood-paneled door at the top of the stairs. A small bell button in a brass circle was set in the doorjamb. She pressed the button. The door opened at once.

“Hi,” she said.

“You made it,” he said:

“I told you I would.”

“Come in,” he said.

Her name was Oona Halligan, she was an Irish girl from Brooklyn, he’d met her at a disco joint last night. Red hair and green eyes, Irish as they come, he loved fucking Irish girls.

She’d explained to him that she had a lot of time on her hands just now because she was looking for a new job while collecting unemployment. Her boss had fired her because she’d wanted to do a certain thing her way instead of his way, which she’d told him was a stupid way to do it. She guessed that wasn’t a particularly clever move, huh? Telling her boss that his way was the dumb way, but live and learn. Anyway, she had a lot of time on her hands just now.

This was while they were sitting on a black leather banquette with music blaring from ten thousand speakers that had to be worth ten million dollars, Andrew with his hand on her knee, Oona with her short red skirt riding clear north to Canada. He’d casually mentioned that if she had so much time on her hands why didn’t she stop by his apartment tomorrow afternoon sometime, say around one o’clock, they could listen to some music and he’d brew her some tea.

The tea always got them.

Made him sound like an English gentleman.

I just might, she’d said, arching an eyebrow. If I’m in the neighborhood.

You don’t have to decide now, he’d said. I won’t make any other plans, I’ll be there all afternoon, I’ll look for you around one.

Where is your apartment? she’d asked.

Actually, at the start of any relationship, he preferred matinees.

Most girls didn’t like to pop into bed with you on the first date. You asked them to stop by the next day, that automatically made it a second date, and it made it daytime in the bargain, which sounded very safe, especially if you were offering tea. Besides, if you did get a girl to go home with you at three, four o’clock in the morning, she’d almost certainly be there when you woke up not knowing who she was or how she’d got there. Afternoons, you played some soft music, you offered tea or hot chocolate or even booze if that’s what the lady preferred, everything slow and easy, and then you took her upstairs later, fucked her brains out with the drapes drawn and daylight peeking around them. If the afternoon turned out to be a bummer, you cut her loose before dinner. If it went well, you asked her if she’d like to go out for something to eat, there were great Italian and Chinese restaurants in the neighborhood, and then you took her back here later, knowing her already, knowing that if she did spend the night it’d be a pleasurable experience and you wouldn’t hate yourself when you woke up alongside a beast the next morning.

Irish girls turned him on.

He thought of an Irish girl as a religious little darling who’d suck your cock and then run to a priest in the morning to confess her sins and say penance at the altar. He particularly liked Irish redheads. A real Irish redhead could drive a person crazy, that wild carrot-colored hair on her head and between her legs. Loved to part that flaming thatch below, spread those innocent pink Irish-girl lips, lick her into an Irish frenzy that would later cost her a hundred Hail Marys and a thousand Our Fathers, not to mention a dozen or more Acts of Contrition. He hated the Catholic religion but he loved fucking religious Irish-Catholic girls.

He wondered all at once if Sarah Welles was Irish.

Secretly, she was happy this hadn’t turned out to be another “family” weekend.

Today was Martin Luther King Day, the eighteenth of January, a school holiday in New York, which meant that Sarah and Mollie automatically had the day off. But the DA’s Office was closed today, too, and it looked as if this might turn into another long weekend like those the family had shared over Christmas and New Year’s. Sarah felt strongly that King should have his own holiday — but not in January. By the time the third Monday in January came around each year, she’d had enough holiday to last a lifetime.

This year was different.

She would later wonder whether her life would have changed so completely if Mollie hadn’t left for Sugarbush on Friday night to spend the long weekend skiing with a classmate named Winona Weingarten, whose parents owned a chalet up there; or if Michael hadn’t decided to run downtown on Monday morning to spend “a few hours” working on this big mysterious case of his. She would recall that the moment he left the apartment at ten-thirty, she’d felt a delicious sense of aloneness, no daughter to care for, no husband to love, honor, and cherish, no students to nurture, just Sarah Fitch Welles, all by her lonesome on one of those magnificently balmy days January sometimes offered as solace to the dwellers of this otherwise wintry gray city.

She stepped smartly out of the building at a quarter to eleven, wearing jeans, ankle-high brown leather boots, a bulky wool turtleneck sweater, and a short woolen car coat — almost dressed too warmly, she realized at once. She said good morning to Luis, made an immediate left turn under the canopy, and began walking the two blocks to Madison Avenue, where she planned to shop the windows and maybe the stores as well. What the hell! Today was a holiday, and she was gloriously alone.

A smoky-blue Acura was parked at the curb some three doors up from her building. Andrew Farrell was half-sitting, half-leaning on the fender of the car, his arms folded across his chest, his head tilted up toward the sun. His eyes were closed, he had not yet seen her. She was starting to turn away, planning to walk back in the opposite direction, when — as if sensing her nearness — he opened his eyes, and turned his head, and looked directly at her.

Her heart was suddenly pounding.

She stood rooted to the sidewalk as he approached.

“Hi,” he said.

No grin this time. Wearing his solemn, serious, grownup look.

“I’ve been waiting since eight o’clock,” he said. “I was afraid I’d miss you.”

“How... how did you... what are you... oh, Jesus, Andrew, what do you want from me?”

“Just you,” he said.

In the car on the way downtown, he told her he remembered Mollie mentioning that they lived on East Eighty-First Street, and whereas he didn’t know her husband’s first name and didn’t think a high school teacher would list herself under her own name, he thought it might be possible that a twelve-year-old girl could have her own telephone. So he’d checked out the name Welles in the Manhattan directory and discovered that there were what appeared to be hundreds of them spelled W-E-L–L-S, but not too many spelled W-E-L–L-E-S. There were no Sarahs, as he’d surmised, and no Mollies, either, but there was a listing for a “Welles MD,” who — if it wasn’t a doctor — might just possibly be Mollie Doris or Mollie Diane or Mollie Dinah or even Mollie Dolly...

“It’s Mollie Dare,” Sarah said.

“Dare?”

“My mother’s maiden name.”

“Even so,” he said, and shrugged.

As fate would have it, however, there wasn’t an address following the MD Welles name, which he thought was maybe being overly cautious, hmmm? Even in this city? Using initials to confuse any obscene phone caller cruising the phone, book, and then hiding the address, too?

“Made it very difficult for someone like me,” he said.

But apparently not too difficult, she thought.

“When were you doing all this?” she asked.

“Late Friday afternoon.”

“Why?”

“Because I had to see you again. And I didn’t want to wait till tomorrow.”

Knew today was a school holiday, she thought. Figured I’d be home today. Tracked me to...

“How did you find me?”

“Well, after I called the school...”

“You what?”

“I’m sorry, but I...”

“Are you crazy? You called the school? Let me out. Stop the car. Please, I want to get out.”

“Please don’t leave me again, okay?” he said.

She looked at him.

“Please,” he said.

“What’d you tell them? Who’d you talk to?”

“I don’t know, some woman in the office. Whoever it was that answered the phone. I told them we had a delivery for a Mrs. Sarah Welles...”

“Who’s we?”

“Grace’s Market.”

“On Seventy-First and Third?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know Grace’s...?”

“Well, that’s another story. Anyway, I told the woman at the school that you’d given us an address on East Eighty-First, but we couldn’t make out your handwriting and we didn’t have a phone number for you. But Herman remembered your telling him you taught at Greer...”

“Herman?”

“I made up a name.”

“Herman?”

“Yeah, which was why I was calling. Because if I could get the correct address on Eighty-First, we’d send the order right over because there was perishable fish involved.”

“Perishable fish,” Sarah repeated.

“Yes.”

“So she gave you my address.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Good.”

“Well.”

“How did you get the address.”

“I remembered something else Mollie said.”

“What was that?”

“The only other time anyone came even close to saving her life was when Luis the doorman yanked her out of the way of a taxi.”

“There must be a hundred doormen named Luis on East Eighty...”

“No, only three.”

“Dear God, please save me,” Sarah said, and began laughing.

“I went to every building that had...”

“A hundred buildings, then.”

“No, I only went to the ones that had doormen. I told whoever was working the door...”

“When was this?”

“Saturday morning. What I said was that Mr. Welles had told me to ask for Luis. If there was no Luis, adios. If there was a Luis, and if the guy on duty said, ‘Who’s Mr. Welles?’ adios again. There was a doorman named Luis in a building near First, but no Welles. There was another Luis near Third, but again no Welles. Your building has a Luis and a Welles. I would have waited for you on Saturday, but I figured your husband might be home.”

“He should’ve been home today, too.”

“Then I’m lucky I caught you alone.”

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Would you like some tea?”

“No.”

“A drink?”

“At eleven in the morning?”

“What would you like?”

She would never know what possessed her to say what she said next. Nor was she sorry when the words left her mouth.

“I’d like you to kiss me again,” she said.

He kissed her at once.

Kissed her the moment she made her blatant suggestion, and then kept kissing her all the way downtown, every time he stopped for a traffic light. He drove the car like a maniac; either he was in a hurry to get wherever he was taking her, or else he was a habitual speeder. Whichever, he screeched to a stop whenever a light turned yellow, and then turned to her with the same alacrity and kissed her full on the mouth while the light remained red, which seemed a shorter while each time. She kept wishing there’d be more red lights, longer red lights, kept wishing he’d pull over to the curb and kiss her incessantly while all the traffic lights in the world flashed yellow and red and green. She kept telling herself this was crazy, she didn’t know this man, who was this man she was kissing so hungrily?

She kept marveling, too, that she didn’t feel any guilt at all. Well, maybe any married woman getting kissed at random traffic lights by a handsome young man six years her junior automatically put aside all thoughts of her husband toiling in the vineyards on a holiday, no less, maybe most married women about to be seduced...

She already knew she would go to bed with him.

... conveniently put aside any feelings of guilt when they were poised on the steamy edge of breaking a solemn covenant, maybe so.

Either that or she was an uncommon slut.

The name on the mailbox outside the door was Carter-Goldsmith Investments. Well, this was no surprise, he’d told her he was an opportunity investor, hadn’t he? The surprise was that he’d taken her to his office, or so she supposed, and not to a hotel or a motel or wherever a twenty-eight-year-old man about to seduce a thirty-four-year-old woman might take her... where had Heather’s sixteen construction workers taken her?

It was no surprise that he kissed her again the moment he closed and locked the outer door behind them. Pressed her against the door and kissed her more fiercely than he had on the beach in St. Bart’s or in the French coffee shop on Second or in the Acura every time a light turned yellow, kissed her with his hands on her ass and his cock huge against her, oh Jesus, this was going to be something more than she’d bargained for, oh Jesus, she was doomed.

As she climbed the steps in the richly wood-paneled stairwell, Andrew behind her, she wished she were wearing a short tight skirt instead of the jeans, wished she’d had the foresight to have dressed in something more accessible, something that would make the impending, inevitable, and irrevocable act easier to accomplish. On the landing outside the door to what she still supposed was an office, he kissed her again and this time she moved in against him, the bulky car coat yet another obstacle to overcome, his hands inside the coat now, his hands on her sweatered breasts, she thought, Oh Jesus, and fiercely tilted her pelvis into him an instant before he broke away to unlock the door.

She scarcely saw the room. The room was a swirl of background impressions that served only as a setting for him, for Andrew, for what he was doing to her and about to do to her. This was not an office, she was certain of that, fireplace at the end of the room opposite the entrance door, he was slipping the coat off her shoulders, sofa facing the fireplace, he tossed the coat onto it, took her in his arms again, bookcases on the wall to the right, she wondered what he read, his lips found hers again, his hands were under the bulky woolen sweater now, on her back, she felt her breasts fall suddenly free, realized he had unclasped her bra, and stepped slightly back from him so that he could slide his hands under the sweater to find her naked nipples.

He took her hand in his, and led her swiftly to another wood-paneled staircase on the wall opposite the bookcases, climbing with her to the floor above where she glimpsed a kitchen and a dining room, and then to the floor above that, which was a bedroom at last, the one place in time she wanted to be with this man, the only place she’d wanted to be with him from the moment he’d kissed her on that morning beach in St. Bart’s.

They both shed clothing as they moved toward the bed. He tossed his jacket wherever it landed, unbuttoned his shirt down the front and at the cuffs, took off that as well, and pulled her to him again, kissing her, her hands on his bare chest, his hands clutching her buttocks. Breathlessly, she broke away and sat in a chair facing a smaller fireplace than the one downstairs, took off the low boots and dropped them to the floor, stood again to pull the sweater over her head, draped it over the back of the chair, tossed the bra over that, unbuckled her belt and lowered her jeans, and stepped out of them and threw the jeans over the rest of her clothing, and turned to him wearing only white woolen socks and white cotton panties cut high on the leg.

He was naked.

Her eyes moved over his body, grazed his cock, boldly lingered there. She wanted to touch him, suck him, take him inside her. She felt suddenly girlish standing there in the woolen socks and cotton panties, suddenly virginal though she was nothing such, suddenly so wet that she thought she would come in the next instant whether he touched her again or not.

She went to him still wearing the socks and panties.

He stood with his legs slightly parted, his arms opening to accept her. She moved into his embrace, felt at once the enormity of him between her legs, nudging the moist panties covering her crotch. They stood this way, joined but yet unjoined, for several seconds, her arms on his shoulders, his arms on her waist, she looking up into his eyes, his eyes coveting her mouth. He lowered his face to hers again and found her lips, and parted them with his tongue, gliding his tongue into her mouth, his hands reaching around her to claim her buttocks again. She rode his cock gently, her panties very wet now, rocking herself back and forth on him, her eyes closed, her mouth joined to his. He lifted her at last and carried her to the bed.

Lying beside him in his arms, she started to say, “I’ve never...”

“Shhh,” he said, and kissed her again.

She thought she would faint. When finally he took his mouth from hers, she was sure her eyes were rolled back into her head. Gasping for breath, she tried to find the voice to tell him she’d never done anything like this before, never been unfaithful to her husband, never so much as even thought of...

He lowered his head to her breasts.

She clutched him to her passionately, twisting on the pillow, tossing her head and her hips as he licked first one nipple and then the other, fondling her breasts, yes, she thought, oh God yes. He suddenly clenched both breasts in his hands, bringing them together caught in his hands, the nipples almost touching, took both nipples in his mouth simultaneously, and sucked on them, and licked them, she was delirious, she had never in her life felt anything like, flicking them with his tongue, his fingers tightening on her as he worked her nipples relentlessly. She was going to come, oh Jesus she thought, don’t make me come yet, just fuck me, damn it, put that cock in me, “Oh Jesus,” she said aloud, and wondered if she’d remembered to take the pill this morning, and wondered if he had any dread disease she wouldn’t care to catch, and breathlessly started to say, “Listen, you don’t...” but his hand was between her legs now.

As deliberately as he’d worked her stiffened nipples, he now began to work the crotch of the saturated white panties, his hand moving mercilessly, stroking and caressing, oh God, she thought, you’re going to make me, Jesus I am going to come. “Listen,” she said, “you don’t... you’re not... you don’t have anything I can catch, do...?” and he said, “No, nothing,” and she nodded in brisk relief and immediately rolled away from him, out of his arms and onto her back, raising her buttocks and hooking her thumbs into the waistband of her panties at the same time. She was yanking them down over her hips, when he said, “No, don’t.”

He gave her no time to register puzzlement. He clutched her hands by the wrists instead, her thumbs still hooked in the panties, and glided his body down the long length of hers, kissing her breasts again in passing, trailing a wet line between her ribs, licking her navel, kissing the fingertips of each hand captured in his, brushing his lips over the flat of her belly above the panties, and finally pressing them to the bulge of her cotton-covered crotch.

