"This I don't know. I could find out who caught the case and what they know, if you want."

"Oh, that'd be great, Jim! I'll owe you one."

"And I'll collect, too," he said, laughed a nasty laugh, and hung up.

Marlene got her gun from the gun safe, clipped it on, logged thirty seconds of quality time with her boys, whistled up the dog, and punched for the elevator. Marlene was in the security business, although the Chens were not clients.

They lived in Confucius Plaza, a seven-year-old structure that had been fully rented before the first spadeful of earth turned over. That the Chens had a nice apartment was an indication that the family was somebody in Chinatown. There were a couple of news vans parked on the street outside, and a small crowd of photo and video journalists lying in wait. Clearly, the cops had suggested, or maybe it was just a media rumor, that the Chens were connected to the "gangland slaying." Hype about a new tong war was in the air, and the press was drooling. As was Sweety, of course. Marlene hooked him to his leash and walked toward the building entrance.

"Sweety, si brutto!" she ordered, and the dog went into his rabies impersonation, heaving at the leash, snarling and flinging long, disgusting ropes of sticky saliva. The media backed away in panic, tripping over cables and dropping mike poles.

"Oh, sorry, oh, gosh, excuse me," Marlene chirped. "Oh, dear! Monster, behave yourself! . . ." until she was at the gla.s.s doors. The security guy, who knew Marlene well, was having a hard time keeping his face straight as he opened it for her.

"Way to go, Meilin," he said. "I'll call up for you."

Marlene had known the Chens for nearly fifteen years and had been to their home-originally an apartment on Mott and now this one-innumerable times, to deliver and pick up her daughter. On every occasion she had been offered tea and cigarettes and engaged in a short conversation, almost always about children and the unbearable difficulties brought on by their slovenliness and ingrat.i.tude. She had thought that she had, through her daughter at least, a good relationship with the Chen family, not intimate, but sufficient to make this visit perfectly natural and, with the offer of help she had in mind, even welcome. She was soon disabused of this idea. At her ring, Walter, the Chens' eldest son, came to the door and stood there, looking at her as at a stranger. Walter was a senior at Columbia, and Marlene knew him as a bright, often amusing, regular (by which she meant Americanized, predictable) kid.

"Hi, Walter," she said, expecting him to move away from the door and usher her in. He didn't move. His eyes were very black, and flat and (she actually thought the word) inscrutable. "Walter," she said, urging a smile to her lips, "aren't you going to let me in?"

He did not return the smile, but said, as to a stranger, "Marlene, that's not a good idea right now. My parents are extremely upset . . ."

"I bet they are. That's why I came over, to see if I-"

". . . and they can't see anyone today," he concluded, and closed the door firmly in her face.

Karp's intercom buzzed. The handicapped were gone and he was dealing with the aftermath, drafting a memo. He threw down his pencil, pushed the b.u.t.ton. O'Malley said, "They're ready for you."

"This is the Catalano meeting?" asked Karp, well knowing it was.

"At long last, and may G.o.d have mercy on your soul," said O'Malley fervently.

As a symbol of his authority, Karp got to use the D.A.'s conference room, a stately, paneled office with a long, mellow oaken table and high, stately green leather chairs. The D.A., on attaining the office, had attempted to reproduce, in detail, in the whole executive suite, the decor favored by his predecessor-but-one, Francis P. Garrahy, of sacred memory. Keegan had run the Homicide Bureau under Garrahy, and Karp had been trained in it, and both men were subject to nostalgia for those departed times, when crime seemed slightly less overwhelming. Both men entertained the suspicion, unvoiced to be sure, that even Phil Garrahy might have trimmed a little more than he did, might have had trouble keeping his integrity untarnished under such a collapse of civil order. To his credit, Keegan tried to keep up the standards, and if his own integrity had a grungy spot or two, the symbols were at least kept brightly polished and dusted. For the conference room Keegan had even located in some forgotten Centre Street attic the framed oil portraits of Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia that Garrahy had hung on his walls and had added one of Garrahy himself, done from a photograph.

It was not a good portrait. In it the old man looked stiff and surprised, neither of which was a characteristic of himself, but it was what they had. This painting looked down upon where Keegan himself now sat at the head of the long table, in his shirtsleeves, toying with a large claro cigar that he never smoked. He was a big, florid Irishman, heavy-shouldered, carrying an elegant head: the requisite pol's mane of white hair, blue, deep-set eyes, an aristocratic beak, no lips to speak of, and a chin like an anvil. He'd played offensive end for Fordham, and retained the grace and the twisty moves. He looked up and popped the cigar into his mouth when Karp walked in, smiling cordially around it. (He never got the end damp, and so no one knew whether he didn't smoke the same one every day or retired the thing at intervals.) Karp nodded to Keegan and to the other three men, and took a seat at the end of the table, where he always sat.

