Criminal Conversation

3: March 9–May 9

Mr. Handelmann’s eyes narrowed the moment she showed him the ring. She hadn’t gone to a neighborhood shop because she didn’t want anyone who knew Michael to mention that his wife had come in asking questions about a ring. She’d settled on the Handelmann Brothers’ shop on Sixty-Third and Madison, close to the school, because she’d bought several pieces of jewelry from them in the past; most recently a pair of earrings for Heather’s Christmas present. Andrew had told her the ring was Roman, but she wanted to know more about it. Where in the Roman Empire? When? She felt she had to know all this, just in case Michael stumbled across it and asked about it. She didn’t think this could possibly happen. She’d buried it at the back of her lingerie drawer, under a pile of panties she never wore anymore. But in the event, she would tell him exactly what she’d just told Handelmann. She had bought the ring in an antiques shop in the Village and had paid seven hundred dollars for it. And then fill him in on the details she hoped to get today.

“Seven hundred, really?” Handelmann said, and reached into his sweater-vest pocket for a loupe. He was a man in his seventies, Sarah supposed, one of two brothers who’d been hurriedly shipped by their parents to London immediately after Kristalnacht, when any Jew in his right mind recognized what was about to happen in Austria and Germany. They had spent their adolescent years in a hostel on Willesden Lane and had come to America at the end of the war, after they learned that both their parents had perished at Auschwitz. Of the two brothers, Sarah preferred dealing with Max, but he was on vacation today, and she was stuck with Avrum.

Loupe to his eye, he repeated, “Seven hundred, really?” and then fell silent as he turned the black ring this way and that, studying the band and the signet, and finally looking up at her and saying, “Mrs. Welles, you got quite a bargain.”

“I did?” she said.

She’d been hoping he would tell her she’d paid too much. Seven hundred dollars was much more than she would ordinarily have spent on herself.

“Quite a bargain,” he repeated, looking at the ring through the loupe again.

“How much do you think it’s worth?” she asked.

“A Greek ring of this quality,” he said, “at least...”

“I understood it to be Roman.”

“No, it’s Greek, at least second century B.C. And in mint condition. I’d say it’s worth five to six thousand dollars.”

Sarah was too startled to speak.

“But, Mrs. Welles, I have to tell you something,” Handelmann said, and again the eyes narrowed. “I think this is a stolen ring.”

“What?” she said.

“Stolen,” he repeated, and handed the ring back to her as if it had suddenly turned molten in his hand. “I’m sure it’s listed on the IFAR list I got just before...”

“The what?”

“IFAR,” he repeated.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The International Foundation for Art Registry. They circulate a list of stolen art...”

“Art? It’s just a...”

“Well, admittedly it’s a minor piece. But some very important items were stolen as well.”

“Stolen... where?” she said.

“From the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, just before Christmas,” Handelmann said.

“Well, I’m sure this isn’t the... the same ring. There must be hundreds of... of similar, rings. I bought it from a very reputable...”

“Oh, yes, there are, many similar rings,” Handelmann said. “But not all of them show up on an IFAR list.”

“What I’m saying...”

“Yes, it could have been another ring,” Handelmann agreed. “Certainly.”

“Because, you see, the shop I bought it from...”

“But these things often slip by,” he said. “Stolen goods. They will sometimes work their way into otherwise reputable shops.”

“Well... wouldn’t they have the... the same list you have?”

“Not necessarily. We trade in antiquities. Which is why we subscribe to IFAR.”

“I see.”

“Yes,” he said. “Would you like my advice, Mrs. Welles?”

“Well... yes. Please.”

“You’ve already purchased what I believe to be a ring stolen from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which has reported the theft to IFAR and undoubtedly to the Boston police, with the result that the piece now appears on a list that goes out to subscribers all over the United States. You have several choices, as I see it,” he said. “You can take it back to the shop where you bought it...”

“That’s exactly what I’ll do,” she said.

“... tell them you believe the ring to be stolen...”

“Yes.”

“... and ask them for your money back.”

“Yes.”

“Which they may or may not return. Especially once you inform them that the ring is a stolen one.”

“I see.”

“Yes. Or you can go to the police and tell them you believe you purchased a stolen ring, and turn the ring over to them. The police here in New York. Not the Boston police, of course.”

“That might be a good idea, too,” she said, and sighed heavily.

“They’ll give you a receipt for it, and they’ll undoubtedly contact the Boston Museum, and that’s the last you’ll hear of it. Forget the seven hundred dollars you paid for it, that’s gone the minute you turn the ring in. The police don’t want to know from seven hundred dollars you paid for stolen goods. You’ll be lucky they won’t charge you with receiving.”

Sarah sighed again.

“Or what else you can do,” Handelmann said, and his eyes narrowed again, and she knew intuitively — even before his voice lowered — that he was about to suggest something at best immoral and at worst criminal. “What else you can do is keep the ring, forget I told you it was stolen — which, by the way, I may be wrong, you yourself pointed out there are many similar rings. Keep the ring, no one will ever know it appeared on some cockamamie list. You paid seven hundred dollars for it, did you know it was stolen?”

“Well, no, of course...”

“So forget about it,” he said. “You never came in here, I never saw the ring, wear it in good health.”

“Thank you,” she said, and opened her bag and slipped the ring into her change purse. “Thank you,” she said again, and went to the door and opened it. Outside, she blinked her eyes against a fierce wind that nearly swept her off her feet.

“Last time I was in this airport,” Rudy said, “it was this shitty little thing with maybe two, three airlines coming in, you walked over to this little cinder-block baggage claim area. Now it’s like any other airport in the world, look at the fuckin’ thing.”

The Continental flight from Newark had landed in Sarasota at 1:45 p.m. Andrew and his uncle were carrying only the small bags they’d brought onto the plane with them, and were walking now through a glittery esplanade lined with shops. They had booked a pair of connecting rooms at the Hyatt; they planned to be here only overnight. As they’d been advised in New York, their driver was waiting for them just outside the baggage claim area, carrying a small sign that read FARRELL. He took the bags from them and carried them out to a white Cadillac sitting at the curb.

“Where’s the fuckin’ bride?” Rudy said, and Andrew laughed as they got into the car.

“You brought some good weather with you,” the driver said.

“Been raining or what?” Rudy asked.

“No, just a little chilly. Lots of wind, too.”

“It’s freezing cold up north,” Andrew said.

“That’s why I moved down here,” the driver said.

“How chilly?” Rudy asked.

“Fifties during the day. Upper thirties, low forties at night.”

So why the fuck’d you move here? Rudy wondered, but said nothing.

It took them some fifteen minutes to get to the Hyatt, where they registered respectively as Andrew and Rudy Farrell, and another ten minutes to get settled in their rooms. Andrew was already on the phone when Rudy came in through the connecting door.

“... where we can talk privately,” Andrew was saying. “Without any interruptions.” He listened, said, “Um-huh,” listened again, looked at his watch, said, “Fine, three o’clock, we’ll be there,” and hung up.

“Where?” Rudy said.

“They’re sending a boat to the dock out back.”

“What is it with these fuckin’ spies and their boats?” Rudy said, shaking his head. “I don’t like boats. A boat, they can throw you to the fuckin’ sharks,” nobody’ll ever know it.”

“I think we’ll be okay,” Andrew said. “They were going to pull anything, they wouldn’t have asked for the sitdown to begin with.”

“I don’t trust spies as far as I can throw them,” Rudy said. “They know we done Moreno, now they want to meet us on a fuckin’ boat. What for? So they can do us?”

“These are different guys, Uncle Rudy. They’re as happy as we are that Moreno’s dead.”

“Still,” Rudy said. “Years ago, you got on a plane, you carried a piece in your luggage. Nowadays, these fuckin’ terrorists, you got to go places naked.”

Andrew looked at his watch again.

“Five minutes from now, you won’t be so naked,” he said.

At two thirty sharp, the telephone rang. Andrew picked up.

“Mr. Farrell?” the voice asked.

“Yeah?”

“Got a package for you. Okay to come up?”

“What’s your name?”

“Wilson.”

“Come on up, Wilson,” Andrew said, and hung up. “The guns,” he said to his uncle.

“About fuckin’ time,” Rudy said.

Wilson was a black man in his late thirties, carrying an attaché case with two Smith & Wesson .38-caliber pistols in it. He did not touch the guns, allowing Rudy and Andrew to remove them from the case themselves. Andrew figured he didn’t want his prints on the pieces, just in case these dudes here were in Sarasota to dust somebody. When Andrew asked him how much they owed him, he said it had been taken care of already. Andrew wondered whether he expected a tip, but the man seemed to bear himself with such dignity and authority that he decided against it.

“Happy hunting,” Wilson said, and walked out.

As promised, the tender from the boat came in at three o’clock sharp. The name of the boat was lettered in gold on the tender’s transom: KATIENA. The same gold lettering marched across the big boat’s transom, KATIENA, and beneath that her home port, FT. LAUDERDALE, FL. Rudy had told Andrew that nobody met on the east coast of Florida anymore. Too much dope shit in Miami, too much local, state, and federal heat all up and down the coast. Sarasota, Fort Meyers, even Naples were quiet little communities convenient to the Colombians and the New Yorkers as well. A person could sit down for a quiet chat in any one of those towns without anybody breaking down the door. Nonetheless, Rudy and Andrew had the thirty-eights tucked into their waistbands.

The man who greeted them as they climbed the ladder aboard was the ugliest person Andrew had ever seen in his life, his face a convoluted tangle of scars and welts that looked as if it might have been scarred by fire. He shook hands with both of them, and said in accented English, “I am Luis Hidalgo, I’m happy to see you.” Apparently he’d already scoped them as they’d climbed the ladder. “You have no need for the weapons,” he said. “Unless they make you feel more comfortable.”

“They make us feel more comfortable,” Rudy said.

“As suits you,” Hidalgo said, and smiled thinly. “Something to drink?”

“Not for me,” Rudy said.

“Thank you, no,” Andrew said.

“Then come above, and we’ll talk.”

The boat was a huge fishing boat. They climbed up to the flying bridge and sat in the sunshine. Hidalgo was wearing chinos, black low-topped sneakers, and a black T-shirt. A gold chain with a thick crucifix on it hung from his neck and lay against the black shirt. Andrew and Rudy were both wearing lightweight gray slacks and navy-blue blazers, white shirts open at the throat.

“There’s lemonade in the pitcher,” Hidalgo said. “If you get thirsty.”

“Thanks,” Rudy said, and poured himself a glass.

“So,” Hidalgo said, “it’s interesting what happened to Moreno, no?”

“A terrible fuckin’ shame,” Rudy said, and took a swallow of the lemonade.

“May he rest in peace,” Hidalgo said, and smiled. When he smiled he looked even uglier. “But he leaves a tremendous vacuum, eh? Because he trained no one to take his place, do you see? For all intents and purposes, the organization is now finished, eh? Se acabo.”

“Which is why we’re here,” Andrew said.

“Sí, desde luego,” Hidalgo said. “But are you speaking to anyone else?”

“Just you,” Rudy said.

“Good. Because the others may try to achieve supremacy, you see, may even claim supremacy, but there is really no one else who can fill the vacuum just now. I’m the one you must deal with. If you wish Colombian cocaine, that is.”

Andrew said nothing.

Rudy sipped at his lemonade.

“You came to the right person, señores,” Hidalgo said, and smiled again.

Rudy was thinking he had a face could stop a fuckin’ clock.

“You understand the plan we have in mind, huh?” he said.

“It was explained to me, yes,” Hidalgo said.

Willie Isetti had flown from the Caribbean to Bogotá to discuss the preliminaries with one of Hidalgo’s people. He had reported back to New York, that the climate appeared, favorable for a deal, his exact words. They were here to deal now. Hidalgo knew they had taken out Moreno in his own bed. His own fucking bed! They hoped this was impressive to him. They were certainly impressed by it.

Cutting to the chase, Rudy said, “We offered Moreno forty percent of the gross. Instead of a third all, the way around. This reduced us and the Chinks by something like three and a third points each, which by the way we were both willing to go along with.

“Still are,” Andrew said.

“... because we recognize the existing market,” Rudy said, nodding. “What’s right is right.”

Hidalgo nodded, too.

“Moreno wanted sixty,” Andrew said. “Which may be why someone in his own organization had him eliminated.”

“Mm, his own organization,” Hidalgo said drily.

“Because they knew he was being fuckin’ ridiculous,” Rudy said.

“Ridiculo, sí,” Hidalgo agreed, nodding. “But still, forty, you know,” opening his hands wide, lifting his shoulders in a shrug, “seems low, when one considers the existing market. As opposed to a market we merely hope to establish.”

Son of a bitch is gonna stick to the sixty, Rudy thought. We’re gonna have to do him in his bed, too.

“I have to talk to others, you see,” Hidalgo said, trying to look put-upon, a mere salaried employee accountable to the company’s stockholders. “I have to sell this to others, you see.”

Bullshit, Andrew thought.

“Okay, what’ll they buy?” he said. “These others. Just remember what sixty bought Moreno.”

Their eyes met.

Rudy wondered if his nephew wasn’t pushing it too far too fast.

“My people are not as ridiculous as La Culebra was,” Hidalgo said at last.

“So what do you think they’ll agree to? Your people.”

His people, my ass, Rudy thought.

“Fifty, for sure,” Hidalgo said.

“No way,” Andrew said.

“Quizá forty-five. But only perhaps. I would have to talk to them very strenuously.”

Bullshit, Andrew thought.

“Then talk to them very strenuously,” he said. “We’ll agree to forty-five, but that’s as far as we’ll go.”

“Bueno, I’ll call you this evening, after I...”

“Isn’t there a fuckin’ phone on this boat?” Rudy asked. “A radio? Whatever?”

“Sí, pero...”

“Then call them now,” Andrew said. “Your people.” Stressing the word again. “Tell them you have a firm offer of forty-five, which you’d like to accept. That is, if you’d like to accept it.”

Hidalgo hesitated a moment.

A grin cracked his ugly face.

“I don’t think I will need to call them,” he said. “I think you can take my word they will accept the forty-five.”

He extended his hand.

Andrew took it, and they shook on the deal.

“I’ll take that fuckin’ drink now,” Rudy said.

“We figure he’s out of town,” Regan was saying.

The three men were eating in a diner off Canal Street. It was Michael’s contention that most cops in this city would eventually die of heart attacks caused by smoking cigarettes and/or eating junk food. Despite the abundance of good, inexpensive restaurants in Chinatown and Little Italy, all of them relatively close to the DA’s Office, Regan and Lowndes, cops to the marrow, had chosen a greasy spoon they much preferred.

Michael was eating a hamburger and french fries. He would have loved a beer, but he was drinking a Diet Pepsi instead. Regan and Lowndes were each eating hot pastrami sandwiches on rye. Lowndes kept dipping fries into the spilled mustard on the paper plate holding his sandwich. Regan kept frowning at this breach of etiquette. They were both drinking coffee.

The diner at twelve thirty that Tuesday afternoon was packed with courthouse personnel, and clerks and secretaries and assistant DAs from the big building at One Hogan Place, and uniformed cops and detectives from the First Precinct and One Police Plaza, or for that matter any precinct in the city that had lost a man to testimony today. The noise level was somewhat high. This was good because they were talking about a surveillance presently known to just a handful of people.

“He’s got maybe half a dozen girls he sees on a regular basis,” Lowndes said. “He calls them, they call him. If he’s not there, they leave messages on his machine and he calls them back.”

“Two of them he sees more than the others,” Regan said. “One of them is named Oona. The other one, we don’t know her name yet, she just says ‘Hi, it’s me.’ He knows who it is, he says ‘Hi, come blow me.’”

“He doesn’t really say that,” Lowndes said, looking embarrassed and quickly picking up a fry and dipping up mustard with it.

“Close to it,” Regan said. “This is unusual, you know, a person not identifying herself when she calls. In a room, a place that’s bugged, you don’t have people using names all the time. That’s for books. A character saying, ‘Well, Jack, I’ll tell you,’ and another character answering, ‘Yes, Frank, please do.’ So the person reading the book can tell the characters apart. But in real life, people don’t use names except for emphasis. Like, ‘I’m going to say this just once, Jimmy, so you better listen hard.’ Emphasis, huh? That’s because they know who’s talking, they can see the person talking. It gets frustrating sometimes, listening to a bug. All these people know who’s talking, but we don’t. On the phone, it’s different. A person usually says who’s calling the minute the other person picks up. Unless she thinks she’s the only broad in his life, in which case, ‘Hi, it’s me.’”