She felt the pressure of his mouth and chin on her pubic mound, knew he could feel how wet she was, how saturated the white panties were, how revealingly soaked she was, how drenched and dripping and desperate for him she was, and she thought For Christ’s sake fuck me already, unwilling to say the words out loud, saying them over and again in her head like a mantra, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, damn it! He’s going to lose me, she thought, he’s going to tease me right out of an orgasm, he’s going to bring me there and strand me there, and it’ll serve him right, the son of a bitch, kissing the insides of her upper thighs on either side of the panties now, licking the tender flesh there, moving the panties aside just the merest fraction of an inch to lick the soft secret skin close to her pubic patch, please, she thought, oh please, just please, bunching the panties in one hand so that they created a narrow thong covering only her slit, yanking up on the thong to capture the slit, working her clitoris with the cloth, slit and clit and cloth so thoroughly shamelessly sodden now, please for God’s sake just...

And suddenly he grasped the panties in both hands, his fingers inside each leg hole, and tore them wide open over her crotch, exposing her completely. She whispered, “Do it,” as he lowered himself between her legs, “Yes, do it,” easing himself down to where she was waiting open for him, “Yes, fuck me,” entering her now, filling the wet aching void of her, “Oh Jesus,” she said again, and wrapped her legs around him, and lifted herself to him, and said “Fuck me, yes,” and realized she was still wearing the silly white socks. She felt herself cresting almost at once, dissolving moistly around him, felt his simultaneous explosion within her.

Later, as they lay spent and sweating beside each other, he murmured, “I love you, Sarah,” and she thought, Yes, that’s me, and felt completely herself for the very first time in her life.

The guilt overtook her some ten minutes later.

He had kissed her gently on the nose and the cheeks and the forehead and then had eased himself out of her and out of bed, and was walking naked to the bathroom when suddenly she was shocked by the realization that this was a strange man with her, this was not Michael walking across the room with his ass white against a lingering suntan, this was a stranger who had just fucked her.

She almost got out of bed that very moment. Almost threw back the covers and dashed naked across the room to where her boots were on the floor and her jeans and sweater and bra were on the back of the chair. Her coat and her handbag were, downstairs, but if she moved fast she could be dressed and out of here in a flash, disappearing from his life and reappearing in her own.

What time was it, anyway?

Was Michael already...?

In sudden panic, she looked at her watch.

No, that couldn’t be right.

Was it really only twenty to twelve?

Had they been here in the apartment for only twenty minutes?

Had what they’d done together taken only twenty minutes?

It had seemed like an eternity.

An ecstatic etern—

No, listen, she thought, are you out of your mind?

Get out of here. Get dressed and get the hell out of here before it’s too late. That man in the bathroom is not your husband. He’s a boy who momentarily turned your head, flattered you into thinking you were... you were... a... a passionate and desirable woman who... who...

God, I loved it, she thought.

Stop it, she thought. Don’t even think it anymore. Just get dressed and get out. Go home to your loving husband who’s been working all morning while you...

“Sarah?”

She did not turn to him at once.

He called her name again.

“Sarah?”

She turned. He was standing in the bathroom doorway. He had draped a towel around his waist. He looked very concerned. His serious little-boy look.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But I have to go.”

“Okay,” he said.

He did not move from the doorway. She felt suddenly embarrassed, not wanting to get out of bed naked, not wanting him to see her naked again. But she could not imagine clutching a sheet to her the way they did in the movies, she was not a dumb college girl, she was a thirty-four-year-old mother, God, what had she done? Without looking at him, she got out of bed, her back to him, still wearing the white socks and the torn panties, and went swiftly to the chair where the rest of her clothes were draped. She put on her bra first, covering her breasts, and then her sweater immediately afterward and was reaching for her jeans when he appeared suddenly behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her in against him.

He was hard again.

She stood quite still, feeling all at once drained of all will, helpless to stop whatever was happening to her because the moment he touched her again, the moment his arms encircled her again, the moment he was there again with his cock hard against the torn cotton panties, she was instantly wet again.

She turned in his arms.

She looked up into his face.

He nodded.

She nodded, too.

For each of them, this was the true beginning.

Dominick Di Nobili’s body was found in the trunk of an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme on Tuesday morning, the nineteenth day of January, in one of the parking lots at La Guardia Airport. There were two bullet holes in the back of his head, which — given Di Nobili’s recent gambling and borrowing habits — almost certainly indicated a gangland-style slaying. The detectives assigned to protect him had allowed him out of their sight only because he’d begged for a lousy two minutes to go say hello to his girlfriend in Queens. He’d gone into her building and disappeared — until now.

On the afternoon of that same day, Regan and Lowndes located the blue Acura with the FAV-TWO vanity plate parked in front of a lighting-supply store near Kenmare and Bowery. There were no parking spaces anywhere near the car, so they double-parked their Ford Escort on the same side of the street, some half dozen cars behind the Acura. At about three o’clock, two cops riding Adam One from the Fifth Precinct pulled up alongside the Ford and asked to see a driver’s license. Regan flashed his detective’s shield. The officers nodded and rolled on.

At twenty minutes past four, a tall, hatless man with brown hair approached the Acura. He looked a lot like the picture Michael had Xeroxed from People magazine.

“Bingo,” Regan said, and started the car.

Andrew Faviola, if that’s who the man was, glanced at the windshield as if expecting a parking ticket — small wonder, given his history — and then unlocked the car on the driver’s side and climbed in. The moment the Acura pulled away from the curb, Regan moved the Ford in behind it.

“Heading downtown,” Lowndes said.

Which was a big surprise, Regan thought, since Bowery was a two-way thoroughfare and the Acura had been parked facing downtown.

“Probably going to Brooklyn,” Lowndes said.

Another big surprise in that if the driver of the Acura made an immediate left, he’d be heading directly over the Williamsburg Bridge, or if he drove further downtown to Canal, he could take the Manhattan Bridge over the river, or yet further south, he could go over the Brooklyn Bridge, any of which would take him to Brooklyn, fuckin’ mastermind partner Regan had.

It was already starting to get dark at four thirty. This city in January, you could have sunshine all day or you could have a day like today which was gloomy all day long and which got dark before you could take a deep breath. Streetlights were on already, car headlights beginning to come on as Regan nosed the Ford through the harsh gathering dusk, sticking close behind the Acura, not wanting to lose Faviola if, in fact, he decided to make the Delancey Street turn onto the Williamsburg Bridge. Which is just what he did do.

“Told you,” Lowndes said.

Fuckin’ genius.

The lights on all the bridges were on. You could look up and down the East River and see this winter wonderland of lights in both directions. Regan memorized the bridges on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in ascending alphabetical order. Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg. B, M, W. Like the car. Further uptown, his alphabetical system started all over again, but it still worked. Q and T for the Queensboro and Triborough bridges. It worked on the West Side of Manhattan, too. Everything in ascending alphabetical order from downtown to uptown. The Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, and then the George Washington Bridge. H, L, and W. If you had a system, everything in the world was simple.

They were on the Brooklyn-Queens elevated highway now, the lights of apartment buildings and factories flickering on sporadically as they moved into the fast-approaching darkness, the Acura speeding into the night ahead of them.

“Probably heading for the LIE,” Lowndes said.

Brilliant fuckin’ deduction, Regan thought sourly.

The Long Island Expressway was jammed with traffic at this hour, the way it was every weekday all year round and on weekends, too, during the summer months. Get a snowstorm anytime during the winter, you could spend the better part of your life trying to get home on the LIE.

“Lots of these wiseguys live on the island,” Lowndes said.

Sighing heavily, Regan settled back for a long ride.

He could not stop thinking of her.

She had left him at two o’clock yesterday afternoon, making a phone call to her husband first, telling him she was in a phone booth at Saks, and would be heading home in a little while. He was not surprised by the speed and ease with which she’d learned to lie. He had earlier told her that he didn’t go around making passes at married women, but that had been a lie, too. He didn’t care if a woman was married or not, so long as she wasn’t married to anyone in any of the families. That could lead to serious trouble, hitting on the wife of anyone connected.

Before she left, he asked her where he could reach her, and she told him he couldn’t call her, she was a married woman, he had to understand that. He said, Okay, sure, nodding, shrugging, giving her a hurt little look, and then he wrote down both his numbers for her, the one on Mott and the one out on the Island. She’d promised to call. But if she didn’t, he’d wait for her outside the school again, or her apartment building, he wasn’t about to let this one get away from him.

They’d kissed each other deeply and hungrily just inside the door to the apartment, and then he’d walked her downstairs to the street door. Just before he unlocked the door to let her out, he’d said again, “I love you, Sarah.” She’d said nothing in response, just reached up to touch his cheek, her eyes searching his face, and then she kissed him quickly and ducked out onto the sidewalk.

I love you.

He said those words a lot, he guessed, to a lot of different women. He’d even said them to Oona Halligan last Friday, Oona, I love you, the three cheapest words in the English language, I love you. He didn’t suppose he loved Sarah Welles, but he sure loved fucking her.

Smiling, he glanced in the rearview mirror to see if there were any highway cops behind him, and then picked up the speed a little, pushing it as far as he could in this heavy traffic. When at last he pulled into the driveway of the house in Great Neck, he didn’t even notice the black Ford Escort that drove past the house as he hit the clicker and the garage door rolled up.

He was thinking that next time he saw her, he would insist on a number he could call. He didn’t like her being in control this way.

The twenty-four-hour surveillance of Andrew Faviola began the moment Regan and Lowndes reported to Michael at home that afternoon. Sarah was in the kitchen preparing dinner when the telephone rang. Regan told Michael that they’d located an address for the suspect, and Michael said he would immediately assign some detectives to work through the night, but that he wanted them back on the job first thing tomorrow morning. Regan asked Michael how he planned to run this thing, the usual eight-hour shifts, or what? Because it was now close to six o’clock and him and Lowndes had been on the job since eight this morning, which meant they’d been sitting on their asses in an automobile for ten straight hours. If somebody came out there to relieve them by seven, say, then why couldn’t a third team relieve tomorrow morning...

“... instead of us again, “Regan said. “This would give me and Alex till four tomorrow afternoon to pick up on Faviola again. That’s what I’m suggesting.”

Michael said he would prefer the second team relieving by seven, as Regan had suggested, but then have the third team come on at midnight, with Regan and Lowndes picking up the next morning at eight...

“... because you’re the two best people I have, and I want you on him during the daytime. And that’ll put us on a regular eight-hour schedule. Eight to four, four to midnight, midnight to eight. With you and Alex working the day shift every day. Till we find out what the hell’s going on here.”

“Well, we were working the day shift today, too,” Regan complained, “but now the night shift is half over, and we’re almost into the fuckin’ graveyard shift, and we’re still out here on Long Island. What I’m saying is I don’t want this to happen every day of the week, Michael, I don’t care if this guy is the boss of all bosses, you understand?”

“Well, I don’t think that’s what he is, but I can promise there won’t be any more long days like this one. Unless you choose to make them longer.”

What the fuck does that mean? Regan wondered.

“Okay, we’re in a development called Ocean Estates,” he said, “though there ain’t no ocean I can see, up the street from 1124 Palm, that’s the house he went in. Must be where he lives because he parked his car in the garage there. We’re on the corner of Palm and Lotus, fuckin’ names here, you’d think it was Miami Beach. Tell the relieving team we’re in a black Ford Escort. This is a busy place here, Michael, I don’t know how we’re going to sit this guy without one of the neighbors spotting us. Tell them to be careful.”

“I will.”

“Who do you plan on calling?”

“Harry Arnucci.”

“Okay, we’ll look for him.”

At seven thirty that night, Detectives/First Grade Harry Arnucci and Jerry Mandel relieved Regan and Lowndes, who were back on the job again at eight the next morning. At a little past ten a.m. that Wednesday, Andrew Faviola left the house and drove directly into Manhattan, where he parked the Acura in a space on Bowery again and then walked to a tailor shop on Broome Street, Regan and Lowndes following. He came out of the shop only once, to walk to a restaurant on Mulberry for lunch. He went back into the shop at two thirty and was still inside there when Regan and Lowndes were relieved at four. During that time at least a dozen men in heavy overcoats went in and out of the shop, some of them staying inside there for hours.

No one was sitting the Mott Street side of the building. No one saw Sarah Welles ringing the bell set in the jamb beside the blue door at six thirty that Wednesday night. No one saw her checking the street furtively and nervously as she waited for Andrew to let her in. Certainly no one saw her throwing herself into his arms and kissing him wildly the moment the door was closed and locked behind them.

This was the part he hated.

When they wanted to talk later. He sometimes felt they went to bed with you only so they’d be able to get into these long conversations afterward. That was the price they paid for being allowed to talk. She was no different from any of the others. A crazy woman while you were fucking her, and then all she wanted to do was talk. Full of questions. Only the second time they’d been to bed together, she wanted to know all about him. Wanted to own him was what it really got down to.

“Is this where you work?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“It seems more like an apartment.”

“No, there’s a nice little office on the first floor.”

“All I saw was a living room.”

“There’s an office behind it. And a conference room, too.”

“Do you work here alone?”

“Most of the time.”

“No secretary?”

“No. I don’t need one. Most of my business is on the phone.”

“Don’t you write any letters?”

“Occasionally. I get help in sometimes. But rarely.”

“Do you like working alone?”

“Yes.”

“Are you here all day?”

“Usually.”

“I had trouble getting through to you this morning.”

“Yeah, it was a pretty busy morning.”

Six hysterical phone calls from Frankie Palumbo, one after another. Frankie was worried that whacking that stupid fuck Di Nobili like Andrew had told him might cause the Colotti family to come back at him. Andrew had told him not to sweat it. The Colottis had only been doing a favor for Di Nobili and they were probably glad to have him off their backs. That was the first call. The second one, and the next three after that, were all about Jimmy Angels being a capo and this broad being his cousin, so how was Angels gonna feel now that his cousin’s dumb boyfriend ended up in a fuckin’ trunk at La Guardia? Andrew kept telling Frankie that this was a favor the Colottis hadn’t even wanted to do, and they’d been very upset when this thief stole money from the Faviola family, so don’t worry about it, okay? The last call was Frankie asking if he thought maybe they should whack the broad, too, before she went yelling and screaming to her cousin again? Andrew said he didn’t think that was such a good idea.

“Who’s Carter-Goldsmith?” Sarah asked.

“Men who own the business,” Andrew said. “They’re partially retired now. I sort of run things for them.”

This was a lie.

Two lies.

Three, in fact.

Nobody owned the business but Andrew, who not only “sort of” ran things but controlled them completely now that his father was no longer on the scene. Nor were “Carter” and “Goldsmith” partially retired, either. They were both very active capos in the Faviola family. Carter was Ralph Carbonaio, also known as Ralphie Carter and Ralphie the Red. Goldsmith was Carmine Orafo; the Goldsmith was a direct translation of his family name into English. Both men were listed respectively as president and secretary-treasurer of a perfectly legal investment corporation which — as Andrew had correctly informed Sarah — looked for businesses that needed an investment of time and money, and nurtured them along till they brought a good return.

These legitimate business interests, owned and operated by the Faviola family, included such diverse operations as restaurants (a favorite lawful enterprise), bars and taverns (another favorite), food distribution, real estate, garment manufacturing, photo-finishing, coffee bars (six in Seattle alone), travel agencies, motel chains, vending machines, garbage disposal, linen supply, and a score of retail shops that sold a wide variety of items including sporting goods, shoes, books and records, ladies’ wear, and home appliances.

All of these legal businesses generated justifiable income, and these receipts were deposited in bank accounts all over the United States. Often, as was the case with several of the retail shops, there were branches in various states, and paper transfers of money were made on the books for goods shipped from one shop to another. It was next to impossible to monitor such legal business transactions. It was equally impossible to link any illicit activity to the recurring operating expenses paid by check from the various bank accounts of these businesses. A great many of the checks paid for salaries or services, however, went to criminals exchanging ill-gotten cash for discounted but laundered money.