Karp took the notes at these meetings, a somewhat unusual role for someone with his rank, this necessary task being regarded by the average legal bureaucrat as suitable only for peasants, or women. Karp had a.s.sumed it for two reasons. First, it made him appear to pompous idiots less important than he was, which made them tend to ignore him, which made it easier for him to sneak up behind them if need be and yank their pants down. Besides that, he understood that who takes the notes at executive meetings controls the memory of an organization, and since Karp had never cultivated a political base, any control he could develop was welcome. While he respected Jack Keegan's skill and competence, and actually liked him well enough as a man, Karp was under no illusions about the district attorney's ambitions. He understood perfectly (for Keegan, to his credit, had made it no secret) that if a sacrifice had to be made to that altar and if Karp was at hand and unprotected, the D.A. would not hesitate for a New York minute before yanking his plug.

Karp took meeting notes in thick accountant's ledgers bound in pale green cloth, items not much in demand at the supply room since computers had come in. He had rows of them in his office in a locked steel cabinet whose sole key was ever in his custody, and he never showed the notes therein to anyone. Thus no one knew what Karp had written down, which tended to make Keegan's more haughty satraps less willing to get into arguments about who had promised what to whom. The note business was an absurdly simple ploy, but it worked to the D.A.'s advantage and polished the l.u.s.ter of Karp. Swiftly, using his idiosyncratic quasi-shorthand, Karp wrote down the purpose of the meeting-"strategy for Catalano murder"-and the date and the names of the three partic.i.p.ants besides himself and the D.A.

The first of these, sitting to Keegan's right was Roland Hrcany, the chief of the Homicide Bureau. Hrcany had the look and build of a professional wrestler, and, like many of them, he wore his straight blond hair combed back from a cave-man brow ridge and long enough to reach past his collar in back. Despite this brutish appearance (or perhaps because of it) he was the best homicide prosecutor in the office, next to Karp, a fact that rankled him, as did Karp's former inc.u.mbency as homicide chief. Some months ago he had been shot by a Mexican felon trying to introduce south-of-the-border criminal justice practices to the New York area, and he was still not back on duty full-time. The event, and its wasting effects on his ma.s.sive body, of which he was inordinately proud, had oddly enough improved his disposition, which had been churlish and of an aggressiveness outstanding even in the testosterone-rich precincts of the D.A.'s office.

Opposite Roland sat Frank Anselmo, the chief of the Rackets Bureau. He was a dapper, dark man with a full head of thick black hair, well cut, and small, active, manicured hands. Anselmo, the son of a police inspector, and thus a man with important cop credibility, had pitched for Fordham during the same years that Keegan had played football. The two men were cronies from way back, and Keegan had brought him in as Rackets chief from the Queens D.A. shortly after taking over the New York office. This made sense, since the D.A. had to trust more than anyone else in his office the person responsible for, among other things, investigating public officials. Karp did not know him well. Rackets was a small bureau, its work was perforce somewhat secret, and it brought few cases to trial. The book on Anselmo around the office was that he was smart, ambitious, and, it seemed, temporarily content to play in the shade cast by Jack Keegan's lofty oak. The relationship with the boss was, of course, well-known, and hardly anyone gave him any trouble. He was smiling and joshing with Keegan about a sports bet. He smiled a lot. In general, Karp was suspicious of people in the criminal justice business who smiled a lot, as he himself did not see much to be happy about there, but Anselmo always seemed to put Keegan in a better mood, which was never to be sneezed at.

The last man at the meeting was clearly not in a good mood and not amused by Anselmo's patter. Raymond Guma, slumped like a bag of dirty laundry in the chair just to Karp's left, was one of the few ADAs who did not at all mind giving Anselmo trouble. Guma had on occasion been mistaken for the former Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, although he was less pretty than Berra, and unlike Berra he had shown (during a tryout for the Yanks, for he had been quite the star at St. John's) that he could not reliably hit a major league breaking ball. He was nearly the same age as Keegan and Anselmo-late fifties-but carried his years more heavily, for unlike the other men there he had never been promoted to any position of authority, and never would be. He had been a homicide prosecutor for over twenty-five years, and he knew more about the New York Mafia than anyone in the building, which was why he was at the meeting. Some said he knew rather too much about the New York Mafia, which was one of the many reasons he had never been promoted. He was a sloppy, ill-disciplined man, a s.e.xist in the current parlance, sour and cynical, but-and this is why Karp loved him-with boundless heart and a sense of humor made of Kevlar.

