Criminal Conversation

4: May 10–June 2

Mollie complained that she didn’t need a baby-sitter, and besides why were they going out on a Monday night? Mollie was twelve years old, and twelve in the city of New York was considered grown-up, at Hanover Prep, anyway. Michael told her there were lots of bad guys out there, and he would feel happier with Mrs. Henderson in attendance. Secretly, Mollie felt Mrs. Henderson would be the first to pick up her skirts and run out the door if a bad guy came climbing through the window. Michael gently told her they wouldn’t be long.

“But why are you going out on a Monday?” Mollie whined like a twelve-year-old grown-up.

Walking beside him on the street now, people everywhere around them, Sarah felt he might kill her. He had left the apartment immediately after their confrontation on Saturday night; she suspected he had spent the night in his office. His anger now was monumental. He walked as if propelled by an inner fury, his jaw set, his eyes refusing to meet hers, his gaze, his head, his entire body, thrusting into the night like a dagger. In a voice she scarcely knew, cold and distant and barely audible, he said, “This man represents everything I hate. Everything I’ve devoted my life to destroying, this man rep—”

“Yes, Michael, I know that.”

“Don’t give me that damn impatient...”

“I didn’t know what he was.”

“Would it have made a difference?”

She was silent for several seconds.

Then she said, “I don’t know.”

He turned to her at once, as if to strike her, his fist clenched, his arm coming up. She stopped dead on the sidewalk, flinching away from him, saw his contorted face and the anger seething in his eyes a moment before he withdrew his hand, trembling. They were on Lexington Avenue, it was a mild night, the sidewalks were crowded; she felt certain he would have hit her otherwise. He began walking again, faster now. She debated running away from him, back to the apartment. She was afraid to do that, afraid he might chase her, grab her, punch her, she didn’t know what he might do. She no longer knew this man. Her husband. This man.

“I’d kill him if it were legal,” he said, his voice quivering with the effort to regain control of himself. “I’ll settle for putting him in jail, and getting you out of my life forever.”

On Saturday night, he’d told her they’d been conducting a 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.

Andrew. He’d been talking about Andrew. Andrew was the target of his investigation, Andrew was the son of a Mafia boss in prison, Andrew was himself a gangster.

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...

She had lain awake all that night, wondering if this was true, knowing it was true, they had tapes. Wanting to call Andrew, wanting to ask him, Is this true, can this be true? But of course it was true.

“This is the deal,” Michael said. “Plain and simple.” His voice had suddenly changed. It sounded clipped, cold, detached, professional. “If you get me what I need, Mollie never finds out about you. We divorce, we share custody, we live our separate lives. If you don’t cooperate...”

“I’m not one of your criminals,” she said.

“If you don’t cooperate, I’ll play those tapes in divorce court, you’ll be declared an unfit mother...”

“You wouldn’t do that,” she said.

“... you’ll be denied custody...”

“Listen,” she said, “don’t...”

“... and you’ll never see Mollie a—”

“... threaten me.”

She was suddenly shaking. My daughter? she thought. You’re threatening me with the loss of my daughter? My Mollie, you son of a bitch? What sort of man...?

“This is what I want,” he said. “You...”

“Don’t offer me any deals!” she said. “I’m not a criminal!”

“Aren’t you?” he asked.

And, of course, she was. Moreover, she had made the criminal’s unforgivable error. She had been caught. He had her cold.

“I don’t care how you do this,” he said, “and I wouldn’t presume to advise you. That’s entirely your business.” From the way he said those words, so slowly and carefully, she knew at once that he was somehow covering himself, a skilled lawyer protecting himself against some future allegation that might come his way. “My business is putting Faviola in jail,” he said. “I want you to get him to talk, that’s all.” She noticed again that he did not suggest — not even by innuendo — how she should get him to talk. It was as if, for the record at least, he was wiping out all knowledge of her infidelity, completely forgetting that she’d already made love to this man, and dismissing the possibility, for the record at least, that in order to elicit further information, she might have to make love to him again. Even here in the open air, where no one could possibly overhear them, he was unwilling to mention that sex was in fact the basic element in this transaction, unwilling even to suggest that in order to encourage conversation about criminal matters, Sarah would have to engage in criminal conversation of quite another sort. There had to be a reason for this, and she wondered what it was. “Get him to describe everything in detail,” Michael was saying now. “Get him to describe all the wonderful things he’s involved in.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” she said.

“Oh, I think you can do it, Sarah.” Spitting out her name as if it were something vile on his tongue. “I think you’d better do it, Sarah. Unless you want your daughter to learn what kind of woman you are.”

“Don’t threaten me!” she said again, louder this time, and turned to him with her fists clenched, ready to kill him if he told her one more time that he would use Mollie to...

“Oh?” he said, and raised an eyebrow.

They stood rooted to the sidewalk, both of them silent and staring, people rushing by heedless in this city of strangers, Sarah trembling, Michael looking down at her the way he must have looked at countless criminals in his office, a smug, superior look on his face, knowing he had her, knowing she was trapped. A faint angry smile flickered momentarily on his mouth and in his eyes. Then he turned away and began walking again, secure in the knowledge that she would follow him. Defeated, she fell into step beside him, trying to match his longer strides, struggling to keep up.

He told her exactly the sort of information he wanted her to elicit from her boyfriend. He kept calling Andrew her “boyfriend.” Each time he used the word it made whatever she’d shared with him sound shoddy and cheap. Her boyfriend. Was that all it came down to in the end? Was Andrew merely a boyfriend? And was she now to do whatever her husband asked of her in order to keep the cheap and shoddy, sordid and shameful truth from her daughter? She was wondering what sort of man could even make such a threat. For that matter, what sort of man would never once suggest that perhaps this marriage might still work. Not even to suggest it? Not even to say I love you, Sarah, I’ll forgive you, help me do this thing and I’ll forgive you? No. The opposite instead. Help me do this thing or I’ll...

It suddenly occurred to her that the detectives had heard everything he’d heard, seen everything he’d seen. Even if she agreed to do what he wanted, the detectives already knew; her daughter would still be vulnerable to...

“The detectives,” she said.

“What about them?”

“They know. They heard the tapes...”

“They don’t know who you are. There are millions of Sarahs in this city.”

“Didn’t they see the video?”

“All they saw was an unidentifiable blonde going in. And they already knew Faviola’s whore was a blonde.”

“Please,” she said.

“Lovely person you turned out to be,” he said. “You must be very proud of yourself.”

“State of the art,” Bobby Triani was saying. “The phones do everything but vacuum the floor. Thanks,” he said to the waitress, and looked her over as she left the table. Top to bottom. Didn’t miss a thing she was showing, and she was showing a lot.

It was late Tuesday afternoon, the eleventh of May, a bright sunny day. They were sitting at a sidewalk table outside a little pasticceria on Mulberry Street, eating cannoli and drinking cappuccino. Bobby had suggested the place. Andrew suspected he’d been here before. He also suspected he’d returned, because of the waitress. He wondered if he should give his underboss a friendly little warning. Keep your eyes off the legs and the tits, Bobby, and keep your hands in your pockets.

“Lenny’s kid put the phones in for me,” Bobby was saying, his eyes moving to the espresso machine, where the waitress was now filling several small cups. “Lenny Campagnia?”

“Yeah?”

“His kid works for AT&T, he gets a break on the equipment, you know?” Bobby said, and winked. “You want me to send him around the office?”

“What for?” Andrew said.

“Fix your phones,” Bobby said, still ogling the waitress.

“There’s nothing wrong with my phones,” Andrew said.

“Put in new ones,” Bobby said, and shrugged. “You’d be surprised, the stuff these phones can do nowadays. He gets a good break on the equipment,” Bobby said, and winked again. “Anyway, the office, it’s a business expense, am I right? I had him go to La Luna, you know? On Fifty-Eighth? He put in new phones every place, the kitchen, the front near the cash register, the table where Sal the Barber sits in back, the office, all over the restaurant. Sal gave him a coupla hundred bucks and this crummy black ring he says came from Rome when there were emperors there. I ought to send him around, Andrew, check out the place, see what he can do for you.”

“I like the phones I have now,” Andrew said.

Bobby signaled to the waitress. She came to the table at once.

“Can I get another cappuccino here?” he asked, smiling.

“Certainly, sir.”

“Andrew? Another cappuccino?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“Just one, then,” the waitress said.

“What’s your name, miss?” Bobby asked. “So I don’t have to keep yelling ‘Hey, you!’ all the time.”

“Bunny,” she said.

“Bunny. That’s a nice name, Bunny. Is that your real name, or did you make it up?”

“Well, my real name’s Bernice,” she said.

“Bernice,” he said, weighing the name gravely. “Is that Jewish, Bunny?”

“No, I’m Italian,” she said.

“’Cause I always thought Bernice was a Jewish name.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Bunny said. “Both my parents are Italian, and they named me Bernice. So I guess it’s Italian, too.”

“Bunny, tell me something. How old are you?”

“Twenty-two,” she said.

“I woulda said nineteen,” Bobby said.

“Oh, well, thank you.”

“Tell me, Bunny, do you live down here in Little Italy?”

“No, I live in Brooklyn.”

“What’s your last name, Bunny?”

“Tataglia.”

“Really?” Bobby said. “That’s a nice name. Bunny Tataglia. Very nice.”

“Well,” she said, and shrugged.

“Bunny Tataglia in Brooklyn,” Bobby said, nodding.

“Mm-huh,” she said.

“I’m Bobby Triani,” he said, and extended, his hand.

“Nice to meet you, Bobby,” she said, and took his hand. He was wearing a big diamond pinkie ring. Bunny looked at the ring as they shook hands. “I’d better get that cappuccino,” she said at last, and let go of his hand and went swiveling away on her black high heels, in her little black flounced skirt and white scoop-neck peasant blouse.

“Don’t call her,” Andrew said.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Don’t call her.’”

“What?” Bobby said. “What?”

“You cheat on my cousin, I’ll break your fuckin’ head,” Andrew said. “Capeesh?”

“Hey, come on, Andrew.”

“Enough said.”

“I mean, what kind of person do you...?”

“Enough said, Bobby.”

Bobby shook his head and tried to look hurt and amazed. When Bunny brought his cappuccino, he didn’t even glance at her. She went off looking really hurt and amazed.

“So you want me to send him around or not?” Bobby asked. “Lenny’s kid. Take a look at your phones.”

The pay phone on the tailor shop wall was an antique with a rotary dial. Whether or not Mr. Faviola decided to go along with a new communications system, Sonny Campagnia would suggest that he contact New York Telephone and ask them to replace the unit with new equipment. That’s if he was thinking of adding the tailor shop phones to whatever he did upstairs, if he decided to do anything.

Mr. Faviola had told him he’d be here at one o’clock to unlock the door and take him upstairs for a look at the system he now had. It was now a quarter past, and he still wasn’t here, and the old guy who owned the tailor shop had asked Sonny three times already if he wanted a cup of coffee or anything, but Sonny had seen how filthy the cups looked, and each time he’d said, No, thanks, really.

It was while he was checking out the wall phone that he made his first discovery. What it was, a wire had been dropped from the phone to the baseboard, disappearing into it. Sonny followed the baseboard around the room, trying to figure out where the wire was leading, and saw that it came out of the baseboard alongside a door, where it was tacked up the wall and over the doorjamb molding, and then down the wall again into the baseboard, where it finally surfaced under a long table. The wire ran up from the baseboard into a 42A block that didn’t have any phone plugged into it. Sonny was on his hands and knees, wondering about this, when Andrew walked in.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking of putting any new phones in the tailor shop, if that’s why you’re...”

“No, I was just wondering about this wire, that’s all,” Sonny said, getting up and dusting off the knees of his trousers.

Andrew was already unlocking the door that led upstairs. He had no particular interest in changing all the goddamn phones in the place, except that Lenny Campagnia was a well-respected capo, and letting his kid install a new system would be a favor to him. He just hoped looking over the place wouldn’t take too much time. Sarah would be here sometime after four, as usual.

“This won’t take too much time, will it?” he asked.

“No, no. I just want to see what you’ve got, maybe take a look outside at the terminal box.”

“What’s that?” Andrew asked.

“Where the lines come in.”

“Just so it doesn’t take too long. I have to drive up to Connecticut this afternoon.”

“No, it shouldn’t take too long, Mr. Faviola.”

Sonny looked at all the phones on every floor upstairs, commenting that this was really very old equipment, Stone Age stuff, you know, and suggesting that he could install a state-of-the-art system, at very little cost, that would make Andrew’s life much simpler. Andrew told him he didn’t want his telephone service interrupted while all this was going on — if he decided to go ahead with it — because the telephone was very important to him, he did a lot of business on the telephone. Sonny assured him that once he’d designed a system for him, the actual installation would be a very simple thing, and he could promise that at least one phone would he completely functional all the while he was working inside the building and out. He told Andrew he’d like to take a look at the terminal box now, which he guessed would be on the rear wall of the building, or perhaps on a pole outside.

The box was, in fact, on the rear wall of the building. Sonny opened it and began studying the various wires inside it, and that was when he found the slave Freddie Coulter had installed there on the last day of January.

The first thing Michael thought was that Sarah had told him.

Regan was saying that all at once everything went dead.

