The Assassin

TWENTY

At twenty-nine minutes after eight, Matt entered the outer office of Chief Inspector Mario Marchessi, of the Internal Investigations Bureau, which was housed in a building about as old as the Schoolhouse, literally under the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, which connects Philadelphia with Camden, N.J.

Staff Inspector Peter Wohl and Officer Jesus Martinez were already there.

"Good morning, sir," Matt said.

Wohl did not reply. He gestured for Martinez and Payne to follow him out into the corridor.

"I want to make this clear before we go in to see Chief Marchessi," Wohl said. "This is to see what, if anything, can be salvaged as a result of you two going off like you thought you were the heroes in a cops-and-robbers movie on TV. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"No, sir," Matt said. Martinez shook his head no.

"Jesus!" Wohl said disgustedly. "Martinez, you were sent to the airport to keep your eyes and ears open, and to report what you thought you heard or saw to me…"

What does he mean, "Martinez, you were sent to the airport"?

"…but when I asked you to tell me your gut feelings, you decided, to hell with him, I'll play it close to my chest; I'm Super Cop. I'll catch this dirty cop by myself."

Matt looked at Martinez, who looked crushed.

"And you!" Wohl turned to Matt. "Whatever gave you the idea that you could, without orders, surveil anyone, much less a police corporal of a district you have absolutely no connection with at all, anywhere, much less to somewhere in another county, for Christ's sake, where you knew illegal gambling was going on?"

"Inspector, I didn't…"

"Shut up, Matt!"

"…follow anyone anywhere."

"I told you to shut up," Wohl said. "I meant it."

He went back into Chief Marchessi's outer office.

Matt looked at Jesus Martinez.

"What did he mean when he said you were sent to the airport?"

Martinez raised his eyes to his, but didn't reply.

"Well?" Matt asked impatiently.

Wohl put his head back out into the corridor.

"Okay, let's go," he said.

They followed Wohl into Chief Marchessi's office. He pointed to where he wanted them to stand, facing Marchessi's desk, then closed the door to the outer office, then sat down on a battered couch.

"Okay, Peter, what's going on?" Chief Marchessi asked.

"My primary mistake, Chief, was in assuming that Detectives Martinez and Payne…"

Detectives Martinez and Payne?

"…had a good deal more common sense than is the case."

"I don't follow you, Peter," Marchessi said.

"At two o'clock this morning, Detective Payne, having followed him there, observed an Airport Unit corporal signing a marker for two thousand dollars in a gambling joint in the Poconos."

"What gambling joint?" Marchessi asked.

"What was the name of this place, Payne?" Wohl asked.

"The Oaks and Pines Lodge," Matt replied. "Sir, I didn't follow…"

"Speak when you're spoken to," Wohl said.

"Let him talk," Marchessi said. "What were you saying?"

Wohl didn't let him.

"The reason he followed this fellow to the Oaks and Pines," Wohl went on, "was because Detective Martinez asked him to."

Marchessi put up his hand, palm out, to silence Wohl.

"Did you follow this Corporal…have we got a name?"

"Lanza, sir. Vito Lanza," Martinez said.

"Did you follow this Corporal Lanza to this place in the Poconos?" Marchessi asked.

"No, sir."

"Inspector Wohl thinks you did."

"The inspector is mistaken, sir. May I explain?"

"I wish somebody would."

"Officer Martinez believes…" Matt began.

"DetectiveMartinez," Marchessi interrupted. "Let's get that, at least, straight."

Jesus! That means Hay-zus was working the Airport undercover, and as a detective.

"Detective Martinez became suspicious of Corporal Lanza, sir," Matt started again.

"Whoa!" Marchessi said. "Why were you suspicious of Corporal Lanza, Martinez?"

"His life-style, sir," Martinez said. "He had too much money. And a new Cadillac. And he gambles."

Marchessi looked at Wohl.

"That's all?" he asked.

"He had almost ten thousand dollars in cash in the glove compartment of his Cadillac, Chief," Martinez said.

"How do you know that?"

"I saw it."

"He showed it to you?"

"No, sir."

"Does this Corporal… Lanza…know you know he had all this cash?"

"We hope not," Wohl said sarcastically. "We think Detective Martinez's breaking and entering of Corporal Lanza's personal automobile went undetected."