“Or unless she’s married,” Lowndes said, “and is looking over her shoulder.”

“Yeah, that’s a possibility, too.”

“Anyway, we stop listening the minute it’s any of the bimbos,” Lowndes added.

Michael immediately figured they didn’t.

He had checked their line sheets, and it showed them turning off the recording equipment the moment Faviola received any privileged calls or any calls clearly beyond the purlieus of the surveillance warrant. The times were listed for any and all to read, and Michael had no reason to doubt that they had indeed turned off the equipment at the times indicated, and then turned it on again for spot checks at the times subsequently listed. But did that mean they hadn’t already listened a bit longer than they should have? Gee, we had to keep the machine on so we could make sure, you know? Cops were cops. Overhear some cheap hood in bed with his bimbo, chances were they’d keep listening longer than required by the minimization rules. Maybe he was wrong, but he was willing to bet six to five on it.

“Especially if it’s Oona or the other one,” Lowndes said. “’Cause he’s banging them on a regular basis.”

“Oona is a broad named Oona Halligan,” Regan said. “She left her number in Brooklyn, the phone company checked it out for us. That’s also the number he calls back. We’ve also got numbers for five of the other broads, two in the Bronx, two in Manhattan, one in Great Neck, which is very nice of him, don’t you think, also shtupping a local girl? Their names are...” he said, and reached into his jacket pocket for his notebook.

“And the winners are,” Lowndes said, like a host at the Academy Awards.

“The winners are,” Regan said, reading from his notebook, “Alice Reardon, Mary Jane O’Brien... he digs Irish chicks... Blanca Rodriguez...”

“Spies, too,” Lowndes said.

“Angela Cannieri, who is the local talent from Great Neck, and another mick named Maggie Dooley. He fucks more Irish girls than I’ve ever fucked in my life, this kid.”

“How about ‘Hi, It’s Me’?”

“Never leaves a number. Never says whether she’s calling from home or from work. We can hear background traffic noises sometimes, we figure she’s using phone booths on the street.”

“Any idea where the booths are located?”

“Need a Trap-and-Trace for that,” Regan said.

A wiretap surveillance did not normally record the telephone number of any incoming caller. This information required an additional court order specifying “reasonable suspicion” and requesting specific geographical locations, an expensive procedure usually followed in kidnap cases, where investigators were waiting for a ransom demand; Regan could not remember a single instance of the DA’s Office requesting a Trap-and-Trace on a racketeering surveillance case.

“You really want to know where these booths are?” he asked Michael. “I mean, a Trap-and-Trace for some bimbo standin’ in the rain...”

“No, no,” Michael said. “You don’t have any reason to believe these women are related to the criminal activities listed in the court order, do you?”

“No, sir,” Lowndes said at once. “Which is why we turn off the machine the minute we know who it is.”

“Except this morning the one we got no name for says, ‘Hi, it’s me, I guess you’re still in Florida, I’ll try you tomorrow.’”

“Tomorrow’s what?” Michael asked.

“The tenth. We figure he must’ve left early this morning. Leastways, that’s when all the wiseguys stopped calling. They probably know he’s out of town, so why bother? Today, it’s just the bimbos been calling.”

“Not all of them,” Lowndes said. “Just Oona and the one we don’t know.”

“Oona,” Regan said, and licked his lips. “I’d love to eat her pussy, a name like that. Grrrrr,” he said, growling like a dog.

“Did she mention Florida?”

“Oona? No. I don’t think he told her he was going away. What we think, the relationship with the other one is more important to him. From what we can pick up, anyway. Before we tune out.”

“In the minute or so before we tune out,” Lowndes added, and nodded.

“Did any of them mention the Florida trip on the phone?”

“Nobody,” Regan said. “Well, Faviola told Bobby Triani he had to buy some oranges before he went up to see his mother next week, which when we tie it with what the bimbo said this morning, he had to be using a code word for Florida.”

“Not Oona, the other one. The one who calls from the street.”

“He told Petey Bardo the same thing, come to think of it.”

“Yeah, the oranges, “Lowndes said.

“He always wears brown, Petey Bardo,” Regan said.

“Yeah, he likes brown,” Lowndes said.

“Anyway, what do you want us to do about this harem he’s got? You want us to put tails on ’em?”

“How do you figure they’re important?”

“I don’t.”

“Does he talk mob shit with them?”

“Not so far.”

“Until he does, we’d be wasting time.” Michael thought for a moment, and then said, “When did she say she’d try him again?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Do you think she knows he’s coming back tomorrow? Or is she just trying him on the off chance?”

“Tomorrow’s Wednesday,” Regan said. “If he’s back, you can bet your ass they’ll be screwing their brains out again. That seems to be her regular night, Wednesday.”

“Good,” Michael said. “If he tells her why he was in Florida, and it just happens to be something criminal, stay on it. Otherwise...”

“Otherwise, we’ll tune out,” Lowndes said.

“Naturally,” Regan said.

“God, I missed you.”

“He’s back,” Regan said.

“I missed you, too,” the woman said.

“You look great.”

“You do, too.”

“Hold me.”

Silence.

“Kiss me.”

“There they go,” Lowndes said.

“God,” she said.

“Grabbing a handful of cock,” Regan said.

“God, I missed you.”

“Must be an echo in the place,” Regan said.

More silence.

Both detectives listened.

In a while, they heard the woman moaning, and they knew exactly what the pair of them were doing in that bedroom. They took off the earphones, turned off the equipment, and noted the time. Two minutes later, they listened again for some thirty seconds, ascertained that the two of them were still fucking, and tuned out again.

It wasn’t the fucking itself they particularly enjoyed listening to, it was the things the woman said to Faviola when they weren’t fucking. Or sometimes when she was coming, the things she shouted when she was coming. Compared to “Hi, It’s Me,” Oona Halligan was a novitiate nun. Oh, yes, at Faviola’s urging Oona would sometimes politely ask him to keep fucking her, Yes, please fuck me, but never once did she construct a scenario comparable to those the other broad seemingly pulled out of thin air.

Oona was a redhead. They gathered this from little tidbits Faviola dropped about how Irish she looked with those masses of red hair, probably didn’t know there were Irish girls with hair as black as his own, the dumb wop. The other one was unmistakably a blonde. This, too, they gathered from what was said in the bedroom, but mostly from her half of the conversation. She seemed to know he enjoyed her blondeness, seemed to realize it turned him on, so she kept mentioning it, Do you like my being blond down here, too?, wanting to know what effect her blondeness had on him, Does it excite you to kiss my blond pussy?, Faviola lapping it all up while simultaneously lapping her, from the sound of it. They imagined her as some kind of tall glacial beauty with blue eyes and long blond hair she tied around his cock, a fuckin’ nymphomaniac with great tits and legs, who Faviola worshipped like a naked blond goddess in a jungle movie, the dumb fuckin’ wop.

“... told me it was stolen,” she was saying.

They had just put on the earphones and turned on the machine for one of their periodic spot checks. If they heard anything related to a crime, they would continue listening and recording. If Blondie here started discussing the merits of sucking a big cock as opposed to a teeny-weeny little one, they would reluctantly turn off the machine, write down the on and off times on the line sheet, and then wait another minute or so before doing another spot check. Watching the clock was painstaking and boring. So was listening — most of the time.

“The ring,” she said. “He told me it was stolen.”

“Leave it on,” Regan said. “She’s talking about stolen goods.”

“He said it was stolen from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,” she said.

“That’s impossible,” Faviola said. “I bought it from...”

“That’s what he told me. He has a list.”

“Did he show you this list?”

“No, but...”

“Then how do you know... Look, it’s impossible, really. I bought it from a jeweler I’ve done business with for years.”

“Maybe you ought to take it back to him.”

“Oh, you can bet on that,” he said.

“I’ll bet on that, too,” Regan said.

“I also found out how much it cost, Andrew. I couldn’t possibly...”

“He shouldn’t have told you how...”

“... keep it, now that I know...”

“... much it cost. The ring was a gift. Why’d you go to him in the first place?”

“To find out where it had come from in Rome. You told me it was Roman...”

“Yeah, that’s what I understood.”

“So I wanted to know where. The Roman Empire was huge...”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Greek, as it turns out, the ring. The point is, I had no idea it was so expensive, Andrew. Five thousand dollars? Really, Andrew.”

“Five...”

“I could never explain something that cost so much. Please return it, Andrew. Get your money back. Tell whoever you bought it from...”

“Well, sure, if the ring was stolen...”

“Yeah, yeah, tell us about the ring,” Regan prompted.

“Where’d you buy it, anyway?”

“Good,” Regan said.

“Guy on... uh... Forty-Seventh Street.”

“You should take it right back to him.”

“I will. Trade it for something else. I want you to have a ring from me. To wear when you’re here. So I’ll know you’re mine.”

“You know I’m yours, anyway. When I’m here. I shouldn’t have taken the ring home with me, that was too dangerous. But I wanted to keep looking at it. Because it was from you, and because seeing it on my hand, putting it on my finger whenever no one else was there, it reminded me of you. It’s so beautiful, Andrew, it was so thoughtful of you to...”

“I’ll get another one for you.”

“That can’t be traced this time,” Regan said.

“But only to wear here,” the woman said. “And nothing that expensive, please. I don’t want, you to spend that kind of...”

“I’ll buy you some earrings, too. To wear when you’re here.”

“And some nipple clamps,” Regan said.

Lowndes laughed. Regan laughed with him. They almost missed what she said next.

“... there in Florida?”

“Shhhh,” Regan warned.

“I had some business down there,” Faviola said.

“So you told me. But how’d it go?”

“Fine.”

“How was the weather?”

“Only so-so.”

“I wish I could’ve been there with you.”

“I didn’t have much time for anything but meetings,” he said. “Anyway, my uncle was with me.”

“Rudy Faviola,” Lowndes whispered.

Regan wondered why the jackass was whispering.

“Is he with the company, too?” she asked. “Your uncle?”

“Oh, boy is he,” Regan said.

“Yes, he is,” Faviola said.

“I thought... well, from what I understood, this wasn’t a family business.”

“It isn’t.”

“Like fun, it isn’t,” Regan said.

“You said the men who’d started it were semiretired...”

“That’s right.”

“... and that you ran things for them.”

“Well, I have help, you know. I mean, this isn’t a one-man operation.”

“I didn’t think it was. The conference room downstairs...”

“Uh-huh, for board meetings.”

“The company car...”

“Uh-huh.”

“Billy’s a wonderful driver, by the way.”

“Yeah, he’s a good man.”

“Are you planning to invest in Sarasota?”

“No, no. Well... uh... you remember my telling you we look for companies we can bring along till they become moneymakers?”

“Yes?”

“Well, this meeting was with a South American exporter who’s interested in doing business with a Chinese firm. We’re arranging a merger.”

“Chinese?”

“Yeah. We’re bringing them together so there can be an exchange of products.”

“What sort of products?”

“Rice and coffee.”

“Ask a stupid question,” she said.

“Rice and coffee, my ass,” Regan said.

“How does your company fit in?”

“Well, I told you. We arranged the merger...”

“So?”

“So there’s a fee for that. Naturally. Nobody does things for free, you know.”

“A flat fee?”

“Sometimes. It depends on the deal. Our fee on this one is a share of the profits.”

“You get a share of the profits just for bringing these two companies together?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. The principals, yes.”

“But a share of the profits?”

“It’s not as easy as it sounds.”

“How big a share?”

Faviola laughed.

“A pretty big share,” he said.

“How big?”

He laughed again.

“Come on, tell me. How much?”

“How much what? How much do I love you?”

“That, too. But how much are you getting for a day’s work...”

“I love you more than...”

“... in Sara—”

“... life itself.”

There was a long silence.

At last, she said, “You don’t.”

“I do,” he said.

Another silence.

Then, from the woman, “Mmmmm, yes. God, yes.”

“Shit,” Regan said.

Andrew Faviola was telling Sal the Barber that he wanted to know where that fucking ring had come from. Regan and Lowndes were listening. Faviola had moved fast; this was Friday, only two days after they’d first heard about the ring being a stolen one.

“You give nice presents, Sal,” he was saying. “Next time tell me something’s hot, and I won’t...”

“Hey, Andrew, gimme a break, will ya?” Sal said. “I didn’t know the fuckin’ thing was hot.”

“Hot? The fuckin’ Boston Museum!”

“The ring came my way, how was I supposed to know somebody lifted it in a fuckin’ museum?”

“How’d it come your way, Sal?”

“How do things come a person’s way? I’ll tell you the truth, I thought I was doin’ you a favor, Andrew, givin’ you a beautiful ring like this one. You got to admit it’s an unusual ring, Andrew, ain’t it? I never seen a ring all black like this one, did you?”

“Where’d you get it, Sal?”

“There’s this shitty little crackhead named Richie Palermo used to do collections for me, this was maybe two, three years ago, before he got so hooked he don’t know his own fuckin’ name. I wouldn’t trust him to walk me across the street no more, but he gave me a fuckin’ sob story, so I lent him a grand, this was last month sometime. So naturally, the little fuck misses two payments, and when I find him he offers me the ring and a nine, I don’t know where he got them. I tell him don’t bother me with your fuckin’ problems, I’m not a fuckin’ fence. The nine...”

“Then you knew this was stolen goods, right?”

“No, no, did I say that? I was bargaining with him. Like makin’ him think I thought the shit was stolen. The nine was a good piece, but the ring looked rusty or something, you know what I mean, all black like that? What he owes me is still the grand, plus two weeks’ interest at fifty bucks a week compounded. In short, he owes me eleven hundred and two dollars and fifty fuckin’ cents, the shitheel, for which he’s offering me the ring and the Uzi in settlement of the whole thing. I tell him shove the ring up his ass, I’ll take the nine for the two weeks’ vig and he still owes me the grand. The ring looks like it came out of a Cracker Jack box, am I right? He tells me the ring is valuable, it’s some kind of fuckin’ Roman antique, second century, third century, just like I told you when I gave it to you. He said you could tell it was Roman because of the satyr and the bird on it, what the fuck do I know?”

“It’s Greek.”

“Greek, okay, whatever. I tell him okay, I’ll take the ring for the next week’s vig, but he still owes me the grand. Which is where we left it. In other words, I got the gun for a hundred and change, and the ring for fifty. But it’s a beautiful ring, Andrew, you got to admit that, once you get past it lookin’ rusty.”

“In other words, you gave me a ring this fuckin’ Richie Palermo crackhead stole someplace...”

“Andrew, I didn’t know it was stolen, I swear on my mother’s eyes!”

“... which my friend takes into a jewelry store to see which part of the Roman Empire it came from...”

“He said it was Roman, yeah.”

“... and it gets back to me that it’s a Greek ring stolen from the Boston Museum. This Jew who owns the shop tells her it’s a stolen ring, Sal. Which if the man wanted to cause trouble, he could’ve informed the police, Sal. The fuckin’ ring is on a list, Sal, capeesh? You almost brought the fuckin’ cops to my door with your fuckin’ rusty stolen ring!”

“I didn’t know it was stolen.”

“Did you ask him?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Where did you think a crackhead got a Greek ring from the second fuckin’ century B.C....”

“He said it was Roman.”

“... if he didn’t steal the fuckin’ thing? Tell me that, Sal.”

“I don’t know where he got it. I didn’t ask him where he got it. I didn’t ask him where he got the gun, either.”

“Where’s the gun now?”

“Gone with the wind.”

“Are they gonna trace that back, too?”

“Nobody’s tracin’ nothin’ back, Andrew.”

“How do you know that gun wasn’t used in a fuckin’ murder someplace?”

“The gun is in some fuckin’ African country by now, don’t worry about the gun.”

“All I have to worry about is the ring, right?”

“You don’t have to worry about the ring, either. There’s no trouble here, Andrew, believe me. The gun’s gone, and I’ll take the ring off your hands. There’s nothin’ to worry about, okay?”

“Just don’t ever bring me anything else you know is hot!”

“I didn’t know it was hot. But I’m sorry.”

“You want to have stolen goods traced to you, fine. Just don’t get me involved in it.”

“I’m sorry, Andrew, I didn’t know it was stolen.”