“We’re listening to Faviola talking to some guy about putting in a new phone system, and the guy says he’s going out back, take a look at the terminal box, and next thing you know, everything goes dead. I figured you ought to know about it right away.”

The bitch told him, Michael thought.

“So what do we do now?” Regan asked. “We turned on the backup receivers the minute everything quit, but so far we haven’t heard a thing.”

“You think they found the backups, too?”

“Who knows? These guys, the minute they find one bug, they go around tiptoeing with their fingers to their mouth.”

“I’ll talk to Freddie Coulter,” Michael said. “He may have to go in again.”

“What do we do meanwhile?” Regan asked. “Pack it in, or what?”

“Stay with it,” Michael said. “The backups may still be working.”

There was activity everywhere around them on Canal Street, tourists strolling, residents shopping, Chinamen hawking fish in baskets, souvenir sellers waving lacquered bowls and paper lanterns to the three men as they came up the street. Spring was truly here at last, and the air was virtually balmy. Andrew was walking in the middle. Petey was on his left, Bobby on his right. Petey was wearing brown. A brown suit, brown shoes, a maize-colored shirt, a brown tie. He walked with his hands behind his back, the thumbs linked. The expression on his face was extremely grave. Bobby, on the other hand, looked as though someone had just hit him with a baseball bat. He kept shaking his head in disbelief.

“Which other rooms?” he asked.

“The kitchen, the phone on the counter there,” Andrew said. “And the one upstairs in the bedroom. On the nightstand alongside the bed.”

“They all have bugs in them?”

“Yeah, what Sonny called ‘Brady bugs,’ I’ll show you what they look like when we get back to the office. There was one downstairs under the cutting table, too. In the tailor shop.”

“Is the pay phone bugged, too?” Bobby asked. “The one in the shop?”

Andrew wondered who he’d been calling from that phone.

“I don’t think so. But the bug under the table could pick up anything in the room.”

“How long has this shit been in place?” Petey asked.

“Sonny didn’t know. This thing he found out back, in the terminal box, is something called a ‘slave.’ It takes the signal from the bug, does something to it, sends it out again to whoever’s listening.”

“Who do you think’s listening?” Petey said.

“Who the fuck knows?” Andrew said.

“That meeting about Moreno...”

“Yeah.”

“In the conference room? We were talking some pretty heavy stuff there,” Bobby said.

“How about when Rudy died?” Petey said. “When we were discussing the whole damn...”

“I know.”

“This is very serious.”

“I’m tryin’a think what else we talked about,” Bobby said. “On the phone. In the conference room. You mind if I smoke?” he asked, and without waiting for Andrew’s answer, pulled a package of Camels from his breast pocket, tapped a cigarette loose, popped it into his mouth, and flipped open his lighter. Andrew didn’t object. They were outdoors, and this was serious business.

“Anyway,” he said, “Sonny yanked out the slave and all the bugs, so nothing’s operational anymore.”

“How’d they get in there, is what I’d like to know.”

“You let any people in there could’ve done this thing?” Bobby asked.

“You crazy?”

“Well, who’s been up there, for example?”

He was puffing frantically on the cigarette now, clouds of gray smoke trailing behind them as they walked. A little girl in a pale blue dress, running by with a boy younger than she was, stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, pointed her finger at Bobby, and squealed, “You’re gonna get cancer!”

“Get lost,” Bobby said.

“Cancer, cancer,” the little girl chanted, and ran off with the younger boy, who gigglingly picked up the chant, “Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer...”

“Fucking brats,” Bobby said.

“What about the bedroom phone?” Petey asked.

“I told you.”

“Ever talk business on it?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“The kitchen phone?”

“Most of the business is on the phone in the conference room.”

“You ever talk business with any of your girlfriends?” Bobby asked.

“No.”

“You may have said something you didn’t realize,” Bobby said, and shrugged, and stamped out his cigarette, and immediately lighted another one.

“I didn’t tell anyone anything, don’t worry about that,” Andrew said. “I’m more worried about the phone in the fucking conference room!”

“Andrew, who are these girls?” Petey asked solemnly and gently, sounding very much like a priest in a confession box.

“Why do you want to know?”

“’Cause somebody put a hundred fuckin’ bugs in,” Bobby said.

“None of these girls put...”

“How do you know one of them ain’t a cop?” Bobby said, puffing furiously again.

“I know none of them are cops.”

“For Christ’s sake, none of them are cops,” Petey said. “Would Andrew be dating a fuckin’ cop?”

“You sure of that?” Bobby asked.

“Yes, I’m sure,” Andrew said.

“Because, Andrew, I mean no disrespect,” Bobby said, recognizing he was treading dangerous ground here. “But if the place got bugged once, it can get bugged again. Your father’s in jail because there was a bug in a place he never thought there could be one.”

Andrew listened.

“Tell us who these girls are, we’ll ask around,” Bobby said. “Quiet, no fuss. We’ll just ask around. See who’s who and what’s what, okay? No disrespect intended.”

“None taken,” Andrew said. “But I don’t want anybody asking around. I’ll do my own asking.”

“I meant no disrespect,” Bobby said.

“I told you none was taken.”

“We were talking murder that day,” Petey said softly.

“I know that.”

“We were talkin’ about killing that fuckin’ spic!” Bobby said.

“This is very serious,” Petey said again.

“He was killed in a foreign country by two foreigners we never heard of,” Andrew said. “We’ve got nothing to do with it.”

“You ordered the hit,” Petey said gently.

“I’m not worried about it.”

“Well, I’m not a lawyer,” Petey said, “but when those cocksuckers get hold of anything we say in private, they have ways of makin’ a fuckin’ federal case of it. Literally.”

“They put together three felonies,” Bobby said, “we’re...”

“Two and a mis,” Petey said.

“We’re lookin’ at twenty-five for openers.”

“We don’t know what they have,” Andrew said. “The bugs could’ve gone in yesterday, for all we know.”

“Or they could’ve been in there forever, for all we know,” Petey said.

“They could be makin’ their case right this fuckin’ minute,” Bobby said.

The men fell silent. They walked in the sunshine on a bright spring day, each separately wishing those bugs had never, been installed, each separately wondering what they’d said while someone somewhere out there was listening. They were silent until they reached Broome Street. As they turned the corner, Bobby said, “You think they flipped that fuckin’ Benny, used to press clothes? Or that new kid, whatever his name is?”

“Mario,” Petey said.

“I don’t think they flipped any pants pressers,” Andrew said.

“Then how’d they get in there to do all that?” Bobby said.

“Bugs all over the place,” Petey said. “How’d they get in?”

“You didn’t give a key to any of these broads, did you?” Bobby asked.

“No,” Andrew said.

“’Cause they had to’ve got in some way.”

“They have ways of gettin’ in,” Petey said. “They’re bigger thieves than, thieves.”

“Be easier with a key, though.”

“I didn’t give anyone a key.”

“Be funny one of them was a cop, wouldn’t it?” Bobby said.

“Yeah, very,” Petey said drily.

“Throw her down a fuckin’ sewer,” Bobby said, and looked across the street. “Anybody want a hot dog?” he asked.

On Wednesday morning, Michael advised her to keep her usual Wednesday afternoon tryst with Faviola. If it was true that she hadn’t told him about the existence of the backup listening devices...

“It’s true,” she said.

“I hope so. Otherwise...”

“Don’t threaten me again,” she warned.

“I own you,” Michael said.

She was here now. Owned. Apprehensive at first. Frightened. Expectant. Certain she would be repelled by this man she now knew was a gangster. But lying here in his arms, he did not seem to be a gangster. He seemed only to be Andrew. And she wondered again what kind of woman she was.

Unless you want your daughter to learn what kind of woman you are.

Michael’s words.

What kind of woman?

I’m not cut out for this role, she thought.

I wasn’t meant to be an informer, the garment doesn’t quite fit me. Lying here in his arms, I want to shout my treachery aloud. What will I do if he ever starts telling me he’s murdered someone? Or ordered someone’s murder, like father, like son, I’ve had a dozen men killed, didn’t you know, Sarah? Will I scream No, don’t tell me, it’s a trap, I’m a trap, don’t say anything, don’t trust me, don’t love me, I’m an informer! Will I try to save him from himself and from me?

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I’m afraid people are still listening to us,” she said.

She was whispering.

“Nobody’s listening,” he said. “Not anymore. I told you. We ripped everything out.”

Both of them whispering now.

Get him to talk, she thought. Get him to talk or lose my daughter.

“But who would do such a thing?” she said. “If a person’s not involved in criminal activity...”

“I’m not.”

“Well, of course, you’re not. So why would anyone want to put a bug in here?”

Get him to talk.

“A lot of business is conducted in this building,” he said, “on the phones in this building. We have competitors. I wouldn’t be surprised if any one of them was ruthless enough to do something like this.”

“Then this is just a business thing, is that right?”

“Strictly business, yes.”

“It has nothing to do with... well, when you think of bugs, you think of police. Or spies.”

“Business spies, yes.”

“But not the police.”

“No,” he said, “not the police,” and looked at her intently for a moment. “My associates are very concerned about this,” he said. “About how anyone could have got in here to bug the place.”

“Your associates,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Carter and Goldsmith?”

“Well, the people I work with. They think someone must have got hold of a key somehow. Someone I know personally. Got hold of a key and turned it over to whoever got in here to bug the place. That’s what my associates think.”

She realized all at once that he was accusing her. She was the personal someone who’d somehow stolen a key and delivered it to her husband’s detectives so they could later listen to her making love to him. The irony was so delicious, she almost burst out laughing. He was watching her intently again, waiting for some kind of answer. Well, she thought, how would Sarah Welles, the innocent schoolteacher, respond to such a bizarre notion? Never mind the Sarah who’s here as a spy. How would I myself react if the man I love accused me of working with his competitors?

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and began walking to where her clothes were draped over the back of the easy chair. She was reaching for her panties when he said, “What are you doing?”

“Getting dressed.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like being told...”

“I’m trying to protect you!”

“Oh?” she said, and yanked up her panties and let the elastic go with an angry thwack. “And here I thought you were suggesting that I unlocked the door for whoever came in here to bug your phones,” she said, and reached for her bra.

“I’m only repeating what was said to me.”

“By whom?”

“One of my business associates.”

“Who?”

“Never mind who. He suggested...”

“What? That I stole a key?”

“That somebody might have, not necessarily...”

“Anyway, how do they know about me, these people?” she asked, reaching behind her to clasp the bra. “Did you tell them about me?”

“They know I have girlfriends.”

“Oh? Is it still plural? Still more than...?”

“They know I used to see a lot of girls. All they suggested was that one of them...”

“Not me, pal.”

“... might have...”

“Try one of your...”

“... got hold of...”

“... teenagers!”

“... my keys, which you have to admit is a...”

“No, it’s not a possibility! Not as it concerns me,” she said angrily, and stepped into her skirt, and pulled it to her waist and was fastening it when he came to her and took her by the shoulders.

“Get away from me!” she said.

“I don’t want anybody hurting you.”

“You’re hurting me right this minute!”

“I’m sorry, but you have to hear what I’m saying.”

“Let go of me.”

“Only if you promise to listen.”

“Just let...”

“All right, all right,” he said sharply, and released her. She reached immediately for her blouse.

“Listen to me,” he said.

“I’m listening,” she said.

But she was putting on the blouse.

“They suggested two things. One...”

“They? I thought this was only one of your associates. Is it more than one? Do they all think I stole your keys and...?”

“It’s just this one person.”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter who.”

“I’d like to know who my accuser is, if you don’t mind. You owe me at least...”

“Bobby, all right? His name is Bobby.”

“Bobby what?”

“Just Bobby, okay? He said maybe somebody I know is working for one of our competitors.”

“You tell Bobby I’m not working with any of your competitors. Is that what you think, too, Andrew? That I’m some kind of company spy?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Well, you tell Bobby he doesn’t have to worry about me anymore. Because the minute I walk out that door, you won’t be seeing me again.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

“You do that,” he said, “and Bobby’ll know he was right.”

She was slinging her shoulder bag. She turned to him, clearly puzzled, her eyes squinted, her brow furrowed.

“We find the bugs,” he said, “and next thing you know, you’re walking out on me. Bobby’ll say that sounds very suspicious.”

“Really?” she said, and walked to him, and stood very close to him. “Then maybe you ought to tell Bobby just why I’m walking out,” she said, “whoever Bobby may be. The fast thing you can tell him, in fact, is that you don’t trust me enough to tell me his last name, if he has a last name. And you can...”

“Triani,” he said. “All right? Bobby Triani.”

“Thanks,” she said, “but you’re a little late. You can tell him next,” she said, “that you don’t trust me enough to believe I come here every damn Wednesday because I love you and want to be with you and not because I’m hanging bugs all over the place. You can tell him, too,” she said, “that I’m walking out because I didn’t hear what I wanted to hear from you, I didn’t hear a single word of apology for getting me involved in your damn corporate maneuverings. I didn’t once hear you say, ‘Gee, I’m sorry that strangers were listening to everything you said to me, all those things you said to me, complete strangers hearing all those things. I’m sorry you landed in the middle of all this, whatever it is, I’m really sorry about that, because I love you to death and I wouldn’t want you hurt for anything in the world. You can tell Bobby Triani that’s why I’m walking out,” she said. “Because you never once told me you’re sorry you got me into this whole damn mess!”