Marchessi snapped his head to look at Martinez. He was on the verge of saying something, but, visibly, changed his mind.

"And with all this somewhat less than incriminating evidence in hand," Marchessi said, "you enlisted the aid of Detective Payne to surveil Corporal Lanza, and he followed him to this lodge in the Poconos?"

"Not exactly, sir," Jesus said.

"Tell me, exactly."

"I asked Detective Payne if he would be willing to follow Lanza there if I found out he was going."

"Why?"

"You mean why did I ask Payne?"

Marchessi nodded.

"Because my friend in Vice said it was a high-class place and I figured Payne could get in. I couldn't follow him myself."

"And did you tell Detective Payne what you're doing at the Airport Unit?"

"No, sir. Just that I thought I found a dirty cop."

"And you learned that Lanza was going to this place, and told Payne, and Payne followed him up there. Is that correct?"

"No, sir," Matt said.

"I'm asking Martinez," Marchessi said.

"I didn't tell him Lanza was going there," Martinez said. "He went up there on his own."

Was that a simple statement of fact, Hay-zus, or are you trying to stick it in me?

"Why did you do that, Payne?"

"Hay-zus is a good cop, sir…"

"Who the hell is'Hay-zus'? Marchessi interrupted.

"That's the Spanish pronunciation of 'Jesus', sir."

"Whether'Hay-zus' is a good cop seems to be open to discussion," Marchessi said. "Go on."

"I thought if he said he had a dirty cop, he probably had one."

"Just as an aside, Detective Payne, there is a departmental policy that states that police officers having reason to suspect brother officers of dishonesty will-will,notmay -bring this to the attention of Internal Affairs."

"Yes, sir. Martinez asked me if I would be willing to go to this place to see if Lanza was associating with known criminals…"

"And if he was, I was going to tell you his name, Inspector," Martinez said to Wohl.

"…and I agreed," Matt went on. "Then it occurred to me it would make sense if I knew where I was going. To take a look at the place before I followed Lanza there, in other words. So I went up there."

"No one, correct me if I'm wrong, told you to do so. Just your buddy Martinez asked you, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Is there anyone else involved in this? Another buddy?"

Martinez and Matt looked at each other.

"Okay, who?" Marchessi asked, correctly interpreting the exchanged glances.

"He didn't do anything, sir," Martinez said.

"Who,dammit?"

"I talked about Lanza to Detective McFadden, sir."

"He's the officer you worked with in Narcotics?" Marchessi asked.

"Yes, sir."

If he knows that, Matt thought, he knows that it was Hay-zus and Charley who brought down the guy who killed Uncle Dutch. That ought to be worth something.

"Anybody else?"

"No, sir."

"Just the three of you, huh? Your own private detective squad within the Department, huh?"

Marchessi looked between them until it was clear that neither dared reply to that, and then went on.

"You have any trouble getting in this place, Payne?"

"No, sir."

"It's open to the public?"

"I believe it's operated as a club, sir. I was with someone who belonged."

"That could be interpreted to mean that you are associating with known criminals."

"Not in this case, sir," Matt said quickly.

But that's bullshit. Penny is a known narcotics addict, as well as someone known to associate with known criminals. Jesus!

"And this Corporal Lanza was there?"

"Yes, sir."

"Associating with known criminals?"

"I don't know, sir."

"The truth of the matter, Payne," Wohl said, "is that, with the possible exception of somebody like Vincenzo Savarese, you wouldn't recognize a known criminal if you fell over one. Isn't that so?"

"Yes, sir."

"Tell me about the two-thousand-dollar marker," Marchessi said.

"Sir, as I was cashing out, I saw Lanza sign a marker for two thousand dollars' worth of chips. He was in the line ahead of me."

"I thought you said you didn't follow him up there."

"I didn't. He was there."

"You knew him by sight? That would suggest he knows you by sight."

"Yes, sir. But not the way that sounds, sir."

"Clarify it for me."

"I didn't know who he was. But I made him as a cop. He was carrying."

"People, other than policemen, sometimes go about armed."

"I had a gut feeling he was a cop, sir, and then he spoke to me."

"What did he say?"

"I had apparently run into him in Las Vegas, sir. And on the airplane from Las Vegas home. He recognized me. Not as a cop."