Money as such is anonymous, which is why cash was the medium of exchange in most criminal transactions. But cash illegally gained was something of a curse, nice to have but essentially useless until it was converted into cash that seemed respectably earned. Money laundering was a crime that existed merely to make the fruits of other crimes usable. By funneling the proceeds of criminal activity through any number of legitimate businesses, cash obtained illicitly was magically transformed to cash that seemed earned through honest labor. Becoming unwanted partners in businesses that needed “an investment of time and money” — as Andrew had put it — often involved threatened or actual violence, yet another crime. But crime was the primary business of the Faviola family.

Andrew’s father had been sent away forever on four murder counts, but it was open knowledge that the family was involved as well in narcotics and gambling and loan-sharking and money laundering and labor racketeering and possessing stolen goods and extortion and prostitution. Carter-Goldsmith had been created to generate a sheen of respectability for these covert criminal activities. Although Carbonaio and Orafo both lived in the Northeast — Carbonaio on Staten Island, Orafo in New Jersey — their legitimate business activities took them all over the United States, and they were gone more often than they were home. In the days when Anthony Faviola was in charge, they reported directly to him. Now they reported directly to Andrew.

And now Sarah Welles, lying cradled and naked in Andrew’s arms as he began feeling the first faint stirrings of another erection, was asking him things like how many hours did he work every day, and didn’t it get lonely working here all by himself...

“Well, I get reports from the field,” he said. “People coming in all the time.”

... and shouldn’t an investment company have an office in the financial...

“Where are you supposed to be tonight?” he asked.

Bringing the conversation back to practical matters. If they were going to keep doing this — and that was certainly his intention — he didn’t want her to get caught. All he needed was a dumb husband discovering...

“I’m at a teachers’ meeting,” she said.

“Where?”

“We’re supposed to be having dinner together. Six of us. English teachers.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t...”

“Think of a place before you go home. Think of it now, in fact.”

“Well...”

He waited.

“Bice,” she said.

“Where?”

“On Fifty-Fourth off Fifth.”

“Near the school,” he said, and nodded in approval. He opened the nightstand drawer on his side of the bed, pulled out the Manhattan telephone directory, found the listing for Bice, and punched in the number.

“Hello,” he said, “are you serving tonight? How late? Thank you very much.” He put the phone back on its cradle, said, “Good choice. They serve till eleven fifteen,” and was about to take her in his arms again when she said, “What time is it, anyway?” and sat up immediately and looked at her watch. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, “it’s ten to eight!”

“I’ll have a car run you home, don’t worry,” he said.

“Can you do that?”

“A phone call is all it takes.”

“I still have to go,” she said, and sat up.

“Half an hour,” he said. “I’ll call now, have you picked up at eight-thirty.”

“That’s not a half hour, that’s forty minutes,” she said.

“You’ll be home by nine.”

“That’s late.”

“Not if you met for dinner at six-thirty.”

“Andrew...”

He had already picked up the receiver again.

“No, wait, please.”

He waited. The dial tone hummed into the room.

“Please put the phone down. I have to talk to you.”

He wondered what she thought they’d been doing till now. But he put the receiver back on the cradle. She sat with the sheet draped over her middle, knees up, breasts exposed. She did not look at him when she spoke. She stared at her hands, instead, the fingers interlaced over her tented knees, the wide gold wedding band on her left hand.

“Getting here was very difficult tonight,” she said.

“It’s a long way, I know.”

“I’m not talking about distance.”

“Then...?”

“I didn’t like lying about where I’d been Monday, and I didn’t like lying about where I was going to be tonight. It’s difficult for me to lie, Andrew.”

“I can understand that. I’m sorry. I’ll call for the car right this...”

“It’s just that urging me to stay when I have to leave only makes it necessary for me to... to... Don’t you see, Andrew? If I’m late getting home... later than I should be... then I’ll have to tell another lie about why I’m...”

“I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have...”

“But that’s not even the point. The point... Andrew,” she said, and turned to him, “the point is I’m not sure I can... I can keep on lying this way,” she said, and shook her head, and lowered her eyes and kept shaking her head over and over again. He took her chin in his hand. Turned her face toward his again. She looked up at him. Her eyes were beginning to mist.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“You’re not saying...?”

“I told you I don’t know what I’m...”

“If this is just a matter of...”

“I’m lying to my husband, I’m lying to my daughter...”

“You’ve never told a lie before, huh?”

“I’m not that sort of person. I don’t lie about things. I just don’t.”

“Never, huh?”

“Not to my husband.”

“About anything?”

“Never anything important.”

“Am I important?”

“That’s got nothing to do with...”

“I asked you a question. Am I important?”

“Yes.”

“Then lie about me,” he said, and picked up the receiver again. He dialed a number, waited, said, “Billy? I’ll need a car around eight thirty. Uptown to Eighty-First and Lex. Don’t be late.”

He put the receiver down.

“Okay?” he said.

She was staring at her hands again, the wedding band on her hand.

“I’ll send a car to get you next time,” he said. “Make it easier for you. Someplace away from the school. Maybe on Fifty-Seventh. That’s a busy street.”

“Who’s Billy?” she asked.

“Man who drives for us.”

“Women? Does he drive other women?”

“I do business with a lot of women. Yes, he drives other women.”

“Because I wouldn’t want him to think...”

“He’s used to it. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Used to it, she thought.

“Maybe I’ll take a taxi instead,” she said.

“Fine, if that’s what you’d prefer.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Fine,” he said, and picked up the receiver again, and dialed the same number again. “Billy?” he said. “Forget it,” and hung up.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, and nodded. “I’d better get dressed.”

“We have time yet.”

“You’re doing it again,” she said. “I tell you I have to leave, and you...”

“I’m sorry. When will I see you again?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, and got out of bed and went to where her clothes were draped over the chair.

“Next Wednesday night?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sarah,” he said, “don’t do this to me, okay? I love you, Sarah...”

“That’s impossible,” she said, “you can’t, you don’t. So please don’t say it again.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you don’t.”

“I do.”

She nodded, and sighed, and turned away from him. He watched as she began dressing in silence.

“Where can I call you?” he asked.

“You can’t,” she said.

“What time do you leave for work in the morning?”

“Seven thirty.”

“What time does your husband leave?”

“Sometime after that.”

“When does he get home?”

“Six or thereabouts.”

“And you?”

“Anytime between four thirty and six. But my daughter’s usually home by then. I’m never alone, Andrew, don’t you see? This is impossible. I can’t do this anymore. Really. I just can’t. It’s too...”

“Where do you have lunch?”

“The teachers’ lunchroom.”

“Is there a phone there?”

“A pay phone. But there are other teachers...”

“What time do you have lunch?”

“The fifth period.”

“What time is that?”

“Twelve thirty.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow. What’s the phone number there?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, don’t call me.”

“Then you call me. And you can read me the number off the phone. I want to be able to reach you whenever I want to.”

She said nothing.

“Because I love you,” he said.

She still said nothing.

“Do you love me?” he asked.

“Don’t ask me that.”

“I’m asking. Do you love me?”

“I haven’t thought of anything but you since Monday,” she said. She was buttoning her blouse. Her hands stopped. “There hasn’t been anything but you on my mind since Monday. I think I’m going crazy,” she said, and shook her head and finished buttoning the blouse, and sat in the chair, and reached for her pumps.

“I feel the same way,” he said.

She stood up abruptly, smoothed her skirt, and walked to where she’d hung her coat in the closet.

“You haven’t said it yet,” he said.

“I have to leave,” she said, and put on her coat.

“I’ll get dressed,” he said, “come find a cab for you.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “I’m a big girl now.”

“But not big enough to lie for me, hmm?”

She did not answer him.

“Even though you love me,” he said.

They looked at each other for a moment in silence, and then he nodded, and got out of bed and began dressing. They left the apartment together at a quarter past eight. Bowery was almost deserted at that hour, all the service stores closed, the street dark except for the streetlamps. It was bitterly cold. Vapor steamed up from the manhole covers. There wasn’t a cab in sight. She was beginning to think she should have let Billy, whoever he was, drive her home. She was beginning to think she shouldn’t have come here at all. She had already decided she would never see him again. If she got past lying to Michael when she got home tonight, she would never again—

A cab was coming up the avenue.

Andrew whistled for it.

Time was running out. She felt suddenly empty.

The cab stopped.

Andrew opened the back door for her.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.

“No, don’t,” she said.

“I’ll find the number and I’ll call you.”

“I don’t want you to,” she said.

“I will,” he said.

“Don’t,” she said, and pulled the door shut, and told the driver where to take her. She did not look back at Andrew as the cab pulled away from the curb.

Alonso Moreno was dressed for the equator. Andrew guessed no one had ever told him it got to be twelve degrees above zero here in New York City. The place Moreno had chosen for their meeting was a club on Sixteenth Street and Eighth Avenue. The band was playing Spanish music, and Moreno and Andrew were eating Spanish food. Moreno sat in a beige tropical-weight suit, a brightly colored floral print tie trailing down the front of his pearl-colored shirt. Hookers at the bar kept flashing wide smiles at him, but Moreno was too busy with his food. He ate the way Charles Laughton did in Henry the Eighth, which Andrew had once seen on late night television. Washed the food down with sangria he poured from the pitcher on the table. Two of his goons sat at a nearby table, keeping an eye on things. Moreno didn’t want them in on the conversation, but he did want their presence to be felt.

“That was very brave, what you did that day,” he told Andrew.

“I’m a good swimmer,” Andrew said, brushing off the compliment.

“Still,” Moreno said. “Sharks.”

Andrew wanted to know what deal Moreno had come up with, never mind sharks. The orchestra was playing something that sounded very familiar, one of those Spanish songs you’re sure you know, but can’t remember the title or the lyrics. Moreno kept eating and drinking as if he were in a five-star restaurant instead of a dinky little club on Eighth Avenue, which his cartel probably owned. Andrew poured himself a glass of sangria. One of the hookers at the bar smiled at him and raised her glass to him. He raised his glass back.

This was Thursday night.

He had debated calling Sarah this afternoon, had gone so far as getting a number for the teachers’ lunchroom from a woman in the main office who sounded like the one he’d tried to con earlier about the grocery delivery. He might have called at twelve thirty, when Sarah had told him she’d be having lunch, but his uncle called five minutes earlier to tell him Moreno wanted a sitdown tonight, he suspected the man was ready with a counterproposal. They’d talked for about fifteen minutes, Uncle Rudy telling him these goddamn chemotherapy treatments were going to kill him quicker than the cancer would, the two of them arranging to meet tomorrow morning to discuss whatever Moreno had to say tonight.

So far Moreno hadn’t said a word.

The hooker at the bar was a black girl wearing a blond wig. That was the only thing about her, the color of her hair, that reminded him of Sarah. He didn’t know why he hadn’t called her this afternoon. Maybe he was protecting himself. Married woman getting nervous, starting to feel guilty about lying to her husband, fuck her, there were plenty other fish in the sea. Or maybe he was intuitively playing her like the schoolteacher she was, letting her stew in her own juices for a day or two before he popped up again. He really didn’t know. Or particularly care. He’d see how it worked out.

“So what’s on your mind?” he asked Moreno.

“Well, first I have to tell you a story,” Moreno said, and winked slyly, as if he was about to tell a dirty joke. “It’s a story about a fox and a snake... Do you know they call me La Culebra in Spanish? That means the Snake.”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Andrew said, lying.

“Sí, La Culebra. But this story isn’t about me, this is an old Spanish tale that goes back centuries. I think the blonde there likes you. Shall I have her sent over?”

“Let me hear your story first,” Andrew said.

“The story has to do with a sly fox and a wise-snake. Did I tell you that this was a very young fox? If I forgot to tell you that, I’m sorry. This is a very young fox. Not that the snake is very old, either. It is just that the snake is more experienced than the fox. In years, they are not so far apart. How old are you, Andrew?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“I’m eleven years older than you are. Thirty-nine. That’s not very old, is it? But like the snake in the story, I’m very experienced. Not that the story is about me.”

“I understand,” Andrew said.

Get on with it, he thought.

“The fox, although very young, is very sly. And he thinks he can trick the snake into giving away all his eggs. Snakes lay eggs, did you know that, Andrew? In Spanish, the word ‘snake’ is feminine. Perhaps that’s because snakes lay eggs, I’m not sure. La culebra. Even a male snake like the one in the story is called ‘la’ culebra. That’s odd, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“That a snake, which so resembles the male sex organ, should be female in Spanish. Very odd.”

“Mr. Moreno, this is a very interesting story so far...”

“Oh, it gets much more interesting. The sly young fox... did I tell you he was both sly and young? The sly young fox goes to the wise old snake and tells him that if he gives him all his eggs, he will make him rich for the rest of his life. Well, this is very tempting to the snake...”

“This is an old Spanish folk tale, huh?”

“Oh, yes, everyone knows it. El Zorro y la Culebra. Afamous story.”

“And the fox wants the snake’s eggs, hmm?”

“That’s the way the story goes, yes. In exchange for lifelong riches. The problem is the snake is already rich. And he knows that the fox is looking out only for his own...”

“That’s where the story veers off,” Andrew said.

“Veers off? From what? This is only a story.”

“I’m sure it is. In reality, we’re offering you...”

“The fox is very persistent, as I’m sure you can imagine. He is desperate to have those eggs. But the...”

“Not as desperate as you think,” Andrew said.

“Perhaps not. But the snake knows one thing the fox doesn’t. In this part of the forest, the fox is bigger than the snake, you see, and he thinks that size alone matters. He thinks he can swallow the snake in a single gulp. But the snake can outwit him in a minute.”

“How?” Andrew asked.

“By eating the eggs himself.”

He’s threatening to dry up the supply of coke, Andrew thought. No coke, no deal with the Chinese.

“If the snake did that,” he said, “he’d be poisoning no one but himself.”

“Until the fox became hungry again. There will always be eggs. A deal can always be struck later.”

“Is that the end of the story?”

“The beauty of the story is that the fox and the snake can write their own endings to it.”

“Tell me how. In plain English.”

“In plain English,” Moreno said, “you’re offering me something I already have for a share of something that may or may not become real.”

“I’m offering you a third of a huge new market, here and abroad. The market is there, waiting to be exploited. All we have to do...”

“Hear me out,” Moreno said. “In plain English. There’s no one to listen in this place. We can speak plainly here.”

“Then speak plainly,” Andrew said.

“Your deal, as I understand it, is this. We supply cocaine, the Chinese supply heroin. The two drugs are processed and combined by your people in Italy for distribution all over the United States and Europe. You envisage a three-way split.”

“That’s right.”

“But you see, I already have a distribution setup in America and abroad. I don’t need you or the Chinese to...”

“You don’t have moon rock.”

“I don’t need moon rock, I have cocaine. Besides, moon rock is nothing new.”

“Open borders are.”

“We’re already in Europe with cocaine. Open borders or not. Crack hasn’t taken real hold yet, but Europe is always a little behind us. When the borders open...”

“When the borders open, moon rock’ll be the thing of the future.”

“Like it was the thing of the past, huh? Sprinkle a little heroin over a rock of crack, you’ve got moon rock. Nineteen eighty-eight, eighty-nine, they were already doing that. To level out the crack high.”

“Sure,” Andrew said. “And before that, you could get the same results with a speedball, shooting the mix in your arm. But this is the nineties! I’m trying to sell you the fucking future!”

Moreno looked at him.

“And, by the way,” Andrew said, “while we’re discussing the future, you might want to give some thought to your current cocaine clients.”

“Oh? Why should I do that?”

“Because they may discover that doing business with you can get them killed.”

“Fuck them,” Moreno said, “I’ll bring in my own people.”

“In which case, we’d have to settle this in the streets.”

Moreno looked at him again.