She realized all at once that she was not acting. This was not the Sarah Welles who was “owned” by the district attorney. This was the Sarah Welles who’d lost her heart to a gangster, a mobster, a hoodlum, a bum. And she was talking about something quite other than business spying. She stood motionless, looking at him, tears streaming down her face.

“I know you had nothing to do with this,” he said, and took her in his arms.

“Serve you right if I did,” she said, sobbing.

From where Regan and Lowndes sat listening in the room on Grand Street, they heard only her muffled sobs now, and figured she was weeping into his shoulder. But they had heard and recorded all of the earlier conversation as well, because whoever had yanked out the Bradys and the slave had missed at least the one-watt transmitter Freddie Coulter had installed as a wall receptacle last February.

Heather looked as if she were already flying. Her new haircut was swept back and away from her face to give an appearance of windblown flight. In exactly forty minutes, she would be boarding the plane to the Dominican Republic, where she would get her overnight divorce before flying back to New York the day after tomorrow. She was in constant motion already, though, tapping her fingers on the tabletop, jiggling her foot, spasmodically sipping at the gin and tonic she’d ordered.

“I wish you were coming with me,” she told Sarah.

The sisters sat in a small lounge near the security gate. There weren’t many people flying to the Caribbean this time of year. Most of the passengers moving through the X-ray machines looked like natives going home.

“I keep asking; myself why I’m the one doing this,” Heather said. “Why isn’t Doug going down for the divorce? He’s the one who wants to marry Miss Felicity Twit in such a hurry, isn’t he? He’s the one yearning to be so goddamn free of me. But on the other hand, there’s something fitting about my being the one who does the actual thing, who gets the actual papers signed and sealed down there. I’m the aggrieved party, do you see, Sarah?”

“Yes,” Sarah said, and wondered if she should tell her sister about Andrew and the awful situ—

“I don’t want people thinking Doug’s the one leaving me because of something I did,” Heather said. “He’s the son of a bitch who broke the contract, the covenant, whatever. He’s the one who fouled the marriage bed, Sarah, not me. If he went down to Santo Domingo, people would think I’m so reluctant to give him the damn divorce, he’s got to run down there himself to get it. Am I making any sense to you?”

“Yes, I understand completely,” Sarah said.

Everywhere around them urgent messages erupted from hidden speakers, announcing arrivals and delays, boardings and departures. Sarah wondered if on a Sunday like this one, she would soon be sitting in this lounge again, sipping drinks with her sister, who’d be seeing her off instead. Or would Michael, as the injured party, be the one to fly south for the divorce?

The injured party.

She wondered who, after all was said and done, would truly be the injured party.

She could think of no one but Mollie.

“... laughing at me,” Heather was saying. “That’s the one thing I couldn’t stand. She’s so young, you know, that’s the thing of it. I wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d chosen someone closer to his own age. But nineteen? Jesus! Well, she’s twenty now,” Heather said, and sighed deeply. “Twenty to my thirty-two, where’s the competition? Closing fast on thirty-three, in fact. You don’t know how lucky you are, Sarah.”

“Heather,” she said, and paused, and then said, “There’s something I ought to tell you.”

Heather looked at her over the rim of her glass.

“Michael and I...”

“No, please don’t,” Heather said. “That’s all I need right now. Please, Sarah, no.”

“All right,” Sarah said, and picked up her own drink, and looked away because she was afraid she might burst into tears. Heather kept staring at her across the small round table.

“What is it?” she asked at last.

“I don’t want to burden you.”

“You’ve already burdened me. What is it?!’

“Trouble.”

“What kind of trouble? Tell me.”

Sarah told her.

Heather listened intently, one eye on the clock. The airline announcements riddled Sarah’s recitation, making it difficult for her to complete a single sentence without being interrupted by what sounded like bulletins from the front. Heather finished her drink. She did not ask for another one. She listened wide-eyed to what Sarah was saying, her face expressionless, only the eyes revealing a mixture of horror and disbelief. A final boarding announcement exploded like a mortar shell, but Sarah was finished now. She sat looking down at the wedding band on her left hand.

“When did this start?” Heather asked.

“St. Bart’s.”

“Not the handsome kid under the angel’s-trumpet?”

Sarah nodded.

“What do you plan to do?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Does Michael suspect?”

She had left a few salient points out of her story. She had neglected to mention, for example, that Andrew Faviola was a criminal and that Michael hoped to put him behind bars. She had also left out the part about the eavesdropping warrant. She had not told her sister that every word she and Andrew uttered in that third-floor bedroom was recorded by detectives. Telling her sister she was having an affair had been bombshell enough. Heather still looked as though she’d walked into a wall.

“I don’t think he knows,” Sarah said. “Yet.”

“Do you plan to tell him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sarah, this kid’s asked you to marry him! You’ve got to decide one way or...”

“He’s not a kid. He’s twenty-eight.”

“Just a bit older than Felicity Twit, “Heather said, and grimaced. “Do you love him?”

Sarah hesitated for what seemed a very long time.

Then she said, “Yes.”

The loudspeaker erupted again, announcing the boarding of American’s flight five eighty-eight to Santo Domingo. Heather picked up her carry-on.

“I’ll get this,” Sarah said, and took the check from the table.

“You know where I’m staying,” Heather said, and leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. “If you want to talk, call me.”

“Okay, honey. Be careful.”

“Wish me luck,” Heather said, and gently touched Sarah’s face, and slung the carry-on over her shoulder, and went swiftly toward the security gate.

Sarah watched as she put her bag onto the moving belt and then stepped through the detector frame. She remembered suddenly a playhouse she and her sister had built of branches and twigs when they were respectively eight and six years old.

“It has no door, Sarah,” Heather had complained.

Her sister stepped through the doorless frame now, moving toward her bag on the other end of the belt, slinging the bag again, and then stepping out briskly into her future.

Sarah watched her until she was out of sight down the long corridor.

A river ran through the property upon which Anthony Faviola had built his sprawling Connecticut estate. There were trout in the river, but Tessie Faviola would not allow anyone to fish for them. That was because she personally fed the fish every day, and she felt it would be unfair to first throw bread in the water for them and then bait a hook and take advantage of their tameness. Tessie also felt it was unfair that her birthday always followed so closely after Mother’s Day. It meant that unless they were reminded, some people might forget a gift on one or the other of the two reasons to celebrate her existence. Petey Bardo’s personal opinion, Tessie was a tyrant. All fuckin’ mothers were tyrants, you wanted to know, his own included.

It was still chilly on this third Sunday in May, so Petey was wearing a brown woolen sweater over his brown swimming trunks. Bobby Triani, sitting beside him on the dock, dangling his feet in the very cold water, was wearing a snug blue swimsuit and a white mesh shirt, his muscles bulging. Bobby was smoking. Petey had quit smoking three years ago, when he’d suffered a mild heart attack. He still believed the reason he’d been passed over for underboss was the fuckin’ heart attack. Rudy drops dead of a heart attack, they’re gonna fill his shoes with somebody else has heart trouble? No way. Instead, they gave it to Bobby here, who didn’t know his ass from his elbow about the business, except where it came to stolen property.

Petey found it difficult to be near people who smoked, but he said nothing about it now because there were more important things to discuss with the fuckin’ underboss. The women were all up at the house, cooking, running after the kids. Andrew was up there, too, bullshitting more with his cousin than with his own two sisters, as usual. Ike and Mike, they look alike. Petey sat shivering in bathing trunks and a woolen sweater, and thinking the only good thing about a fuckin’ brook, you knew it wasn’t bugged.

“I think it’s dangerous the way Andrew’s treating this so lightly, “he said. “It’s one thing he found the bugs and yanked them out. It’s another how it could’ve happened.”

Bobby nodded.

“I don’t mean any disrespect to him...”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bobby said, and waved this aside with the hand holding the cigarette.

“But I really think we should find out who these broads are he’s boffin. What I’m worried about,” he said, glancing at the fish darting below, “is that they got in there once, they can get in again. We got heavy stuff comin’ down the pike very soon, Bobby. Even if we change where we meet, if one of Andrew’s girls is workin’ for them, those cocksuckers’ll follow us wherever we go.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said.

“They got somebody in there boffin’ Andrew, they can put bugs in wherever we go, hear everything we’re saying.”

“They ain’t allowed to do that, are they?” Bobby asked.

“Do what?”

“Let a cop sleep with somebody? I’ll bet there’s a rule about that. About an undercover sleepin’ with somebody. It’s the same as a vice cop takes off his clothes in front of a hooker, the bust goes out the window.”

“Who says it has to be a cop?”

“I thought you said an undercover.”

“No, I said whoever he’s boffin’. It could be somebody they flipped,” Petey said. “A hooker, a junkie, somebody they got the whole nine yards on, she’ll go down on the Pope, they ask her to.”

“Yeah, that’s possible.”

“She’s in there workin’ for them, they’ll be under our skin forever,” Petey said.

“You know,” Bobby said, “I told him we should ask around...”

“I know you did.”

“Find out what’s what.”

“I know.”

“He said forget it, he’d do his own askin’.”

“I know.”

“He’s the fuckin’ boss,” Bobby said, and shrugged.

The men sat in silence on the riverbank. Trout splashed in the water. From far above them, the children’s voices came rolling down the sloping lawn. Petey dipped one foot in the water. It was freezing cold. This wasn’t even the end of May; summer was a long way off.

“The other hand,” he said, “sometimes you gotta do things are for the boss’s own good.”

The garage where Billy Lametta kept the company car was on Delancey Street, over near the East River. Bobby found him there the very next day, in his shirtsleeves, the sleeves rolled up, polishing the Lincoln, a cigarette dangling from his mouth as he worked. Bobby admired people who still had the courage to smoke.

“Hey, Billy,” he said, lighting up a cigarette himself. “How’s it goin’?”

“Okay, Mr. Triani,” Billy said. “How was your weekend?”

“Very nice,” Bobby said. “We went to the country.”

“Great day for the country.”

“Beautiful,” Bobby said.

“So what brings you down here?”

“Few things I wanted to talk to you about,” Bobby said.

The polishing cloth hesitated for just an instant. Billy was wondering what he’d done wrong to rate a visit from the underboss.

“Always glad to see you,” he said, and resumed running the cloth over the shiny black metal of the Lincoln. But he had begun sweating.

“First,” Bobby said, “I know this ain’t Christmas, but you been doin’ a good job, and there’s nothin’ wrong with a little bonus in May, is there?”

He reached into his jacket pocket and took from it a fat roll of bills fastened with a rubber band. The outside bill was a C-note. Billy could see that at once.

“Gee, hey, that’s nice of you, Mr. Triani,” he said, “but Mr. Faviola takes good care of me, you don’t have to worry.”

“Get yourself a new suit, whatever,” Bobby said, and nudged him with the roll of bills.

“No, really, I wouldn’t want Mr. Faviola to think...”

“I’ll tell him about it, don’t worry. Here,” he said. “Take it. It’s two thousand bucks.”

Billy’s eyes widened.

“Take it,” Bobby said.

Billy hesitated.

“Go on, take it,” Bobby said, and tucked it into Billy’s shirt pocket.

“Well... thanks, Mr. Triani, I appreciate it.”

“Hey,” Bobby said, and grinned expansively.

Billy was wondering what he wanted from him. He kept polishing the car. The garage was a place where a lot of so-called black cars were kept. These were either Caddies or Lincoln Continentals like the one Billy was polishing, but they were mostly owned by limo companies instead of privately. The difference between the black cars and the stretch limos was that the limos cost thirty-five an hour to hire whereas the smaller cars cost only twenty-eight. Billy was salaried, more or less; he received a legitimate check from Carter-Goldsmith Investments every two weeks. In addition, Faviola slipped him a coupla hundred bucks whenever the mood struck him. Triani had just stuffed a month’s salary into his shirt pocket.

“Been using the car much?” Bobby asked.

So that was it. Triani thought Billy had been using the company car for his own pleasure. But then why had he slipped him the two K?

“Yeah, well, you know,” he said, “Mr. Faviola’s a busy man.”

“What I want to ask you, Billy...”

Here it comes, Billy thought.

“You been driving many girls in the car?”

“Hey, no, Mr. Triani,” Billy said at once, “I never use the car on my own. This is a company car, I wouldn’t dream of...”

“For Mr. Faviola, I mean,” Bobby said, and winked.

Billy looked at him.

“You drive girls for him?” Bobby asked, and winked again.

“Well, yeah, every now and then. Not too many nowadays, though. Nowadays, he’s got like a steady.”

“You know the names of these girls?”

“Well... yeah. I guess.”

Billy still didn’t know where this was going. Was Triani asking to be fixed up with one of these girls? Was that what the two thou was for? Billy waited.

“You know their addresses, too?” Bobby asked.

“Yeah, I wrote them in my book. ’Cause they were regulars I used to pick up and drop off all the time. Nowadays, though, like I said, there’s only the...”

“I want all their names and addresses,” Bobby said.

“I don’t know all their home addresses.”

“The ones you know.”

“’Cause some of them, I only picked up after work.”

“Give me the ones you know.”