"You made him, is that what you're saying, as a cop, but he didn't make you as a cop?"

"I'm sure I could have told if he had, sir."

"I admire your confidence in your own judgment, Payne," Marchessi said. "And then what did you do?"

"I came back to Philadelphia and called Off…DetectiveMartinez and told him (a) that Lanza had been in the Oaks and Pines and (b) had signed a marker for two thousand dollars."

"And then I went to see you, sir," Martinez said to Wohl.

"Tell me, Martinez," Marchessi said. "Have you anyevidence to connect Corporal Lanza with the smuggling of narcotics, or, for that matter, of anything else, or any other criminal activity, at the airport?"

"No evidence, sir. But it has to be him."

"'Has'to be him?" Marchessi replied, softly sarcastic.

He looked at Wohl, who shrugged his shoulders.

"You two wait outside. In the corridor," Marchessi said.

Matt and Martinez turned around and left his office.

"You want some coffee, Peter?" Marchessi asked.

"What I would like is a stiff drink."

"At this hour of the morning?"

"Figure of speech," Wohl said.

"Both of them talked about 'gut feelings,' or implied it," Marchessi said. "My gut feeling is that they've found who we're looking for."

"But have they blown it?" Wohl asked. "Dammit, I asked him to give me a name."

"Give him the benefit of the doubt. He didn't want to point a finger until he was sure."

"And while he was making sure, there was a good chance this guy would smell that he was being watched. And breaking into his car was absolute stupidity."

Marchessi chuckled.

"There was a story going around that one of my staff inspectors, carried away with enthusiasm, tapped the line of a Superior Court judge without getting the necessary warrant."

"Ouch!" Peter said.

"I didn't believe it, of course," Marchessi said. "I don't know what I would have done if somebody had discovered the tap."

"What, to change the subject, Chief, do we do about this?"

"Well, I think we've already been shifted into high gear, whether or not we like it," Marchessi said.

He pushed one of the buttons on his telephone, then picked up the receiver.

"Ollie, can you come in here a minute?" he said, and hung up.

Less than a minute later, Captain Richard Olsen, a large, blondhaired man of forty, wearing a blue blazer and a striped necktie, opened Marchessi's door without knocking.

"Sir?"

"Come in and close the door, Ollie. You remember Peter, of course?"

"What brings you slumming, Inspector?"

Captain Olsen, whose exact title Wohl could not remember, provided administrative services to the fourteen staff inspectors assigned to the Internal Investigations Bureau. The staff inspectors, from whose ranks Wohl had been transferred to command of Special Operations, handled sensitive investigations, most often involving governmental corruption. Wohl liked and respected him.

"How are you, Ollie?"

"Ollie," Marchessi asked, "if I wanted around-the-clock, moving surveillance of an off-duty Airport Unit corporal, starting right now, what kind of problems would that cause?"

Olsen thought that over for a minute.

"What squad is he assigned to?"

"Three squad, four to midnight," Wohl furnished.

"I can handle the next twenty-four hours, forty-eight, with no trouble. After that, I'll need some bodies. What are we looking for?"

"For openers, association with known criminals. Ultimately, to catch him smuggling drugs out of the airport."

"Watching him on the job would be difficult."

"I'm wondering if I can strike a deal with the feds. I know goddamned well they have people undercover out there. If I told them I'll give them a name, if they let us have the arrest…"

"And if they won't go along?" Wohl asked.

"That would bring us back to Hay-zus, wouldn't it, Peter?" Marchessi said thoughtfully.

"Yeah," Wohl said.

"You call it, Peter, you know him better than I do."

"We'd be betting that Lanza has accepted the story that Martinez is out there because he failed the detective's examination," Wohl thought aloud. "And I would have to impress on Martinez that all, absolutely all, that he's to do is watch him on the job…Screw the feds. I don't like the idea of having the feds catch one of our cops dirty. Let's go with Martinez."

"I have no idea," Olsen said, "who or what either of you are talking about."

"I think we should bring Martinez back in here," Marchessi said. " I don't think we need Payne. Except to tell him to keep his nose out of this."

"I'll handle Payne," Wohl said. "I don't think you need me, either, do you, Chief?"

"No. And you're on the mad bomber too, aren't you? How're you doing?"