“We’re stronger than you are,” Andrew said. “And not only in this part of the forest. We’ve been at it much longer.”

“Bullshit. We have ties with Jamaican posses all over the United...”

“We’re not playing cowboys and Indians here, Jamaican posses. Who gives a damn about those amateurs? You think dreadlocks scare me? Are you a pro, or what the fuck are you? I’m talking more money here than any of us has ever seen in his life. Cocaine’s already bringing four times as much in Europe as it does here, and crack’s only recent over there. Crack can be smoked, Moreno, that’s why it got so popular here. People don’t want to use needles, they’re afraid of needles, they don’t want to catch AIDS. And they don’t want their noses to fall off from snorting coke powder. They want to smoke. Look at cigarettes. They make laws against them, they raise the price on them, they put warnings on them, people are still smoking them. All right, you want to know why users are sprinkling heroin on their crack? Because it prolongs the high. A crack hit lasts, what? Two, three minutes? And then you crash and you feel like shit. Instead, if you spread heroin over the rock, and then fire it up, you get a high that can last three hours.”

“I already told you, chasing the dragon’s nothing new,” Moreno said. “Even before crack was on the scene, they were mixing coke powder and heroin in aluminum foil, heating it up, and sucking it in through a straw.”

“And that’s preferable to a rock half the size of a sugar cube, huh? Which you can light up and smoke for a dollar a hit? We bring in moon rock in huge quantities, the whole fucking country will be smoking it. What am I offering you, Moreno, a kick in the head? I’m offering you more money than...”

“I still see risks.”

“Believe me, there’ll be bigger risks if you...”

“I mean business risks. There’s no guarantee you can make any kind of dope popular. Moon rock’s been around a long...”

“Not in quantity.”

“Besides, a lot of crack users prefer mixing their own combinations. You can still get very good China White, seventy-five pure, ninety pure...”

“Sure, at a dime a bag. When you can get a crack hit for seventy-five cents!”

“I admit crack’s selling cheap nowadays.”

“We start moon rock at a dollar, once it takes off, the sky’s the limit.”

“If it takes off.”

“If it doesn’t, I’ll give you my personal share of the deal, how’s that?”

“You’re that sure?”

“I’m that sure.”

Moreno fell silent, thinking.

“The Italians supply the ships both ways?” he asked at last.

“Both ways.”

“And do the processing?”

“Everything. Process it over there, handle the distribution for us in Europe, ship product to us for distribution in America. All you do is what you’re already doing. Except you get a third of this huge market we’ll be...”

“Make it sixty percent,” Moreno said.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s the way I want it.”

“There’s no way I can get anyone to agree to that.”

“Then there’s no way we can deal. I’m sorry.”

“I came here prepared to offer you...”

“Sixty percent of the total. You and the Chinese can share the other forty however you wish.”

“As a token of good faith, I was willing to raise your share to forty instead of the third we offered. But...”

“I’d be losing money if I went lower than fifty-five.”

“Forty-five and we’ve got a deal.”

“Fifty. I can’t go lower than that.”

Andrew sighed heavily.

“Deal,” he said, and the men shook hands.

“You’re a wise old snake,” Andrew said, and smiled.

“You’re a sly young fox,” Moreno said, and returned the smile.

Andrew had already decided to have him killed.

It was the last Wednesday in January.

The man approached her as she was leaving the school building. She had no idea how long he’d been waiting for her. She knew he was not one of New York’s loonies because he addressed her by name.

“Mrs. Welles,” he said. “I’m Billy. I was asked to pick you up.”

It was four ten.

She did not know why she got into the automobile. Andrew hadn’t called last Thursday as he’d promised — or threatened — to do, but now there was a car and a presentable young man named Billy, who opened the back door for her and then closed it behind her and came around to the driver’s side of the car. As he turned the ignition key, he said, “I’ve been waiting since three o’clock. I wasn’t sure what time you’d get out.”

She said nothing. Did not ask him who had sent the car, did not ask him where they were going, simply sat back against the leather seat and watched the city’s darkness enveloping them as the car moved steadily downtown. The car was a Lincoln Continental, she could see the identifying logo on the dashboard panel. Oddly, she was thinking she would have to call Michael immediately, to tell him another teachers’ meeting had been called and she wouldn’t be home until eight thirty, nine o’clock.

“You’re pretty much the way you were described,” Billy said.

She wondered how she’d been described.

She did not ask him.

He dropped her off some fifteen feet from the blue door on Mott Street. Around the corner, Detectives Regan and Lowndes were watching the tailor shop. They did not see Sarah as she entered the building.

She went into Andrew’s arms at once.

Somehow this did not surprise her.

The touch of his hands was familiar. His hands cupping her face, his hands moving to her breasts, his hands sliding up under her sweater to unclasp her bra. She knew his lips far too well already, his lips on her face, on her mouth, on her nipples. He slid his hands under her skirt, bunched the skirt above her hips, his hands on her buttocks now, clasping her to him. She wished she’d worn sexier panties, but she hadn’t expected the car, hadn’t expected to see him ever again — or had she? He was on his knees now, his hands exploring the leg holes of the panties, she did not want him tearing them open again, she started to say, “Please don’t ruin...” but he was moving the nylon aside, exposing her blond pubic patch, parting her lips with his fingers and searching with his tongue until her sudden gasp told him he’d found her. Her back arched, her eyes closed, her hands clutching the bunched skirt above her hips, she stood before him helplessly trembling as he brought her to orgasm. In a near swoon she allowed him to carry her to the bed. He took off only her panties, sliding them down over her hips and her waist and the long length of her legs, and her ankles, and spread her to him still wearing her pumps and her skirt bunched above her waist, and her sweater raised to expose her breasts. She opened her legs wide to him, raised her hips, and guided him into her.

He moved against her slowly at first, sliding the full length of him deep inside her, and then withdrawing until her lips enfolded only the head of his cock, clinging there precariously for the tick of a second, and then thrusting deep into her again. She did not know how long he kept her on the edge of screaming aloud, the deep penetration, the slow withdrawal, the fear that she would lose him entirely, but still enclosed, still there, still captured, and then the sudden lunge again, the swift hard rush deep inside her, the near orgasm each time his downward stroke battered her clitoris. And then he began moving against her with a steadier rhythm, and she joined the rhythm and urged it to a faster pace, her legs around him, her ankles locked behind his back. She found herself urging him with words as well, Yes, give it to me, her skirt high on her waist, feeling vulnerable and exposed because she was still dressed and he was fucking her in spite of it, Yes, fuck me, she said, his mouth on her nipples, his hands fiercely clutching her ass, never in her life had she, fuck me, never with Michael, never with the boy at Duke, give it to me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.

At a little before five, she called Michael at his office and was told by his secretary that he was down the hall with the chief. Grateful that she could lie to Phyllis rather than to Michael personally, she asked her to tell him that another teachers’ meeting had been called and since she wouldn’t be home until later this evening, could he please take Mollie to the Italian restaurant on Third for dinner?

“And tell him I love him,” she said.

Which she supposed she still meant.

Down the hall, Michael was reporting to Charles Scanlon, the Organized Crime Unit chief, on the progress being made on the Andrew Faviola surveillance. Scanlon, as usual, was puffing on a pipe and looking meditative. Michael was of the secret opinion that Scanlon felt he was a reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes. Why else the incessantly fired pipe and the sweater with all the burn holes in it? If he didn’t work for the District Attorney’s office, Scanlon probably would have been shooting cocaine in emulation of his literary idol. Charlie, as he insisted all of his people call him, thought he had a deductive mind. Michael wasn’t so sure about that. But he admired his immediate superior for his tenacity, his willingness to go head-to-head with the DA for any one of his people, and his true determination to rid this city of organized criminal activity. His obsession was similar in many respects to Georgie Giardino’s, except that it was not ethnically motivated. He had asked Georgie to attend the late afternoon meeting because his knowledge of the Faviola family was impressive. Both men listened now as Michael told them what he thought was happening.

“I think the house in Great Neck is where he sleeps and that’s all. None of the detectives tailing him reports anyone going in or out of that house but Andrew himself. The tailor shop is another matter.”

“It’s where again?”

Scanlon. Puffing on his pipe. Sitting behind his desk in room 671, behind the secured doors that sealed off all the unit’s offices. A diminutive man with beetling black brows and a hooked nose. The nose could have been Basil Rathbone’s when he was playing the master sleuth, but nothing else about him was even remotely Sherlockian. Michael himself had always felt the Holmes novels were badly written and not what he would call compelling in any way. Sue him.

“Broome Street,” he said.

“Broome Street,” Scanlon said, and nodded.

“Fifth Precinct,” Georgie said.

He had come back from his trip to Vail and had listened all amazed while Michael reported his belief that the playboy son of Anthony Faviola was now running the show. He listened now in further amazement as Michael told them that Andrew Faviola was running things from a shitty little tailor shop on Broome Street.

“There’s no question in my mind,” Michael said. “He’s using the back of the tailor shop as a business office. We’ve had detectives go in there at all hours of the day to take in dry cleaning or to have alterations made, and none of them have ever seen him in the front of the shop. From what we can gather, there’s a pressing machine in the back, you can catch a glimpse of it when Faviola or any of the others go back there. There’s sort of a curtain on a rod that divides the front from the back. Vaccaro — that’s the tailor’s name, Louis Vaccaro — works at a sewing machine up front. Usually there are some cronies who drop in to smoke their stogies and shoot the breeze with him while he works. But they’re neighborhood people, and we haven’t identified any of them as wiseguys. They’re just passing the time with their old goombah Louis. Who we don’t think is mob-related, either.”

“Who is?” Scanlon asked. “That you’ve seen going in there?”

“So far, we’ve been able to identify Rudy Faviola...”

“Anthony’s brother,” Georgie supplied.

“Used to be underboss,” Scanlon said, and nodded. His pipe had gone out. It would probably go out a dozen times during the meeting. The ashtray on his desk was brimming with burnt wooden matches. Looking like Vesuvius on a bad day, Scanlon filled the office with a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke, puffing violently, intent on the flame of the match and the bowl of the pipe.

“Who else?” he asked.

“Petey Bardo.”

“Consigliere,” Scanlon said.

“Favors brown suits,” Georgie said.

“Used to be consigliere, anyway,” Scanlon said, “when Anthony was still boss.”

“My guess is the hierarchy is still the same,” Michael said, “except that Andrew’s taken over for his father.”

“Who else have you seen?”

“Capos from all over the city. We’ve been able to identify Gerry Lacizzare, Felix Danielli...”

“Heavy wood,” Scanlon said.

“It gets heavier. Bobby Triani...”

“Rudy’s son-in-law.”

“Sal the Barber Bonifacio...”

“Guy who started it all,” Georgie said.

“No, the guy who started it all is dead,” Michael said.

“Dominus vobiscum,” Georgie said in mock piety, and made the sign of the cross.

“Et cum spiritu tuo,” Scanlon said by rote, and both men smiled in the conspiracy only lapsed Catholics shared.

“Fat Nickie Nicoletta, Frankie Palumbo...”

“Nice company the kid’s keeping...”

“Joey Di Luca...”

“Enough already,” Scanlon said.

“The way I figure it,” Michael said, “we’ve got probable cause coming out of our ears.”

“Oh, really?” Scanlon said. “Where? How do you know anything criminal is going down in that shop? They could be using it as a social club, a place to meet, have a cup of coffee, talk about who’s cheating on his wife, what horse looks good in the fifth at Belmont, whatever, none of it criminal. Where’s your p.c., Michael?”

“We’ve got Faviola and his brother on a wire, talking about the kid taking over when...”

“So let’s say he did.”

“So all at once he shows up at this tailor shop every day of the week...”

“Maybe he likes clothes.”

“... and, he’s visited there, by ten thousand capos who are running operations like narcotics and loan-sharking and...”

“That doesn’t mean that’s what they talk about there.”

“I think they’re reporting to him, Charlie.”

“Gut feelings don’t add up to probable cause.”

“Let’s try it on a judge.”

“I don’t think it’ll fly.”

“It’s worth a shot.”

“Okay,” Scanlon said, “write your affidavit, and I’ll ask the Boss to make application for an eavesdropping warrant. We’ll pick our judge, and hope for the best. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” He puffed on his pipe again, and then looked up and asked, “Who’s sitting this week?”

She was wearing a black silk robe monogrammed in red with the letters AF over the breast pocket. She had rolled up the sleeves, and she was sitting in one of the living room easy chairs, her legs tucked under her. He had mixed drinks for both of them — a Scotch and soda for her, a Beefeater martini for himself. Like a cat getting used to new surroundings, Sarah had prowled first the upstairs bedroom and then the kitchen and dining room on the second floor, and lastly — while he mixed the drinks — the office and conference room behind the living room here on the entry level. From inside the living room, you couldn’t tell there was an entrance door; the wall bearing the door merely looked like solid wood paneling. No doorknob, nothing to indicate the presence of a door. To open the door from the inside, you pushed on it, and a touch latch snapped it open to the walnut-paneled stairway leading to the street.

“Why isn’t there a door on this side?” she asked.

“Architect thought it would look better.”

“I guess it does,” she said, appraising the wall again.

“Freshen that?” he asked.

“I’d better not,” she said.

She felt comfortable in his robe. Rather like the way she’d felt wearing her father’s shirts when she was a little girl. It was still only a bit past five thirty, they had hours together yet.

“Why didn’t you call me?” she asked.

“You told me not to.”

“I didn’t ask you to send a car, either.”

“I thought I’d make it easier for you.”

“I kept waiting for you to call, I kept visualizing one of the other teachers in the lunchroom picking up the phone and saying, ‘It’s for you, Sarah.’ I kept imagining going to the phone, and saying ‘Yes?’ and then hearing your voice. I used to tremble just wondering what I would say when I heard your voice again.”

“What’d you decide?”

“What do you, mean?”

“To say. If I’d called.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Because you told me not to.”

“And you always do what I say, hmm?”

“Always.”

“Since when?”

“Since now.”

This both excited her and tempted her. She felt suddenly like giving him a command, tossing the robe aside, spreading herself to him, ordering him to kiss her everywhere again. There was something thrilling about being in his robe, too. Wearing something of his, possessing it if only for a little while, was like possessing Andrew himself.

“What would you have said?” he asked.

“I think I’d have said, ‘Who’s this, please?’”

“And when I said, ‘You know who this is. When can I see you?’”

“I’d have said, ‘Oh, yes, Dr. Cummings, I was going to call you later today. Do you have any free time on Wednesday?’”

“Is that your doctor’s name?”

“No, I just made that up.”

“Cummings, huh?”

“Yes,” she said. And then, getting it, “Oh.”

He was sitting on the sofa opposite her, wearing a robe not quite as luxuriant as the one she was wearing, a sort of cotton wrapper you might find at Bloomie’s. His comment on her inadvertent pun recalled St. Bart’s and his outrageous definition of “bimbo.” Did he know how Freudian the Cummings pun had been? Well, of course he knew. Why else would he have mentioned it?

“Do you know the one about the Freudian slip?” she asked. “This man is with his psychiatrist and he tells him he made a terrible Freudian slip with his wife this morning. The doctor asks him what it was, and he says, I can’t believe I made such a slip. The doctor says, Well, what was it? The man says, What I wanted to say was ‘Please pass the toast, darling,’ but I made this slip. Well, what did you say? the doctor asks. And the man answers, What I said was ‘You fuckin’ cunt, you ruined my life!’”

Andrew’s eyebrows went up in surprise for an instant, and then he burst out laughing. Watching the conflicting responses cross his face was amusing in itself. She began laughing as well.

“Did you ever see That Championship Season?” he asked, still laughing.

“No,” she said, and wondered what that had to do with Dr. Cummings or Dr. Freud, for that matter.

“There’s a line Paul Sorvino has. Do you know him? He’s a wonderful actor. He was also in GoodFellas, did you see that one?”