“Here, take your fuckin’ ring back.”

“Yeah, thanks. I’m sorry about this, I really am.”

“You owe me five grand.”

“What?”

“Five grand, Sal. For the ring.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what the ring’s worth, five thousand bucks. That’s what the Jew appraised it for, and that’s what I want for it. For all the trouble you caused me.”

“Hey, come on, Andrew, give me a...”

“Five grand, Sal. By tomorrow morning.”

“Jeez, Andrew...”

“So I can buy a ring doesn’t have a pedigree.”

“I really didn’t know the fuckin’ thing was...”

“Goodbye, Sal.”

“Jesus.”

The snow started on Saturday morning and did not end until Sunday sometime. Everyone was calling it “the storm of the century,” though she seemed to recall heavier snowfalls when she was a child. She and Michael took Mollie to the park, and they sledded all afternoon and then had dinner at Fazio’s on Seventy-Eighth, one of the few places open for business that weekend. The streets, the sidewalks, the entire city looked clean and white. Tomorrow the snow would turn gray, she knew, and in the days after that a sooty black. But for now, the city was a wonderland, and she wished she could be sharing it with Andrew. She felt certain tomorrow would be declared a snow day. Could she possibly get away to meet him? Would Michael’s office be open, or would he be home, too? When would the streets be cleared of snow? When would traffic start moving again? Would Andrew be able to send the car for her on Wednesday? If not, would the subways be running? She could not bear the thought of a blizzard preventing her from seeing him as usual this week.

When the phone rang on the Monday night following the weekend storm, Andrew knew at once that something was wrong. Oddly, the first thing he thought was She told her husband.

“Hello?” he said.

The digital clock on the nightstand beside the bed read 11:50 p.m. He was more than ever convinced that Sarah had broken under fire.

“Andrew?”

He recognized the voice at once. His cousin Ida. Uncle Rudy’s daughter. Oh, Jesus, he thought.

“What is it?” he said.

“Honey,” she said, “my father is dead.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said out loud. “What do you mean? I thought...”

“Not from the cancer, Andrew. He died of a heart attack.”

“Where are you?”

“At the hospital. The emergency room doctor told me two minutes ago. You’re the first person I called,” she said, and suddenly she was crying.

“Ida?” he said.

Sobbing uncontrollably now.

“Sweetie?” he said.

“Yes, Andrew. Yes.”

Still sobbing. Her voice overwhelmed by tears.

“Where’s Bobby?”

“Here with me.”

“Put him on.”

“Are you coming here, Andrew?”

“Yes. Put Bobby on.”

Bobby Triani came on a moment later.

“Yeah,” he said.

“What happened?”

“He went to bed right after supper, woke up around nine thirty with first a pain in his arm and his shoulder, and then chest pains, and like he’s burping, you know? Something’s repeating on him. He called Ida, told her what was happening, but he figured it was something he ate. A little acida, you know? Anyway, Ida got worried, you know how she’s been about him ever since her mother died. She tells me get dressed, we’re going over his house. This is now around a quarter to ten. We went there, the pains are really serious now, he tells us it’s like an elephant is standing on his chest. So I called the ambulance, and they took him straight to the emergency room. They were working on him for almost an hour, Andrew, but they couldn’t do nothin’, this stuff they gave him couldn’t dissolve the clot, the strepto whatever they call it.”

“How’s Ida taking this?”

“Hard.”

“Tell her I’ll be right there.”

“I will, Andrew.”

“Tell me what hospital you’re at.”

He debated calling Billy at home, figured by the time he got to Great Neck with the Lincoln, he could already be oh his way in the Acura. He was out of the house in ten minutes flat.

The Cross Island was empty at this hour of the night.

Snow was banked high on either side of the narrow cleared lanes. His headlights threw long bright tunnels into the darkness.

In many respects, he’d always been closer to Ida than he had to his own sisters. Angela was four when he was born, and Carol was two. A sort of twinship existed between them before he arrived on the scene, and although they lavished hugs and kisses and cuddly language on their cute little baby brother, he found it difficult to break into their cozy little gang when he was older, and seeking true companionship.

Ida, on the other hand, was born two months after he was, and she was the one who became his constant playmate and confidante. Uncle Rudy and Aunt Concetta lived close by, and the two brothers and their families were constantly in each other’s houses. On Sundays, too, the entire family gathered in the big old house on Long Island’s North Shore, where Grandma and Grandpa had moved when they closed the bakery in Coney Island. Andrew’s sisters secretly signed with their hands in the deaf language they’d learned from the encyclopedia, but Andrew didn’t care because he had Ida.

Dark-haired, dark-eyed Ida, who resembled her father more than she did her mother, with the same nose Andrew later saw on paintings made during the Italian Renaissance. Andrew was still a blond little boy at the time — his hair didn’t begin turning first muddy and then chestnut brown till he was twelve or thirteen — but Uncle Rudy used to call them “Ike and Mike,” and then invariably would add, “They look alike,” though they didn’t resemble each other at all. He was referring to their closeness, Andrew later realized.

He’d lost touch with Ida over the years.

As he sped through the night to where she now waited for him at the hospital, he remembered the time she broke his head with a pocketbook when they were both six and he’d been teasing her about something. Wham, she’d swung her little red leather bag at him, and the clasp hit him on the back of the head and drew blood.

She’d cried harder than he had.

Ike and Mike.

She used to tell him his ears were too big.

He used to tell her she had a big nose.

Eek, what a beak! Is that a nose or a hose?

She called him Mickey Mouse.

He called her Pinocchio.

He’d loved her to death.

He burst into sudden tears, and did not know for a moment whether he was crying for his dear Uncle Rudy or for all the dear dead Sundays he’d spent running around Grandma’s house with, his cousin Ida.

The front page of Tuesday morning’s Daily News blurted out the story in a single hurried breath:

The Post, riven by internal problems, carried a headline that was equally blunt:

Sarah saw the headlines when she picked up the Times at the newsstand on the Seventy-Seventh Street subway platform. On the ride downtown, she merely glanced at the Metro Section story about the death of some big-shot gangster who’d survived countless shootings only to die, ironically, of a heart attack. Which served him right, she thought, and turned the page.

When she got off the station at Sixtieth Street, she walked to the phone booth on the corner of Lex and dialed Andrew’s number. Standing on a mound of snow as she leaned into the receiver, she heard his familiar voice telling her the office would be closed on Tuesday and Wednesday. She waited for the tone, said, “Hi, it’s me. I hope nothing’s wrong.” Then she fished more change from her purse and dialed the number in Great Neck. There was no answer at all there.

The weekend’s heavy snowfall was beginning to melt. The sun was shining brightly. Tomorrow was St. Patrick’s Day, and spring would be here on Saturday. But she could only think she would not see Andrew this week.

Barney Levin called them at home that Wednesday evening, while she was making dinner.

“Happy St. Patrick’s Day,” he said. “Did you go march?”

“No,” she said. “Did you?”

“I always march,” he said. “With the gays,” he added. “Have you got a minute?”

“If you want Michael, he isn’t home yet.”

“No, this is a question for you,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of checks here written to a woman named Maria Sanchez. Both of them for a hundred bucks even, one dated...”

“Yes, she’s a cleaning woman. Comes in twice a week. I pay her fifty for the day.”

“This something new, Sarah?”

“She started a few weeks ago. Why?”

“Did you withhold anything from those checks?”

“No. Was I supposed to?”

“Is she an illegal alien?”

“I have no idea.”

“Then don’t ask her. Pay her in cash from now on, and forget we ever had this conversation.”

“Wouldn’t that be breaking the law?” Sarah asked.

“Wouldn’t what be breaking the law?”

“Come on, Barney. Michael’s a DA. I can’t do anything criminal.”

“Then start deducting federal, state, and city withholding taxes, plus PICA. And make sure she’s covered for workmen’s comp, New York State unemployment insurance, and disability insurance, too. Either that, or fire her. Those are your choices.”

“Thanks. I’m so happy you called.”

“Who asked you to marry a DA?”

“Listen, Barney, while I have you...”

“Yeah?”

“What do you know about a company named Carter-Goldsmith Investments?”

“What company?”

“Carter-Goldsmith Investments.”

“Are they on the Big Board?”

“I have no idea.”

“What do you want to know about them?”

“Just how they’re rated, what they do, who the principals are, that sort of thing.”

“Thinking of investing with them?”

“Maybe.”

“Let me ask around.”

“Thanks. I’ll call you from school tomorrow.”

“Gee, can’t you give me till midnight tonight?” Barney asked.

“Friday, then,” she said. “Good night, Barney.

“Good night, Sarah. Say hello to Michael.”

“I will.”

Smiling, she put the phone back on the cradle.

While waiting for Andrew’s return from wherever he was, she’d decided to write a little poem for him. She had already looked up “Andrew” in the name book she’d bought before Mollie was born, and had discovered the name was from the Greek and that it meant “manly, valiant, and courageous” — no surprise at all. The nicknames for Andrew were Andy, Tandy, Dandy, and Drew, which sounded like a vaudeville team, but which had given her a lot to work with.

The name Farrell was from the Celtic, and it meant “the valorous one” — how did these people know he’d once jumped into the sea to save her daughter? On the other hand; Farrell was a variant form of “Farrar,” going all the way back to the Latin ferrains, which meant “a worker with iron,” or, more simply, “a blacksmith.”

She had already written the first stanza of her opus; now she wanted to do a second stanza that referred to his professional life. All by way of surprising him when he returned, whenever that might be.

As she checked the thermometer on the roast in the oven, she went over the first stanza again in her head:

... which was where she needed something about Carter-Goldsmith. She made a mental note to call Barney from the teachers’ lunchroom on Friday, and wondered for perhaps the fiftieth time today when Andrew would be back.

On Thursday morning, the Post and the News both carried stories of the big gangland funeral, complete with photos of obvious hoodlums carrying the coffin of their fallen leader. There were more flowers in view than at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. What was not in view was the face of the third pallbearer on the right, blocked from sight by the ornate black coffin itself.

The Times covered the funeral in its Metro Section, giving it no photographs, and very little space. Mollie scanned the story as she rode the bus uptown to a Hundred and Tenth Street, where she would transfer to the crosstown bus that would take her to Hanover. Apparently, there was speculation and concern about who would take control of what was now called the Faviola family, but which had once been known as the Tortocello family. The former boss of the Faviola family, a man named Anthony Faviola, was now in jail and the most recent boss, his brother, Rudy, had died of a heart attack this past Monday night. So who was to succeed to the throne?

Ahhh, such an earth-shattering question, Mollie thought.

The article went on to say that law enforcement sources now believed that someone named Andrew Faviola, the nephew of the recently deceased dead gangster, would likely be heading for the maximum security prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, to consult with his incarcerated father, the aforementioned Anthony Faviola, about succession in the Faviola family, which name tickled Mollie because it reminded her of the Farkel family on the Nick-at-Nite Laugh-In reruns.

On the facing page there was a story about a big drug bust in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Undercover detectives from the Thirty-Fourth Precinct had raided a supposed body repair shop where they’d recovered five hundred kilos of cocaine — according to the Times, this translated as eleven hundred pounds — and two and a half million dollars in cash. On the bottom of that same page, the Times ran a small item they obviously felt was related by subject matter if nothing else. A twenty-four-year-old man named Richard Palermo, described as a small-time drug runner, had been found dead in a basement room on Eighth Avenue. The two bullets in the back of his head led the police to believe this was a gangland slaying, more than likely drug-re—

The bus was pulling into the curb at her stop. Mollie grabbed for her book bag and rushed to the exit door.

Standing in the bitter cold at the phone on the southeast corner of Sixtieth and Park, Sarah first dialed Andrew’s Great Neck number, got no answer there, hung up, managed to retrieve her only quarter even though someone had fiddled with the return chute, and immediately tried the Mott Street office. She got his voice on the machine again.

“The office will be closed on Tuesday and Wednesday...”

But this was Thursday already.

“Please leave a message at the beep and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you.”

But when? she wondered.

The beep sounded.

She said, “Hi, it’s me. Where are you?”

Then she put the phone back on the hook and ran across Park and past Christ Church toward the school.

He had flown out on Wednesday night, after all of Uncle Rudy’s friends, relatives, and associates had come by Ida’s house to pay their respects following the funeral. Now, at ten o’clock on Thursday morning, he sat opposite his father in the visitors’ room at Leavenworth. A thick glass panel was between them, a two-way microphone-speaker set into it.

“Everybody was there to pay their respects,” Andrew said. “People from all over, Pop. Families from Chicago, Miami, St. Louis, in spite of the storm, they got there. Some of them I didn’t even know.”

His father nodded.

Andrew could sense the fury seething in him. Their attorney, Abraham Meyerson, had petitioned the warden to grant an overnight leave for Anthony Faviola to attend his only brother’s funeral, but the request had been denied. The indignity of being kept here in a prison deliberately far from his friends, relatives, and business associates was now compounded by the fucking warden’s refusal. Andrew’s father sat on his side of the glass partition, his hands clenched on the countertop, his mouth set, his dark eyes glowering. He had lost weight in prison, and his complexion was pale, and his sideburns were turning gray. All at once, Andrew felt the same sense of sadness he’d felt when driving to the hospital on the night of his uncle’s death.

“There were flowers, Pop, you’d’ve thought it was summertime, we had three cars of flowers following the hearse.”

“Did anybody from the Colotti family show up?”

“Oh, yeah, they all came, sure, Pop. There was a tremendous snowstorm, you know, but it didn’t stop anybody, they all came anyway. Jimmy Angelli, Mike Mangioni...”

“Mike the Jaw, huh?” his father said, and smiled. “I’m surprised. It was my brother gave him that jaw. This was when we were still kids. He was some fighter, my brother.”

Andrew began reeling off the names of everyone he could recall who’d been at the church services or the funeral or at Ida’s house later, but his father was staring into the distance beyond his shoulder now, his eyes appearing somewhat out of focus, remembering the brother they had buried only yesterday.

“The priest gave a nice elegy,” Andrew said. “Father Nigro, do you know him?”

“Do I know him? He baptized you.”

“This wasn’t the boilerplate elegy they give when they don’t know the dead person from a hole in the wall. Father Nigro knew Uncle Rudy, and he talked about him as a personal friend. It was very moving, Pop.”

“I’m glad,” his father said, and nodded.

There was a long silence.

Then he said, “They should’ve let me come.”

“They should’ve, Pop.”

“Sfasciume,” he said bitterly.

“Anyway,” Andrew said, “I brought you some newspapers to look at. This is the News,” he said, and held the tabloid up to the glass to show his father the front page. “And this is the Post, it’s a miracle they’re still publishing with all the trouble they’re having. Uncle Rudy got the front page there, too, and also a feature story inside. The Times had an obit and a story in the Metro Section. I’m leaving all these for you, they told me they’d send them to your cell. There’ll probably be stories on the funeral, too. I’ll send them to you when I get back. I asked Billy to hold them for me.”

“Thanks,” his father said.

“Who’d’ve thought a heart attack?” Andrew said. “The doctors were giving him six months, a year.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s, you know, one of those things you can’t figure.”

“No, you can’t figure something like that.”

The two men fell silent again.

“How’s everything else going?” his father said at last.

“Fine, Pop.”

“The thing I was working on before I...”

He stopped talking, his anger virtually choking him. He was thinking again of the unfairness that had caused his present intolerable situation. He took in a deep breath, let it out, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, and in a soft, controlled voice said, “Before they sent me here. My project. How’s it coming along?”

“It’s a done deal, Pop.”

“Good.”

There was satisfaction in his voice. Something he had conceived, something he had initiated, had come to fruition under his son’s guidance. He nodded contentedly, and a tiny pleased smile touched his lips. Andrew figured this might be a good time to bring up the little matter of succession. Or was it too soon? Uncle Rudy just dead, just buried?

“Pop, I know this is a bad time,’ but...”

“I know what you’re going to ask.”

“What am I going to ask, Pop?”

“You’re going to ask who.”

“Yes.”

“By rights, it should go to Petey Bardo.”

“I know.”

“Those brown suits,” his father said, and shook his head and began chuckling. Andrew smiled. And waited.

“But Bobby has bigger balls,” his father said.

“I know.”

“So keep Petey where he is, and give Bobby the spot. Petey has a problem, tell him to talk to me about it.”

“Okay, Pop.”

“Don t you agree?