“The work addresses, too?”

“Yes.”

“Well... I better get a piece of paper from the office.”

Billy dropped the polishing cloth on the hood of the car and walked to a corner of the garage where there was a small, glassed-in office. The driver of a long white stretch that looked like a wedding limo tooted his horn and came rolling in. Bobby watched a short Spanish guy in a chauffeur’s uniform get out of the stretch and saunter toward the men’s room. When Billy came back, he was carrying a pencil and a lined yellow pad.

“Okay, let’s see now,” he said, and went to where his jacket was draped over a railing and took a black notebook from it. Thumbing through the book, he casually asked, “Why do you need this, Mr. Triani?”

Bobby looked at him.

Billy simply turned away, avoiding Triani’s gaze, leaned over the hood of the car, and kept leafing through the pages. “There’s this redhead he used to see all the time,” he said. “On my block, she’s the winner.” He was still thinking Triani was looking to lay one of these girls. “She lives in Brooklyn, but she works here in the city, in the Time-Life Building,” he said, and wrote the name Oona Halligan and then both addresses. “There’s also this girl in Great Neck,” he said, “her name is Angela Cannieri, she’s got black hair and tits out to here,” and wrote down a single address for her. Bobby watched as he copied more names and addresses onto the yellow pad, Maggie Dooley and Alice Reardon, both living and working in Manhattan, Mary Jane O’Brien and Blanca Rodriguez, with home addresses in the Bronx and work addresses in Manhattan, and “the only one he’s been seeing lately,” Billy said, and wrote the name Mrs. Welles on the pad, and then her address on Eighty-First Street.

“What’s her first name?” Bobby asked.

“I don’t know. That’s all he gave me.”

“Mrs. Welles.”

“Yeah.”

“Where does she work?”

“I don’t know. I usually pick her up somewhere around Fifty-Seventh, Fifty-Ninth, the neighborhood there.”

“You think she works someplace around there?”

“I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t know. I never pick her up at the Eighty-First Street address no more, that was only the first time. I usually drop her off someplace in the neighborhood there. I pick her up midtown, drop her off uptown. She’s married, is what I guess it is.”

“Mm,” Bobby said. “Who’s this Angela Cannieri in Great Neck? Tony Cannieri’s daughter?”

“I don’t ask those kind of questions,” Billy said.

“I’ll bet it’s Tony’s daughter,” Bobby said. “He’s fuckin’ a spic, too, huh? Rodriguez. That’s a spic, ain’t it?”

“Well, I told you, Mr. Triani, all I do is pick ’em up and drop ’em off. I don’t ask questions whose daughters they are or whether they’re spies or Chinese.”

“One of them is Chinese?” Bobby asked, surprised, scanning the list of names again.

“No, no, I’m just saying.”

“You got phone numbers, too?” Bobby asked. “For these girls?”

There it is, Billy thought. Just what I figured.

“No, sir,” he said, “I don’t. But maybe Mr. Faviola can help you there.”

Bobby looked at him again.

“I don’t want Mr. Faviola to know you gave me these names, capeesh?” he said. He reached into his pocket and took out another roll of banded bills, smaller this time. “It might piss him off at you, he found out,” Bobby said, and tucked the roll into the shirt pocket with the other one. “You want to drive me home now?” he asked, and grinned like a shark.

Up here on the roof, Luretta could see the George Washington Bridge spanning the river, see the lights on the Jersey cliffs, see clouds scudding by on a stiff breeze. She sometimes thought the roof up here was the safest place in all Washington Heights. Wasn’t safe in the streets, wasn’t safe in the apartment, wasn’t safe anywhere but here on the roof. Night like tonight, quiet night like tonight, she could stand here near the parapet and look out over the river if she liked, or else move to the other side of the roof and look down at the lights of the cars moving by on the streets below. Up here she was queen of her own kingdom and she could do whatever she felt like doing.

You went to the movies, you saw men in tuxedos and women in long shimmering gowns, they’d be standing on a terrace someplace in midtown Manhattan, looking out at all the glittering lights of the city, sipping martinis in long-stemmed glasses. Here on the roof, Luretta sipped Diet Pepsi from a can, and looked out at the lights on the Jersey side, but she knew that someplace in New York there really were people like the ones in the movies, most of them white. Only time she’d ever seen black people in tuxedos and gowns was when her cousin Albert got married. Luretta had worn a pretty dress her mother’d made for her, this was before she’d started taking up with the Hundred Neediest, dragging in any junkie who’d share her bed and call her darling.

She knew her mother was doing crack.

Suspected it a month ago, learned it for sure this past Tuesday, when she found an empty vial in the bathroom. Knew it wasn’t Dusty’s because Dusty was on heroin, Dusty wouldn’t bother himself with something cost only seventy-five cents a rock, oh no, Dusty was a big man hooked on the big stuff. So here was her mother with a baby five months gone inside her, sleeping with a junkie and smoking crack that’d hook the baby, too, sure as shit. So what was Luretta supposed to do?

Up here on the roof, she had no worries.

Up here, she could feel the cool breeze touching her cheek.

Could look out over her kingdom.

Smile a little.

Little enough to smile about these days.

A tugboat was moving up the river. Chugging along, moving under the bridge, lights strung like diamonds in the sky.

The door to the roof opened.

“Thought you might be up here!”

His voice came like a cannon shot, exploding on the stillness of the night, spilling diamonds from the sky. Startled, she dropped the can of soda. It fell to the roof at her feet, rolled away trailing syrup. She started, to move from the parapet, attempting a flanking maneuver, trying to pass him and get to the metal door behind him. But he recognized what she was trying to do, and moved diagonally to intercept her, so that she was still standing with her back to the roof’s edge, the low parapet behind her.

“You mama wants you,” he said.

“What for?”

“Needs you t’pick up suppin f’her.”

Stepping closer to her. Forcing her to move a few steps back again, closer to the parapet at the roof’s edge.

“Pick up what?”

Her heart pounding.

“Suppin she needs.”

A step closer to her.

She could smell alcohol on his breath.

“What you got under that dress, girl?” he said.

“Get out of my way,” she said.

“Sweet li’l tiddies under that dress?” he said, and reached for her.

She shoved out at him instinctively, wanting only to push him out of her way, wanting only to get past him to the stairs. In her dream world, in her twinkling magic kingdom up here on the roof, he reacted by sidestepping at once — which he did — doing a sort of twisted little dance step that took him out of her way, but sent him spiraling toward the edge of the roof instead. In her dream world, here in her glittering magic realm where men in tuxedos sipped martinis with women in long shimmering gowns, he lost his balance, flailed at the air, looked startled, and then went over. One moment he was there, silhouetted against the lights of the bridge and the Jersey shore, and the next he was gone.

In her dream world, he didn’t make a sound as he fell.

No long trailing scream like in the movies.

Nothing.

It was as if he’d magically disappeared.

But that was in her dream world.

In real life, he recovered his balance at once and came at her snarling, ripping the front of her dress before she could break away, clawing at her breasts like a wild animal. She hit him with her clenched fists, and screamed, and tore free of his grasp at last, and went running down to the street, without stopping at the apartment to see what her mother needed, because she suspected that what she needed was crack.

In the street, walking on this balmy springtime night humming with voices, covering her torn dress with her spread hands, she began sobbing gently.

Detective/First Grade Randolph J. Rollins liked dealing with these people. He didn’t consider it working for these people, he considered it dealing with them. He knew cops in his precinct who were looking the other way when it came to serious crimes like dope. Rollins had never in his life taken a nickel for squaring a dope rap. These people he dealt with knew better than ever to ask him to square any kind of criminal offense, even a parking ticket. But when they came to him with something like this, find out if any of these broads are police informants, Rollins was happy to flash the tin in pursuit of the gold, which in this instance was exactly six thousand dollars.

Rollins knew it was next to impossible to flip anyone who wasn’t in deep shit to begin with. No one was going to become an informer unless you had something on him that could send him to jail for a long, long time. Better to sleep with the enemy than to sleep behind bars, no? So he ran a computer check to see if any of the women on the list had ever run into the law in any serious way. The only person with a felony arrest, and a subsequent suspended sentence, was a person named Oona Halligan, who turned out to be an absolutely gorgeous twentysomething redhead. He fell into step beside her as she came out of the Time-Life Building at ten minutes past five p.m. on the eighteenth of May, and showed his shield and said, “Good evening, I’m Detective Rollins, I wonder if I can ask you a few questions.”

The girl looked at him in surprise and then said, “How do you know who I am?”

Rollins explained that the super at her building in Brooklyn had pointed her out to him this morning, but he hadn’t wanted to approach her just then because he knew she was on her way to work, and he thought this might be a more convenient time. She still looked a bit puzzled, probably wondering how he’d learned where she worked, the super didn’t know that, but he jumped in before she could question him further, and told her they were investigating a burglary in the building next door to hers, and he wanted to know if she’d seen anything or heard anything suspicious on the night of May fourteenth, this past Friday night, which she hadn’t, but which was all part of the bullshit. He then got down to brass tacks.

“Miss Halligan,” he said, “please forgive me for asking all these questions, but I have to fill out a report — in triplicate, no less,” he said, and rolled his eyes, “and I do need the answers.”

Oona had a cocktail date all the way downtown with a multimillionaire stockbroker, to hear him tell it, and she didn’t want to waste any more time here with a fat-assed detective investigating a dumb burglary in the building next door, of which there were probably hundreds in her neighborhood.

She said, “Well, if you make it fast, because I have a date.”

Which didn’t surprise him, her looks.

“Miss Halligan,” he said, “can you tell me what sort of work you do?”

“I’m a receptionist with a firm called Blue Banana Cosmetics.”

“Really?” he said.

The name of the company amused him. Blue Banana Cosmetics.

“Yes,” she said, and looked at her watch.

“How long have you been working there?” he asked.

“Since March,” she said.

“And before that?”

“I worked for an accounting firm.”

“Named?”

“Haskins, Heller, and Fein.”

“Where?”

“Here in the city.”

“How long did you work for them?”

“Six months. I got fired because I told the boss his way of doing something was stupid. Or dumb, I guess I actually said,” she said, and looked at her watch again.

“Ever been arrested?” he asked.

“Never.”

“Sure? I can check.”

“Hey, what is this?” she said.

“Routine investigation,” he said. “Not even a minor violation? Speeding? Parking in a no-parking...”

“I’ve had traffic tickets, yes.”

“Any DUI violations?”

“No. What?”

“Driving under the...”

“Oh. No. Never.”

“Nothing serious, then?”

“Nothing.”

“I can check,” he said again.

“Okay,” she said, and sighed heavily. “I was arrested when I was sixteen for possession of an ounce of a controlled substance. Marijuana. I got off with an ACD because it was a first offense and I was only sixteen and it was only an ounce. Okay?”

“Ever work for the police?” he asked.

“No. What?”

“Any strings attached to that ACD?”

An ACD was an Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal. Rollins knew there’d have been no strings attached to it. This was a bullshit violation they were discussing.

“I don’t know what you’re suggesting,” Oona said. “I told you. This was just a lousy ounce of...”

“Were any deals offered?”

He knew no deals would have been offered.

“Of course not! For an ounce of marijuana?”

“Ever go in anywhere wearing a wire?”

“What?”

“Miss Halligan, I’m a police officer. If you were ever an informant for the department, the information is safe with me.”

“What?” she said.

“Were you? An informant? Ever?”

“I thought this was about a burglary next...”

“It is,” he said. “But we have reason to believe a member of the force may be involved,” he said, lying. “I’m telling you this in strictest confidence.”

Oona blinked.

Gorgeous green eyes wide open now.

“I knew about the adjournment,” Rollins said, lying.

She kept staring at him.

“You’ve never done any work for the police, is that right?”

“Never.”

“Wouldn’t know any bent cops, would you?”

“I don’t know any cops at all. I don’t even remember the names of the ones who arrested me.”

“In that case, thank you, Miss Halligan, sorry to have bothered you.”

“Not at all,” she said, and looked at him, still baffled, and then looked at her watch again, and hurried off toward the subway kiosk on the corner.

He figured she was clean.

Rollins didn’t get to the end of his list until that Friday, the twenty-first of May. He showed his shield to the doorman of the building on Eighty-First Street, asked him what his name was...

“Luis,” the doorman said.

... and then told him that everything they said in the next few minutes was to be held in strictest confidence, did he understand that? This was an ongoing police investigation, and he was not to reveal this visit to anyone, was that clear?

Luis almost wet his pants.

His sister was an illegal alien from the Philippines.

He nodded and assured Rollins that he would not tell a soul the police had been here.

Rollins went inside and looked at the mailboxes, jotting down several names at random. He came back out again and started asking questions about the various nameplates in the boxes, really wanting to know only about the nameplate for 12C, which read M. WELLES. He tossed in a few red herrings to keep Luis off base, and then he said, “How about Welles? Know who’s in apartment 12C?”

“Oh, yes,” Luis said. “Mr. and Mrs. Welles and their daughter.”

“What’s her first name?”

“Mollie,” Luis said.

“Mrs. Mollie Welles?”

“No, no, tha’s dee daughter,” Luis said.

“What’s the mother’s first name,” Rollins asked, closing in for the kill.

“I don’ know,” Luis said.