“Are these movies?”

“Yes. Well, That Championship Season was a play first, but I didn’t see it on the stage, I saw the movie. I don’t go to see plays too often, do you?”

“Hardly ever,” she said. She did not tell him that Michael felt most plays were simplistic.

“The other one was a book first. About the Mafia. But television stole the title — there was a show on television called Wiseguy — so they had to change it when they did the book as a movie. The movie was called GoodFellas. Paul Sorvino played a capo. He was very good. Very believable.”

“A what?”

“A capo. That’s some sort of lieutenant, I guess. I guess the Mafia has all that kind of military crap. Like the army, I guess.”

“Uh-huh.”

She was wondering just how much she’d really shocked him with the word “cunt.” She was also wondering if he was getting hard again. With Michael, you made love once, and that was it for the night. Or sometimes even the week. Andrew seemed to be perpetually ready. The idea that he was only twenty-eight was exciting to her. She felt as if she were bedding a seventeen-year-old. She also wondered if she’d get anything to eat tonight. Last Wednesday, she’d left here as ravenous as a bear. Dining out with the girls was fun except that you didn’t get anything to eat. She was beginning to feel really very hungry again. She suddenly thought the Scotch might be getting to her; she’d already forgotten how they’d got to this part of their conversation.

“Anyway, the other picture was about a reunion of a basketball team. Robert Mitchum was in it, too, didn’t you see it?”

“No.”

“He played the coach.”

She wondered if she could make him hard again without even touching him. Just sit here across from him and get him hard. She decided it might be worth a try.

“Anyway, Sorvino’s talking to one of the other, players about something, I forget what, and he says something like ‘You know the only woman I ever loved? My mother. Fuck Freud!’”

She burst out laughing. Nodding in appreciation, Andrew began laughing, too. Their laughter trailed at last. He nodded again and sipped at his martini. She sipped at her Scotch and then shifted her position slightly on the couch, allowing the robe to fall partially open over her breasts.

“Is it possible we could send out for something to eat later?” she asked.

“Sure, are you hungry?”

“Well, later. Let’s finish the drinks first,” she said, and gestured with her glass.

“There are lots of good restaurants in the neighborhood,” he said. “But I didn’t think you’d want to go out.”

“No, I don’t think we should.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“No,” she said, and slipped her legs out from under her and then leaned over to put her glass on the coffee table. The robe opened wider over her breasts. She could feel his eyes on her. She pulled the robe closed, crossed her legs, leaned back.

“So how’d you describe me?” she asked.

He looked at her, puzzled.

“To Billy.”

“Oh.”

“The driver.”

“I told him your name was Mrs. Welles, and I said you were a tall, beautiful blonde,”

“Do you really think I’m tall?”

“Yes.”

“How tall do you think I am?” she asked, and leaned over to retrieve her drink again, giving him a good long look at her naked breasts, and then sitting up again all oblivious and innocent.

“Five-ten,” he said.

“I’m five-eight.”

How’re we doing under that robe? she wondered. That thing getting hard for me again?

“You look taller,” he said.

“I give that impression,” she said, and uncrossed her legs. “Did you mean the part about the beautiful blonde?”

“I meant it.”

“What else did you say about me?”

“That’s all I said.”

“Did you describe my breasts to him?”

“No.”

“Well, don’t you like my breasts?” she asked.

“I love your breasts.”

“Then why didn’t you describe them to him?”

The thought of him describing her breasts to another man was making her wet again.

He said nothing.

“Did you think that might excite him?” she asked. “Describing my breasts?”

“It might have.”

“Or my nipples?” she said, and opened the robe in a wide V over her breasts. “Do you like my nipples?”

“Yes.”

“Can you see how hard they are?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like my legs?” she said, and stretched them out in front of her, pointing the toes, pulling the robe up to her knees. “Did you describe my legs to him?”

“No.”

“No, you don’t like my legs?”

“I love your legs. No, I didn’t describe them to him.”

“Did you tell him I’m a natural blonde?” she said, and pulled the robe back and spread herself to him.

“Do you know what you’re doing to me?” he asked.

“What am I doing to you?”

“What are you trying to do?”

“I’m trying to excite you.”

“You’re exciting me. You’re the most exciting woman I’ve ever...”

“Get you hard again,” she whispered.

“I am hard.”

“Get you to put that big hard cock in me again.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Now,” she said. “Get you to fuck me again now!”

He rose and came to her. Her eyes flicked the hardness of him under the thin cotton robe. He unbelted the robe, let it fall open, reached out with his right hand to cup her chin. His left hand brushed her hair behind her ear. His right thumb parted her lips.

“Yes,” she said, “that, too.”

She hated shopping on Saturday, she hated shopping with Mollie, and she hated shopping with Heather. The weather was rotten, too. It had been rotten ever since Thursday morning, when she’d awakened with thoughts of Andrew in her mind and sounds of Michael in the bathroom. She’d thought at once that she’d overslept, but instead he’d awakened early. It was snowing outside, she wondered if they’d declare a snow day. If so, she wondered if she should call Andrew, tell him she’d be there as soon as — but no, a snow day would give her daughter the day off, too. Anyway, the snow tapered by nine and ended by noon, leaving behind a slushy residue that froze solid that night when the temperature dropped to twenty-two degrees. For the past two days now, it had hovered just above the single-digit mark, fourteen degrees yesterday, twelve this morning.

Mollie wanted the new sneakers every other kid in school was wearing. Something about a disc instead of laces, who knew, who cared? Heather was looking for something that would make her look young and exciting again. Thirty-two years old, she wanted to look young again. Sarah felt as if she were merely along for the bumpy ride. They had already hit Bloomie’s in vain, and were now trudging along a Fifth Avenue thronged with Japanese tourists and all blustery with winds that seemed raging directly from the Arctic. Sarah’s cheeks were raw and cold, and her lips were chapped, and her nose was dripping and she was thinking she’d rather be reading a book on a miserable Saturday like this one. Or actually, she realized in an instant, what she’d really rather be doing was—

“Where does Uncle Doug live now?” Mollie asked.

“I don’t know,” Heather said.

“With the bimbo?” Mollie asked.

“I don’t think he’s seeing her anymore.”

Sarah wondered if she herself could be considered a bimbo. Could a thirty-four-year-old mother be a bimbo?

“His lawyer probably advised him to quit the houghmagandy till we reach a settlement.”

“What’s houghmagandy?” Mollie asked.

“Hanky-panky,” Heather said.

Sarah wondered if Mollie knew what hanky-panky meant. Then she wondered what Mollie would think if she knew her mother was engaged in hanky-panky with the man who’d saved her life not a month ago! But it wasn’t really hanky-panky, it was — she didn’t know what it was. She knew only that she couldn’t stop thinking about him, couldn’t stop hungering for him. She had never felt like this in her life. Even when she was head over heels in love with the Duke basketball player who’d taken her to bed — well, the backseat of his Mustang, actually — three weeks after she’d met him. Eighteen years old and thrilled by his every move. She’d told her roommate that Avery on a basket — that was his name, Avery Howell, six feet five inches tall, redheaded and freckle-faced — Avery on a basketball court was “poetry in motion.” Direct quote. Eighteen-year-old Sarah Fitch, giddily in love. Even that was nothing compared to what she felt whenever she was with Andrew. But that wasn’t love, was it? No, she knew exactly what it was. And that made her a bimbo, yes.

“... question, Mom?”

“What? I’m sorry.”

“Aunt Heather just asked you a question.”

“My question was,” Heather said, sounding more exasperated than the situation seemed to warrant, “should we go to that little omelette place on Sixty-First, or should we go further uptown to Coco Pazzo?”

“I vote Coco Pazzo,” Mollie said.

“Too expensive,” Sarah said.

“My treat,” Heather said.

“Even so.”

“Omelettes, then,” Heather said, and sighed heavily.

“How come you always have the last word?” Mollie wanted to know.

“But I don’t,” Sarah said.

“Yes, you do, Mom. I want Coco Pazzo, Aunt Heather wants Coco...”

“They’re always booked solid,” Sarah said, “you have to call weeks ahead. Anyway, do you really want to walk all the way up there in this freezing...?”

“Cabs, sweetie,” Heather said, and winked at Mollie. “New invention. Yellow, motorized, all the rage.”

“Sure, just try to get one in this weather,” Sarah said.

“But suppose we can get one?” Mollie said.

“And suppose he’s willing to drive us up to Seventy-Fourth?” Heather said.

“And suppose we get there without crashing into a telephone pole or anything...”

“And suppose they can take us for lunch?”

“Would you then be willing to eat there?”

“Listen, I don’t give a damn where we eat,” Sarah said, suddenly annoyed. “Just stop ganging up on me, okay?”

“Wow!” Mollie said. “Where’d that come from?”

“We’ll eat the fucking omelettes, okay?” Heather said.

“And watch your mouth when Mollie’s around,” Sarah snapped.

“Mom, I’ve heard the word before, really,” Mollie said, and rolled her eyes.

“Fine, you’ve heard it, that doesn’t mean your aunt has to use it every ten seconds.”

“Use it every...?”

“And bimbo and hanky-panky and whore gandy or whatever the hell else you...”

“Hey, listen...”

“Come on, Mom...”

“No, you listen! Every time the two of you get together, I become the...”

“Mom, what the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Let’s drop it, Mollie,” Heather said.

“Right, let’s drop it!” Sarah said.

They walked in silence past Saks and then St. Patrick’s, Sarah fumingly aware that Heather and Mollie were exchanging puzzled glances. By the time they reached Tiffany’s, her anger had dissipated, and she was beginning to wonder what had prompted her outburst.

“Okay, we’ll go to Coco Pazzo,” she said, “If they can take us.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve changed my mind about treating,” Heather said, deadpanned.

“Then I’ll treat, damn it!” Mollie said.

They all laughed.

Sarah guessed everything was all right again.

The Tech Unit detective Michael had chosen was named Freddie Coulter. He had the long rangy look of an adolescent, with narrow hips, a thin face with high cheekbones and dark brown eyes, unruly black hair, and a black mustache that looked borrowed from a western gunslick. He was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved chambray shirt, and a blue denim vest. A .38 Detectives Special was holstered to his belt on the right-hand side of his waist. Coulter was a Detective/First attached to the District Attorney’s Office Squad. He listened intently as Regan and Lowndes told him what he could expect at the tailor shop tonight.

“Today’s Sunday, so the shop is closed,” Lowndes said.

Jackass, Regan thought. Would they be sending him in if the place was open?

“There’s no alarm,” he said.

“The Mafia doesn’t need alarms,” Lowndes said.

“Anybody crazy enough to rob a Mafia joint deserves everything coming to him.”

“You rob a Mafia joint, the next day you have four broken arms.”

“That’s if you return what you stole.”

“No alarm,” Lowndes said, “and a Mickey Mouse lock on the front door.”

“What’s the catch?” Coulter asked.

“The catch is there’s only the one door going in and that’s right on Broome Street.”

“Any cops, patrolling on foot?” Coulter asked.

“How’s that gonna help you?”

“Shake a few doorknobs,” Coulter said, and shrugged.

“Good idea,” Michael said. “Can we suit him up?”

“You get caught inside in uniform, you’re a dead man,” Lowndes said.

“I don’t plan to get caught,” Coulter said, and smiled.

“They find a uniformed cop in there, next thing you know your relatives’ll be sending flowers,” Lowndes said.

“To a funeral home,” Regan said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Coulter said.

He had a reputation for fearlessness which Regan personally found foolhardy. In this job, only a jackass took risks. You gave Regan a million bucks he wouldn’t sneak in no fuckin’ Mafia joint wearing a police uniform and carrying bugging equipment. Far as Regan was concerned, Coulter was the dumbest fuck on the squad.

“This is the layout,” he said, and began drawing a crude floor plan on a sheet of DAO stationery. Coulter watched as the tailor shop took shape. “The curtains going to the back are about here,” Regan said, and drew a series of slash marks on the page. “They’re on like metal rings...”

“You just shove them aside...”

“Right or left?” Coulter asked.

“To the left,” Lowndes said. “In back, there’s a pressing machine on the right and what looks like a table on the other wall.”

“What kind of table?”

“We’ve never been back there,” Regan said. “This is just what we were able to catch, the times we been in the shop.”

“Is there a phone back there?”

“Telephone company says there are two phones in the shop.”

“One of them in the back room?”

“Is what we figure.”

“What kind of warrant do we have?”

“Basic bug.”

“No wiretap?”

“No. We already got an access line for you, by the way.”

The access line was what they would need to activate the bug Coulter installed. As soon as they’d obtained their eavesdropping warrant, Regan had called New York Telephone to say he was with a security company that needed an access line in the terminal box behind the Broome Street address. This was standard operating procedure. A security company, an alarm company, a data communications company, anything of that sort. The billing addresses for the fictitious firms were separate mail drops maintained by the NYPD.

“Where’s the terminal box?” Coulter asked.

“Out back on the rear wall of the building.”

“That’s the way they have them down there in Little Italy and Chinatown,” Lowndes said. “Them old buildings.”

On any hard-wire installation, Coulter connected his bug to the existing telephone line. The bug took the normal audio signal, raised it to a frequency much higher than could be heard, and using the phone line as an antenna, passed it on to the terminal box. Inside the box, Coulter would install a device known as a “slave,” which would take the high-frequency signal, demodulate it, and bridge it electronically to the access line, where anyone listening would again hear it as a normal audio signal.

“Should be simple,” Coulter said.

My ass, Regan thought.

The phone on Michael’s desk rang. He picked up at once.

“ADA Welles,” he said.

From where Sarah stood at the pay phone, she could see Mollie circling the rink, trying to do a series of linked pirouettes.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“Good,” he said. “You having fun?”

“Mollie is. I hate skating. What time do you think you’ll be home? It’s Sunday, you know, I thought we could go to a movie. There’s a good one playing on Eighty-Sixth.”

“What time does it go on?”

“We’ve already missed the two o’clock.”

“When’s the next one?”

“Four fifteen.”

“And the one after that?”

“I didn’t even bother.”

“What’s it now?” Michael said.

“Three ten.”

“I’ll try to wrap up here in ten minutes,” he said, “be home no later than four.”

“That’s cutting it close.”

“Best I can do.”

“Chinese after the movie?”

“Yeah, good.”

“Shall I reserve?”

“Be a good idea. Honey, let me go. Sooner I can...”

“Goodbye already,” she said, and hung up.

She looked out over the rink to check on Mollie again, and then dialed “O” for operator, and then the area code and number Andrew had given her for his house on Long Island. When the operator came on, she did just what Andrew had instructed her to do.

“This is a collect call,” she said.

“Thank you for using New York Telephone,” the operator said.

Sarah waited.

The phone was ringing on the other end. Once, twice...

“Hello?”

His voice.

“I have a collect call for you sir.”

“Yes?”

“Miss, may I have your name, please?”

Miss, she thought.

“Sarah,” she said.

“I’ll accept,” Andrew said.

“Go ahead, please.”

“Hi,” she said.

“Where are you?” he said.

“The Wollman Rink.”

“Where’s that?”

“Central Park. Are you from Mars?”

“Yes,” he said. “I love you, do you know that?”

“Say it.”

“I love you.”

“Again.”

“I love you.”

“Say it in Martian.”

“Meet me at the apartment and I’ll fuck your brains out.”

“Is that Martian?”

“It’s plain English.”

“Basic English, I’d say.”

“Can you meet me?”

“Andrew; it’s Sunday!”’

“So what?”

“You know I can’t. You’re not serious. You won’t be going, there, will you?”

“Not unless you say you’ll meet me.”

“I can’t.”

“Are we set for Wednesday, then?”

“Yes.”

“No problems?”

“None. What are you doing?”

“Watching television.”

“Are you alone?”

“No, there are three Chinese girls with me.”