“I do.”

“Good,” his father said, and fell silent again. After a while, he said, “I miss you, Lino.”

“I miss you, too.”

“Tell your mother I love her.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“When you gonna find a nice girl, get married?”

“I don’t know, Pop.”

“Give me some grandchildren?”

“You’ve got grandchildren already, Pop.”

“Not yours. Not my son’s kids.”

“Well, someday.”

“You seeing somebody?”

“Few girls.”

“Who?”

“Few girls, you don’t know them, Pop.”

“Anybody serious?”

“No,” Andrew said. “Nobody serious.”

The assigned coordinator of the detective team on the Faviola wiretap had duplicated Wednesday’s audiotapes, line sheets, and pen register tapes, and had them delivered to Michael’s office by eleven o’clock that Thursday morning. At four that afternoon, Michael called Georgie Giardino in his office down the hall and asked him to come by. Over coffee in cardboard containers, the two men tried once again to find a pattern to the calls coming in and going out of Faviola’s office-apartment complex.

It had not surprised Michael that most of the calls Faviola made on Tuesday, the morning after his uncle died, were to known gangsters, informing them of the untimely demise and making certain they knew where the body could be viewed and where flowers should be sent. Georgie told Michael that at an Italian wake, it was usual for friends and relatives to drop little envelopes containing money into a box with a slot on its top, this presumably to defray the cost of funeral expenses. He did not think a multimillion-dollar enterprise like the Faviola family would either seek or accept such contributions, but who the hell knew?

“These guys are the cheapest bastards in the world,” Georgie said. “Freddie Coulter told me the lock on that door leading upstairs from the tailor shop is the crummiest piece of shit he ever saw. What these guys do, they need a lock, they need an alarm, they remember that Joey Gabagootz’s son went to a vocational high school and learned to be a mechanic or an electrician, so they’ll call Joey and he’ll send his kid over to rig an alarm or install a lock and they’ll hand him twenty bucks, and tell him thanks, kid. What Freddie likes to do, whenever he finds one of these cheap alarms, he deliberately sets it off every time he leaves the premises. He goes in four, five times to do whatever he has to do, he sets it off as he’s leaving each and every time. The target thinks Hey, what kind of job did Joey Gabagootz’s son do here, the alarm’s broken already? So he says the hell with it, and he doesn’t turn it on anymore.”

“Freddie does the same thing with a Medeco lock,” Michael said.

“What do you mean? How can he set off a Medeco?”

“No, no, he gums it up. No one on earth can pick a Medeco and anyone who tells you he can is lying. When Freddie finds one, he squirts Krazy Glue in it.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Georgie said, and burst out laughing.

“The wiseguy sticks his key in, the lock won’t work, he thinks it’s because some other wiseguy’s son installed it for ten bucks. So he figures the hell with it, it’s broken, and he uses the other locks on the door instead.”

“I love the way Freddie jerks these cheap bastards around,” Georgie said, still laughing. “I’ll bet they did expect those little cash envelopes in the box. And I’ll bet Rudy’s daughter didn’t refuse them, either.”

The original pen register tapes were about the same width as an adding machine tape, the printing on them a sort of violet blue. The Xerox copies were in black and white. The format was slightly different for a number dialed out of the apartment than it was for a caller dialing in. On any outgoing call, the tape showed the number of the phone being dialed, and then the time the call began, and the time the call ended, and the duration of the call. On an incoming call, the tape did not record the phone number of the caller, but in addition to the other information, it listed the number of rings before the target phone was picked up. On any wiretap surveillance, the detectives sitting the wire transferred the pen register information to their line sheets, and the phone company later supplied names and addresses for any outgoing call numbers appearing on the tape. Most of the numbers Faviola called were familiar to Michael and Georgie by now, but they spot-checked the line sheets, anyway, to make sure they agreed with the pen register tapes and then, together, they listened to the audiotapes.

None of the wiseguys had called on Tuesday, the first day of the wake. Too busy kneeling before Rudy’s coffin, Michael guessed. There was a call that day from a man named William Isetti, who said he was calling from St. Thomas. Whoever he was, he left a number with an 809 area code and asked that he be called back. He made no mention of Rudy Faviola’s death.

Only one of Andy Boy’s lady friends seemed to know.

The pen register and line sheet showed a call from a woman who identified herself as “Angela in Great Neck” at four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, long after Faviola had left his office and turned on his machine. The audiotapes had her leaving a message saying she’d just heard about his uncle and wanted to tell him how sorry she was.

“The local talent,” Georgie said.

“Mmm,” Michael said.

There were several other calls from Faviola’s parade of bimbos that Tuesday afternoon, all of them from familiar voices, all of them calling just to say hello and to wonder when they could get together again.

On Wednesday, “Hi, It’s Me” called four times, never once leaving a return number. Her voice sounded breathy on the tapes. The last time, she sounded virtually frantic. That same day, Oona Halligan called three times from her new job in the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue, leaving a number and asking him to call when he got back to the office. Same message each time. “It’s Oona, call me when you’re back in the office.” Oona sounded younger than “Hi, It’s Me.” Her voice was somewhat breathy, too. Maybe women automatically affected the same sexy voice when they were on the phone with Andy Boy.

“Or maybe they’re sisters,” Georgie said.

“Be funny if he was banging sisters and neither of them knew about it,” Michael said.

“Brooklyn girl,” Georgie said. “Oona.”

“I wonder where the other one lives,” Michael said.

“Mystery woman.”

“Calls from phone booths on the street.”

“Never leaves a return number.”

“Never.”

“Got to be married.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe to one of the paisans,” Georgie said: “What was the name of that broad they all wanted to bang? On the trial tapes?”

“Teresa Danielli.”

“Terry, yeah. Maybe it’s her.”

“Maybe.”

“Who do you suppose Isetti is?”

“No idea.”

“The Virgin Islands.”

“Mmm.”

“What’s down there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who do you think’ll fill Rudy’s spot?”

“Triani.”

“You think so?”

“I feel positive.”

“Bardo’s in line.”

“I still think it’ll go to Triani. My guess is there’ll be another meeting in Faviola’s conference room sometime next week.”

“Not Wednesday, though,” Georgie said. “That’s the blonde’s day.”

“Not Wednesday, no. But whenever, we’d better be listening hard.”

“You think these line sheets are straight?” Georgie asked suddenly.

Michael, was silent for a moment.

“No,” he said at last.

“Me, neither,” Georgie said. “I think Regan and Lowndes are listening longer than they need to.”

“I think all three shifts are listening.”

“Mike, that can...”

“I know. Time for another little talk. I’ll tell you, Georgie, this better be strictly ABC, or they’re off the case.”

“Don’t do it before the meeting, though. We can’t afford a new team if anything big’s going down.”

“Not before the meeting,” Michael said, and looked at his watch, and immediately picked up the receiver and dialed his home number. The phone rang once, twice...

“Hello?”

“Sarah, it’s me. I know we’re meeting the Learys for dinner, but is it up there or down here?”

“It’s at Rinaldi’s.”

“Okay, I’ll come home, then.”

“It’s for seven o’clock, Michael.”

“Then I’d better get out of here.”

“Don’t be late, honey, you know them.”

“I’ll be home by six.”

“No later. Please.”

“I promise,” he said.

Sarah put the receiver back on the cradle and wondered if she should try reaching Andrew again. Mollie was down the hall, watching something very noisy on television. If she used the phone in the bedroom, she felt certain she would not be overheard.

She considered it for another moment and then decided against it.

Richard Leary was an attorney who wrote amusing little articles about lawyers and the law for any magazine that would publish them. Michael suspected he had a closet desire to be another Turow or Grisham. Richard told them now that he was working on a piece about criminal conversation.

“What’s that?” Sarah asked. “Talk among crooks?”

“Nope, it’s a tort,” Richard said.

“What’s a tort?” his wife asked. “Some kind of Danish pastry?”

Rosie knew damn well what a tort was; she’d been married to a lawyer for twenty years.

“A tort is, quote, any wrongful act, damage, or injury done willfully, negligently, or in circumstances involving strict liability, for which a civil suit can be brought, unquote.”

“Except breach of promise,” Michael said.

“As in a contract,” Richard said, and nodded.

“I hate lawyer talk,” Rosie said.

“Be that as it may,” Richard said, “criminal conversation is defined as defilement of the marriage bed...”

“Please,” Rosie said, “not while I’m eating.”

“... or sexual intercourse,” Richard went on, undaunted, “or a breaking down of the covenant of fidelity.”

“He means fucking with a stranger,” Rosie said, and then immediately covered her mouth in feigned shock.

“I mean adultery,” Richard said, “considered in its aspect of a civil injury to the husband, entitling him to damages.”

“How about the wife?” Rosie said. “If the husband’s playing around?”

“The tort applied only to debauching or seducing a wife.”

“So what else is new?” Rosie said, and shrugged.

“That’s exactly the point of my article,” Richard said. “I think the issue still has relevance to the women’s movement, even though the tort was abolished in 1935.”

“You mean until then...?”

“Until then, a husband could bring action against a man for criminal conversation, yes. For committing adultery with a man’s wife.”

“Funny name for fucking around,” Rosie said. “Criminal conversation.”

Sarah thought it was an entirely appropriate name.

Looking down at her plate, hearing Richard go on about the popularity of such suits in seventeenth-century England, where the tort was familiarly called “crim con,” and where damages from £10,000 to £20,000 were not uncommon, staring at the food on her plate, not daring to look up at Michael across the table, she thought Yes, criminal conversation is what I share in that bedroom with Andrew. We’re a pair of thieves plundering a marriage, and the damage is far more severe than any court in the world can ever remedy.

“But criminal conversation?” Rosie asked, and turned to Sarah for support.

Yes, Sarah thought, criminal conversation.

Aloud she said, “It does sound odd.”

The meeting took place on Tuesday morning, the twenty-third of March. Monitoring it with Lowndes in the room on Grand Street, Regan was still pissed off because Michael Welles had seen fit to read the minimization lecture to the entire surveillance team yet another time — with what you might call a veiled warning tacked onto the end of it.

“I know you all understand the importance of this case,” he’d said, “and I think you understand, too, how serious a breach it would be if any one of us provoked suppression of the material we’ve been gathering so painstakingly. So I’d like to tell you one more time: when in doubt, shut down.”

He’d also told them to pay strict attention during the days and weeks to come because the death of Rudy Faviola was sure to cause ripples. So here they were, three days after the beginning of spring, sitting in the middle of all those ripples, listening to the broken noses discussing who was going to take over The Accountant’s position in the organization.

The mucky-mucks began arriving at two that afternoon.

Benny Vaccaro no longer pressed clothes in the back of his father’s shop. From conversations between him and Andrew Faviola, earlier overheard and recorded, they knew that he was now working on a pier on the West Side, probably offloading false-bottom crates containing all sorts of controlled substances. Or so they surmised. In none of the conversations had anything illegal ever been mentioned. They had tuned out the moment they’d realized Faviola was offering the kid a seemingly honest job.

The new presser was someone named Mario.

They hadn’t yet got his last name, but they figured he had to be a cousin or nephew of a mob soldier, or the son of someone a mob soldier knew, in any event a person who could be trusted to witness the comings and goings of various higher-ups without later discussing it with anyone.

“Hello, Mario.”

“Hello, Mr. Triani.”

Mario sounded younger than Benny. They figured him to be sixteen or seventeen, a high school dropout working his way up the echelons of organized crime, starting as a presser who mistered and sirred all the big shots to death.

“Hello, Mr. Bardo.”

“Hello, Mario.”

Followed by the familiar voice on the speaker, Faviola telling each of his business associates, the fuckin’ creeps, to come on up, and then buzzing them in. By two thirty, all of them were assembled. Regan and Lowndes had counted an even dozen of them, six more than had been present the last time there’d been a meeting here, when all they had going for them was the downstairs bug. This time if a flea farted upstairs, they’d be hearing it and recording it.

The first order of business was to tell Faviola how sorry they were about his uncle and to tell Triani how sorry they were about his father-in-law, who happened to be one and the same dead gangster. Sal the Barber led off with his condolences, and he was followed by Frankie Palumbo and Fat Nickie Nicoletta, who knew Rudy from the old days and who was one of the elderly thugs present who still called Andrew Faviola by his childhood nickname “Lino.” On and on the ritual grief went, each and every wop hoodlum paying his respect to that poor, dear, departed fuck, Rudy “The Accountant” Faviola.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Regan said.

That out of the way, Faviola told the assembled mobsters that his uncle’s death left a gap in the organization which he had discussed with his father when he went out to Leavenworth last week...

“So that’s where he was,” Lowndes whispered.

“... and my father feels the way I do, we both agree on who should take Uncle Rudy’s place, may he rest in peace.”

“Amen,” Regan said.

“Petey, I don’t want you to get upset by this,” Faviola said. “This has nothing to do with the very real value the family places on you...”

“I don’t want it, anyway,” Bardo said at once.

“It’s simply that you’re too valuable where you are,” Faviola said.

“I told you I don’t want it, Andrew!”

His voice rapping out angrily. He was no dope, Petey Bardo, and he’d undoubtedly guessed what was coming, and had prepared himself to get through this one with his dignity intact. But venting steam at little Andy Boy was one thing. Getting pissed off by a decision jointly arrived at by the Faviola padre e figlio was quite another thing.

“What you want matters to us, of course,” Faviola said smoothly. “But what’s best for the family matters even more. We need you where you are, Petey. And we need Bobby to take over Uncle Rudy’s responsibilities. That’s the way we think it’ll work best.”

The room went silent.

The words “underboss” and “consigliere” had never once been mentioned. This could have been a meeting of the board of any legitimate family-run business anywhere in the world. The chairman had just announced a promotion. Bobby Triani — Rudy Faviola’s son-in-law and until this moment a capo who’d been overseeing the family’s stolen-property operation — had just been promoted to the number-two spot in the organization, where he would answer only to Andrew Faviola. But apparently Faviola felt that the ruffled feathers of Petey Bardo needed further smoothing.

“Petey,” he said, “we can’t afford to lose you where you are.

“Look, I told you I...”

“Please. Hear me out. Please, Petey. If there are problems inside the family, you’re the one who smooths them. Somebody wants a territory here, a territory there...”

Never once mentioning what kind of territory. Always cognizant of the old Italian expression that said “I muri hanno orecchi.” The walls have ears. No suspicion whatever that the place was bugged six ways from Sunday, but nonetheless no one was saying anything that could be considered incriminating. Not yet, anyway.

“... to you to make the case for each of the disputing parties,” Faviola was saying. “I don’t know anyone who can do it better. No one. Whenever a sitdown becomes necessary...”

Sitdown was criminal slang, but nothing you could take to court.

“... you’re the one who tries to make peace between the skippers...”

Another word for capo. Skipper. Or captain. So sue him.

“... you’re the one who has the experience, and the patience, and the diplomacy to work things out to everyone’s satisfaction. There’s no one we have who could fill your shoes, if we moved you up a notch, Petey. But does this mean Bobby’s going to take home a bigger piece of the pie because technically he’s a step above you? I can promise you it won’t, Petey. You have my word in front of every person in this room. I’m going to work out a proper compensation for you. I don’t need to go into it now, but you have my promise. And when I say that technically Bobby’s moving above you, I mean that. This is only technically. As far as I’m concerned, especially now with the new business that’ll be coming our way...”

“What’s this, what’s this?” Regan said, and leaned closer to the equipment, even though he was wearing earphones.

“... I’m going to need a three-way sharing of responsibility at the top. Three ways. This is a vast new challenge we’re undertaking. My hope is that everything will be fully operational by the summer. To do that, we all have to work together, starting with the top, and continuing on down to the smallest member in the organization. Once we begin distributing the new product here in New York, I’m going to...”

“Dope,” Lowndes whispered.

Regan nodded.

“... support, and cooperation of everyone here today. This can’t work without you. It’s too complicated and there are too many risks. But once it’s in place, I promise there’ll be plenty for all of us. I’m talking billions of dollars. For all of us to share.”

“Fuck’s he talking about?” Regan said.

“The Chinese have a saying, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ We have the ability here right in this room...”

“Fuckin’ shitheads,” Regan said.

“... and we’ve got a lot of needy people in this room, too.

Laughter.

Lowndes shook his head.

“So what I’d like to do now is pour some wine all around... Sal, you want to open some of those bottles? Nickie? Can you lend a hand?”