"We don't have a clue who he is," Wohl said, getting off the couch. "Thank you very much, Chief. You've been very understanding."

"I have some experience, Peter, with bright young men who sometimes get carried away. Every once in a while, they even catch the bad guys. You might keep that in mind."

"Just between you, me, and the Swede here, I'm not nearly as angry with those two as I hope they think I am," Wohl said.

"You could have fooled me," Marchessi said. "Send in Martinez, will you, Peter?"

"I guess I'll be seeing you, Peter?" Olsen said, extending his hand.

"More than you'll want to, Ollie," Wohl said.

At 9:24, Mr. Pietro Cassandro pulled up before Ristorante Alfredo' s entrance at the wheel of a Lincoln that had been delivered to Classic Livery only the day before. On the way from his home, Mr. Vincenzo Savarese had been concerned that there was something wrong with the car. It smelled of something burning.

Mr. Cassandro had assured Mr. S. that there was no cause for concern, that he had personally checked the car out himself, that it was absolutely okay, and that what Mr. S. was smelling was the preservatives and paint and stuff that comes with a new car, and burns off after a few miles. Like stickers and oil, for example, on the muffler.

Mr. S. had seemed only partially satisfied with Pietro's explanation, and Pietro had decided that maybe he'd made a mistake in picking up Mr. S. in the car before he'd put some miles on it. He would never do so again. The next time Mr. S. was sent a new car, it would have, say, two hundred miles on it, and wouldn't smell of burning anything.

Mr. Gian-Carlo Rosselli got out of the passenger seat and walked quickly to the door. Ristorante Alfredo didn't open until half-past eleven, and Pietro hoped that Ricco Baltazari had enough brains to have somebody waiting to open the door when Rosselli knocked on it. Mr. S. did not like to be kept waiting in a car when he wanted to go someplace, especially when the people knew he was coming.

Mr. Cassandro's concerns were put to rest when the door was opened by Ricco Baltazari himself before Rosselli reached it. Rosselli turned and looked up and down the street, and then nodded to Pietro, who got quickly out from behind the wheel and opened the door for Mr. S.

Mr. S. didn't say "thank you" the way he usually did, or even nod his head, but just walked quickly across the sidewalk and into the restaurant. Pietro was almost sure that was because he had business on his mind, and not because he was pissed that the car smelled, but he wasn't positive.

He wondered, as he got back behind the wheel, if he raced the engine, would that speed up the burn-the-crap-off process, so that the car wouldn't smell when Mr. S. came out.

He decided against doing so. What was likely to happen was that, sitting still, the smoke would just get more in the car than it would if he just let things take their natural way.

But then he decided that he could take a couple of laps around the block and burn it off that way. Mr. S. probably wasn't going to come out in the next couple of minutes, and if Rosselli looked out and saw the car wasn't there, he would think the cop on the beat had made him move the car.

Sometimes, the cops would leave you alone, let you sit at the curb, if there was somebody behind the wheel, but other times, they would be a pain in the ass and tell you to move on.

Pietro put the Lincoln in gear and drove off. At the first red light, he raced the engine. A cop gave him a strange look. Fuck him!

"Good morning, Mr. S.," Ricco Baltazari said as he carefully shook Mr. S.'s hand. "I got some nice fresh coffee, and I sent out for a little pastry."

"Just the coffee, thank you, Ricco," Mr. S. said, and then changed his mind. "What kind of pastry?"

"I sent out to the French place. I got croissants, and eclairs, and…"

"Maybe an eclair. Thank you very much," Mr. S. said.

"Would you like to go to the office? Or maybe a table?"

"This will do nicely," Mr. S. said and sat down at a table along the wall.

Gian-Carlo Rosselli looked as if he didn't know what he should do, and Mr. S. saw this.

"Sit down, Gian-Carlo, and have a pastry and some coffee. I want you to hear this."

"I'll get the stuff," Ricco said.

When he came back, Mr. S. asked after his family.

"Everybody's doing just fine, Mr. S."

Mr. Savarese nodded, then leaned forward and added cream and sugar to the cup of coffee Ricco had poured for him.

"There's a little business problem, Ricco," Mr. S. said.

"With the restaurant?" Ricco asked, concern evident in his voice. He glanced nervously at Gian-Carlo.

Mr. S. looked at him for a moment, expressionless, before replying and when he did it was not directly.