“I’ll break your head.”

“What are you wearing?”

“Oh, I’m very sexy freezing here in the cold.”

“What’ll you wear Wednesday?”

“My teacher clothes.”

“Do you plan to teach me something?”

“Maybe. I have to go. My daughter’s skating over.”

“Wednesday,” he said. “Billy will be waiting.”

“Outside the movie theater on Third and Fifty-Ninth,” she said. “Four o’clock.”

“I love you,” he said.

“Wednesday,” she said, and hung up before she had to say it.

Mollie executed a smart stop near the fence, sending up a spray of ice flakes.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Daddy,” Sarah said.

In the bedroom of the Great Neck house, Andrew put the receiver back on its cradle and turned to the bathroom door. Redheaded Oona Halligan was standing there wearing high-heeled pumps and one of his pajama tops unbuttoned low over her breasts.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“My mother,” he said, and opened his arms to her.

At eight o’clock that night, while Sarah and Michael and Mollie were coming out of a Chinese restaurant on Eightieth and Third, and while Andrew was really on the phone to his mother in Stonington, Connecticut, a uniformed police officer came up Broome Street, shaking doorknobs to make sure the shops lining the street were locked for the night. He tested doorknob after doorknob, rattling a knob, moving on, rattling yet another knob, until he came to the tailor shop on the corner of Broome and Mott, where he went through the same automatic routine before crossing the street. On the other side of the street, he went through the same ritual with the doors there, and then crossed over again and started back toward the tailor shop, checking both sides of the street as he approached the door. This time, there was a credit card in his left hand.

He took the doorknob in his right hand, made a swift pass at the doorjamb with the credit card, sliding it between jamb and spring bolt, and had the door open in exactly three seconds. In another two seconds, he was inside, the door locked again behind him. Two seconds after that, two men turned the corner from Mott Street and walked past the shop. By then, Freddie had brushed aside the hanging curtain and was in the back room. The two men took up a position in a dark doorway across the street. They were Freddie’s backups.

He snapped on his penlight only long enough to find an electrical outlet. He plugged a quarter-watt night-light into it and then waited while his eyes adjusted to the scant illumination. A moving flashlight would have been unmistakable from outside the shop. The beat officers had been alerted that he’d be in here, but he didn’t want one of the paisans passing by and noticing any flickering movement. From the outside, it would now appear as if someone had deliberately left a night-light burning, a not uncommon occurrence. He would work only by this light; he knew his tools well.

The back room was long and narrow.

You came through the curtains separating it from the front of the shop and immediately on the right, on one of the short walls was a pressing machine. On the long wall opposite the curtains was the table above which Coulter had plugged in his light. There was a huge pair of cutting shears on the table, several cardboard patterns, a bolt of blue cloth, a heavy pressing iron. A calendar hung on the wall behind the table, just above the outlet. Its illustration showed a peasant girl in a scoop-neck blouse, grinning and holding a basket overflowing with ripe yellow grapes. The days in January had been methodically X’d out to date; today was the thirty-first, the end of the month.

There was a door to the left of the table. Doorknob on it, a deadbolt lock above it. The door was painted white, like the rest of the room. A speaker with a push button on it was set into the jamb on the right. Coulter moved to the door, rapped gently on it with his knuckles, testing. It did not give back the sound of another room behind it; he guessed it opened on a stairwell. There were no wires running around the jamb; the speaker had been wired from the other side of the wall.

There were several chairs pulled up to the long table. Coulter surmised the table served several purposes. Shove the chairs back when you wanted to cut a garment, pull them up again when you wanted to talk or eat. On the short wall opposite the pressing machine and right-angled into the wall with the door and the cutting table, there was a pay telephone. Coulter was in business.

When the batteries in a battery-powered transmitter gave out, they had to be replaced, and this meant having to go in all over again, doubling or tripling or even quadrupling the risk depending on the length of the surveillance. You wired a person with a battery-powered transmitter, but when you were bugging a room, you looked for your AC power source. A telephone of any kind gave you exactly what you needed.

Coulter guessed that any meetings taking place back here would be at the long table against the far wall. That was where the chairs were. He further guessed that any business-related calls were made from the pay phone on the wall. The eavesdropping warrant did not give them the right to install a wiretap, but using the phone’s electrical power, he could install a bug that would pick up any conversation taking place in the room, including whatever was said into the phone on this end.

Coulter went to work.

He’d done jobs where the least-suspected installation was in plain sight. People felt comfortable in their own environments, they didn’t go looking for anything unusual. Theory of “The Purloined Letter.” Splice into the phone line, run your wire along the baseboard where it could be clearly seen, straight into a bug in your 42A block across the room. You could buy a 42A block in any store selling telephone accessories; it was just a simple two-by-three-inch ivory-colored receptacle with either a single or a double phone jack in it. A Brady bug fit neatly inside it. You fastened the block in plain sight, nobody ever noticed it or the bare-faced wire running to it. But according to Welles, there were some heavy wiseguys coming in and out of this place, and maybe they were a little smarter than your average Gabagootz Mafia bum.

Coulter took off the baseboard molding and tucked his wire behind that, leading it around to the door in the center of the room. He tacked the wire up one side of the door, and over it, and down the other side of it, where he tucked it behind the molding again. The wire surfaced again just under the table, where Coulter had fastened the 42A block with the Brady bug in it. He screwed the wire into that, tacked up the molding again, retrieved his tools and his night-light, checked the street before he went out, and pulled the door closed, making sure the spring latch clicked shut behind him.

As he attached the slave to the access line in the box hanging on the rear of the building, his two backups stood shivering across the yard from him, covering his foolhardy ass.

Mollie was preparing for bed. Murder, She Wrote had just gone off. Sarah snapped off the television set. Across the room, Michael was reading the appeals brief Anthony Faviola’s attorneys had filed on his behalf. Michael had called his contact in the U.S. Attorney’s office...

“What’s all this Faviola interest all of a sudden? First the transcripts...”

“One of our people is thinking of writing a book.”

... because he wanted to be sure he didn’t make any mistakes with Faviola’s son. Any appeals loopholes the elder mobster’s shysters had found would help Michael when he began sifting whatever the eavesdropping surveillance disclosed. He would not commit any technical errors. When he was finished with this, father and son would be walking the same exercise yard together for an hour after lunch every day for the rest of their lives. He hoped.

The racketeering activity of which Faviola was convicted in this case consisted of the execution murders of George Antonini, Carmine Gallitelli, John Panattoni, and Peter Mugnoli at a restaurant on August 17, 1991. Shunting aside the holding in U.S. v. Ianniello, Faviola seeks to reverse his RICO convictions on the ground that committing or aiding and abetting four murders cannot be a pattern if the murders all occur at the same time and place. Faviola also distorts the trial court’s charge in an effort...

“Michael?”

He looked up.

“Are you going to be with that all night?” she asked. “You worked all day today...”

“I’m sorry, honey,” he said, and immediately closed the brief and took off his glasses, and came to her and hugged her close. “What would you like to do?” he asked. “Shall we run around the corner for some cappuccino, leave Mollie home alone, risk charges of...”

“I thought...”

“Or shall I go pick up a video?”

“Michael we just saw a movie. Can’t we just sit and talk? We’ve both been so busy lately...”

The deception, she thought. Share the blame. We’ve both been so busy.

“Good idea,” he said. “Let’s go kiss Mollie good night.”

The deception. Ringing a variation on the familiar theme. Instead of the deceived husband asking, Is anything wrong, darling? here was the unfaithful wife complaining of neglect while longing to be in her lover’s arms tonight and every night, for the rest of her life. Her lover. The word echoed in her head, carrying with it lustful undertones contrary to the motherly act of tucking her daughter in.

“Mom?” Mollie said.

“Yes, honey.”

“We had this dance, you know? On Friday? The older boys from Locksley came over? And there was this one boy I kind of liked. He kept staring at me, you know? This was in the gym?”

“Yes, darling.”

“And I sort of kept staring back at him. Because he was so cute, you know. With blond hair like mine, but with very dark brown eyes. And I could tell he liked me.”

“Um-huh.”

“So... he came over. He walked all the way across the gym from where he was standing with some of his friends in their little blue Locksley jackets, and he stopped right in front of where me and Winona were sitting, and he asked me to dance.”

“Um-huh.”

“And I said no.”

The room was silent for a moment.

“I don’t know why I did that,” Mollie said. “I really wanted to dance with him, and he was so cute and all, and he’d come all that way across the gym, but I said no. I sometimes think there’s something wrong with me.”

“No, there’s nothing wrong with you, darling.”

“I hope not. He was so embarrassed. I thought I would die, too, refusing him like that.”

“Maybe you felt you couldn’t handle it quite yet. Dancing with a strange boy. Someone older than you.”

“Maybe,” Mollie said, and fell silent again. “Winona got her period last week,” she said at last.

“Did she?”

“Yeah. When do you think I’ll get mine, Mom?”

“Soon enough.”

“Winona says it’s a nuisance.”

“I suppose it is.”

“But I wish I’d hurry up and get it.”

“You will, darling,” Sarah said.

“Winona’s my best friend in the whole world,” Mollie said.

“That’s good, darl—”

“Except you, Mommy.”

Sarah swiftly turned her head away.

“Mommy?” Mollie said.

“Yes, darling.”

“Why are you crying?”

“Because I love you very much,” Sarah said. She pulled the blanket to Mollie’s chin and leaned over to kiss her on the forehead. “Good night, sweetheart,” she said.

“I love you, too,” Mollie said.

“I know.”

“I wish I’d grow up one of these days,” she said, and closed her eyes on a heavy sigh.

Sarah went back into the living room, where Michael was waiting for her.

The deception.

The goodwife, goodmother, goodteacher, telling Michael again that they’d decided to hold their teachers’ meetings every Wednesday evening, careful not to use the word “night” with its heavier connotations...

“I hope you don’t mind, Michael, we just feel...”

“Don’t be silly,” he said.

How easy to deceive him, she thought.

And how perfectly natural it seems.

Pouting a bit as she told him his work seemed more important than she did these days, what was he working on, anyway?

“Can’t tell you,” he said.

“Still a big secret, huh?”

“Very big.”

“When will you tell me?”

“When it’s nailed down.”

“Meanwhile, you’re gone at dawn every morning...”

“Objection, Your Honor.”

“Six thirty, then.”

“Only one day last week.”

“And you went to the office today.”

“Important meeting.”

“About what?”

“Putting in a bug.”

“Where?”

“Secret.”

“Why?”

“Secret.”

“Tell me.”

“Then it wouldn’t be a secret anymore.”

Secrets, she thought.

“Would you like to make love?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

Whore, she thought.

“Although you’re both experienced detectives...” Michael said.

Well, one of us is, Regan, thought.

“... who’ve investigated dozens of eavesdrop cases, I’m required by case law to brief you on the procedure to be followed in listening to any conversation originating in the back of that tailor shop.”

They were in his office and this was early Monday morning, the first day of February. They were about to leave for the apartment where they’d be monitoring the bug Coulter had installed. Michael had read them the eavesdropping warrant, and was now about to give them the “minimization lecture” they’d each heard ten thousand times before.

Well, me, anyway, Regan thought.

He told them first that the courts generally regarded an eavesdrop warrant like any other search warrant authorizing a limited search and seizure of evidence. The law made no distinction between listening to, monitoring, or recording a conversation.

“Whether a conversation is merely overheard, or also recorded, makes no difference legally,” Michael said. “Either way, the conversation has been seized.”

He went on to say that the warrant gave them authority to intercept the conversations of the named subject — Andrew Faviola — and various coconspirators, accomplices, and agents also named in the warrant...

“The hoods you saw going in and out of the shop,” he said.

... authority to intercept their conversations as they relate to the crimes of loan-sharking, drug trafficking, and — since the unfortunate waiter Dominick Di Nobili had been found with two bullets in his head in the trunk of a car at La Guardia Airport — murder as well.

“In short,” he said, “you’re permitted to listen to any conversation regarding these criminal activities, or for that matter, any other criminal activity that might come up during the course of the eavesdrop. What you can’t listen to is any privileged conversation.”

A privileged conversation was defined as any conversation between the subject and his attorney, the subject and his priest, the subject and his doctor, or the subject and his wife. If Regan or Lowndes detected that Faviola was talking to any of these people, they should immediately turn off their recording equipment and stop listening.

Ho-hum, Regan thought.

“A conversation between the subject and his girlfriend isn’t considered privileged,” Michael said. “But the minute they start talking about anything unrelated to the criminal activities named in the warrant, you have to quit listening.”

This did not preclude them from making occasional spot checks. For example, one moment the subject could be talking to his attorney about defending a suit that’s been brought against him; this would be privileged communication. But five minutes later he could begin talking about whether or not the attorney wished to be present at a meeting in the Bronx where they’d be restructuring the narcotics distribution setup in the Four-One Precinct. Trafficking in narcotics had been mentioned in the warrant; this would clearly be a criminal conversation.

It was permissible, therefore, to listen even to a privileged conversation for a few seconds every minute or so. If during this brief spot check they intercepted evidence of any of the crimes named in the warrant, it was okay to keep listening and recording. But the penalty for listening to or recording anything not specifically authorized was that everything they heard might be suppressed.

“Be extremely careful,” Michael said. “If you’re in doubt, just turn off the equipment and stop listening.”

In conclusion, he told them that the eavesdropping warrant had been obtained by the district attorney of New York County, and that he’d been appointed as the DA’s agent to assure that the warrant was properly executed. The justice of the Supreme Court who’d issued the warrant had the right to require periodic reports about the progress of the investigation and the manner in which the warrant was being executed...

“... and whenever he wants such reports,” Michael said, “I’m the guy he’ll turn to. The time may also come when a search warrant, or an additional eavesdropping warrant, or some other legal document or legal advice or legal decision is needed. I’m the one who’ll have to do that, so I have to know what’s going on. Please keep me informed, okay? Make sure I get copies of all the logs, tapes, and surveillance reports. I want to hear each and every tape as soon as it’s duplicated. If anything seems to be breaking suddenly, call me. Here are my numbers, office and home. Post them in a conspicuous place at the plant. That’s it,” he said. “Good luck.”

The phone numbers were posted on the wall above the telephone in an apartment on Grand Street, a block from the tailor shop. Regan and Lowndes had dialed the number of the access line, turning on the bug, and the line was now open. They could hear every conversation originating in the back room of the tailor shop as if they were sitting right there with the goombahs. Wearing earphones, adjusting and readjusting the volume controls, they learned almost instantly that the one constant player was someone named Benny, and they figured out quickly enough that he was the son of the owner and that he ran the pressing machine — at least for the time being. From one of the early conversations between Benny and his father that first Monday of the surveillance, they gathered that he might not be working there much longer.

“But I thought you liked working with me,” the old man said.

Louis Vaccaro, owner of the shop. Regan and Lowndes knew what he looked like and sounded like because they’d been in and out of there at least a dozen times.

“I do like working with you, Pop...”

Benny Vaccaro, running the pressing machine. Steam hissing in the background as he spoke.

“It’s just I don’t like pressing. Andrew told me he could get me something on the docks. This was after...”

“You have to be careful, the docks.”

“Yeah, I know. But I turned down the fish-market thing, I can’t stand the smell of fish, Pop. Andrew said I could begin work right away, soon as I cleared it with you. I’d be making more money, Pop, and he said he’d see about some other little things I might be able to do for him, you know, special little things’d bring in even more money. I really want to do this, Pop.”

“I thought you liked it here,” the old man said.

“I do, Pop, I do. But, you know, just running this machine all the time...”

“When I first started this business, I used to do all my own pressing,” Louis said. “The tailoring and the pressing, too.”

“Well, that was the old days, Pop.”

“The old days, yes.”

“Andrew thinks he can help me make a better life for myself. Pop, I’m thirty-three years old, I can’t spend the rest of my life behind a pressing machine.”