The two detectives listened while the wine was being opened and poured. They could overhear several conversations at once now, chairs being shoved back, people moving about the room, and then finally the clinking of a utensil against a glass. Faviola began speaking again.

“I want to lift my glass first to my Uncle Rudy, who I loved to death and who I miss with all my heart. His fondest wish was to see this idea of my father’s become a reality. He’s not here to see it as it begins to take shape, but he was in on the meeting we had in Sarasota, and before he died, he was on the phone day and night with the people in Italy and with the Chinese. So he knows where he is in heaven that it’s just a matter of time now, just a matter of getting all the nuts and bolts in place. Uncle Rudy, rest easy, this is about to happen, believe me.”

“Salute!” someone shouted.

“Salute!” they all joined in.

“Next, I’d like to congratulate both Bobby and Petey, because in my eyes there’ve been two promotions today, and I plan to make that evident to Petey by way of compensation as you all heard me promise. Bobby, Petey, congratulations!”

“Thank you.” From Triani, modestly.

“Thank you.” From Bardo, skeptically.

It was almost four o’clock.

“There’s a lot of work to be done in the weeks and months ahead,” Faviola said. “I know I can count on you to get that work done. My father’s keeping a close eye on this, this is his baby, he wants it done right. I want it done right, too. Don’t let me down. That’s it.”

Before the men began filing out, they paid their individual respects to Andy Boy again by promising him he could count on them for their support and hard work. Fat Nickie Nicoletta said, “You need any spic heads busted, Lino, they don’t like our move, you let me know.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Faviola said.

Sal Bonifacio said, “You hear about Richie Palermo?”

“Richie...?”

“Palermo. This kid used to do some work for me? He was most recently in jewelry? You remember him?”

“Oh. Yeah. Right.”

“He got killed in a shooting on Eighth Avenue,” Sal said.

Faviola said nothing.

Regan and Lowndes were listening intently.

“A basement on Eighth Avenue,” Sal said. “Two shots the back of his head. It was in the paper last week.”

“I didn’t see it,” Faviola said.

“Yeah,” Sal said. “A fuckin’ shame, hah?”

Regan and Lowndes lost the assorted hoods as they went down the stairs to the back room of the tailor shop, and then picked up their voices again once they were in the room saying their farewells to Mario. The new presser showered bouquets of sirs and misters on their royal asses as they filed out onto Broome Street where video cameras manned by two detectives in a second-floor window across the way recorded their separate departures for posterity.

Oona Halligan materialized out of thin air at seven thirty that night. The two detectives who’d relieved Regan and Lowndes on the wiretap figured she’d been there all afternoon. Otherwise, since the tailor shop closed at five, how the hell had she got in?

Harry Arnucci was forty-eight years old, a bald and burly detective/first who’d worked Narcotics out of Manhattan North before his transfer to the DA’s Office Squad. The one thing he knew about hoods was that as smart as they thought they were, they were basically very stupid. He kept sitting the wire waiting for Faviola to say the one dumb thing that would send him away for a hundred years. Sooner or later they all said the one dumb thing. The minute Faviola fucked up, the minute they arrested him and the parade of bums who marched in and out of his office up there over the tailor shop, the sooner Harry would make lieutenant.

His partner’s name was Jerry Mandel, and he was shooting for lieutenant, too. He’d joined the police department over the protestations of a great-grandmother who could still remember when Irish cops were breaking Jewish heads on the Lower East Side. It was a fundamental principle of police work in this city that only an Irishman could rise above the rank of captain. Mandel wanted to prove this axiom false by becoming the first Jewish police commissioner in the city of New York. He was now only thirty-three years old, and was already a detective/second grade on the DAOS. Like Harry, he knew how important this case was, and was hoping it would result in an arrest that would almost certainly lead to a promotion.

Both men had felt insulted when Michael Welles gave them his little pitch about minimization this morning. They’d been keeping the line sheets scrupulously, turning off the equipment whenever Faviola was in bed with his Wednesday night bombshell. They knew what was riding on this wiretap, and they didn’t need to be told again. They were, in fact, about to turn off the equipment when they heard the Halligan girl’s voice out of the blue — where the hell had she come from? Must’ve been here all along, they figured, but then Faviola said, “Let me take your coat,” and Oona said, “Thanks,” and they realized she’d just come in, but how? There was a short silence, and then Oona murmured a long “Mmmmmmmm,” which meant they were kissing. “Can I mix you a drink?” Faviola said, which meant they weren’t in the bedroom, but were instead in the living room just above the tailor shop. Freddie Coulter had provided a rough diagram of all three floors, to assist them in visualizing movement from room to room. They were thinking now that maybe Faviola had gone down to let her in through the tailor shop, or maybe he’d given her a key to the tailor shop. In either event, the team running the video camera across the street would have picked her up coming in, if that’s how she’d got in, end of mystery.

Mandel signaled to Arnucci to turn off the equipment. Arnucci nodded, and was reaching for the switch when the girl said, “Why is that door fake?”

“Architect thought it would look better that way,” Faviola said.

“Hold it,” Mandel said.

Arnucci nodded again.

“Makes it look just like the rest of the wall,” Oona said.

“Well, that’s the whole idea,” Faviola said.

“I mean, no regular doorknob or anything. It looks like a panel there, instead of a door. Part of the walnut paneling.”

“The architect didn’t want to break the look of the wall.”

“Yeah, but a staircase should lead to a door, not a wall.”

“It is a door,” Faviola said. “On the other side.”

“Well, yes, I can see that.”

“With a regular doorknob,” he said.

“Not a knob that turns,” she said. “I never heard of a door with a knob you have to pull on to open the door.”

“That’s a touch latch,” Faviola said. “From this side, you push on the panel. From the other side, you pull on the knob.”

“Also, there’s no lock on it,” she said.

“There are two locks downstairs,” he said.

“Even so,” she said.

“How’s your drink coming along?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Why don’t we go upstairs?”

“Finish my drink first.”

“Okay,” he said, “take your time.”

“Fine. Don’t rush me.”

“Nobody’s rushing you,” he said.

Edge to his voice. The cops figured she was beginning to get on his nerves. Toying with her drink, wanting to know why a door was designed to look like part of the wall, when all he wanted to do was take her upstairs and boff her.

“Why didn’t you let me know you were going out of town?” she asked.

Which they guessed was the reason for the stall. He hadn’t informed her of his comings and goings, so now she...

“I didn’t know I had to,” he said.

The edge to his voice was a bit sharper now. They wondered if little Oona here knew this guy was a hoodlum who could order people killed if he wanted to. Few weeks ago, he’d complained about some dumb ring, and the crackhead who’d unloaded it on Sal the Barber ended up dead in a basement room. They wondered if she knew who she was playing games with here.

“You keep telling me you love me...” she said.

“I do love you,” he said, which they guessed meant Finish your fuckin’ drink and let’s go upstairs.

“... but you’re out of town for two days and you don’t call me, and then you’re back and I can’t get in touch with you till Sunday.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Do you have some problem with that?”

“Well, no, not what you’d call a problem...”

“Then what is it?”

“I just think if you care for somebody, you’re a little more considerate to her. I didn’t even know you were leaving. You just all at once disappear, and...”

“Lovers’ quarrel,” Mandel said, and reached for the OFF switch.

“Hold it a minute,” Arnucci said.

“... wondering if you got hit by a car or something.”

“Harry,” Mandel warned. “This is...”

“Shhh, shhh.”

“... important came up, and I needed advice from one of our officers.”

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t have gone wherever you went...”

“I went to Kansas.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No, I...”

“Wherever you went, I’m saying you should have called me to tell me you were going. Or called me when you got there. Don’t they have phones in Kansas? Where in Kansas were you, anyway?”

“That’s none of your business,” Faviola said.

There was a dead silence.

“Hey, listen,” she said, “I don’t have to...”

“That’s right, you don’t,” he said.

“I mean... what do you mean it’s none of my business? I’m telling you I missed you, I was worried about you, I was hoping you’d call and you tell me it’s none of my business? What does that mean, it’s none of my business?”

“It means do you want to leave right now, or do you want to come upstairs with me?”

There was a long silence.

“Well?”

“I thought...”

“Never mind what you thought. There’s the stairway and there’s the door. What do you say?”

There was another silence, lengthier this time.

“It isn’t even a regular door,” she said, and laughed a curious laugh that sounded almost like a sob.

“Make up your mind, Oona.”

“I guess I... I’d like to go upstairs with you,” she said.

Arnueci turned off the equipment and took off his earphones.

“There’s another goddamn entrance!” he said.

Kirk Irving was telling them about a patient he’d had last week, a kid whose molar was growing out of his cheekbone. His wife, Rebecca, said she thought this was a particularly disgusting subject to be discussing while they were eating. Kirk said he didn’t think orthodontics was disgusting, and he reminded Rebecca that it was orthodontics that put the shoes on their daughter’s feet.

“One of her feet, anyway,” Rebecca said.

This by way of reminding him that she herself was a breadwinner, although in a more modest way; Rebecca worked as a publicist for a small publishing house in the Village. Kirk turned to Michael and began explaining the long and painstaking process of gradually moving the molar back down into the gum where it belonged. Seizing the opportunity, Rebecca caught Sarah’s attention and began telling her how frustrating it was to have budget limitations that prohibited hi-tech author promotion like satellite tours. Sarah much preferred hearing about the difficulties of touring unknown novelists who wrote everything in first person present, but Kirk’s deeper voice kept bullying through, and she found she was hearing more about orthodonture than she ever cared to learn in a lifetime.

When Kirk suddenly shifted the conversation to what Michael was working on, she turned to the men at once, hoping to hear something her husband had thus far been reluctant to reveal. But Michael simply shrugged and said, “Oh, the usual, good guys against the bad guys,” and changed the subject at once, telling them he was thinking about renting a small villa in France this year for their three-week summer vacation. This was the first Sarah had heard about it. Normally, she would have leaped at the prospect. But now...

“Sarah, how marvelous!” Rebecca said, and turned to her at once. “Where? And when are you...?”

“Not Provence, I hope,” Kirk said, and rolled his eyes. “That guy’s made a cottage industry of Provence, whatever his name is. I’ll bet it’s like Coney Island now.”

“I was thinking of the area around St.-Jean-de-Luz,” Michael said. “We went there on our honeymoon. I thought it might be fun taking Mollie there.”

“Dash over the border to Pamplona for the running of the bulls,” Kirk said, and held up his hands and shook them as if waving a cape.

“When would this be?” Rebecca asked.

“Well, I don’t really know,” Sarah said. “Actually, I was...”

“August sometime, I guess,” Michael said. “That’s when we usually...”

“I was planning...” Sarah said, and cut herself off when suddenly everyone seemed to turn to her. “I... I thought I might start on my doctorate this summer. This comes as a total...”

“Honey,” Rebecca said, “screw the doctorate. Take France instead.”

“It’s just I...”

“Do you remember Sunset Boulevard?” Kirk asked. “The scene where Gloria Swanson takes him to buy a coat?”

“You didn’t tell me you were going back to school,” Michael said, sounding somewhat puzzled.

“You didn’t tell me about France, either,” Sarah said, and belatedly realized how sharp her voice had sounded.

“Where William Holden is trying to decide whether to take the cashmere or the vicuna?” Kirk said. “And this smarmy salesman with a mustache leans into the shot and says, ‘If the lady’s paying, take the vicuna.’”

“Take France,” Rebecca said again, and nodded wisely.

“I suppose I can use the rest,” Sarah said, recovering quickly. “France sounds wonderful to me right now.”

“Quick study,” Rebecca said, and winked at Michael.

“She’s been working so hard,” Michael said, and took her hand in his. “Leaves the house at seven each morning...”

“Well, that’s the job,” she said.

“But you do have summers off,” Kirk said.

“... doesn’t get home till six most nights. That’s when she...”

“With pay, no less.”

“... isn’t at a teachers’ meeting,” Michael said.

“Well, that isn’t too often,” Sarah said.

“Every week,” Michael said.

“I’d go on strike,” Rebecca said.

“Not that often,” Sarah said.

“Almost,” Michael said.

“You’re sure she hasn’t got a boyfriend?” Kirk said, and winked.

“I wish,” Sarah said, and waggled her eyebrows.

“Has he got a friend for me?” Rebecca asked.

“Maybe we can take him to France with us,” Michael said, and everyone laughed.

“You bring the wine,” Kirk said in a thick French accent, “and I’ll bring Pierre.”

“Lucky Pierre,” Rebecca said, “always in the middle.”

“Can you get a villa for such a short while?” Kirk asked.

“I think so. I think you can get them for a week, in fact.”

“It’s not called a villa in France,” Rebecca said. “It’s called a chateau.”

“Un chateau,” Kirk said.

“I thought that was a castle,” Michael said.

“Same thing,” Rebecca said.

“Want to come live in a castle with me?” Michael asked, and squeezed Sarah’s hand again.

It was all she could do to keep from crying.

Luretta had to tell her. Couldn’t wait till class was over so she could grab Mrs. Welles’s ear and talk with her privately. Last-period class this Wednesday; the entire school running twenty minutes late because of the unexpected fire drill and assembly this morning, two things the kids at Greer could’ve done without on a nice sunny day like today, for a change.

“... no need to write the rest of the poem, am I right?” Sarah was saying. “It’s all there in that first line, ‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s there.’ By the way, if you want to test anyone who’s ever studied English lit, just ask, ‘What are the words that come after “Oh, to be in England”?’ and nine times out of ten, you’ll get ‘Now that spring is there.’ But the words are ‘Now that April’s there,’ and all the longing, all the passion, all the sweet sorrow of that beautiful month, is right there in that first line. As a matter of fact, the rest of the poem is something of a letdown, isn’t it? Ab? Read us the first few lines aloud, would you?”

Abigail Simms, a lanky fourteen-year-old with straight blond hair trailing halfway down her back, cleared her throat and read, “‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s there, and whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf...’”

“Hold it right there, Ab, thank you. Now, to how many of you does that business about the lowest bough and the brushwood sheaf conjure any images of April at all? Browning should have quit while he was winning, right?”

The class watched her warily, suspecting a trap. She had a way of doing that, Luretta knew, leading them down the garden, letting them think one thing, while all the time she was teaching them something just the opposite. But no, this time she really did seem to be sharing her disappointment. She just hoped the class would hurry up and be over so she could tell her what was happening at home, Dusty hitting on her all the time, her mother looking the other way.

“‘... and after April,’” she was quoting, “‘when May follows, and the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!’ Okay, we all live in the big bad city, we don’t see too many whitethroats or swallows or buttercups waking anew at noontide, but do any of you find those images evocative? Do any of you even know what a whitethroat is? Or a chaffinch? ‘While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough.’ Sally? What’s a chaffinch?”

Sally Hawkins, looking like a chaffinch herself, whatever that was, tall and spindly with stringy brown hair and bulging brown eyes, a true chaffinch if ever Luretta saw one.

“Some kind of bird,” Sally said. “I guess.”

“Any idea what it looks like?”

“No.”

“Is it blue? Yellow? Red? Any idea?”

“No.”

“Well, isn’t it important for a poet to give us images we can visualize? How about a melon-flower? Anyone here know what a melon-flower looks like? Alyce? Any idea?”

“It’s something like a squash, I guess.”

Alyce Goldstein. Cute little girl with dark hair and darker eyes, burdened with the “y” in her name because her mother thought it was more stylish.

“‘Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!’ That’s the last line of the poem. Where is he, anyway? Browning? The poem is titled ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad.’ So where is he? Is the melon-flower where he happens to be at the time? Or does it grow in England?”

“It must be where he is.”

Jenny Larson, thick glasses, freckles all over her face, shy as a butterfly.

“And where’s that?”

“Probably Italy.”

“What makes you say Italy?”

“The melon-flower makes it sound like Italy. I don’t know why. It just sounds like Italy.”

“Also he wrote ‘My Last Duchess,’” Amy Fiske said, “and that was about Italy, wasn’t it?”

“Well, he also wrote ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,’ so how do we know this isn’t Spain? If we know nothing at all about a melon-flower...”

Luretta found Browning a total bore, even when Mrs. Welles was teaching him. Yesterday, she’d read them the T. S. Eliot poem that began with the words “April is the cruellest month,” and those five words had said more to her than all the words Browning had ever...