"I had a telephone call yesterday from a business associate in Baltimore," he said. "A man who has always been willing to help me, when I asked for a favor. Now he wants a favor from me."

"How can I help, Mr. S.?"

"His problem, he tells me, is that the feds, the Customs people, and the Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs people have been making a nuisance of themselves at Friendship. You know Friendship? The airport in Baltimore?"

"I know it, Mr. S."

"He says that he don't think it will last, that what they're doing is fishing, not looking for something specific, but he has decided that it would be best if he didn't try to bring anything through Friendship for the next week or ten days. As a precaution, you understand."

"Certainly."

"And he asked me, would I do him the favor of handling his merchandise through Philadelphia. The point of origin is San Juan, Puerto Rico."

"We don't have anybody at the airport…"

"There are two reasons I told this man that I would be happy to help him," Mr. S. said. "The first being that I owe him, and when he asks: And the second being that I did not want it to get around, and it would if I told him, that at this moment, I don't have anybody at the airport."

"I understand."

"So what I want to know from you, Ricco, how are things going with your friend who works at the airport?"

"I had a telephone call at eight this morning, Mr. S. Our friend was up there last night and he had bad luck, and he signed four thousand dollars' worth of markers."

"You ever think, Ricco, that somebody's bad luck is almost always somebody else's good luck?"

"That's very true, Mr. S."

"So you have these markers?"

"No, sir. They're going to have a truck coming to Philadelphia today, this afternoon, and they'll bring the markers with them then."

"I think I would like to have them sooner than that. Do you think you could call them up and ask them, as a favor to you, if they could maybe put somebody in a car and get them down here right away?"

"Or we could send a car up there, Mr. S.," Gian-Carlo suggested.

"Let them, as a favor to Ricco, bring the markers here to the restaurant. Then, when they come, Ricco can call me, at the house, and say that he has the papers you were looking for, and you'll come pick them up, and take them, and also those photographs Joe Fierello took at the car lot, over to Paulo, and then Paulo can go have a talk with this cop."

"Right, Mr. S."

"Where would you say this cop would be, Ricco, in, say, three hours?"

"I don't know, Mr. S., to tell you the truth."

"You know where he is now? I thought I asked you to have that girl keep an eye on him."

"He's at her apartment now, Mr. S. But what you asked is where he' ll be at about noon. He may be there. He may go by his house, Tony told me he had to have new pipes put in, or he may just stay at Tony's apartment until it's time for him to go to work. I just have no way of telling."

"I understand. All right. The first thing you do is you get on the phone and ask them to please send the markers right away to here. Then, can you do this, you call this girl, and you tell her if she can to keep the cop in her apartment as long as she can, and if she can't, she's to call you the minute he leaves, and tell you where he's going. And I think it would be best if you made the calls from a pay phone someplace."

"I'll have to leave the keys to the restaurant with Gian-Carlo, otherwise you'd be locked in."

"There's nobody else here?"

"The fewer people around the better, I always say."

"And you're right. But I'll tell you what. We'll leave, and then you go find a pay phone and make the call, and when you find out something, you call the house and all you have to say is 'yes' or ' no.' You understand?"

"That would work nicely."

"And besides, if I stayed here, I'd eat all this pastry, it's very good, but it's not good for me, too much of it."

"I understand, Mr. S."

Gian-Carlo got up and walked to the door and pushed the curtain aside and looked for Pietro.

"He's not out there, Mr. S."

"He probably had to drive around the block," Mr. S. said. "He'll be there in a minute."

For the next three minutes, Gian-Carlo, at fifteen-second intervals, pushed the curtain aside and looked out to see if Pietro and the Lincoln had returned.

Finally he had.

"He's out there, Mr. S.," Gian-Carlo said.

Mr. Savarese stood up.

"Thank you for the pastry, even if it wasn't good for me," he said, and shook Ricco's hand.

Then he walked out of the restaurant and quickly across the sidewalk and got into the Lincoln. As soon as Gian-Carlo had got in beside him in the front seat, Pietro drove off.

"I'll tell you, Pietro, if anything, it smells worse than before."

"As soon as I get a chance, Mr. S., I'll take it to the garage and swap it."

"Why don't you do that?" Mr. S. replied.