The old man sighed forlornly.

“Okay, Pop?”

“Stay till I find somebody else.”

“Well, how long will that be, Pop? Andrew says I can start next Monday. That’s the eighth. Will you have somebody by then?”

“I’ll ask Guido.”

Guido was one of the old man’s friends. He came into the back room of the shop on the first Tuesday of the surveillance and the two chatted over lunch. Regan and Lowndes figured they were eating because there were a lot of references to food and wine and a great many words mumbled around chewing and swallowing. The gist of the conversation was that Benny had been offered a better job and Louis would now need someone to run the pressing machine. Guido told him this was a great pity...

“Che peccato, che peccato...”

... but that he would look around and see if he could find someone.

“E necessario che tenga la bocca chiusa,” Louis said.

“Si, naturalmente,” Guido said.

Since neither Guido nor Louis had been named in the warrant, and since criminal activity did not seem to be the subject of the conversation, Regan and Lowndes turned off the equipment and stopped listening. Neither of them knew what the Italian meant. The sentences were translated by an Italian-speaking secretary in Michael’s office on Wednesday morning as Louis saying, “It’s necessary that he keeps his mouth shut,” with Guido replying, “Yes, of course.” Meaning, Michael supposed, that whoever ran the pressing machine would have to remain silent about the comings and goings in the back of the shop, a perfectly natural precaution. Suddenly, this, too, seemed like a criminal conversation.

The comings and goings started on Wednesday morning at ten o’clock, when Andrew Faviola himself arrived. Benny helpfully identified him for the digital recording equipment.

“Hey, Andrew, how you doing?”

“Good, Benny. Good.”

Earphones on their heads, Regan and Lowndes listened. Benny was still at the pressing machine; apparently Louis hadn’t yet found a satisfactory replacement. This was the first thing Benny complained about.

“I told my father I want to start working for you next Monday,” he said, “but he’s draggin’ his heels about finding somebody.”

“I just spoke to him,” Andrew said. “He thinks it’ll be okay.”

“’Cause I’m really anxious to start, you know.”

“It’ll be okay, Benny. We’re working on it.”

“I hope so.”

“Trust me.”

“Go hide the silver,” Regan said.

“Trust him,” Lowndes said disdainfully.

“I’m expecting some people,” Andrew said.

“Yeah, okay, I’ll send them up.”

“Send them up?” Regan said.

“Up where?” Lowndes said.

They heard his footsteps crossing the room. Over the hiss of steam from the pressing machine, they heard a scraping sound, and then a click, and then what sounded like a door opening and closing, and then only the hissing again.

The first of the people to arrive was Rudy Faviola.

“Hey, Rudy, how you doing?”

“Fine, Benny. My nephew here yet?”

“Yeah, he said to tell you to go on up.”

Regan looked at Lowndes. Lowndes looked puzzled.

They heard footsteps crossing the room. Silence. Then another voice, sounding as if it were coming over a speaker. Andrew’s voice?

“Yeah?”

“It’s Uncle Rudy.”

“Come on up.”

A buzzer sounded. They heard what they recognized as the door again, opening and then closing with a firm thud. Then silence. In Coulter’s report, he had mentioned a door with a deadbolt lock on it and a speaker set into the jamb beside it. They were already beginning to fear the worst.

The next person arrived at ten past ten. He was identified by Benny as “Mr. Bardo.”

“Good morning, Mr. Bardo.”

“Good morning, Benny.”

“Petey Bardo,” Regan said.

“The consigliere,” Lowndes said, nodding.

No, the fuckin’ Pope, Regan thought. You jackass.

“They’re upstairs,” Benny said.

They listened carefully. Footsteps. Silence. Then:

“Yeah?”

The voice on the speaker again. Sounding very much like Andrew Faviola.

“It’s Petey.”

“Okay.”

And the buzzer again. And the door opening and shutting. And silence again. Upstairs was where they were going. Downstairs was where Regan and Lowndes would hear shit.

Sal the Barber arrived next.

“Sal,” he said into the speaker, and was immediately buzzed upstairs.

The fifth man to arrive that morning was introduced for the record as Bobby.

“Hey, Bobby, how you doing?” Benny said.

“They here?”

“Upstairs.”

Footsteps. The speaker voice again.

“Yeah?”

“Triani.”

Thank you, Lowndes thought.

“Come up.”

The door opening and closing. Silence again. At the pressing machine, Benny Vaccaro began singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

The next two men arrived together. Before Benny could greet them, one of them said, “Hello, Benny.”

“Hey,” Benny said, sounding surprised, as if he hadn’t heard them coming in. Regan and Lowndes listened to heavy footsteps pounding across the room, heard the familiar voice on the speaker again, “Yeah?” and then “Carmine and Ralph,” and then “Come on up,” and the buzzer, and the door opening and closing — welcome to the party. Ralph Carbonaio and Carmine Orafo were here, and everybody was upstairs, and nobody was going to say a fucking thing down here except Benny, who was singing again at the pressing machine.

Regan took off his earphones.

In the conference room upstairs, they were planning the murder of Alonso Moreno.

“This is not to teach him a lesson,” Andrew said. “The lesson is for whoever follows him.”

“I think we may be starting something we can’t finish,” Carbonaio said. He was called Ralphie the Red because he had red hair. He also had freckles all over his face, and years ago they used to call him Ralphie Irish till he broke a few heads. He had gained a little weight since then, and he sat now at the conference table in gray flannel slacks and a blue cashmere sports jacket with a gray V-neck sweater under it. He was due in Seattle tomorrow morning. He considered this business of having to take care of Moreno a nuisance. Better not to start something that could lead to complications. There were times when Ralphie considered himself a totally legitimate entrepreneur, all evidence to the contrary.

“If we don’t start it, there’s no Chinese deal,” Rudy said. “The fuckin’ Chinks are tellin’ us shit or get off the pot. We gonna let this spic stand in the way of what could be billions?”

“Rudy’s right,” Sal the Barber said in his gruff, rumbling voice. “Fuck ’em. We do our own thing, fuck ’em.”

“Easier to pay him, though,” Triani said. “What he’s askin’.”

Bobby Triani was married to Rudy’s daughter, Ida, and as an intimate member of the family was fourth in the hierarchy of command. He was forty-two years old, a burly, brown-eyed, dark-haired chain-smoker who did not smoke when he was here in Andrew’s apartment, office, whatever the fuck he called it. He resented not being able to smoke here. He felt he could think better when he smoked. He knew his father-in-law was dying of lung cancer, but he still thought smoking helped his thought processes. Whenever Bobby was with one of his little girlfriends, he smoked his fucking brains out. His father-in-law didn’t know about the girlfriends. Bobby hoped he would die before he ever found out.

“We were prepared to give him forty-five as his end here in America,” Andrew said. “He held out for fifty.”

“Even so,” Bobby said, and shrugged.

He was dressed more casually than any of the others, still sporting a tan he’d acquired in Miami, and wearing Ralph Lauren slacks and a purple Tommy Hilfiger sweater.

“Which, by the way, you agreed to,” Petey said.

“Fuck what he agreed,” Rudy said.

“Correct,” Sal said. “Fuck ’em.”

“Still,” Ralphie said cautiously, “our word should mean something, no?”

“Not in this case,” Orafo said.

Like Carbonaio, with whom he worked most closely in the organization, he was wearing a sports jacket and slacks, no sweater, dark tie on a white shirt. He was some sixty-odd years old, and went back a long way with Rudy and also with Anthony, who was now in prison. Carmine still believed in honor. They were all supposed to believe in honor. You gave a man your word, your word was your word. But the man Andrew now wanted killed was a man totally without honor. As he saw it, the rules did not apply here, even though Andrew had given Moreno his handshake.

“This would be a stickup in a dark alley,” he said, “fifty percent of the take. The spic’s out of his fuckin’ mind. Andrew’s right. We dust him as a lesson to whoever’s next in line. Then we go to them with the same deal, and they’ll grab it in a minute.”

“Still,” Carbonaio said, and shrugged.

“I want to do it where he lives,” Andrew said:

They all looked at him.

“Let them know they’re not safe from us wherever they are. If we want to take them out, we can do it in a minute. They agree to our deal or we bury them one by one. That’s what I want them to realize.”

“Are you talking Colombia?” Bobby squeaked. His throat got dry whenever he went too long without a smoke. He felt like killing Andrew, not letting him smoke, never mind the fuckin spic.

“Colombia, yes,” Andrew said. “That’s where he lives, that’s where I want it done.”

“I think he’s still here in New York,” Petey said.

“We could do it easier here, Lino,” Rudy said reasonably.

“I know, Uncle Rudy, but we make a stronger point if we do it there.”

“Do we have people there?” Carmine asked Ralphie.

“Everywhere,” Ralphie assured him. “But I’ll tell you, Andrew, this, could backfire. We’ve got a lot of legitimate businesses in Miami, which is a stone’s throw from where this man operates. It wouldn’t be difficult for his people to find out what they are and where they are. We could be setting ourselves up for terrible trouble in the future.”

“What kind of trouble?” Carmine asked. “What the fuck are you talkin’ about, Ralph?”

“Murders, bombings, you name it. Moreno’s people’ve killed judges, you think they’re gonna draw the line at us?”

“The judges didn’t go into Moreno’s house and kill him in his own bed,” Andrew said.

The men sitting at the conference table said.nothing for several moments, each — with the exception of Rudy — wondering who would be the. first to tell Andrew that this was an impossible thing he was proposing. Rudy didn’t want to undermine his own nephew. He preferred the criticism to come from elsewhere. Besides, he wasn’t sure this couldn’t be done.

“Ahhh... how do we get in his house, Andrew?”

Petey Bardo. Wearing a brown suit, naturally. Brown tie, brown shoes. Mr. Brown.

“By offering someone a million in cash to get in there,” Andrew said.

Which only made sense, Rudy thought, smiling.

At six o’clock that Wednesday night, while Johnny Regan and Alex Lowndes were reporting to Michael that a heavy meeting had taken place at the tailor shop and they had nothing of consequence to show for it, Sarah Welles was buzzed through the door on Mott Street and hurried up the steps to where Andrew was waiting for her. All of this past week she’d thought of him in this place, sitting in one of the big leather chairs in the living room, wearing his silk monogrammed robe sashed at the waist, naked beneath it, waiting for her.

She could not understand why the mere thought of him aroused erotic thoughts she’d earlier entertained rarely if ever. She knew that what she felt for him was not love — how could it be, she hardly knew anything about him? — but was instead what the Bible had called lust and what her teenage students called a plain and simple lech. She didn’t know this man, yet she longed for him virtually twenty-four hours a day. She longed for him now as she climbed the stairs to the familiar door at the top, and saw the door opening, and saw him standing in it wearing not a robe but jeans and a sweater instead, and went into his arms, and lifted her face to his, and drank from his lips and drowned in his embrace.

“Meeting broke up at about twelve thirty,” Regan said.

“I went down for sandwiches,” Lowndes said.

Jackass, Regan thought.

“All of them saying goodbye to Benny the presser,” he said. “Our guys watching the shop reported them filing out one at a time, heading off in all directions. Except our main man. He was in there all day long. Still there when we packed it in at five.”

“That’s when the shop closes,” Lowndes said. “Five o’clock. Warrant gives us a nine-to-five. Which is when it opens. Nine.”

“Team’s still outside watching the front door, though,” Regan said. “They’ll take Faviola home, put him to bed.”

“What’d you mean by nothing of consequence?” Michael asked.

“They ain’t talkin’ in that back room, Mike,” Regan said. “Oh, sure, hello, goodbye, nice day, and so on. But where they’re meeting is upstairs, wherever the fuck that may be.”

“Freddie mentioned a door,” Michael said. “Deadbolt lock on it, speaker off to the side.”

“Yeah,” Regan said, nodding. “Faviola buzzes them in, they go upstairs.”

“Must be some kind of meeting room up there,” Lowndes said. “There’s windows across the front of the building, it could be a room up there.”

“Freddie’ll have to go in again,” Michael said.

“When?”

“As soon as possible,” he said, and stabbed a button on his phone. “We’ll need another court order.”

Apartment was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, never felt right in here. Luretta hated it here all the time. Summertime, with the windows open, you heard all the third-world noises out there, didn’t even sound like you were living in America anymore. Wintertime, you closed everything up tight, keep out the cold, you got all these exotic cooking smells coming under the door, other kinds of foreign smells, too, she sometimes thought these people never took baths. The apartment was freezing cold already. They turned off the heat at eleven every night, and it was already eleven fifteen.

Dusty had moved in with them three days ago.

Told Luretta’s mother he wanted to be near her while his baby formed inside her. His exact words. “I wanns a’be near you, Haze, while mah baby forms in’sahd you.” Fucking lying drug addict, all he wanted to be near was the welfare money her mother got for herself and the two children. Luretta and her younger brother had two different fathers, neither of which either of them had ever had the pleasure of meeting. Hamilton Barnes was twelve years old, the baby of the family till now. Barnes was her mother’s maiden name, which she chose to give her children ’stead of her boyfriends’ names, thank you. Now Hazel Barnes was pregnant again, and her new junkie boyfriend had moved in, hooray. Seemed to always take up with junkies, Luretta couldn’t figure why that was. Did she need needy people? Did she need men who couldn’t take care of themselves?

“Fuck you lookin’ at?” Dusty asked.

She was on the way to the bathroom, wearing a cotton robe over a short nightgown, crossing through the kitchen to get to the hallway beyond. She shared a bedroom with Ham, did her homework in there, tried as much as she could to stay out of any parts of the house where Mr. Dusty Rogers might be sitting around shooting up.

“You hear me?” he asked.

When he wasn’t doing dope, he was drinking booze. Matter of fact, he sometimes did both together. He’d cook his heroin, shoot it in his arm, then nod off for three, four hours sometimes, looking like he was dead sometimes, his chin on his chest that way, his eyes closed, sitting there in his stupor. She hated him like poison; her mother had taken him in over her protests.

She walked on by him now without saying a word to him.

He nodded in righteous agreement with whatever he’d been thinking about her, and poured himself another glassful of Thunderbird.

The kitchen divided the apartment into two uneven spaces. The bedroom she shared with Ham was on one side of it, to the left as you came in from the outside hall. To the right was a small living room, the bathroom, and her mother’s bedroom. As she approached the bathroom, she could hear the television turned up loud in her mother’s room down the hall. They never used the living room, because the only window in it opened on the air shaft, with a grimy brick wall opposite. If she and Ham ever wanted to watch TV, they had to ask her mother if they could come in. More times than not, Dusty was in there with her, lying on the bed in just his undershorts and his stupor. Luretta’d just as soon read a book, anyway.

You turned on the bathroom light, there was always a flurry of activity around the soap dish, where the roaches broke into a mad rush for cover. She wondered why roaches seemed to enjoy eating soap so much. Actually, she didn’t mind them as much as she minded the rats. She was always afraid when she sat on the toilet bowl that a rat would come up and bite her. She always checked the water in the bowl before sitting down, making sure nothing was swimming around in there. She peed now, and then flushed the toilet and washed her hands and her face in preparation for bed.

She didn’t bathe in the tub but every other night. Hot water ran out pretty fast in an apartment building this size, city didn’t care how many tenants called to complain long as the landlord kept paying the taxes. Yes, miss, we’ll see to it right away. Sure. Same as they saw to garbage collection, or snow removal, or electrical wires hanging from the hallway ceilings, you could get electrocuted just walking by. She brushed her teeth, rinsed, spat into the sink, put her brush back in the yellow plastic cup that was hers, alongside her mother’s red one and Ham’s blue one, dried her hands on her towel, and opened the bathroom door.

Dusty was standing in the hallway just outside.

“What takes you so long in there all the time?” he asked.

“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t know you were waiting.”