The bell rang.

“Nuts!” Sarah said.

Luretta clutched her books to her chest, ran to the front of the classroom, took a deep breath, and said, “Mrs. Welles,” I have to...

“Honey, can it wait till tomorrow?” Sarah said. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

She was gone almost before the words left her mouth, snapping her attaché case shut, snatching her handbag out of the bottom drawer of the desk, grabbing her topcoat out of the closet near the door, and waving a brief farewell to Luretta as she ran out.

Luretta supposed it would have to wait till tomorrow.

She ran the three blocks from Sixtieth to Fifty-Seventh, sure Billy would be gone by now, knowing she would first have to call Andrew, tell him she was on the way, and then try to catch a rush-hour taxi. But miracle of miracles, the car was still there, waiting for her at the curb outside Dunhill’s, where it waited for her every Wednesday at four ten, four fifteen, except that today it was closer to four thirty because of the assembly and the fire drill.

The poem she’d written was in her handbag.

She hadn’t seen Andrew in two weeks. She could not wait to be alone with him. She yanked open the back door, slid onto the black leather seat, pulled the door closed behind her, caught her breath, and said, “I thought you’d be gone, Billy, thank you for...”

“My orders are to wait till the cows come home,” Billy said, and turned the ignition key.

“That doesn’t sound like him.”

“Ma’am?”

“Mr. Farrell,” she said. “Till the cows come home.”

“Mr. Farrell, huh?” Billy said.

His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror.

There was a faint smile on his mouth.

“Well, those weren’t his exact words,” he said. “Mr. Farrell,” Still smiling. “What he said is I should wait for however long it takes. I just wait, and that’s it.”

“Does that go for everyone you drive?”

“No, ma’am, it doesn’t.”

He had turned the car onto Park Avenue now, heading downtown. The traffic was heavy. She was beginning to think the assembly and fire drill would cost her a lot more than the twenty minutes they’d added to the school day.

“How long do you wait for other people?” she asked.

“Depends. If it’s the airport, I wait till the plane gets in, however long it takes.”

“Do you pick up many people at the airport?”

“Oh sure.”

“What if it isn’t the airport?”

“Twenty minutes, half an hour. I call in, ask if...” He hesitated and then said, “Ask if Mr. Farrell wants me to wait longer or what I should do. Whatever he wants me to do, I do. He’s the boss.”

She wanted to ask him if he drove many other women. Wanted to ask if his instructions were to wait for as long as it took with any other women but herself. She did not ask. She settled back against the soft black leather, instead, losing herself in the steady drone of the traffic, closing her eyes, lulled almost to sleep until Billy tooted the horn at another car, jolting her immediately back to her senses.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Brooklyn, he wants me to bring you to the Buona Sera,” Billy said, and paused, and grinned into the rearview mirror again. “Mr. Farrell.”

“The what?”

“Buona Sera. It’s a restaurant.”

“A rest—?”

“Very good one, in fact. Right around the corner, in fact.”

“A restaurant? I can’t...”

She was suddenly panicked. A restaurant? Was he crazy? Even in Brooklyn, was he crazy?

“It’s very nice,” Billy said, “you’ll like it.”

He was pulling the car up to the curb in front of what looked like the sort of cheap little Italian joint you passed in Queens on the way to Kennedy if there was traffic and you got off the parkway and took the backstreets. Green awning out front, plastic stained-glass windows in the two entrance doors, big ornate metal door pulls that were supposed to look like bronze, a frayed red carpet stretching under the awning, from the curb to the entrance doors. Billy was out of the car already, coming around it now, opening the back door for her. She would not get out of the car, this was ridiculous. Why had he...?

Andrew suddenly came through one of the twin entrance doors, stepping out onto the sidewalk, walking swiftly toward the curb.

“Hi,” he said.

“Andrew, what...?”

“Time we broke out,” he said, and grinned.

The moment they were seated, Andrew reached across the table to take her hands. Both hands. He was making no effort to hide. This both frightened her and thrilled her.

“I have things to tell you,” he said.

“Couldn’t you have said them in...?”

“I wanted to be with you in public.”

“Why?”

“To show you off.”

“Andrew...”

“To show everyone how beautiful you are. To show everyone how much I love you.”

“This is very dangerous,” she whispered.

“I don’t care.”

“I know we’re in Brooklyn...”

“That’s why I chose it.”

“But even so...”

“Don’t worry.”

“I do worry.”

“Let me tell you what...”

“Can we please not hold hands?”

“I want to hold your hands.”

“I want to hold yours, too. But...”

“Then don’t worry about it.”

“Andrew, suppose someone...?”

“What would you like to drink?” he asked, and signaled to the proprietor, who came sidling obsequiously over to the table, wringing his hands, big grin on his wide round face. They were sitting at a small corner table where a candle burned in a Chianti bottle on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth. The proprietor wasn’t quite Henry Armetta in the old black-and-white movies she’d seen on television, but he ran a close second. Hovering over the table, wringing his hands in joy, he seemed to be daring them not to be in love. From speakers discreetly hidden only God knew where, operatic arias suffused the room, audible enough to be heard, soft enough to sound as if they were drifting from open leaded windows above the Grand Canal. The place was relatively crowded for a Wednesday night. There was the pleasant hum of conversation, the clink of silver on china, the smell of good food wafting from the kitchen.

“Sí, signor faviola,” he said grandly, which she guessed was Italian for “Yes, favored sir,” or “Yes, favorite gentleman,” or something of the sort, favola, faviola, whatever. A solemnly attentive look on his face now, his hands still pressed together, he lowered his voice and gravely said, “Mi dica.”

“Sarah? What would you like?”

“Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks,” she said, “a splash.”

“Beefeater martini on the rocks for me,” Andrew said, “with a couple of olives. Or three or four, Carlo. If you can spare them.”

“Signore, per lei ci sono mille olive, non si preoccupi,” he said, and went swiftly toward the bar.

“Do you understand Italian?” she asked.

“A little.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“No. Are you reading my mind?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s part of what I have to tell you.”

Carlo was back.

“Bene, signor faviola,” he said. “Ecco a lei un Johnnie Black, con una spuzzatina de seltz, e un Beefeater martini con ghiaccio e molte, molte olive. Alia sua salute, signore, e alia sua, signorina,” he said, and bowed from the waist, and backed away from the table.

“Even I understood the signorina part,” she said.

“He thinks you’re seventeen.”

“Ho-ho-ho.”

He raised his glass, held it suspended. “Here’s to you and to me,” he said. “Together. Forever.”

She said nothing. He extended his glass across the table. They clinked glasses. Still, she said nothing. She sipped at the Scotch. He watched her across the table.

“Does that scare you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this past little while,” he said. “About you. About us.” He took another sip of the drink, fished an olive from the glass, popped it into his mouth, chewed it, swallowed it. She had the feeling he was stalling for time. At last he said, “Sarah, you know I’m single, you know I’ve been seeing other girls...”

She hadn’t known that.

The admission hit her like a bullet between the eyes. What girls? Girls? Seventeen-year-olds like those the unctuous Carlo had conjured with his flattering signorina? How many seventeen-year-old girls had the “favored sir” brought here? She realized he was still talking, realized she had stopped listening the moment he’d...

“... until I was out there in Kansas, a million miles away, in the middle of nowhere. I began really thinking out there. About you. About just what you meant to me. I couldn’t shake it. Even when I got back, it was with me. Thinking about you all the time. Trying to figure out what you meant to me, what we meant to each other. It was like having a fever and not being able to think straight, and all at once the fever breaks, and you’re okay, you can think clearly again. What finally happened, I said to myself who needs these other girls? Who’s the only person I really want to see, the only person I want to be with, the only person I love? And the answer was you, you’re that person. You’re the only person I want to be with from now on, from today on, this minute on, till the end of my life. That’s why I brought you here tonight, so I could tell you in public, right out in the open. I love you, I want to be with you forever.”

“What girls?” she asked.

“Well... is that all you have to say?”

“Yes. What girls?”

“Well... there was someone named Oona I was seeing, but that’s over with now. And there was a girl named Angela I knew from Great Neck, but I’ve already told her...”

Sarah was still conjuring Oona. Great name for a cooze, Oona. Great name for a seventeen-year-old Irish cooze he’d probably been screwing in the very same bed he...

“Did you take them there?” she said. “These girls?” she said. “To the apartment?” she said. “To... to... our...”

“Yes,” he said.

“Andrew, Andrew, how could...?”

“But I’m telling you that’s finished. It’s done with, it’s over. Do you understand what I’m saying? I thought you’d be happy. I thought...”

“Happy? You’re screwing,” she said, and then immediately lowered her voice, and repeated in a whisper, “you’re screwing I don’t know how many young girls, and I’m supposed to be...”

“Was,” he said. “Not anymore.”

“How many?” she said.

“Two hundred and forty,” he said, and grinned.

“Very funny, you bastard.”

“I’m trying to tell you...”

“How many?”

“Half a dozen, maybe.”

“You sound like my goddamn sister!”

“What?”

“Half a...!”

“Sarah, I’m single! Before I met you, I was...”

“Go to hell,” she said, furious now.

She picked up her glass, drained it.

“I want another one of these,” she said.

He signaled to Carlo.

“Another round,” he told him.

“Si, signor faviola,” Carlo said, and scurried off again.

“Favored sir, my ass,” she mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You gonna stay angry all night, or what?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, fine.”

They sat in silence until the fresh drinks came. Carlo went through his presentation routine yet another time, and then said, “Alia sua salute, signore, signorina,” and backed away from the table again.

“Some signorina,” she said, and pulled a face, and lifted her drink and took a heavy pull at it.

“I’m leaving for Italy next week,” he said.

“Good,” she said.

“I want you to come with me,” he said.

“Take Oona,” she said. “Take the whole dirty dozen.”

“Half a dozen.”

“Who’s counting?”

“I can’t understand you, you know that?”

“Gee,” she said.

“I tell you I’m never gonna see any other woman but you in my entire...”

“Girls, you said. Girls. And, gee, is that what you were saying? I thought you were confessing to multiple forni—”

“You know it’s what I was saying. And now I’m asking you to come to Italy with me.”

“And the answer is no.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like being part of a harem. Besides, there’s this little matter of my being married, hmmm?”

“It wasn’t a harem. And anyway, I told you six times already, that’s over and done with.”

“How old are they?”

“Were.”

“Were, are, this isn’t an English class.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“So I can cry myself to sleep tonight,” she said, and suddenly began weeping.

“Honey, please,” he said, and reached across the table for her hands again. She pulled them away. “Sarah,” he said, “I love you.”

“Sure,” she said, and lowered her head, still crying, shaking her head, looking down at the checked tablecloth, shaking her head.

“I want you to come to Italy with me.”

“No.”

Shaking her head, sobbing.

“I want you to marry me.”

“No.”

Still shaking her head, still staring at the...

It registered.

She looked up and said, “What?”

“I want you to divorce your husband and marry me.”

She began shaking her head again.

“That’s what I want,” he said.

“No,” she said.

Shaking her head, her eyes glistening with tears.

“Yes,” he said.

“No, Andrew, please, you know I can’t...”

“I love you,” he said.

“Andrew...”

“I want you forever.”

“Andrew, you don’t know me at all.”

“I know you fine.”

“All you know is making love to me.”

“That too.”

“I’m six years older than you are!”

“Who’s counting?”

“I’m not one of your little girls.”

“I don’t have any little girls.”

“I do. I have a twelve-year-old daughter, Andrew, remember?”

“We’ll discuss that in Italy.”

“I can’t go to Italy with you.”

“Yes, you can,” he said. “Are you hungry? Shall I get some menus?”

“Do you realize this is the first time we’ve even been in public together? And you want me to go to Italy?”

“Wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“We had dinner in public in St. Bart’s. And we also had coffee and croissants in that little place on Second Avenue.”

“That was all before.”

“Yes. That was all before. Chocolate croissants. The day we had our first fight.”

“That wasn’t a fight,” she said. “I simply got up and left.”

“Because I kissed you.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to kiss you now,” he said. “Don’t leave.”

He leaned over the table and kissed her the way he had that afternoon long ago, the taste of the chocolate on his lips, the weather raging outside.

“Are we finished fighting?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“Good, will you marry me?”

“I know you’re not serious,” she said. “We’d better eat.”

“How can I convince you?”

“Tell me all their names.”

“Why?”

“I told you. So I can cry myself to sleep.”

“Don’t start crying again. Please!”

“I’m not. I won’t. I want to know because... because then I can exorcise them.”

“Exercise them? How? Walk them around the block on a leash?”

“Exorcise,” she said. “Like you do with the devil.”

“Oh, exorcise,” he said, and grinned. “Now I get it. You mean purge them.”

“Don’t be such a wiseguy,” she said. “Yes, purge them. Get them out of my system.”

“The way I got them out of mine.”

“Sure,” she said skeptically.

“But I had you to help me,” he said.

“Their names, please.”

“You sound like a cop,” he said.

“Their names.”

In a rush, as if he were reciting one name and not half a dozen of them, he said, “Mary Jane, Oona, Alice, Angela, Blanca, Maggie, that’s it. Carlo!” he called. “Could we see some menus, please?”

“Sí, signor faviola, immediatamente!”

“What’s that he keeps saying?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Favola? Faviola? Something like that. What does it mean?”

“I have no idea.”

“I thought you understood Italian.”

“Just a little.”

“Where’d you learn it?”

“At Kent. Why’d you call me a wiseguy just then?”

“Because you were being so smart.”

“I thought it might have had something to do with the movie I was telling you about.”

“What movie?”

“That time.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Then forget it,” he said.

“So,” Carlo said, appearing at the table with the menus. “I will explain to you the specials tonight?”

“Please,” Andrew said.

She listened as Carlo reeled off the specials in Italian, immediately translating each one into English. She watched Andrew all the while. Watched him listening. What were those names again? How could she exorcise all those girls if she couldn’t even remember their names? And suddenly she realized they’d already been exorcised.

“So,” Carlo said, “I give you a few moments, signor faviola, signorina, please take your time.”

Bowing again, he backed away from the table like a ship leaving port.

“He just said it again,” Sarah said.

“Yes, I heard, him,” Andrew said. “What sounds good to you?”

It wasn’t until Billy dropped her off on Lex and Eighty-Third later that night that she realized she’d forgotten to read him her poem.

The detectives were telling Michael that even if they could get a court order for the surveillance of the newly discovered entrance on Mott Street, they couldn’t see any place they could do the job.

“Because what it is,” Regan was saying, “there’s this restaurant-supply place on the northeast corner there, opposite that blue door...”

“Mailbox says Carter-Goldsmith Investments,” Lowndes said.

“Check it,” Michael said. “Find out if it’s a corporation, a partnership, who the principals...”

“Already working it,” Regan said.

“Good.”

“The thing I’m saying,” he went on, hating it whenever anyone interrupted him, “is there’s windows upstairs facing that Mott Street entrance, but the restaurant-supply people own the whole building, and use the whole building, so there’s no place we can put in a camera, even if we did get a court order, which the court might find excessive, by the way, seeing we’ve already got one right around the corner.”

“It’s worth a try,” Michael said. “We don’t know who goes in that other entrance. It might be...”

“We figure the bimbos,” Lowndes said.

“If that’s all, it’s not worth the trouble. But if we’re getting people who for some reason or other don’t want to be seen going through the tailor shop...”

“Yeah, that’s possible,” Regan agreed dubiously.

“So why can’t you plant a truck on the street?” Michael asked. “We won’t need an order for that.”

“Mike, I’ll tell you,” Regan said, “this ain’t Greenwich, Connecticut down there, a bunch of rich assholes can’t tell spinach from crabgrass. This is Little Italy. We put a truck across the street from that blue door, we paint it like a bakery truck or a telephone company truck or a Con Ed truck or whatever we want to call it, the whole neighborhood’s gonna know in ten seconds flat there’s cops in that truck taking pictures of what’s going on across the street.”

“Mmmm,” Michael said.

“Now so far, we got a good thing going here. We got the whole place bugged, and we’ve got a camera on the front door of the tailor shop gives us movies of every cheap hood going in and out of the place. The camera picks them up going in, the bugs upstairs pick up whatever they’re saying, it’s a sweet setup. We also got a wiretap in place, we know everybody he calls, and we can dope out most of the people who call him. We’re gathering lots of information, Mike. What I’m saying is we put in a truck, the truck’ gets made, we might blow the whole surveillance. Is what I’m saying.”