In the normal course of things, Guma should have been in Rackets under Anselmo, but between the two men lay a mora.s.s of near visceral antipathy. This, even more than the hazards of the case on the agenda, accounted for the tension in the room. Keegan let the sports talk peter away. "Guys, you all know how important this one is. We're going to come under a lot of pressure, and I want some early resolution. Butch has my full authority on this one." He looked up as O'Malley came in looking concerned and tapped her wrist.w.a.tch. "The G.o.dd.a.m.n lieutenant governor," growled Keegan. He stood, said, "I'll be back," and left. All faces rotated to the other end of the table. Karp nodded to Anselmo.

"Frank, your meeting."

Anselmo's smile broadened by an inch, showing even, small white teeth, and he ducked his head in a fetching gesture of humility. He shuffled some papers on his lap and pa.s.sed out a set of neatly bound blue manila folders stamped confidential in big red letters. Guma turned his face toward Karp, out of Anselmo's view, and flashed his gargoyle imitation-a convincing one, given his physiognomy.

"All right: Catalano," said Anselmo. "To review the bare facts: on the night of June ninth, a body later identified as that of Edward Catalano was found in a car parked under the West Side Highway at Vestry Street. He'd been shot from behind at close range with a small-caliber weapon. Five shots to the head, a typical gangland murder."

Here what might have been construed by an unsympathetic listener as a snort of derision issued from Guma's direction. It was a low sort of snort, however, and if Anselmo heard it, he paid no attention.

"That method," he resumed, "and the fact that Catalano is known to be a capo regime of the Bollano family suggested that this was a professional hit having to do with the politics of the New York Mob. So-as you probably know, when they start hitting capos, it means that the power balances are shifting. There's disorder in the ranks, shifting loyalties, the wise guys are all looking for where they're going to end up after the dust settles, and so this is a prime time for us to do ourselves some good. Now, the first question we have to ask when something like this goes down is, naturally, cui bono. We look inside the family first, table one in your handout."

Shuffling of papers. Karp cast an eye on Guma, who had leaned back in his chair, the unopened file on his lap, and seemed to be getting set for a snooze. It was not unknown for Guma to drop off in meetings, and Karp hoped that he would not break out in snores. That too was not unknown.

"At the top, of course, we have the don, Salvatore Bollano, known as Big Sally. He's seventy something and not in good shape. Last of the breed, by the way, actually born in Sicily. There's some question as to whether he's still in control. Next in line is Salvatore Bollano, Jr., Little Sally, but not to his face, ha-ha, aka, Sally Jump, age forty-three. You have his arrest record there. a.s.sault, rape, jury tampering, bribery, dozens of collars, never convicted. Violent, short-tempered, little son of a b.i.t.c.h; he may be mentally unstable, in fact."

Here came a snort from Guma. This time Anselmo paused and directed his attention to Guma's chair. "Um, Ray? Did you have a point to make?"

"Uh-uh, Frank," said Guma. "You're doing fine."

"Thank you. Next came Carlo Tonnati, street name Charlie Tuna, currently serving a life stretch in Attica for ordering the murder of Vinnie Ferro a dozen or so years ago."

Karp knew this, as he had personally put Charlie Tuna away, and everyone else did, too. Anselmo was often excessively thorough. He listened with half an ear and took precise notes on autopilot as the man ran through the order of battle of the Bollano crime family and presented his Machiavellian a.n.a.lysis of their various rivalries. The Bollanos were the smallest of New York's Mafia families, not looking to expand at all, but what they held, they held very hard. Their base was the Lower East Side, and Anselmo had charts and tables showing their various estimated sources of income, so much from drugs, so much from prost.i.tution, so much from shakedowns and loan sharking. This was boring. Who cared about the enterprises or politics of thugs, except someone planning to write one of those inside-the-Mob books? Karp's instinct was for the concrete, for the facts, for the evidence. They had a crime; was there a case? Anselmo came to the end of his aria. In the silence that followed, Karp asked, "So you like Joe Pigetti for it?"