"Anthony, something has come up," Mr. Ricco Baltazari, proprietor of Ristorante Alfredo, said to Mr. Anthony Clark (formerly Cagliari), resident manager of the Oaks and Pines Lodge, over the telephone. Mr. Clark was in his office overlooking the third tee of the Oaks and Pines Championship Golf Course. Mr. Baltazari was in a pay telephone booth in the lower lobby of the First Philadelphia Bank amp; Trust Building on South Broad Street.

"What's that?"

"The financial documents you're going to send me…"

"They're on their way, Ricco, relax. The van just left, not more than a couple minutes ago."

"That's not good enough. It'll take him for fucking ever to get to Philly."

"What do you want me to do, get in my car and bring them my fucking self?" Mr. Clark said, a slight tone of petulance creeping into his voice.

"It's not what I want, Anthony. It's what you know who, our mutual friend, wants," Mr. Baltazari said. "He wants those financial documents right fucking now."

There was a moment's silence.

"The only thing I could do, Ricco," Mr. Clark said, "is put somebody in my car and send him after the van, see if he could catch it, you understand?"

"Do it, Anthony. Our mutual friend is very anxious to get his hands on those financial documents just as soon as he can."

"If I had known he wanted those documents in a hurry, I would have brought them myself, you understand that?"

"If I had known he wanted them, I would have come up and got the fuckers myself," Mr. Baltazari replied. "I just left him. He said I should tell you he wants them, as a special favor, right now."

"I'll do what I can, Ricco. You want I should call our friend and tell him what I'm doing, in case my guy can't catch the van? Or will you do that?"

"He don't give a shit what you're doing. All he wants is the fucking markers. How you do that is your business."

"I tell my guy to take them right to our mutual friend?"

"You tell your guy to bring them to me, at the restaurant. When I got them, I'm to call our friend."

"Ricco, I would be very unhappy if I was to learn that you weren't telling me the whole truth about this."

"Anthony, get your guy on the way, for Christ's sake!"

"Yeah," Mr. Clark said, and hung up.

Mr. Clark took a pad of Oaks and Pines notepaper from his desk, and a pen from his desk set.

On one sheet of paper, he wrote, "Give Tommy the envelope I gave you, A.C." and on the other he wrote Ristorante Alfredo, Ricco Baltazari, and the address and telephone number.

Then Mr. Clark went down to the money room off the casino. There he found Mr. Thomas Dolbare sitting all alone on one of the stools in front of the money counting table, on which now sat a small stack of plastic bank envelopes. Mr. Dolbare, a very large and muscular twentyeight-year-old, was charged with the security of last night's take until the messenger arrived from Wilkes-Barre to take it for deposit into six different, innocently named bank accounts in Hazelton and Wilkes-Barre.

"Tommy," Mr. Clark said, "what I want you to do is take my car and chase down the van. He just left. He always goes down Route 611. Stop him, give him this, and he'll give you an envelope. You then take the envelope to Mr. Baltazari. I wrote down the address and phone number."

Mr. Clark gave Mr. Dolbare both notes.

"Right."

"As soon as you have it, go to a pay phone and call me. Or if you can't catch the van, call me and tell me that too."

"I'll catch it," Mr. Dolbare said confidently. He was pleased that he was being given greater responsibility than sitting around in a fucking windowless room watching money bags.

"Don't take a gun," Mr. Clark said. "You won't need it in Philadelphia."

"Right," Mr. Dolbare said, and took off his jacket and the.357 Magnum Colt Trooper in its shoulder holster, and then put his jacket back on.

"Don't drive like a fucking idiot and get arrested, or bang up my car," Mr. Clark said.

"Right," Mr. Dolbare said.

The van that Mr. Dolbare intercepted on Highway 611 between Delaware Water Gap and Mount Bethel was a year-old Ford, which had the Oaks and Pines Lodge logotype painted on both its doors and the sides. It made a daily, except Sunday, run to Philadelphia where it picked up seafood and beef and veal from M. Alcatore amp; Sons Quality Wholesale and Retail Meats in South Philadelphia.

M. Alcatore amp; Sons was a wholly owned subsidiary of Food Services, Inc., which was a wholly owned subsidiary of South Street Enterprises, Inc., in which, it was believed by various law enforcement agencies, Mr. Vincenzo Savarese held a substantial interest.