“Yeah,” Michael said, and sighed heavily.

It was peculiar.

In America, if you stopped any native-born son or daughter whose ancestors had long ago immigrated from Ireland or Italy or Puerto Rico or Serbia, and you asked them what nationality they were, they did not say they were American. They said they were Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Serbian, Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, Albanian, whatever the hell, but they never said they were American. Jews called themselves Jewish wherever their ancestors had come from. The only people who called themselves Americans were WASPs. You never heard a WASP say he was anything but American. Oh, yes, he might make reference every now and then to his illustrious mixed British-Scottish heritage, but he would never tell you he was British or Scottish because he simply wasn’t; he was American, by God.

Andrew and almost everyone else he knew had been born in America. He’d never met his grandparents’ parents who’d come over from Christ knew where in Italy, and the occasional ancient relatives who still spoke broken English were promptly dismissed as “greaseballs” by his mother, who insisted with every other breath — but why did she have to? — that she was “American.” He was American, too, even though if anyone asked him what he was, he answered automatically, “I’m Italian.” But this was merely a handy means of reference, this meant only that somewhere way back in a distant past of chariots and togas and arenas and laurel leaves, some relatives he’d never known had sailed for America to become citizens here. Even if he said he was Italian, he knew he was really American, and everyone else knew it, too. Anyway, that’s what they taught him in elementary school and in junior high; he was American, the same way Grandma and Grandpa and his father and his Uncle Rudy and his Aunt Concetta and his cousin Ida were American.

Sure.

It wasn’t until he got to Kent up there in woodsy waspy wealthy Connecticut that he met a different sort of American for the first time. Until then, he hadn’t known so many blue-eyed blonds even existed. Kids with names that didn’t end in vowels. Kids with last names like Armstrong and Harper and Wellington. Kids with first names like Martin and Bruce and Christopher and Howard. Well, so what? His own blond hair had turned a little muddy, true, but his eyes were still blue, weren’t they? And his first name wasn’t Angelo or Luigi, it was Andrew, wasn’t it? Which should have made him as American as all the other blue-eyed kids with names like Roger, Keith, Alexander, or Reid. But it seemed there was a catch. It seemed that his family name was Faviola — oh yeah, right, the Italian kid playing quarterback.

Somehow — and he didn’t know quite how — but somehow the American dream they’d taught him in elementary and junior high had been denied his grandparents and his parents, which was why he guessed his mother insisted so vociferously and so frequently that she was American. And now that same dream was being denied him as well. Somehow, in this place where he’d been born, in this land of the free and home of the brave, in this his country, in this his America, he had become something less than American. Somehow he had become just what he’d said he was all along — but, hey, folks, I was just explaining my roots, you know? — somehow he had become, and would always remain, merely Italian. And whereas he didn’t know who the real Americans were, he knew for damn sure he wasn’t one of them. Moreover, he knew they would never allow him to become one of them. So he said fuck it and went gambling in Las Vegas where Italians like himself were running the casinos.

Now, this was the peculiar part.

Here in Milan...

What they called Milano...

Sitting at a little outdoor bar...

What they called una barra...

Talking to a man his mother instantly would have labeled a greaseball, he felt American for the first time in his life. Here he was not an Italian. Here he was an American. The man he was talking to was Italian. He thought it odd that he’d had to come all the way here to find out he was American. He wondered if the moment he got back home again he would begin feeling not quite American.

The man was smoking what his mother called a “guinea stinker.” His name was Giustino Manfredi. He did not look as important as he really was. Wearing rumpled black trousers that seemed a trifle long for him, and a white dress shirt open at the throat and rolled up at the sleeves, and a little black vest, he reminded Andrew of Louis the tailor, except that he didn’t have white hair. Manfredi’s hair was black and straight, and parted in the middle. He kept puffing on the little thin cigar, sending up clouds of smoke that drifted out over the square.

This was ten o’clock in the morning on a beautiful sunny day during the last week of April. The little bar was virtually empty at this hour of the morning, and besides, Manfredi had chosen a table at the extreme far end of the outdoor space, under the canopy close to the bank next door, which he suggested with a laugh he would not mind robbing one day. Manfredi lived in Palermo, but he had chosen Milan as the city for their meeting, explaining in his broken English that for the moment it was extremely difficult for businessmen to conduct any sort of business in Sicily. It was not much better in Milan, for that matter, but here you could at least sit and talk about financial matters without the carabinieri rushing in with machine guns.

Both men were drinking espresso served to them by a young man who seemed more intent on impressing a buxom German girl sitting under the other end of the canopy than he was in serving a man who could order him dropped into the fucking Adriatic tomorrow morning with an anvil around his neck. Manfredi seemed not to mind. He knew he wasn’t well known in Milan, which was why he’d chosen the location to begin with. He alternately puffed on the cheap cigar or waved it grandly in the air when he spoke, a man supremely confident of himself, secure in the knowledge that what they were discussing would net him millions and millions of dollars, which in turn would allow him to continue dressing like a ragpicker and smoking cheap little cigars.

The more he spoke, the more Andrew felt like an American.

The man’s English was atrocious.

At one point, Andrew burst out laughing, and then — when he realized Manfredi was about to take offense — immediately explained why the comment had been so comical.

Manfredi had been explaining that the goods could move freely in or out of any number of Italian seaports...

“Ma non la Sicilia, eh? Too difficult now Sicilia. Other ports, naturalmente. We have much ports, Italia...”

Andrew was thinking his mother should be here listening to this greaseball...

... explaining now that most ports in Italy were available to them for their purposes, which translated as controlled by them, which he would not say aloud either in Italian or in his impoverished English, and then uttering the words that caused Andrew to explode in laughter.

“We come in, we do what to do, eh? And then we just pass away.”

The laughter burst from Andrew’s mouth like a cannon shot. Manfredi was so startled he almost dropped his foul-smelling cigar. Rearing back as if fired upon, his eyes and his mouth opening wide in surprise, he realized in an instant that he was being laughed at, and he was on the narrow edge of displaying some fine Sicilian rage when Andrew quickly said, “Let me explain, Signor Manfredi,” and then managed to control himself long enough to define the American euphemism. The definition immediately tickled the Sicilian’s funny bone, causing him to burst into laughter as well, which allowed Andrew to join him before he busted.

“Pass away, Dio mio,” Manfredi said, drying his eyes, still laughing. He signaled to the waiter for refills, but the waiter was now staring into the German girl’s blouse and impressing her with his command of English, greater than Manfredi’s to be sure, but nothing to write home about, either. The girl seemed overwhelmed by the pimply kid’s Italian charm. Andrew felt more and more American.

Manfredi was telling him that all next week he would show him the various ports...

“Better more than one port, eh?”

... that would be offloading the product from the East...

Refusing to say either “China” or “Asia”...

... which should be arriving in Italy sometime late in May. He was hoping the southern product...

Refusing to say either “Colombian” or “South American”...

... would be arriving in Italy at about the same time so that they could begin their work here.

The way this came out in his hopeless English was, “They come Italia, the ship, we lift one, two, immediatamente...”

And we just pass away, Andrew thought, and almost burst out laughing again.

That night, long after he and Manfredi had parted company, Andrew walked the streets of Milan and tried to find something in common with these elegantly dressed men and beautiful women who moved by on the soft spring night trailing hushed foreign voices behind them. Even the Italian they spoke seemed different from the language he’d heard when infrequent visitors from distant provinces in Italy dropped by smoking stogies as foul as Manfredi’s and stinking up his mother’s drapes. Her face said I’m American, what are you doing in my house?

These people were foreigners to him.

This country was alien and strange to him.

He recognized in Italy a place of beauty and grace, a gentle land of soft light and rolling hills, but nowhere could he find any real connection to himself, nowhere could he discover those much touted “roots” Americans were incessantly seeking all over the world. He wondered again why anyone born in America should have to seek his roots elsewhere. That was the irony of it. Americans swarming all over the globe searching for identities denied them in their native land.

He bought a gelato on a cone at a stand in one of the arcades, and was stepping out onto the ancient cobblestoned street again when he almost collided with a tall man whose eyes were as blue as his own.

“Mi scusi, signore, mi scusi,” the man said.

“Sorry, my fault,” Andrew said.

They did a little sidestepping jig around each other, each apologetic and smiling, and as the man rejoined his companion, Andrew heard him softly explain, “Americano.”

Yes, he thought.

The girls were sweaty and tall and the boys were sweaty and short. This was a fact of life when you were twelve and had just done forty minutes of gymnastics in Morningside Park. Mollie and her best friend, Winona Weingarten, called the seventh-grade boys “Munchkins” — sometimes, and cruelly, even when they were within earshot. Boys and girls alike were, wearing the blue-shorts, blue-sweatshirt gym uniform with the white Hanover crest over the left breast. Mollie was wearing the sneakers she’d finally found the day she and her mother and Aunt Heather had gone shopping together. Winona was wearing identical sneakers. The seventh-grade boys called the girls “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” in retaliation for the Munchkin label and also because they did look very much alike, both of them tall and slender with long blond hair tucked now under identical billed caps, and also because they talked some kind of dumb secret language only the two of them understood.

The girls were straggling a bit behind the other kids, talking that language now. The language was called “Frankendrac,” named for Frankenstein and Dracula because it was supposed to sound like a Baltic mix of German and Slavic even though it was an entirely new language with a vocabulary the girls had invented themselves when they’d first met at Hanover at the age of five. The girls would not have revealed the structure of their language even if threatened with torture or rape. The rapid-fire mélange sounded like gibberish to anyone else, but made total sense to both of them. At Hanover, you had to study two foreign languages; Frankendrac was their third. Enjoying the bright sunshine on this last Friday in April, the first truly glorious spring day they’d had so far, the girls ambled behind the others, chatting like a pair of foreigners in their native tongue.

This was not a day for physical exertion — which they both deplored, anyway, despite Miss Margolin’s total obsession with fitness, fitness, fitness. Nor was it a day for contemplating a return to the classroom after half an hour of jumping up and down. What they both would have preferred doing was walking up to Rosa’s on a Hundred-Tenth and Amsterdam, buying some sweets, and then strolling along lazily while they savored every luscious bite. Instead, there’d be a mad scramble in the locker room to change out of gym uniform and back into the de rigueur pleated watch skirt and white blouse before rushing off to their next class, which happened to be French, and much easier than the language they’d invented.

Empty crack vials lay strewn along the sides of the park path.

“They look like those little perfume samples they give away,” Mollie said in Frankendrac.

And to her utter astonishment, Winona said, “Ich kenner-nit vetter thenner giu.”

Which translated into English meant, “I can’t wait to try it.”

She had been counting the days since he’d left for Italy, counting the days till his return, and she wondered now what her response would be if Andrew again suggested, sometime in the future, that she accompany him on a trip someplace. She could not have gone this time, in any event; she was a teacher and the last week in April was not a school holiday. The first week in April might have been another story. Passover started at sundown on Monday, and then Good Friday fell in the same week, followed by Easter Sunday — she might have been able to make a good case for taking off those extra few days in the middle of the week. A good case with the school, anyway. What she would have told Michael was quite another matter. But the very idea of a week alone with...

“... know what it is in a minute,” Michael said.’

“Uh-huh,” she said, and realized she hadn’t been listening to him, hadn’t heard a word of what he’d been saying for the past two or three minutes.

“So I’m thinking of a hot dog wagon instead,” he said, as if that would explain it all.

“Uh-huh.”

They were finishing their coffee and dessert. Mollie was crosstown with her friend Winona for the weekend. Andrew was in Genoa. Tomorrow he would be in Naples. And the day after that...

“... with the striped umbrellas, you know? Sabrett, whatever. Have Freddie Coulter rig it with a video camera, none of the locals’ll think it’s a detective selling knishes and pretzels down there. What do you think?”

“Down where?” she said.

“That I can’t tell you,” he said.

“This is some kind of surveillance, right?”

“Yes. The case I’m working.”

“Which you still can’t...”

“Can’t, sorry.”

“But you can tell me you’re thinking of putting a camera in a hot dog wagon.”

“Yeah. Well, one of those carts, you know?”

“Sounds like James. Bond!” she said.

“Half the things Freddie rigs are James Bond.”

“Why do you have to rig something so elaborate?”

“Because there isn’t a facility we can use in the building across the street.”

“Then I think it’s a good idea,” she said, and nodded.

“If Freddie thinks it’ll work.”

“And if you can find a detective with dirt under his fingernails,” Sarah said.

“So he’ll look like a real hot dog seller,” Michael said, and they both burst out laughing.

Michael suddenly reached across the table and took her hand in his.

“What?” she said, surprised.

“I don’t know,” he said, and shrugged.

But he did not let go of her hand.

The lights were out and they were speaking Frankendrac. Winona was saying she thought it was all a conspiracy that their parents and teachers had cooked up to keep them from having a good time. She was saying she couldn’t see anything wrong with using drugs, and she couldn’t wait to be old enough to try them.

This from Winona Weingarten, her very best friend in the entire world, who had an IQ of 156, and who spoke Frankendrac like a native.

“Miekin bro stahgatten smekker pot venner hich har twofer tin,” Winona said.

Which translated loosely as “My brother started smoking pot when he was twelve.”

In English, Mollie whispered, “That was another time and place, Win.”

“Zer lingentok!” Winona warned.

Mollie immediately switched to their secret tongue, telling Winona she could not for Christ’s sake compare her brother growing up in 1972 with what was happening today, when all these dangerous drugs were on the market...

“That’s what they said about LSD, too,” Winona said in the language. “My brother tried LSD, do you see him running around like some sort of crazed freak?”

“Crack is insidious,” Mollie said, having a tough time translating “insidious” because it wasn’t a word in the secret vocabulary, but Winona seemed to catch the improvisation, because she immediately replied in letter-perfect Frankendrac, “No more lethal than pot, my dear.”

“You’re so eager to try something,” Mollie said in English, and before Winona could shoot her another warning glare, immediately said, “Tryker zin blowden jobber.”

Both, girls burst out laughing.

In bed that night, Sarah found the courage to explore what she hadn’t been able to at dinner.

Michael had been reading, and she knew from the heavy-lidded look of his eyes and his deeper breathing that he was about ready to doze off.

Out of the blue, she said, “Would you be terribly upset if I went off for a few days with the girls?”

“Mollie and Winona?” he asked.

She’d started off on the wrong foot. She never called women “girls.” She’d done so now only because she was nervous and the cliché had come so readily to mind, a night out with “the girls,” a few days off with “the girls.” She quickly said, “I meant the other teachers. Some of us. We were thinking we might get away for a weekend this summer...”

“A weekend?” he said.

“Or during the week, to discuss the fall curric—”

“When did this job get so serious all of a sudden?”

“Well, it’s always been serious, Michael, you know that.”

“Well, yeah, but Jesus, Sarah...”

“We thought we’d keep contact over the summer...”

“You’ve never done that before.”

“Well, I know, but...”

“Eight years now at Greer...”

“Yes, but...”

“All of a sudden, meetings every week...”

“Well, that’s the whole...”

“All of a sudden, a few days off with the girls...”

“That’s the whole idea, Michael. We’re trying to make this a more coordinated teaching effort. If we can get input from each other on a regular basis...”

“We’re going to France this summer, remember?”

“Well, this wouldn’t be then, Michael.”

“When would it be?”

“We haven’t set any dates yet. Three of us are married, we wanted to discuss it with our husbands first.”

“Weekends are out of the question,” he said.

“With all the weekends you’ve been working, I would have thought...”

“This is an unusual case.”

“It would seem so.”

“And I’ve worked weekends before.”

“Yes.”

“In the past.”

“Yes. So it’s okay for you to work weekends...”

“Going away with the girls isn’t working, Sarah!”

“Oh, isn’t it?”

“Where would you be going?”

“I have no idea. ‘We haven’t taken it that far yet. I told you, Michael. Jane and Edie are married, too. They have to discuss it with their husbands. We’re talking two or three days here, for Christ’s sake, not two months in the country!”

“You said a weekend.”

“Or a few days during the week, I said. I didn’t know this would be so upsetting to you, Michael.”

“It’s not upsetting.”

“You sound upset. Look, forget it, I’ll tell them I can’t...”

“Sure, make me the heavy, right?”