“How, about the husband? Know his name?”

“Michael,” Luis said. “Michael Welles.”

And clear out of the blue, he added, “He worrs for the DA’s Office.”

“What it is,” Rollins was explaining to them, “he’s the deputy chief DA in the Organized Crime Unit.”

In the rearview mirror, Petey exchanged glances with Bobby.

The three men were driving through Queens in Petey’s car, which he knew was not bugged because he had it checked by a mechanic every Friday. He’d had it checked yesterday, and he knew it was clean. He almost wished it was bugged, this kind of information. Andrew Faviola fucking a DA’s wife, this was information he’d love them to hear downtown. Rollins was sitting on the front seat beside him. Bobby Triani was in back. The car was a new Cadillac Seville with dual air bags and a telephone. It was a gift from a person for whom Petey had done a favor, like having somebody break his wife’s boyfriend’s legs. Rollins had one arm draped over the back of the seat. He kept turning his attention from Bobby to Petey and back again.

“I checked the minute this spic doorman told me where he worked. Turns out he investigated and tried a very big case five years ago, put away the whole Lombardi Crew, six of them altogether. They’re still doing OCCA time.”

“What’s his name again?” Bobby asked.

“Welles. Michael Welles.”

“Michael Welles,” Petey said.

“Yeah.”

“The Lombardi Crew.”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s possible,” Bobby said.

Rollins knew better than to ask what was possible.

“That she could be the one,” Petey supplied.

Rollins still said nothing.

“You’re sure she’s this guy’s wife, huh?” Bobby said. “The one done the Lombardi Crew?”

“Positive.”

“What’s her name?”

“I still don’t have it.”

Bobby sighed.

Petey sighed, too, and nodded to Bobby in the rearview mirror.

Bobby began peeling off hundred-dollar bills.

“Thanks, Randy,” he said, “you done a good job.”

Rollins liked dealing with these people.

They gave good weight for the pound, and they always paid cash on the barrelhead.

“I hear you’re serious about some girl,” Ida said.

She looked a lot like her father, with Rudy’s strong nose and ink-black hair. Andrew could never be with her without thinking of the little girl she’d once been. The Sunday visits to Grandma’s house. Roller-skating with her on the sidewalk outside. Watching television together in the room Grandma had that looked as if it had come straight from Italy on a boat carrying olive oil, a small, warm, cozy room with red velvet drapes and big heavy furniture and ornately framed pictures of mustachioed men in stiff white collars and cuffs.

Whenever he came to Ida’s house on a Sunday, Andrew spent most of the time there with her. Bobby he could see any day of the week. In fact, he sometimes saw Bobby more days of the week than he could stand. Ida he saw once every couple of months, if he was lucky.

“So who is she?” she asked.

She was at the stove, tasting the tomato sauce bubbling in a pot. She wasn’t such a terrific cook, Ida. She hadn’t been a great stickball player, either, but that hadn’t stopped her from trying. She was wearing a plastic apron over the blue dress she’d worn to church this morning. The apron had the words PLEASE DON’T KISS THE COOK printed on it.

“Where’d you hear that?” he said.

“Your father wrote to me,” she said, and shrugged. “He said when you went out there, you mentioned some girl. He told me he thinks it’s serious. You and this girl.”

“No, I never said anything like that, Ide.”

Ida wouldn’t let it go.

“You can tell me, come on,” she said.

“I’m telling you there isn’t anybody,” Andrew said, but he grinned like a schoolboy.

“Your father said it sounded serious.”

“He heard me wrong, Ida. I told him there was nobody serious. I mean it,” he said, and grinned again.

“Would you tell me if there was?” she asked, and lifted the wooden spoon from the pot and brought it to her lips, tasting the sauce.

“Sure, I would,” he said.

“Or is there a problem?” she asked.

“What kind of problem?”

“I don’t know. She could be somebody’s daughter, for example...”

“No, no.”

“Like I heard, you know, you were dating Tony Cannieri’s daughter, which I have to tell you isn’t such a good idea, Andrew, messing with somebody’s daughter who’s respected like Tony is.”

“I stopped seeing her, Ide.”

“Good. That was a wise decision,” she said, and began stirring the sauce again. “I hope it’s not somebody’s wife you’re serious about.”

“I told you I’m not serious about anyone,” he said, and grinned again.

“Yeah, yeah, come on, this is me.”

“I’m telling you, Ide.”

“’Cause that could be really dangerous, somebody’s wife.”

“It’s not anybody’s wife you would know,” Andrew said.

“Then she’s married?” Ida asked at once, and looked up straight into his face.

“Ida,” he said, putting on the serious little-boy look she knew so well, “I really can’t talk about this right now.”

“She’s married, hmm?”

“Yes.”

“But not to anybody it would be like a problem, hmm? You wouldn’t be dishonoring anyone in the...”

“No, Ida, how could I do that?”

“Listen, you dated Tony’s daughter, who knows what you could do?”

“It’s not anybody’s wife like that.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Who said there’s a problem?”

“Well, you’re so secretive about her...”

“I told you, Ida, she’s married. I can’t go blabbing all over town about her.”

“Of course not,” Ida said. “But this isn’t all over town, Andrew, this is me. Ida. Remember me, honey? Your cousin Ida? Remember?”

“No, who are you?” Andrew said, and smiled.

Ida returned the smile.

“Is she married to anyone else could be a problem?” she asked, still smiling.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I don’t know. Someone who could be a problem.”

“Like what kind of problem?”

“I don’t know. You’re the one being so secretive, I figure there’s got to be some kind of problem.”

“She’s married to a lawyer, there’s no problem,” he said.

“What kind of lawyer?”

“I don’t know. He works for the city,”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know his name, tell you the truth.”

“Well, what’s her name?”

“Come on, Ida.”

“What’s the big secret? All I’m asking you is her name.”

“I’m not ready to tell you that, Ida.”

“When will you be ready?”

“When I know.”

“When you know what?”

“Whether she’ll marry me.”

“Did you ask her already?”

“I asked her.”

“So what’s taking her so long to decide?”

“Well... she’s got a daughter, Ide. It isn’t easy.”

“How old? The daughter?”

“Twelve.”

“You’re ready to take on a twelve-year-old kid, Andrew?”

“Yeah. I am, Ida.”

“And this isn’t serious, huh?”

“It’s very serious.”

“Then you better discuss it with some other people before you make a final decision,” Ida said.

“Why?”

“Bringing someone into the family? It should be discussed with Petey. And with Bobby. They should know about this. If you really decide to marry her.”

“That’s what I’m hoping, Ida.”

“Then you have to sit down arid talk to them about it. That’s what Bobby did when he wanted to marry me. He talked not only to my father but to your father, too. And to Petey. It isn’t as if you have no obligations, Andrew. This has to be discussed, you understand what I’m saying?”

“Well, I’ll see.”

“What’s the problem?” Ida said.

“No problem.”

“I think there’s a problem,” she said, and nodded wisely.

“I’m telling you no.”

“Then sit down with them.”

“When I’m ready.”

“I think you’d better do it now. Before she says yes and surprises you.”

“I hope to God she does, Ida.”

“I hope so, too,” Ida said, and lifted another spoonful of sauce from the pot, and tasted it, and said, “But talk to your people first, hmm? Get their opinions. Show them the proper respect. You’re a very important man, Andrew. This has to be dealt with in the proper manner. Sit down with them. Talk to them,” she said, and tasted the sauce again.

“Well, I’ll see,” he said.

“Does this need salt?” she asked, and extended the wooden spoon to him.

In bed with her husband that same Sunday night, Ida said, “I don’t think he’s hiding anything from you.”

“What’d he say about the husband?” Bobby asked.

“Only that he’s a lawyer.”

“That’s all? What kind of lawyer?”

“He doesn’t know. All he knows is the guy works for the city.”

“He doesn’t know the guy’s a DA?”

“I don’t think he knows,” Ida said.

“Is he protecting her, or what?”

“I don’t think so. I told you a hundred times already I don’t think he knows. Now go to sleep.”

“Because if he knows...”

“Mm-hmm.”

“... and he’s not telling anybody about it...”

“Mm-hmm.”

“... that could be serious.”

“Yeah.”

“That could be very serious,” Bobby said. “I wish you coulda got him to open up more.”

“I did all I could,” Ida said, and rolled over. “Go to sleep,” she said. “Tomorrow’s another day.”

The baby-sitter was in the living room at the other end of the apartment, watching the Sunday night movie on TV. Mollie and Winona were in Winona’s room, next door to her brother’s room, which he still used whenever he and his wife came home to visit. Max’s bedroom was cool, with a full-length poster of Tina Turner tacked up on the ceiling over the bed, and pennants for all the major league baseball clubs and NFL football teams on the walls, and a Mason jar full of pennies alongside a model of the Kitty Hawk on his dresser. Winona had found his marijuana stash on the top shelf of his closet, in a metal box containing fishing tackle.

Winona was rolling a joint now.

She kept spilling marijuana flakes all over the bed.

“I don’t think we should be doing this,” Mollie said.

“I think we should be doing it,” Winona said firmly. “Don’t be so chickenshit, Moll.”

“How do you know it’s still good? How long has it been in the closet?”

“It doesn’t go stale,” Winona said. “In fact, it gets better with age.”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s a known fact. Anyway, this isn’t old pot. Max smokes every time he comes home.”

“Doesn’t it stink up the whole house?” Mollie asked.

“He opens the windows. There,” Winona said, and triumphantly held up a messily rolled but nonetheless reasonable facsimile of a cigarette.

“Suppose what’s-her-name comes in?”

“Fat Henrietta? She won’t come in. She never comes in. She thinks my mother pays her to come watch television.”

Winona began rolling a second joint. Mollie watched her intently.

“So what do you think I should do?” she asked.

“Smoke it and shut up,” Winona said.

“I mean about France.”

“Did they tell you for sure the trip’s off?”

“Yeah. He said he had too much work to do, and my mother starts going for her doctorate soon as school lets out.”

“Which is when?”

“The tenth. Same as us. I told them we’d been planning this whole thing about our two families being in Paris at the same time, because you’re going to the Riviera in July, which is when we were supposed to be going to St.-Jean, and you and I were so excited about being there together, the two of us, in Paris...”

“True,” Winona said, her head bent studiously over her task.

“... and now they tell me we’re not going. I told my father that was cruel and unusual punishment, and he knew it.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said we weren’t going away this summer, and that was that. And he threatened to send me to camp if I didn’t get off it.”

“Camp!” Winona said. “Jesus!”

“Yeah. So what do you think I should do?”

“Cool it for a while. Maybe it’s a phase they’re going through.”

“They’re going through something, all right,” Mollie said, and rolled her eyes.

“There,” Winona said, “practice makes perfect. This one is yours, Moll.”

Twenty minutes later, both girls were stoned out of their minds. They had smoked the joints down till they’d almost burned their fingertips, and had then opened the roaches and sprinkled the remaining pot out the window, rolling the papers into tiny balls and flicking those out, too. The windows were still wide open to the traffic below, and the girls lay side by side on Winona’s bed, wearing only panties, talking loudly and giggling every ten or twenty seconds.

Mollie wanted to know if this was really the first time Winona had tried this. Somehow the question struck her funny, so she burst out laughing. Winona assured her that she would never do anything for the first time unless it was with her very best friend in the entire world. Both girls began giggling at this fresh witticism.

“Except play with my buzzer,” Winona said.

Since the word “buzzer” was in itself hysterically funny, the girls began giggling all over again. Winona said she’d done that for the first time without Mollie, played with her buzzer, that is. Mollie wanted to know what a buzzer was and how you played with it. Winona told her you had to find it first. She herself had found hers quite by accident in February, up in Vermont, while she was leaning against the washing machine downstairs off the kitchen, doing all her socks and thermal underwear and turtlenecks from the week’s skiing. The machine kept vibrating against her and all at once she realized something was, well, buzzing down there in her jeans. So she pressed a little harder against the machine to make the buzzing a little stronger. Mollie found all this hysterically funny, the idea of somebody having a buzzer in her jeans.

Winona went on to say that in the bathtub later that night, while she was washing herself down there, she began to feel that same buzz again, though not as strong as it had been when she was doing her laundry. So she searched around with her fingers to see if she could find what was causing this very peculiar, very pleasant sensation, and she discovered this little, well, buzzer between her legs — “meine kleine friggin buzzerei,” she said in Frankendrac.

“Sometimes I do it to music,” she said, and sat up, and climbed over Mollie, and padded to the bookcase. Mollie watched as she put a digital disc on the machine, turned the volume up loud, and then came back to the bed. She climbed over Mollie again, lay back down on her side of the bed, and slipped her hand into her panties. “Just do what I do,” she said. “It’s fun.”

Five minutes later, Mollie was masturbating for the first time to the stereo beat of Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” both girls giggling at the wonder of it all. Sixteen-year-old Henrietta in the living room up the hall, watching her movie blithely unaware, thought they sounded like they always did, dumb and going on thirteen.

“How do you know this?” Andrew said.

“We asked around,” Petey said.

“Who asked around?”

“We had a detective check on her.”

“A private eye?”

“No, a real cop. A tin shield. Somebody we got in our pocket.”

“You checked on her without first asking me?” Andrew said.