She started moving past him in the narrow hallway. In her mother’s bedroom down the end of it, she could still hear the TV blaring. Somewhere outside the apartment, she could hear people arguing in one of the Middle Eastern languages, she didn’t know which, the words harsh, the cadences strange.

“What’s your hurry?” he said, and grinned.

“Out of my way,” she said calmly.

But she was scared to death.

“Why, certainly,” he said, and stepped aside, still grinning, and as she was starting to walk past, he grabbed a big piece of her ass and squeezed hard. She wriggled out of his grasp, scurried through the kitchen like a roach running from a suddenly blinding light, rushed into her bedroom, and closed the door behind her. There was no lock on the door.

Ham hadn’t come in yet.

Twelve years old.

It’s ten p.m. Do you know where your children are?

Except that it was already eleven thirty.

She cleared the books spread on her bed, pulled back the covers, climbed in, and turned out the bedside light. The room was frigid. She pulled the blankets up under her nose and tried falling asleep, knowing there was no lock on the door, afraid Dusty would come into the room after her, afraid rats would scurry over the bed and gnaw at her face, afraid Ham wouldn’t come home at all one of these nights, and they’d find him dead in the street the next morning.

At a little past midnight, she heard his key in the lock.

He tiptoed through the kitchen, came into the bedroom, undressed in the dark, and climbed into the bed across from hers. She did not let him know she was still awake. She did not ask him where he’d been or why he’d stayed out so long. In seven hours, she had to get up, and get ready for school. She hoped before then Dusty would die of a self-administered overdose.

It took exactly eleven days to get to Alonso Moreno.

The two men who’d agreed to do the job were both imported from Sicily. They spoke only broken English, but that didn’t matter because they planned to present themselves as emissaries from Rome. To two skilled assassins like Luigi Di Bello and Giuseppe Fratangelo, Moreno meant nothing and Colombia meant less. For that matter, even Andrew Faviola was of little importance to them, even though the scheme they’d been hired to execute had been conceived by him. The only thing that had any meaning for them was the million dollars they would share when the job was done. Faviola had paid them ten percent on a pair of handshakes. Now all they had to do was earn the remaining nine hundred thousand.

It was common knowledge that Moreno had for years courted the Catholic Church in his native country. His constant traveling companions, in fact, were two priests respectively and respectably named the Reverends Julio Ortiz and Manuel Garcia. These two clerics sat with Moreno on the board of directors of the charitable organization he’d founded for the elimination of slums in Bogota, Medellin, and Cali. They appeared with him at rallies and benefits where they praised to the heavens all the wonderful things Moreno was doing for Colombia, forgetting to mention that the millions he distributed to the poor and the needy — and the Church — had been obtained by flooding the United States of America with cocaine. Andrew had read in Time magazine that Moreno had recently petitioned the Pope for a private audience. That was all he needed to know.

The papal stationery was provided by a forger in Rome, premised on a letter stolen from the Vatican mailbox.

The letter was typed on a Macintosh Ilsi computer, in English, by an associate in Milan whose native language was Italian. It had all the authenticity of someone writing uncertainly in a second language:

It had taken two days for the stationery to be copied and printed and another two days for the letter to be typed and posted from Rome. The letter was picked up at the local post office by two of Moreno’s men on the twelfth of February, and driven to the Puerto Ospina ranch that same day in one of Moreno’s private Toyota Land Cruisers — what the Colombian soldiers called narcotoyotas. The very next day, the holy fathers Di Bello and Fratangelo arrived by dusty jeep at the front gates of Moreno’s riverside fortress on the Equadorian border.

Each was wearing the long brown, hooded cassock of the Franciscan order, roped at the waist. Each wore a black wooden cross hanging from a silken black cord. Each wore sandals on his otherwise bare feet. Under the cassocks, each carried a nine-millimeter Uzi manufactured in Israel and equipped with a silencer. In a mixture of broken English and Sicilian Italian, they produced a letter written in English, introducing themselves to two armed guards who spoke only Spanish.

One of the guards got on a walkie-talkie and said something in rapid-fire Spanish. The two Franciscan friars stood solemnly, piously, and patiently waiting. The riverfront was alive with the sound of insects. Father Di Bello slapped at a mosquito and mumbled a Sicilian curse neither of the guards understood. At last, someone drove down from the main house in a Mercedes-Benz. He read the letter of introduction slowly, clearly struggling with the English, and then his face brightened, and he bowed to each of the priests in turn, and said in an English as halting as their own, “Please to come. Por favor. Please, my sirs.”

The grounds were sumptuous. Tropical flowers bloomed everywhere along the road as the Mercedes climbed higher and higher, away from the river. Fountains flowed. There were statues of nude women in all the gardens; the good fathers averted their eyes.

Moreno greeted them effusively, explaining in his very good English that he had no Italian, and that he hoped they could understand his poor English. Di Bello and Fratangelo nodded and beamed and told him in their hopelessly fractured English that they could only stay overnight, “Just’a for la notte, eh?” — although Moreno couldn’t recall having invited them — because there was other church business they had in Bogota. It might be good, therefore, if they discussed at once the dates available for Mr. Moreno’s audience with His Holiness, which, they assured him, His Holiness was eagerly anticipating. Actually, what Di Bello said was, “He looks very much forward, eh?” Moreno was on the edge of wetting his pants.

He poured some California wine for the prelates and then offered to show them through his mansion before dinner, an invitation they eagerly accepted because their instructions were to kill him in his bed, and to accomplish this, they had to know where he slept. He showed them his billiards room, and asked if they played, and he showed them his music room, with its grand piano (and asked if they played) and his Wurlitzer jukebox with its two hundred selections. He escorted them to a vast paneled dining room with a table that could have seated at least fifty guests, and he showed them his bar, and his living room decorated in furniture Fratangelo thought looked sumptuous but which some ungrateful guests had described — out of Moreno’s earshot — as “cheap Miami shit” and he showed them the bedrooms where they’d be spending the night, and at last he showed them his own bedroom on the second floor of the house with a mirrored ceiling over the bed, and a rose-trellised balcony looking down the hillside to the river.

Over a splendid dinner served outdoors, Japanese lanterns lining the terrace and the paths winding down to the river, they discussed the dates that might be suitable — there were several in July and several more in August — and Moreno graciously submitted that whichever date was convenient to His Holiness would be more than convenient to him. Di Bello suggested that perhaps the beginning of July might be preferable...

“Not so hot like August, eh?” he said.

... and Moreno said the beginning of July would be fine. He poured more wine for the priests and they toasted the forthcoming audience, and Moreno casually mentioned that he was a heavy contributor to the Catholic Church here in his own land, and he would love to make an offering to the Church in Rome as well. Fratangelo tut-tutted this aside, and gave Di Bello a look of unmistakable surprise, which caused Moreno to believe he’d probably pulled a gaffe. He immediately added, “If His Holiness would not consider it unseemly,” which neither Di Bello nor Fratangelo with their limited English understood. So they both merely nodded sagely and said that they had to get an early start tomorrow morning, so perhaps they all ought to call it a night.

At a minute past midnight, they left Di Bello’s bedroom and went upstairs to the ballustraded corridor that ran past Moreno’s bedroom. An armed guard was standing just outside the door. From the end of the corridor, firing with the silenced Uzi, Di Bello took out the guard with a single shot.

Inside the bedroom, Fratangelo pumped six equally silenced shots into Moreno’s face. Then — as a token nod to the anniversary of a more famous Chicago slaying many years ago — Di Bello plucked a single red rose from the trellis outside and left it on Moreno’s blood-soaked pillow.

The apartment was flooded with roses.

Valentine’s Day had come and gone three days ago, but there were roses in the living room and roses in the kitchen and dining room and roses everywhere Sarah looked in the bedroom. Roses in vases on the nightstands flanking the bed and roses on the fireplace mantel and roses on the hearth and roses standing in vases under the bank of windows fronting Broome Street. Each bouquet carried a small white card:

She was beginning to believe him.

“I thought of sending a dozen on Sunday...”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“I hope this makes up for it.”

“They’re wonderful,” she said.

“I got this for you, too,” he said.

She knew it was lingerie even before she opened the gift-wrapped package from Bendel.

“Try it on,” he said.

She went into the bathroom. There were roses in a vase on the countertop. She took off her clothes and then slipped the short white nightgown over her head. She was wearing red pumps. She felt like the devil’s bride the white gown scantily covering her, the high-heeled red shoes. She posed for him in the bedroom door, one hand over her head and resting on the jamb.

“Oh, yeah, I got this, too,” he said, and handed her a tiny box.

She hoped against hope — but what else could it be? How on earth would she be able to explain...?

“Open it,” he said.

“Andrew...”

“Please,” he said.

She undid the ribbon.

As she’d feared, there was a ring in the box. A ring with a slender black band and an oval black crown with some sort of signet.

“It’s bronze,” he said. “I bought it in an antiques shop on Madison Avenue.”

“Andrew, it’s... beautiful! But...”

“The figure is some kind of half-man, half-goat,” he said.

“A satyr,” she said, nodding. “But, Andrew, how can...?

“That’s a bird he’s holding. It’s supposed to be Roman.”

He slipped the ring onto the third finger of her right hand. Wearing the short white gown and the red shoes and the black ring on the hand opposite her gold wedding band, she felt truly like the devil’s bride. She did not know how she could possibly wear the ring, it had to have cost a small fortune. She could not even imagine wearing it on a chain around her neck. Michael would surely question how it had come into her possession. But neither could she refuse it. He took her right hand in his. He brought the hand to his lips. He kissed her hand.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” she said.

Lying beside him in bed, the black ring on her right hand, her left hand resting on his chest, her head on his shoulder, she tried again to understand how she could possibly love someone about whom she knew absolutely nothing. She supposed adolescents could fall instantly and madly in love with someone simply on the basis of looks and personality but that was only because there was so little else to know about a teenager. Didn’t an adult have to know someone before she could love him? And yet, what other man had ever filled an entire apartment with roses for her? The only other man who’d ever bought her a ring was Michael. Her engagement ring, and then the wedding band she now wore on her left hand. Someone she did not know at all had filled her life with roses and slipped an ancient Roman ring onto her finger. Black, no less. She had never owned a black ring in her life. Before this evening, she hadn’t even known that bronze could turn black.

I love you, too, she had told him.

And now she tried to learn who this man she loved was.

“Are your parents still alive?” she asked.

“Oh yes.”

“Where do they live?”

“Well, my mother lives in Connecticut. My father’s in Kansas.”

“Are they separated?”

“Sort of.”

“What does your father do?”

“He used to be a building contractor.”

“What does he do now?”

“He’s retired.”

“How old are they?”

“My father’s fifty-two. My mother’s fifty.”

Only sixteen years older than I am, she thought.

“Where in Connecticut?”

“Stonington.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“Two sisters.”

“Older or younger?”

“Older.”

“I’ll bet they spoiled you rotten.”

“They did.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“Kent and UCLA.”

“What’d you major in?”

“Business administration.”

“When did you graduate?”

“I didn’t. I got kicked out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, suspended, I guess they called it.”

“Why?”

“Drunk and disorderly.”

“Be serious.”

“I’m serious. I beat up four guys who poured spaghetti sauce in my bed.”

“Why’d they do that?”

“I guess they thought it was funny. Anyway, I was already beginning to lose interest in school. I used to go up to Vegas a lot, gamble, fool around, you know. The two didn’t mix.”

“I’ve never been to Vegas.”

“I’ll take you there sometime.”

“Why’d they separate? Your parents.”

“Oh, I don’t know. One of those things.”

“Did your father want it? Or your mother?”

“Neither of them. It was something that just happened.”

“My sister’s going through a divorce right this minute.”

“I know. Pretty woman.”

“Yes.”

“But not as pretty as you.”

“Thank you.”

She was silent for a long while. Then she said, “You shouldn’t have bought me the ring, Andrew.”

“I wanted to.”

“How can I possibly wear it?”

“Wear it when you come here. I don’t care about the rest of the time. Just wear it when you come here.”

“All right.”

“While you’re here, I want you to take off the other ring. I want you to wear only my ring while you’re here.”

“All right. I’ll find a place to hide it. I’d love to wear it all the time, it’s so beautiful...”

“No, just when you’re here,” he said. His voice lowered. “Take off the other one now.”

“All right.”

She took off her wedding band and placed it on the nightstand alongside the telephone. She felt no guilt taking it off. She slipped it from her finger as though Michael no longer existed. Andrew kissed her finger where the ring had been.

“Now take my cock in your hand,” he said. “The right hand. The hand with my ring.”

“Here they go again,” Regan whispered.

“Better turn it off,” Lowndes suggested.

“Shhh,” Regan said.

The bedroom bug was in the telephone on the nightstand alongside the bed. There were similar bugs in the kitchen counter phone on the second floor, and in the conference room phone on the first floor. New York Telephone had reported that there were three unpublished phones in the apartment above the tailor shop. Freddie Coulter had subpoenaed the phone company for the numbers, and then had subpoenaed again for cable-and-pair, terminal location, and pair-and-binding information. He’d put his access line in the same terminal that contained the target’s phone lines, coming off the already existing B-P posts. Before entering the tailor shop again, he’d revisited the terminal box on the rear of the building, and shorted out all the phones, disabling them. It took him a total of nine minutes to bug all three phones.

But while he was in there, and just for good measure, he went to each room, found a wall with a good aural sweep, and unscrewed a 110-volt outlet from it. He then replaced each outlet with a one-watt radio transmitter. On the outside, this looked like any functioning wall outlet, which in fact it still was. Behind the faceplate, however, was the complicated circuit board that sent out the voice signal. Each transmitter had a range of some two to three blocks and required its own receiver. The devices were strictly emergency backups, and would be used only if, for one reason or another, the phones went out. In the bedroom, the fake outlet was on the wall close to the dresser. Freddie replugged a lamp into it, tried the lamp to make sure it still worked, and then started packing his tools.

The new application for a court order had this time cited reasonable suspicion as well as probable cause, and had requested both a wiretap and a pen register in addition to the bugs. The wiretap would enable them to listen to and record both ends of any telephone conversation. The pen register would print out only telephone numbers dialed from the premises, but it would also record the time and the duration of any call whatever, incoming or outgoing. All minimization requirements were still in effect. If Faviola’s mother called to talk about her homemade lasagna, for example, the investigators would have to shut down at once.

Everything had been in place since Valentine’s Day.

This was the first time Regan and Lowndes had heard a woman talking.

“Hold it tight,” Faviola said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Fuckin’ woman gives me a hard-on,” Regan said.

“Better turn it off,” Lowndes suggested.

“Can you see the ring moving up and down on your cock?” she said.

“Got to be a pro,” Regan said.

“The black ring you gave me, moving up and down on your stiff cock?”

“Turn it off,” Lowndes warned.

“I don’t want you to come yet,” she said.

“Then you’d better...”

“I want you to beg me to come.”

“If you keep on...”

“No, no, not yet,” she said.

“She’s letting go of it, the cunt,” Regan said.

“You’re gonna blow the whole fuckin’ thing!” Lowndes shouted.

“So will she,” Regan said, and laughed.

“For Christ’s sake, Johnny, turn it off!”

“Let’s see just how hard we can make you, all right?” she said. “Let’s see what rubbing this ancient Roman ring on your cock can do, all right? My hand tight around you, the black ring rubbing against your stiff cock...”

“Must be a magic ring,” Regan said.

“Johnny, please!”

“The satyr and the bird,” she whispered.

“Jesus.”

“Are you my satyr, Andrew?”

“Jesus, you’re...”

“Am I your bird, Andrew? No no no, not yet, baby. Not till I want you to. Not till I say you can. Just keep looking at the ring. Just keep watching that black ring, Andrew. My hand tight on your cock and the ring moving...”

“Good enough,” Regan said, and turned off the equipment.