“Michael, what’s wrong with you?”

“The other husbands’ll say, ‘Sure, darling, go to Tokyo for a month, that’s fine with me.’ It’ll just be Michael the Shmuck who makes a big fuss.”

“It’s not that important,” she said. “Forget it. I’ll tell...”

“No, no, it’s fine with me. Just let me know in...”

“I wouldn’t think of...”

“... advance, so I can send out for some Chinese food.”

She wondered if she should accept graciously, or back out while she still had the chance. Her heart was pounding. She hadn’t even suggested to Andrew that she might be able to get away for a few days, but now it seemed almost too easy, and Michael’s final if reluctant compliance made her feel manipulative and cheap. Tell him no, she thought. Tell him it was a stupid idea. Do it now, this minute. But the thought of driving up to New England someplace, finding a quiet little inn, spending two or three days there with Andrew...

“It’s just that I’ll miss you,” Michael said, and kissed her on the cheek and then reached up to turn out the light.

In the dark, her eyes wide open, Sarah wondered what she’d become. She did not fall asleep for a long, long time.

At nine o’clock on the balmy spring evening of May fourth, the telephone in the Welles apartment rang, and Michael picked up after the second ring.

“Hello?” he said.

There was a click on the line.

“Hello?” he said again.

Nothing.

He looked at the receiver, annoyed, and then hung up.

“Who is it, darling?” Sarah called.

“Nobody there,” Michael said.

She knew at once that the call was from Andrew. He was back.

She kept reading. The words made no sense to her. They swarmed over the page. She had to get out of here, had to get to a telephone. But not too soon after the call. Give it time, she thought, and read again the same paragraph for the third time. At twenty past nine, she said, “Do you feel like some frozen yogurt?”

“Not really,” Michael said.

“I think I’ll go down for some, would you mind?”

“I think there’s some in the freezer.”

“I want the soft kind,” she said, and got up and marked her place in the book, taking plenty of time, closing the book, setting it down on the coffee table, all of this feeling like slow motion to her, wanting to race out of the apartment, find the nearest phone booth, walking to the entry hall to the same slow-motion beat, “Can I bring one back for you?”

“No, thanks, hon.”

Hoping he wouldn’t suddenly change his mind and tell her he’d like to come along, picking up her bag from the hall table, opening it in slow motion, and then opening her purse to make sure she had quarters because otherwise she’d have to go to the laundry jar in the kitchen cabinet and steal some quarters, but there were three quarters in the purse, together with a handful of nickels and dimes, she was all right. She snapped the purse closed with a click that sounded like a cannon shot, and put it back in her bag, and slung the bag on her shoulder, and said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Maybe I...”

No, please, she thought, don’t!

“... will have one,” he said. “The no-fat Dutch chocolate, on a sugar cone. If they have it. Otherwise whatever they’ve got.”

“In no-fat, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. See you in a bit.”

Casually. No further talk. Just get out of here. Reaching for the doorknob. Opening the door. Stepping out into the hall. Pulling the door shut behind her. The click of the lock. Forcing herself to walk slowly, slowly, slowly down the hall to the elevator, and pressing the button for the elevator, and hearing it clattering up the shaft, the door sliding open, stepping into the car, pushing the black button with, the white L stamped onto it, the door sliding shut again, and the elevator starting its descent.

She did not feel safe until she reached the coffee shop on Seventy-Eighth and Lex.

“Hi,” she said, “it’s me.”

“Sarah! God, I missed you!”

“You’re back.”

“I’m back. You knew it was me calling...”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“Downstairs. I made an excuse to get out.”

“Are we okay for tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Billy’ll be there. Same time.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Neither can I. I wish I were there with you right this minute.”

“So do I.”

“I love you, Andrew,”

“I love you, too, Sarah.”

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

There was a click on the line.

The pen register recorded the duration of the conversation as twenty-three seconds. Sitting the wire in the apartment on Grand Street, Detective/First Grade Jerry Mandel picked up the clipboard with the line sheets on it and recorded the caller’s name as Sarah.

At that very moment, a block away, Detective/First Grade Freddie Coulter, wearing Con Ed coveralls and a Con Ed hard hat, was unscrewing the plate from the street pole on the corner of Mott and Broome. He had installed a video camera with a pinhole lens in the hot dog cart that would be in place on the corner tomorrow. Now he needed his power source.

Power was always the main consideration. You either supplied your own power or you stole your power. In this instance, either a boat battery or a car battery inside the cart would have been sufficient, but sooner or later it would have needed replacement. He preferred stealing his power from Con Ed. He tapped into the pole now, fitted his cable with a male plug that would fit into the female outlet he’d already installed in the cart, and then screwed back onto the base a new panel notched to accommodate the cable running from inside the pole.

Hiding the cable with a tented wedge of wood painted in yellow and black stripes to look official, Coulter packed his tools and walked away from his handiwork, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow morning at ten, the hot dog cart would be here on the corner, ready to take pictures of anyone who went through that blue door across the street.

By four-thirty p.m. that Wednesday, the fifth day of May, Detective/Third Grade Gregory Annunziato of the District Attorney’s Office Squad was beginning to think the plant was a lousy idea. He’d sold a lot of hot dogs since ten this morning, true enough, but selling hot dogs wasn’t taking pictures of wiseguys.

Annunziato was wearing a plaid sports shirt and corduroy trousers and a white, mustard-smeared apron that effectively hid the .38 Detectives Special in a clamshell holster on his belt. He had curly black hair and dark brown eyes and a lot of his customers asked him if he was Italian. When he said he was — although he’d been born in Brooklyn — they invariably broke into Italian, which he spoke only sparingly, telling him how good his hot dogs and knishes were and expressing gratitude for the presence of the cart on this otherwise dismal corner. Annunziato kept his eye on the blue door across the street.

At four forty-three p.m., a black Lincoln Town Car pulled up on the same side of the street as the cart, some fifteen, twenty feet ahead of it, and a good-looking blond woman wearing a gray suit and carrying an attaché case and a gray leather shoulder bag got out of the car, leaned back in to say something to the driver, and then closed the door behind her. As she began walking diagonally across the street toward the blue door, Annunziato hit the remote button that started his video camera.

Her back to the camera, the woman went to the shadowed door and rang the bell.

She leaned in close to the speaker to say something.

Annunziato heard a buzzer sound across the street, unlatching the door.

As the woman went in and closed the door behind her, the tape digitally recorded the time and date as MAY 05–16:43:57.

She didn’t get to read him the poem she’d composed until that afternoon. She took it out of her handbag, and sitting naked in the center of the bed, feeling very much like a child reciting for an expectant parent, she began.

“What does that mean?” he asked sharply.

“Well, we couldn’t find...”

“Couldn’t find?”

“Yes, we...”

“We?”

“My accountant. I asked him...”

“You what?”

“I asked him to run a check on Carter-Goldsmith. So I could use the information in the poem. But there wasn’t anything, so I...”

“Why’d you do that?”

“For the poem.”

“Asked someone to check CGI?”

“Yes, but...”

“And he found nothing, huh?”

“It’s not listed on any of the ex—”

“That’s because it’s privately owned. You shouldn’t have checked on me.”

“I wasn’t. I...”

“Never mind. Let me hear the rest of the poem.”

“No.”

“Let me hear it.”

“I don’t want to now.”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” she said.

She sat stunned by his outburst, trying to understand what had provoked it, suddenly sensitive to her own nakedness, feeling exposed and vulnerable, somehow betrayed, utterly bewildered, and hurt, and close to tears. They were silent for what seemed a very long time. Then, wishing to retaliate, hoping to cause in him the same hurt twisting inside her, she said, “I’m going away this summer.”

His scowl changed at once to the familiar hurt and petulant little-boy look. Good, she thought.

“When?” he asked at once.

“I think he said August.”

Enjoying his discomfort. He would miss her. His face said he would miss her. But the scowl returned almost at once.

“You think who said? Your accountant?”

“My husband. That’s when he usually takes his vacation.

“For how long?”

“Three weeks.”

“What am I supposed to do during that time?”

The petulant look again. His changing emotions immediately flashing on his face.

“You can always call one of your teenagers,” she said, and shrugged. Sitting upright. Arms at her sides supporting her, elbows locked.

“You’re my teenager,” he said.

“Oh sure.”

“I hate these rich lawyers who can pick up and go at the drop of a hat.”

“He’s not a rich lawyer.”

“No? All of my lawyers are rich.”

“All of them? How many do you have?”

“Three.”

“Well, my husband earns eighty-five thousand a year.”

Deliberately using the word “husband.” Still wanting revenge for the way he’d pounced on her over a silly damn...

“Good reason to leave him.”

“What makes you think I’d ever do that?”

“Well...” he said, and shrugged.

Still sulking. Good, she thought. Lying naked on the bed beside her, looking limp and forlorn and gorgeous and utterly adorable. Casually, with the edge of her right hand, she brushed at an imaginary something on her left breast.

“What if I told you I may be able to get away for a few days?” she asked. Brows slightly raised.

“What do you mean?”

“With you.”

Turning to face him.

“You’re kidding. When?”

His expression changing again at once. The eyes brightening with expectation.

“It would have to be in July sometime. During the middle of the week sometime. A Tuesday... Wednesday...”

“You’re kidding!”

“I’ve already asked him.”

Lowering her eyes like a nun. Breasts beckoning, eyes averted.

“And he said okay?”

“Well... reluctantly.”

“But no fuss?”

“A slight fuss.”

“If you were married to me...”

“But I’m not.”

“... and you told me you were going away for a few days...”

“I’m not saying he liked the idea.”

“But he agreed to let you go.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t ever try that with me.”

“Oh? No? What would you do?”

“I’d kill him.”

“Oh sure.”

“I’d find out his name, and I’d kill him.”

“Sure.”

“Try me. Do you know how much I make in a year?”

“I don’t care how much you make.”

Still annoyed that she’d brought up her husband again. Good. Stay annoyed, she thought.

“I never heard of a lawyer who makes only eighty-five a year,” he said.

“He works for the city. That’s what they pay.”

“Eighty-five a year.”

“Yes. Well, actually a bit more.”

“How much more?”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Why would someone go to law school for however many years, pass the bar exam, go to all that trouble, and then settle for a job that pays so little?”

“He doesn’t consider it settling. He finds it challenging.”

“Oh, yes, it must be very challenging.”

“It is.”

“Bringing suit against landlords who don’t turn on the heat when they’re supposed to...”

“October fifteenth,” she said. “That’s the date you have to turn on the heat.”

“How do you know that?”

“When we were first married, we had an apartment that was freeeeeeezing cold. We called the Ombudsman’s Office...”

“How’d you know to do that?”

“My husband researched the law, found out the mandatory date for...”

“I hate it when you talk about him. All the things he does or doesn’t do in his crummy little job that pays...”

“Getting the heat turned on had nothing to do with his job.”

“Where will you be going?”

“France. St.-Jean-de-Luz.”

“Where’s that?”

“Near the Spanish border. We went there on our honeymoon.”

“Terrific.”

“Andrew, this won’t be any kind of romantic trip. Mollie’s going with us.”

He was silent for several moments.

Then he said, “I’ll miss you.”

“I’m not gone yet,” she said, and suddenly wanted to take him in her arms again, stroke him, pet him, adore him.

“How’s this thing doing?” she asked.

“There she goes again,” Regan said.

“Leave it on a few more seconds,” Lowndes said.

“Looks like it might need a little help,” she whispered.

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“Mmmmm,” she said.

“Gobbling it again,” Regan said.

Tomorrow was Mother’s Day, and — with the exception of Heather’s estranged husband — the family would be gathering to celebrate at the Fitch apartment on Seventieth and Park. Sarah’s parents had returned from St. Bart’s on the third. Tomorrow would be the ninth. She had spent a lazy Saturday with Michael and Mollie and now, at fifteen minutes before midnight, she was ready to read herself to sleep. But Michael was waiting for her when she came out of the bathroom in her nightgown.

“Something I want to talk to you about,” he said. “Come on down the hall.”

She followed him down the corridor, past Mollie’s room, her daughter already asleep. Silently, they went past the loudly ticking grandfather clock standing against the wall, a gift from Michael’s mother, and then into the den at the far end. The room was small, a sofa on one wall, a French lieutenant’s bed on another, an audio/video center on the third wall, and windows overlooking Eighty-First Street on the fourth wall. Michael closed the door behind him. The walls in the prewar apartment were thickly plastered, making each room virtually soundproof. She wondered why he was whispering.

“This case I’ve been on?” he said.

She nodded.

“I think I can tell you a little about it now.”

She wondered why he had chosen to tell her at just this moment, close to midnight, when she was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to lose herself in Vogue before she drifted off to sleep. Family gatherings at her parents’ apartment were never quite stress-free. She’d been looking forward to a good night’s sleep in preparation. But no, Michael was telling her how they’d been conducting this surveillance since the beginning of the year...

“The son of a Mafia boss the U.S. Attorney put away for good. We’re certain he’s running the mob now, we’ve just been waiting to get enough for an OCCA conviction. To do that, we’ve got to show a pattern of racketeering activity. Problem is we haven’t got anything concrete as yet. We know he’s linked to narcotics and loan-sharking, but we can’t prove it from what he or anyone else has said. We also think he may have ordered a hit or two, but again, no proof. The reason I’m telling you all this...” Michael said.

Yes, why are you telling me all this? she wondered.

“... is that I think we’ve found a way to get to him.”

“Well, good,” she said.

“I got hold of all this stuff on Thursday morning,” he said, and went to the tape deck in the cabinet on the wall. She noticed that the power was already on. “Here, listen,” he said, and hit the PLAY button.

At first she thought she was living a nightmare.

“October fifteenth,” a woman’s voice said. “That’s the date you have to turn on the heat.”

“How do you know that?”

A man’s voice.

“When we were first married, we had an apartment that was freeeeeeezing cold. We called the Ombudsman’s Office...”

“How’d you know to do that?”

“My husband researched the law,” the woman’s voice said.

Her voice said.

“... found out the mandatory date for...”

“I hate it when you talk about him,” the man’s voice said.

Andrew’s voice said.

She thought her heart would stop.

“All the things he does or doesn’t do in his crummy little job that pays...”

“Getting the heat turned on had nothing to do with his job.”

“Where will you be going?”

“France. St.-Jean-de-Luz.”

“Where’s that?”

“Near the Spanish border. We went there on our honeymoon.”

“Terrific.”

“Andrew, this won’t be any kind of romantic trip. Mollie’s going with us.”

There was a long silence.

“I’ll miss you.”

Andrew’s voice again.

“I’m not gone yet. How’s this thing doing?” Her voice changing to a whisper now. “Looks like it might need a little help.”

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“Mmmmm.”

Another long silence.

She did not know where to look. She would not meet Michael’s eyes. Was it possible he hadn’t recognized the voice on the tape? Was it possible he didn’t realize that the woman performing...?

“You ever do this to your husband?”

“Yes, all the time.”

“You don’t.”

“I do. Every night of the week.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m lying.”

“Jesus, what you do to me!”

“Whose cock is this?”

“Yours.”

“Mine, yes. And I’m going to suck it till you scream.”

“Sarah...”

“I want to see you explode! Give it to me!”

“Oh God, Sarah!”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes!”

And another long silence.

Michael snapped off the machine.

“We think we know who she is,” he said, and moved to the VCR. Again, the power was already on, a cassette was already in place; Michael simply pressed the PLAY button.

From the right-hand side of the screen, Sarah saw herself moving into the frame...

He knows, she thought.

... crossing hurriedly to the blue door on Mott, her back to the, camera...

Oh God, he knows.

... and then pressing the bell button under the Carter-Goldsmith Investments nameplate, back still to the camera...

There was no way that any objective viewer could say for certain that the blonde leaning into the speaker in that shadowed doorway, her face partially hidden, was Sarah Welles. No way that any stranger could possibly identify her as the woman announcing herself beside that blue door. The picture simply wasn’t that good.

But as she watched herself reaching for the doorknob the instant the buzzer sounded, watched herself breathlessly letting herself in, she knew that anyone who knew her would recognize her in an instant. Michael knew her. Knew the clothes she was wearing, knew the way she moved, the way she walked, knew every nuance. Even with her back to the camera...

The door closing behind her now.

The camera lingering on just the door now.

Outside in the hall, the big clock tolled midnight.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” Michael said bitterly.