It was also believed by various law enforcement agencies that through some very creative accounting the interlocked corporations were both depriving the federal, state, and city governments of all sorts of taxes, and at the same time laundering through them profits from a rather long list of illegal enterprises.

So far, no law enforcement agency, city, state, or federal, had come up with anything any of the respective governmental attorneys believed would be worth taking to court.

Tommy Dolbare gave the van driver Mr. Clark's note, and the van driver gave him a sealed blank envelope.

Tommy got back in Mr. Clark's Cadillac Sedan de Ville, and continued down Highway 611 to Easton, where he had to take a piss, and stopped at a gas station. He decided, on his way back to the car, that Mr. Clark would probably like to hear that he had intercepted the van, so he went into a telephone booth and called Oaks and Pines Lodge.

Then he got back in the Sedan de Ville and continued down US Highway 611 toward Philadelphia. It is one of the oldest highways in the nation, and from Easton south for twenty miles or so parallels the Delaware Canal.

Shortly after Mr. Dolbare passed the turn off to Durham, a tiny village of historical significance because it was at Durham that Benjamin Franklin established the first stop of his new postal service, and from the canal at Durham that George Washington took the Durham Boats on which he floated across the Delaware to attack the British in Princeton, Mr. Dolbare took his eyes from the road a moment to locate the cigarette lighter.

When he looked out the windshield again, there was a dog on the road. Mr. Dolbare, although he did not have one himself, liked dogs, and did not wish to run over one. He applied his brakes as hard as he could, and simultaneously attempted to steer around the dog.

The Cadillac went out of control and skidded into the post-andcable fence that separates Highway 611 from the Delaware Canal.

The fence functioned as designed. The Cadillac did not go into the Delaware Canal. The cables held it from doing so. Only the front wheels left the road. Mr. Dolbare was able to back onto the road, but when he did so, one of the cables, which had become entangled with the grill of the car, did not become unentangled, and held. This caused the grill of the Cadillac, and the sheet metal that held the grill and the radiator in place, to pull loose from the Cadillac.

There was a scream of tortured metal as the fan blades struck something where the radiator had been, and then antifreeze erupted from the displaced radiator hose against the engine block.

"Oh, shit!" Mr. Dolbare said.

He got out of the car. He looked in both directions down the highway. He could see nothing but the narrow road in either direction. He did not recall what lay in the direction of Philadelphia, but he estimated that it was not more than a couple of miles back toward Easton where he had seen a gas station and a bar, which would have a telephone.

He slammed the door of Mr. Clark's Cadillac as hard as he could, and started walking back up Highway 611 toward Easton, his heart heavy with the knowledge that he had really fucked up, and that he was now in deep shit.

Mr. Dolbare had just passed a sign announcing that the Riegelsville Kiwanis met every Tuesday at the Riegelsville Inn and had just learned that the Riegelsville American Legion welcomed him to Riegelsville when he saw a familiar vehicle coming down Highway 611.

He stepped into the road and flagged it down.

"What the fuck are you doing walking down the highway?" the driver inquired of him.

"We have to find a phone," Mr. Dolbare said. "You see one back there?"

"What the hell happened?"

"Some asshole forced me off the road; I had an accident."

"You wrecked Clark's car?" the Oaks and Pines van driver replied, adding unnecessarily, "Boy, is your ass in deep shit."

"No shit? Get me to a fucking phone."

Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Anthony Clark telephoned to Mr. Ricco Baltazari, at the Ristorante Alfredo, to inform him that there had been an accident, some asshole had forced his guy off the road in the sticks, but that the van had caught up with him, and those financial documents they had been talking about were at this very minute on their way to him.

Mr. Baltazari told Mr. Clark, unnecessarily, that he would pass the progress report along to their mutual friend, who wasn't going to like it one fucking bit.

"He's going to want to know, Anthony, if you didn't have somebody reliable to do this favor for him, why you didn't do it yourself."

"Accidents happen, Ricco, for Christ's sake!"

"Yeah," Mr. Baltazari said, and hung up.

He looked at his watch. It was quarter to twelve. He thought that although it wasn't his fault, Mr. S. was going to be pissed to hear that the goddamned markers were still somewhere the other side of Doylestown.

Somewhat reluctantly, he dialed Mr. S.'s number.