“We were trying to protect you, Andrew,” he said. “If this was something you didn’t know, we had to find out. For your own protection.”

“What’s his name? The husband?”

“Michael Welles. He put away the Lombardi Crew five years ago.”

“You’re positive about all this?”

“Pos—”

“Because if you’re making a mistake...”

“No mistake, Andrew.”

“Causing me trouble over a mistake...”

“Andrew, I swear on my mother’s eyes, this is the truth. I personally phoned the DA’s Office, asked for Michael Welles, it went right through.”

“Who answered the phone?”

“He did himself. ‘ADA Welles’ is how he answers.”

“Then how do you know he’s a unit chief?”

“’Cause that’s who I asked for on the phone, Deputy Unit Chief Michael Welles. Anyway, Andrew, whether he’s a chief or just an Indian, who gives a shit? He’s a DA who works in the Organized Crime Unit. For me, that’s enough.”

Andrew was silent for several moments.

Then he said, “What do you expect me to do about this?”

“That’s entirely up to you,” Petey said. “I know what I would do. Because you see, Andrew, he may be the one put in the bugs, her husband. And she may be working for him, Andrew, I hate to tell you this. She may be a snitch, Andrew. She may be a rat.”

“So what would you do?”

“I think you know what I would do, Andrew.”

As the last class broke on Wednesday afternoon, Luretta came up to Sarah’s desk and handed her a long white envelope.

“Mrs. Welles,” she said gravely, “if you get a chance, I’d appreciate it if you read this sometime.”

“I’d be happy to,” Sarah said. “What is it?”

“Well,” Luretta said, and ducked her head.

She had never been a shy girl. Sarah looked at her.

“What is it, Luretta?” she asked again.

“Jus’ something. There’s my phone number on it, case you feel like calling me.”

Sarah studied her, puzzled.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No, no. Well... jus’ read it, okay? When you can,” she said, and ran swiftly out of the room.

Sarah put the envelope in her attaché case.

The sun was blinding as she walked southward on Park Avenue, wearing sunglasses, hurrying toward Dunhill’s where Andrew’s blue Acura was parked in front of the store. She said nothing as she got into the car.

“Hi,” Andrew said, and smiled.

“This is dangerous,” she said, and tossed the attaché case into the backseat. “Could we please get moving?”

Andrew started the car at once, heading directly cross-town, toward the river. Billy usually began driving immediately downtown on Park, but she knew Andrew was taking her to dinner tonight. When he’d told her about it on the phone, she’d wondered immediately if he’d discovered the still operative bugs in the Mott Street building. They were on the East River Drive now, heading uptown toward the Bruckner Expressway.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Edge to her voice, still nervous.

“I know a nice little place in Connecticut,” he said.

“Connecticut? Andrew, I haven’t got that much time, you know I can’t...”

“Well, I think you may have time,” he said.

She did not take off the sunglasses, even though the sun was no longer blinding her. She sat quite still in the seat beside him, her bag in her lap, her hands over it, Andrew darkly silent behind the wheel.

He was wondering if she was wired.

He knew the car wasn’t bugged. He had taken it to the garage where they kept the Lincoln and had asked Billy to put it on a lift and check it top to bottom, inside and out. The car was clean. Whatever he and Sarah Welles said in this car today would not get back downtown to her husband in Organized Crime. Unless she herself was wired.

“I know who your husband is,” he said.

She said nothing.

“His name is Michael Welles, he s deputy chief of the DA’s Organized Crime Unit.”

Still, she said nothing. Her heart was pounding. He knew about Michael, it was senseless to lie. But if she told the truth...

“Your husband who makes eighty-five a year for putting away people like me.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you know what I mean,” he said.

He did not turn to look at her. He kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road. They were passing through a section of the Bronx that used to be Italian but was now Latino. The small, joined, two-family row houses reminded him of the homes his father sometimes took him to when he was small, to visit this or that soldier in the organization, “Keep up the morale,” he told Andrew. The older men would smoke their guinea stinkers and pat Andrew on the head, and tell him, “Hey, you getta so big, Lino.”

“Was it your husband who had the place bugged?” he asked.

Still not looking at her. Eyes on the road.

“I told you I don’t know what you...”

“Sarah, you’re in serious trouble. If you know who I am, you know what I can do. I suggest you start telling me the truth.”

“All right,” she said.

“Was it your husband?”

“Yes.”

“Very nice. He uses his own wife to...”

“No,” she said. “That’s not true, Andrew.”

“No? Then how...?”

“I didn’t know about the bugs. He found out about us through the bugs.”

“But now he knows.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re still seeing me. Which means Sonny missed something, the place is still bugged. Otherwise, why would your husband...?”

“Yes, the place is still bugged.”

“How long have you known about me?”

“Since Mother’s Day.”

“You know since May sometime, and you keep seeing me. So what do you mean no? You are...”

“I see you because...”

“You are working for him, leading me on...”

“I see you because I love you.”

“Bullshit. You’re getting me to talk...”

“No...”

“Yes, you’re an informer, you’re here to send me to jail!”

“I had no choice,” she said.

She was thinking he would kill her. She had seen movies where people like him took informers to the country for a nice little ride. In his eyes, she was an informer.

“Yes, you had a choice,” he said. “You could have told me. You could have...”

“I’m telling you now.”

“Only because I already know!”

“I was going to tell you, anyway.”

She wondered if this was true.

He was wondering the same thing.

“Do you realize I can have you killed in a minute?” he said.

Which meant he himself was not about to kill her. But this didn’t exclude the possibility that he was driving her to a nice little place he knew in Connecticut, where two happy goons would be waiting with garrotes and chain saws.

“I don’t think you’ll do that,” she said.

“In a minute!” he said, and took his right hand from the wheel, and snapped his fingers for emphasis, still not looking at her, his eyes on the road. “A goddamn informer? A fucking rat? You know what we do with rats?”

He said nothing for the longest while, searching for a spot where he could turn off Bruckner onto a side street. He found one some three minutes later, pulled off the road, drove past a gas station pumping diesel for trucks, and then turned onto a sunny street with scrawny trees and small whitewashed houses. He drove along until he came to an empty corner lot with a Cyclone fence around it. There were junked cars heaped high in the lot. There was razor wire on top of the fence. Not a soul was in sight. He cut the engine. The sun-washed street was still except for the sound of cars and trucks rushing past in the distance. He turned from the wheel.

“Are you wired?” he asked.

“No.”

She was still wearing the sunglasses. He couldn’t see her eyes.

“Take off the glasses,” he said.

She took off the glasses. Reached into her handbag. Put the glasses into their case.

“Look at me,” he said.

She turned to look at him.

Blue eyes wide in that gorgeous face.

“Tell me again. Are you wired?”

“I’m not wired, Andrew.”

“Open your blouse,” he said.

She obeyed immediately, unbuttoning her blouse to expose her bra. He felt inside the bra, ran his fingers around and under her breasts, ran his hands over her back and her ribs and her belly and her buttocks, reached under her skirt to touch her thighs and her pubic mound. These were not a lover’s hands.

“Empty your handbag,” he said.

She looked at him stonily for a moment, and then she picked up her bag and turned it over, dumping its contents on the seat between them. She buttoned her blouse while he began rummaging through the items on the seat. The sunglass case, her wallet, her house keys, a package of chewing gum, her Filofax, a tube of lipstick, a comb, a hairbrush, a package of Kleenex, a paperback copy of Howard’s End, some loose change. He flipped through the pages of the book to make sure it hadn’t been hollowed out. He opened the Filofax to make certain nothing was buried in its pages. He turned the bag upside down, shook it, felt inside it with his hands. He found nothing even remotely resembling a recording device.

“All right,” he said at last, and turned away from her and started the car. As he drove back toward Bruckner, she put everything back in the bag, item by item, silently, slowly, deliberately, angrily. When they were on the highway again, she said, “Well, that was a nice little indignity.”

“Listen,” he said, “it’s your husband who’s the fucking DA, not mine!”

“Are you satisfied now?”

“Yes.”

“That I’m not wired?”

“Yes.”

“That I’m here only because I want to be here?”

“Yes.”

“Then slow down,” she said. “I don’t want to die in a car crash!”

He glanced swiftly into the rearview mirror, nodded, and eased up on the pedal.

“I didn’t realize I was going so fast.”

“You drive like a maniac,” she said.

They rode in silence for what must have been ten, fifteen minutes. At last he said, “Does he know you’re with me today?”

“Yes. He wants me to keep this going. Until he has everything he needs.”

“How much does he already know?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What did you mean when you said you had no choice?”

“My daughter.”

“What’s she got to...?”

“He threatened to take her away from me.”

“Would he do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know him anymore. He has a video of me going in, he has...”

“A video! Jesus, what else have they...?”

“They’ve been watching the door on Mott Street,” she said. “They have pictures of anyone who goes in or out.”

This had to be the truth. She wasn’t wired. She was telling him the absolute truth.

“He showed me the video,” she said. “He also has tapes of everything you and I said together. He played them for me.”

“Who else?”

“Did he play them for? I guess the people he...”

“No, who else has he got on tape?”

“I don’t know. He’s going for an OCCA. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes, I know what that is.”

“He threatened to use the tape in a divorce action if I didn’t do what he asked.”

Andrew nodded.

He was silent for several moments.

Then he said, “They want me to have you killed. They know about your husband, they think you may have...”

“How’d they find out?”

“They put a detective on you.”

“A private de—?”

“NYPD. Tin. Somebody we own. They already knew about you and me, I don’t know how they found out.”

“Billy,” she said at once.

“Maybe,” he said, and nodded. “They think you’re an informer. A rat. And informers have to be taught a lesson. So nobody else will even think of informing.”

“Informers have to be killed, is that what you mean?”

“Yes,” he said. “Informers have to be killed.”

“Even well-connected informers?” she asked.

“Especially well-connected ones,” he said.

“I’m not talking about my husband. Not that connection.”

He turned to look at her, puzzled.

“I’m talking about you,” she said.

Trucks were speeding by on either side of them.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“You asked me to marry you,” she said.

A huge eight-wheeler rushed past on their left, raising dust, scaring them both.

“Did you mean it?” she asked.

“I meant it,” he said.

“Then, yes,” she said.

She came out of the bathroom naked, her bag slung over her shoulder. She carried the bag to the dresser near the four-poster bed, and went to him at once.

There was for her — as there was whenever she was with him — the same sense of urgency and need. She went into his arms like a wanton, immediately abandoning herself to the same passion she’d known from the very first time they’d made love. Even knowing who he was and what he represented, she was nonetheless helplessly, hopelessly enamored. He was her love, and she loved him still.

The inn was on the edge of a narrow river with a small waterfall. Swans glided on the still, pondlike expanse of water before the falls, just under their second-story window. As they lay naked in embrace on the four-poster bed, they could hear the tumbling water below.

He was brimming with questions, bursting with plans, bubbling with excitement, babbling as steadily as the rippling river outside. When, would she tell her husband, how soon could she get the divorce? Would he consent to it? Could she move out meantime? What about her daughter?

Ah yes, what about my daughter? she thought.

“I know she likes me,” he said, “but...”

“She adores you,” Sarah said.

“But this is different, this is a divorce, this would be a new father coming into the picture...”

“It’ll be difficult, I know.”

“I’ll take good care of her, Sarah.”

“I know you will.”

“And you too. No one will ever harm you while I’m around.”

“I know,” she said.

“You’ll have to meet everybody,” he said. “Well, not everybody, just the people who matter. Actually, it gets down to two people who have to know, Bobby Triani and Petey Bardo, they’re second and third in command — I make it sound like an army, but it isn’t that at all.”

“Do you need their approval?” she asked. “Is that it? To marry me?”

“No, hell no, I don’t need anybody’s approval to do anything. This is like a courtesy, Sarah, a way of showing respect for the people you work with. When I told you I was in the investment business, I wasn’t lying, that’s what we are in a sense, investors looking to make a profit, the same as any other investors. Bobby is immediately under me in the organization, and Petey comes after him. Everything funnels through us, the profits, and we decide how they’ll be distributed, which percentage goes to which person, whatever position he may hold in the organization...”

And now, perhaps because hiding the truth about himself had become an intolerable burden over all these months, now the truth that had been dammed within him burst free, rushing over the dam and through the dam, destroying the dam itself and the silence it had forced, words tumbling free in a torrent as swift as the running river outside. And as he spoke she thought she’d never loved him so much as she did now, when he was telling her the truth about himself at last, revealing himself completely at last, trusting her, revealing all at last.

“... mostly a cash business, so most of our distributions are in cash. In fact, one of our big problems is getting rid of money. I don’t mean throwing it in the streets, I mean giving it respectability, do you understand what I’m saying? I guess you realize the reason my place was bugged isn’t because what I do is legal. You asked me if I was involved in anything criminal, and I told you no, because in my mind a criminal is somebody who kills somebody else or who sticks up somebody else or who hurts somebody else in a serious way, none of which things I’ve ever personally done. I suppose in your husband’s eyes — and maybe in yours, too, for all I know, I don’t know — doing things like making it easy for people to gamble or to borrow money or to indulge in pleasures they seek of their own accord, these things may seem criminal to him, which would mean that anybody involved in these things would automatically become someone involved in so-called criminal activity. But my father and my uncle and me, too — I have to admit I feel the same way — think of this activity as providing services that people want and need. Petey, Bobby, we all feel the same way. Sal the Barber, these are all people you’ll meet someday, Ralphie Carbonaio, he’s the Carter in Carter-Goldsmith Investments, Carmine Orafo, he’s the Goldsmith, it actually means that in Italian, Orafo, all of them, we’re all in this business together to provide services which, by the way, in different times of history and in different places all around the world, would have been considered legal.

“You won’t have to worry about the business, my mother never worried about it, still doesn’t, you’ll be meeting her, too, so she can give you her Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, huh? I’m not expecting a problem with her, she’ll fall in love with you the minute she sees you, why wouldn’t she? I have to tell you, though, it isn’t going to be easy, expecting these guys to open their hearts to someone who’s got a history like yours, your marriage I’m talking about. There’s what you might call a natural animosity there. It’s a matter of mindset, Sarah. Guys who are used to believing that loan-sharking isn’t such a terrible thing, these guys aren’t going to understand why I would want to marry a woman whose ex thinks otherwise. Sal the Barber, for example, who’s the man who gave me that ring, remember? The black ring? The one your jeweler said was stolen? He’s a decent, hardworking man, you’ll see when you meet him, though he sounds like a roughneck — well, look at the beautiful ring he came up with. That’s not the kind of thing someone without sensitivity could find beautiful, is it? Sal didn’t know it was stolen, either, by the way. The guy who passed it to him is sorry he ever did, believe me — if he can still be sorry about anything, which I promise you he can’t.

“So there might at first be Hey, what’s Andrew doing, bringing this woman around, what kind of craziness is this? But you’ll get to know them, they’ll get to know you, and before you know it, everything’ll be fine. Especially since later this month they’re all going to come into a lot of money, everybody all the way down the line, when this new venture of ours goes into operation. Everybody’s going to be very happy, believe me, when the profits begin rolling in and we start distributing those profits all the way down the line. All these people are going to be looking very affectionately on anything I do. I don’t think any of them are going to find fault with you in any way, I promise you. I think each and every one of them will show you the proper respect.”

“What new venture is this?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t know how you feel about dope, Sarah, I’m sure there are people who would like to lock up anybody caught smoking even a joint. But there are millions of people all over the world who smoke marijuana on a daily basis, and there are millions of others — I’m not talking about hopheads or junkies now, I’m talking about legislators and lawyers and criminologists and judges and social workers, people like that — these people believe that the best thing that could happen is for narcotics to be legalized. I’m not taking a stand one way or the other. I’m only saying there are millions of people who depend upon drug use to get themselves through the day, and it might be a bigger crime to deny these people the support they need to live their lives in some kind of peace. I’m not even talking about marijuana. I’m talking about hard drugs like cocaine or heroin, yes, there are people who believe these drugs are less dangerous in the long view than either alcohol or cigarettes. I never heard of a cocaine addict dying of cirrhosis of the liver or lung cancer, did you? And, by the way, I’m not even sure there’s any proof that crack cocaine is addictive. Cocaine you can smoke, you know? Crack cocaine. Or even heroin you can smoke, which is this new thing we’re bringing in, a combination of cocaine and heroin, what’s called ‘moon rock.’ Do you remember when I went down to Florida with my uncle?”

“Yes?”

“It was to talk to this man named Luis Hidalgo, who took over the Putumayo Cartel after Alonso Moreno met with a terrible, ahem, accident. What we’re doing... Do you remember when I asked you to go to Italy with me? That was to meet with the man who’s handling distribution on the Continent. It’s a three-way setup, you see, what you might call a triangle. Hidalgo provides the Colombian product, which we ship to various ports in Italy. Meanwhile, Manfredi is taking delivery of the Chinese product. We process it right there in Italy, and turn it around as moon rock...”

On and on he went, the words gushing from his mouth, trapped too long, pouring forth excitedly now, directed toward Sarah where she sat cross-legged on the four-poster bed, listening intently, and then moving past her to where her bag sat on the dresser near the bed.

A reel-to-reel NAGRA tape recorder was hidden under a Velcro flap at the bottom of that bag. A wire from the recorder had been sewn into the lining and fed up into the bag’s strap, where the microphone showed only as what appeared to be one of a pair of black rivets fastening strap to bag. Sarah had turned on the machine while she was in the bathroom. It was now capable of recording four hours of conversation before the tape ran out.

“... Stonington some Sunday,” Andrew was saying. “I’ll ask my mother to invite Ida and the kids, you’ll love Ida, she’s my cousin, we’ve been best friends from the day she was born. I used to call her Pinocchio, because she has my uncle Rudy’s nose, and she used to call me Mickey Mouse, because I had big ears when I was a kid. I was nicknamed ‘Topolino,’ in fact, which means Mickey Mouse in Italian, because of the ears. Well, ‘Lino,’ it got abbreviated to. My mother still calls me Lino every now and then, can you imagine? Lino? The house in Stonington...”

The two men met on Memorial Day in the rectory of the Church of the Holy Redemption on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, where a priest named Father Daniel frequently extended hospitality and privacy to men of their persuasion in exchange for contributions to his perpetual building fund. In the cloistered silence of the rectory, with sunlight streaming through the leaded windows, and music floating from the church outside where someone practiced in the organ loft, Bobby Triani and Petey Bardo discussed this serious problem they now seemed to have.

“You think he’s gonna take care of this?” Bobby asked.

“I don’t think so,” Petey said.

“So what do we do? This is a complicated thing.”

“Not that complicated.”

“Should we talk to some of the others?”

“I don’t think so. I’d rather line up some people. Move ahead on this before it gets out of hand.”

“I worry about doing that,” Bobby said. “Some of these old wops who knew his father... I don’t know, Petey.”

“You got a better suggestion?”

“I’m saying there’s still these old guys around who knew him when he was a kid with big ears.”

“Yeah, and now he’s a kid with a big mouth.”

“Petey, let’s be fair. We don’t know for sure he told her anything.”

“If he’s fuckin’ her, he’s tellin’ her,” Petey said.

“Yeah,” Bobby said, and sighed heavily. “Still. To the older guys, he’s still Lino, you know what I mean? I think we oughta ask them first. Don’t you?”

Petey was thinking the first mistake Andrew had made was appointing this jackass his underboss.

“Petey? Don’t you think we should call a meeting, get their advice?”

“No.”

“At least ask Fat Nickie what he thinks.”

“No.”

“Because...”

“What I see here,” Petey said, “is a pussy-whipped snot-nose who couldn’t keep it zipped and who’s gonna get us all in trouble, that’s what I see. I won’t go over your head on this, Bobby, you know I won’t...”

“I appreciate that.”

“But I’d like t’line up some people.”

“They won’t like it, the older ones.”

“Fuck them and him,” Petey said.

Lino, Michael thought.

What goes around comes around.

It was now a quarter to midnight on the hot Tuesday night immediately following the holiday, and he was sitting in a car opposite Andrew Faviola’s house in Great Neck, waiting for him to come home. Resting on the seat beside him was a tape player containing a copy of the reel-to-reel Sarah had recorded last Wednesday. Despite a waterfall and a river in the background, the fidelity of the tape was exceptionally high. Michael now had close to three hours of conversation that linked Faviola and his goombahs to enough criminal activity to bring racketeering charges against almost all of them. In a breathless, virtually nonstop monologue, Faviola had attested to the family’s involvement in virtually every crime defined in the section on criminal enterprise. You named it, the family was involved in it — from A to Z.

Arson, Assault, Bribery, Burglary, Coercion, Criminal Contempt, Criminal Mischief, Criminal Possession of Stolen Property, False Written Statements, Forgery, Gambling...

He told Sarah he’d administered and enforced his father’s gambling operation in Las Vegas throughout the two and a half years he’d attended UCLA, and that he’d personally transmitted orders from his father to two contract hitters who’d cursorily eliminated a heavy gambler who was “into the family for a hundred thousand and change...”

Grand Larceny, Hindering Prosecution, Homicide...

The way he’d casually admitted to ordering the murder of the Queens gambler who’d set this whole thing in motion was typical of the abandon he’d felt while talking to Sarah: “I told Frankie Palumbo to take care of him... so it wouldn’t happen again. Frankie’s the capo this jerk stole the money from. It was supposed to be a cash pickup, he stole five grand from the bundle.”

As offhandedly as that.

Insurance Fraud, Kidnapping, Narcotics...

And here he went into vast detail about a three-way Colombian-Italian-Chinese operation that would imminently flood the streets of New York with moon rock. “The ships are already on their way from Italy,” he’d said. “We’ll be offloading and distributing sometime in June...”

Perjury, Promoting Prostitution, Robbery, Usury...

Which was loan-sharking and which he described as one of the mainstays of their operation; the others, of course, were gambling, and narcotics, and labor racketeering, and receiving and distributing stolen goods. He described in detail the profitable loan-sharking operation run by Sal the Barber, who — he did not fail to mention — had himself broken many a head in his time, and who had ordered the murder of a punk named Richie Palermo...

“Do you remember the ring I gave you? The one that turned out to be stolen? I brought this to Sal’s attention, and the kid turned up dead in a basement room in Washington Heights. You have to maintain control over these lower-level people, or they’ll do something dangerous or stupid that can turn against you, and then the law will swarm all over you.”

Weapons...

Not only the criminal possession of what amounted to an arsenal but involvement in a vast arms trade that included the manufacture, transport, disposition, and defacement of weapons — as in converting a semiautomatic into an illegal fully automatic rifle.

Well, no Z.

And, to his credit, Faviola had not admitted to anyone in the family ever having committed rape.

But everything else was there. The crimes, in many cases the names of the people who’d committed those crimes, in other instances the places and dates of commission, more than enough to bring charges and seek indictments. In two hours and fifty-three minutes of almost continuous babble, apparently driven by a need to impress Sarah with his acumen, cunning, power, and stealth, Faviola had let out all the stops, and had been rewarded afterward with...

Michael had turned off the tape the moment they began making love.

He detested them both.

The problem he still had, however, was the same one he’d had all along, except that the moment Sarah had actually gone in wired, she’d technically become an “informant” instead of the unknown “subject” she’d been on the previous tapes. He could not now call Sarah to testify without revealing her identity. He could not get this tape admitted in evidence unless Sarah swore under oath that she’d been there at the Rockledge Inn in Norwalk, Connecticut, while the conversation was taking place...

That this was a complete and accurate tape of the conversation...

That the man she’d been conversing with was Andrew Faviola...

And that the conversation had taken place on such and such a date...

At such and such a time...

And so on and so forth, if it please Your Honor.

His unwillingness to call her had nothing to do with his promise to her. He had given her his word of honor that if she delivered the goods, he would never reveal to Mollie or anyone else what kind of woman she was. That was the deal he’d made. Upon more circumspect reflection, however, he felt he’d be justified in telling Mollie all about her mother’s infidelity; she was, after all, a mature child who deserved to know exactly why her parents were divorcing. In truth, then, he was ready to throw Sarah to the sharks provided the sharks didn’t then turn on him.

He felt he’d adequately protected himself against any due-process challenges that might have stemmed from deliberately sending Sarah in to exchange sex for information. “Outrageous government conduct,” as defined in U.S. v. Cuervelo — where federal courts warned government investigators against using sex as a means of gathering evidence — had been very much on his mind when he’d presented her with her marching orders. He further knew that no sane defense attorney would ever claim he had been the one who’d initiated or encouraged a love affair between his wife and Faviola. Sarah had started that all on her own, thanks, before the eavesdropping surveillance had begun.

Besides, it was unthinkable that the DA would even allow him to prosecute this case. Were that to happen — and it couldn’t, it was simply an impossibility — the defense would enjoy an unprecedented feeding frenzy, portraying him as a man with an overly vindictive motive, a man with too much personal interest in the case, a man who was not in that courtroom to see simple justice done...

“I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to consider just what kind of man this district attorney is. I ask you to ask yourselves what kind of man would use his own wife as an informant, would send his own wife into another man’s embrace, would listen to his own wife making love to another man, just so long as she betrayed her lover, just so long as she played the role of Delilah to my client’s unsuspecting Samson. I ask you to consider the moral values of this district attorney who’s so very eager to put my client behind bars that he’d sacrifice his own wife to the cause. I ask you to consider whether the evidence he’s offered here in this courtroom is not evidence procured by a zealot and not a man even remotely interested in the even hand of justice. I ask you to consider...”

No.

Even if the case miraculously survived a due-process challenge under Cuervelo standards, he himself would never be allowed to try it. In fact, given the circumstances — the close personal relationship of a key informant to someone in the District Attorney’s office — whoever tried it was in severe danger of losing it. The trick was to nail Faviola without ever going to trial. Toward that end...

A car was turning the corner. A blue Acura. Michael waited until it pulled into the driveway, its headlights illuminating a beige-colored garage door that immediately began opening. He was already crossing the street as Faviola drove the Acura into the garage. The tape player was in his right hand. He was waiting in the driveway when Faviola got out of the Acura, walked to the door-closing button, hit it, and then stopped dead in his tracks when he realized he wasn’t alone. The closing door almost got him. He ducked to avoid it, and then clenched his fists as if expecting immediate trouble.

“Who is it?” he said.

“ADA Welles,” Michael said.

He had expected a boy. The pictures in People showed a handsome college kid, and the voice he’d heard on far too many tapes had sounded very young. But the person sitting opposite him now was a man. Handsome, yes, and bearing himself with the sort of casual ease only the very young can bring off, but there was maturity in those knowing blue eyes and the smirking set of his mouth. Seeing him in person at last, sitting here with him, a cold dark fury began seething inside Michael. The realization that his wife’s seducer had been knowledgeable and mature, a cunning son of a bitch who’d understood all along the consequences of his actions, was almost too much to contain. Michael wanted to kill him. It was all he could do to keep from leaping up and grabbing him by the throat. Strangle the bastard where he sat, listen to him choking and gasping for breath, eyes rolling back in his head, drop him still and gray and lifeless to the thick carpet underfoot.

The two men sat opposite each other on brocaded chairs in a lavishly furnished living room illuminated only by a tassel-shaded lamp on a marble-topped table. Michael was wearing what he called his prosecutor threads, blue suit, white shirt, dark tie, dark socks, black shoes. He was here on business. Andrew was wearing tan summer slacks and a blue double-breasted blazer, blue tasseled loafers, a pristine white shirt open at the throat. He kept watching Michael in what appeared to be enduring surprise. He did not offer Michael a drink. Michael would have refused one, anyway. He was here to play a tape. He was here to cut a deal with the man who’d stolen his wife.

They sat in relative darkness as the tape unreeled.

When it ended, Andrew rose and went to the bar and poured a drink for himself. He still did not offer one to Michael, who, in any case, still would have refused it.

“So?” he said.

“So you’re going,” Michael said. “And you’re taking a lot of people with you.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I want to talk a deal.”

“Why? You’ve got your fucking tape...”

“A gold mine, in fact.”

“Where’d she have the wire?”

“What difference does it make?”

“None, I guess,” Andrew said, and shrugged.

His question suddenly took on new meaning. They’d made love in that room in Connecticut. She’d been naked, he’d been inside her. So where had the wire been? A perfectly natural question. Where had she hidden the wire? Images conjured by the earlier tapes suddenly flashed on the screen of Michael’s mind.

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

Again, Michael wanted to kill him.

“This is my offer,” he said. “You walk in and plead, or I bring down all of you.”

“Plead to what?”

“Two counts of murder, an agreed twenty-five to life on each. Consecutive.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

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

Kill them both.

“If I go public with the Connecticut tape,” he said, “you’re a dead man. Your own people will learn you told all their business to a woman, they’ll get to you wherever you are. Even if you’re denied bail, they’ll reach you in jail. On the other hand, if you plead, I forget I ever heard this tape...”

“Who else has heard it?”

“Just me.”

“Who else knows about it?”

“Just Sarah.”

“Nobody in law enforcement?”

“Nobody.”

“How about the detectives working the case?”

“I said nobody.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because I’m telling you.”

“I’m supposed to believe a man who’s ready to suppress evidence...”

“It isn’t evidence yet. It’s evidence only when it’s admitted as evidence. Right now, it’s just a man and a woman talking on tape.”

Andrew was listening.

“To introduce this tape,” he said, “I’ve got to call Sarah. I can’t try this case without her testimony. The minute I reveal the existence of the tape, I have to...”

“There are other tapes.”

“No one knows who she is on those tapes.”

“You do.”

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!

“No one will ask me who she is.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because her identity is a nonissue. On those tapes, she’s merely a subject. We don’t have to know who she is. Those tapes can be introduced through the detectives who conducted the surveillance.”

“But you, personally, know who she is.”

“That’s irrelevant,” Michael said.

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!

“She said you’ve also got her on videotape.”

“She’s unrecognizable.”

“What you’re saying...”

“What I’m saying is I’ll only have to call her if I introduce the Connecticut tape. She went in wired for it, that makes her an informant. But I won’t have to introduce anything if there’s no trial. You plead to the two counts...”

“What’s in this for you? If you can put us all away, why are you willing to settle for me alone?”

“I don’t want to hurt my daughter. If I call Sarah, the whole thing comes out.”

“It’s a little late to be thinking about that, isn’t it?”

“It’s a little late for all of us,” Michael said softly.

The room went suddenly still.

“I’m willing to give up the better case just so Mollie... just so my daughter doesn’t get hurt,” Michael said.

“There’s another reason, though, isn’t there?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“There’s nothing else. You plead to the two counts, I make a small presentation, we get our indictment, and you accept the agreed twenty-five to life. Nobody will know this tape ever existed. Not my daughter, not your paisans. What do you say?”

“I’ll plead to just the one count. And I do the time in a federal prison.”

“No. You go to Attica.”

“Then we don’t have a deal.”

“You want me to use Sarah, is that it?”

“You’ve already used her.”

The room went silent again.

“I’ll plead to one count,” Andrew said, “or you take it to trial. Once the jury hears you turned your own wife into a whore, I may even walk.”

“It was my understanding that you loved her,” Michael said.

Andrew said nothing.

“I didn’t think you’d want this to happen to her,” he said.

Andrew still said nothing.’

“Well,” Michael said, “think about it,” and rose ponderously, and walked to the door.

Andrew sat alone in the living room, listening to the sound of the car starting outside, listening to it disappear on the night.

He could not fall asleep.

He lay upstairs in the big bed in the master bedroom of the house, going over every word of the conversation he’d had with Sarah’s husband, debating over and over again the only viable course of action that seemed open to him.

He would have her killed, of course.

First because she’d betrayed him yet another time...

But she had done it for her daughter.

Fuck her daughter, he thought angrily. She double-crossed me, she came in wearing a wire, this wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, this was something that required planning, this was something she did to me personally! Told her husband we wouldn’t be going to the bugged apartment this Wednesday, we’d be going out instead to a delightful little restaurant someplace. Oh, really, darling? Well, no problem. Here’s a tape recorder to stuff up your kazoo.

Have her killed, of course.

Call Sal the Barber.

Sallie, baby, remember what happened to that runner in Washington Heights, the one who stiffed you with a stolen black ring? Well, I have something similar that needs taking care of.

Immediately.

Call him right now, nail her tomorrow morning on the way to school.

Now!

Do it!

He hadn’t looked at all like what Andrew had imagined.

Eighty-five grand a year, he’d expected a wimp.

A nice-looking guy, actually. Controlling himself, Andrew could see that. His hands shaking. Wanting to kill him, he supposed, well sure. Fucking the man’s wife, of course he’d want to...

But I love her, he thought.

Never mind that, call Sal.

She has to go.

Because without her, there’s no case. He admitted himself that he can’t get that Connecticut tape in without calling her as a witness. And if he had enough on the other tapes, he wouldn’t have come here trying to deal. Whatever he’s got, it isn’t enough without the Connecticut tape, and without her he can’t get the tape in. So, it’s simple really. When you think of it, it’s really very...

But I love her.

He stared up at the ceiling and wondered how she could have done this to him, coming in wired, telling him she wanted to marry him, was she serious about that, had she at least meant that? Did she know how he was aching inside right this minute just thinking she may have been lying to him about that, too? Just so he would open up, just so she could get him talking for the wire?

He’d have to call Sal.

What time was it, anyway? Two, three o’clock? Sal would be asleep, it could wait till morning. Catch her as she came out of school tomorrow, catch her as she...

Tomorrow was Wednesday.

She’d be expecting Billy to pick her up on Fifty-Seventh, as usual. Or had her husband told her he’d be coming here with a deal tonight? I shouldn’t be too long, darling, I just want to play this incriminating tape for your lovely boyfriend. Ta-ta, don’t wait up.

Well, come on, he wasn’t like that at all.

Tall, good-looking guy, you could sense a kind of... I don’t know... strength about him. Something strong about him. The way he sat there, looking me dead in the eye. Except when... whenever he mentioned Sarah, his lip began quivering. Well, his wife.

But you know, Andrew thought, I didn’t want to hurt you, mister, I mean that. For what it’s worth, I mean that. I didn’t even know you. You weren’t even a part of the scheme, the equation. It was just Sarah and me. You had nothing to do with any of it. So...

You know.

I hope you didn’t come here thinking you’d find some kind of... bum.

Some kind of cheap...

Wop.

I love her, you see.

Oh, Jesus, how could this have...?

I mean...

I wanted her to meet Ida. Ida, I was gonna say, this is her. This is the woman I was telling you about, isn’t she beautiful, Ida? I love her to death, Ida, we’re gonna get married.

Why did she have to do this? How the fuck could she have done this to me? To us? Come in wired? How could she have done such a thing?

Well, the daughter.

You love someone, you do whatever’s necessary to protect that person. You really love someone with all your heart, you can’t let that person be destroyed. You can’t do that.

It was my understanding that you loved her.

The stiff way he’d said those words, as if they were very hard to get past his lips. As if he would choke on them.

It was my understanding that you loved her.

Yes, Andrew thought, that’s true, Counselor, your understanding is entirely correct, I do love her, Counselor, but if you think I’m going to cop to murder one...

I didn’t think you’d want this to happen to her.

... and spend twenty-five to life in a state pen just so you won’t put her on the stand and embarrass your fucking daughter...

I didn’t think you’d want this to happen to her.

“I don’t,” he said aloud.

It was my understanding that you loved her.

“I do love her,” he said aloud.

He lay in bed for a long while, silent and thoughtful and troubled.

At last, he snapped on the bedside lamp and opened the drawer in the nightstand. He found the number in his directory and swiftly dialed it.

Billy drove her to the Buona Sera, the Brooklyn restaurant where first they’d dined in public...

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. I simply got up and left.

Because I kissed you.

Yes.

I’m going to kiss you now. Don’t leave.

He kissed her the moment she was at the table.

“You look beautiful,” he said.

“So do you,” she said.

She was wearing a blue suit, a white blouse with a stock tie, and patent blue pumps. He was wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, a rep tie, and black shoes.

“We match,” he said.

“We do,” she said.

He took her hands in his. The way he had that first time they were here. When she’d been so terribly afraid they’d be seen.

“We have to talk,” he said. “But let’s order drinks first.”

“What about?”

“The future. Our future.”

The unctuous proprietor came over, wringing his hands, smiling like Henry Armetta.

“Sí, signor Faviola,” he said. “Mi dica.”

They went through the drink-ordering ritual yet another time. She was thinking There is no future to talk about. When the drinks arrived, Andrew lifted his glass and said, “To you.”

“To you,” she said, and lifted her glass.

“To us,” Andrew said, and clinked his glass against hers.

They drank.

“Ahhh,” he said.

“Ahhh,” she said.

He put down his glass. He took her hands again.

“When I called last night...”

“I thought you were crazy.”

“Why? He knows. There’s nothing to worry about anymore.”

“Four in the morning?”

“Do you still sleep with him?”

“No.”

“Good. I called because I was going to tell you all this on the phone. But I thought...”

“All what?”

“I heard the Connecticut tape.”

She almost pulled her hands back from his. They tightened on hers. His hands would not let her go, his eyes would not let her go. He’s going to kill me, she thought. He’s taken me here so that someone will kill me.

“I think I know why you did it...” he said.

“Andrew, you have to understand...”

“I wish you hadn’t, but I...”

“Mollie,” she said.

“I know.”

“I had to.”

“I know.”

“But... the tape? You heard the tape?”

“Your husband came to see me.”

“What? When?”

“Last night. He offered me a deal.”

“Andrew, what are you saying?”

“I plead, he sends me away, we keep you out of it.”

“Plead?”

“Guilty. To two counts of murder one. I refused. I think he’ll agree to a single count. If he does, I’ll take it.”

“What do you mean, you’ll keep me out of it?”

“No one will ever know. No one will ever hear any of the tapes.”

She nodded.

He kept holding her hands, looking across the table at her. She turned away from his steady gaze.

“I feel rotten,” she said. “I feel as if I’m personally sending you to prison.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Sarah,” he said, “I still want to marry you.”

She looked into his eyes.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be away,” he said.

She squeezed his hands hard.

“... but I’ve got good lawyers, and maybe we can pull some strings here and there. I’m hoping to get out...”

“Andrew,” she said, “please don’t break my heart this way.”

“I love you, Sarah,” he said.

“Oh, I love you, too, Andrew. Oh my darling, darling, darling, I love you so very much.”

“Then tell me you’ll...”

Petey Bardo’s goons came in the front door.

They moved like automatons, right hands inside their jackets, fingers wrapped around the nine-millimeter Uzis under the jackets, legs propelling them speedily toward the rear of the restaurant. “Excuse me, sirs, do you...?” a waiter started to say, but they shouldered him aside and continued their swift, steady glide to the table on the right in the rear of the place. The man at the table had spotted them, he was already beginning to stand up. The woman stood up, too, puzzled, her hand in his, and turned to look where he was looking as he started to pull her away from the table. The gunman in the lead fired four rounds into the man’s face. He fell over backward against the wall, his chair falling over, the gunman pumping round after round into him. The woman was screaming. She held onto his hand as he went over and backward, screaming, screaming all the while.

The second gunman fired seven rounds into her face and her chest, and left her slumped against the blood-spattered wall as he and the other one ran down the hall and into the kitchen and out a back door into the alley.