"Yeah, I do. It's the only scenario that makes sense. Pigetti and Catalano were the two most powerful capos. Catalano was tight with Little Sally, Pigetti was on the outs with both of them, but he was Charlie Tuna's protege and he had more or less replaced Tonnati with Big Sally. If the old don were to kick off, though, he'd be up s.h.i.t's creek. Or maybe he heard that the two of them were going to do him. So he goes to the don and lays something bad on Catalano. Some betrayal, he's skimming-whatever. The old guy's not so sharp, so he gives the okay. For Pigetti it was a good career move."

Karp seemed to give this serious attention. "Roland?"

"Well, Pigetti's out as the actual trigger," said Roland. "He's alibied to the neck. Apparently there was a big party the night of. One of the don's nephews was getting married, and the goombahs threw him a party at the Casa D'Oro on Elizabeth. Pigetti was there until two or so, and then he and a bunch of them went out clubbing until four-thirty. Catalano was at the party and he left around one-thirty, or it could've been an hour earlier or later, because all the boys were feeling pretty good by then and vague about the time. In any case, it happens that we know the exact time of death because one of the bullets fired into the back of Catalano's skull came out through his eye and broke the dashboard clock at three-fourteen a.m." He paused to see what effect this detail had on the a.s.sembled group.

"That's a fancy touch," said Karp carefully.

"It is a fancy touch," Roland agreed. "A little fancier than we're used to from the wise guys. Call me cynical, but you might suspect that it was done on purpose that way to give Joe an alibi. It turns out that a little before three, Joe was checking into the valet parking at a club at 57th off Eighth. So clearly the cops are looking for an a.s.sociate of Joe's who doesn't have an alibi for the time of, and they come up with Marco Moletti. Moletti was also seen leaving the Casa D'Oro with Catalano and a couple of other guys. Catalano was going to drop by his girlfriend's house, and he took this bunch along for the ride, maybe call up some ladies and continue the party. But Mutt and Jeff got talking to some girls at a light and they bailed. According to Mutt and Jeff, Marco was the last guy in the car. According to Marco, Marco wasn't feeling so hot, having overindulged at the fiesta, so after dropping Catalano at the girl's place at Park and 36th, he handed over the keys, walked to his place, Lex and 49th, and crashed. He says."

"That's a long walk, you're not feeling so good," said Karp.

"The cops thought so, too," said Roland. "Besides that, Catalano never made it to the girlfriend that night. The cops think Marco stuck a gun in Catalano's back, made him drive to under the highway, and popped him there. Then either someone picked him up or he walked away and took a cab or the subway home. In any case, Marco was the last person to see Catalano alive."

"The second to last if he wasn't the shooter," said Karp. "Are you charging him?"

Roland waggled a hand and twisted his face into a doubtful expression. "It's thin. He was in the car, but they all admit that. The search found a box of .22 longs in his place, but no gun. The vic was killed with .22 longs. There was also a bag with a little short of fifty K in it. Payoff money? Ordinarily, I'd give it a pa.s.s, but . . ." Here he looked over at Anselmo, who put in, "Right, but this is not an ordinary case. I'm pushing Roland to charge him and then squeeze him to give us Pigetti. This could be the thing that cracks the whole Bollano family."

Karp looked at the faces: Anselmo avid, smiling like a kid at the circus; Hrcany pretending forbearance, willing to go along as long as no one made him responsible for a weak case, and perfectly willing to see Anselmo carry this freight; and Guma? Was the jerk actually asleep or just pretending the most elaborate boredom? Under the shelter of the conference table Karp's cap toe reached out and gave Guma one in the ankle. The monkey eyes opened, the floppy mouth yawned, showing more bridgework than anyone wanted to see.

Hrcany said, "Now that you mention it, Frank, Guma has some thoughts on that. Ray?"

"Yeah, Frank," said Guma pleasantly, "my thoughts are that you try to squeeze Moletti, you might get some of that scungilli he scarfed down at the party there, but nothing else."

"Why?" snapped Anselmo. "Because of the sacred code of omerta? They don't do that s.h.i.t anymore, Guma. They sing just like anyone else when you push them."

Guma looked up at the ceiling as if he thought the answer to this question might be inscribed there, and when he responded it was in the sort of voice a kindergarten teacher might use to explain that D came after C. "Actually, Frank, I wasn't thinking of any high-tone Mafia stuff like that. I was thinking about Marco. You know what they call Marco Moletti on the street? No, don't look in the file, Frank, I'll tell you. If they sort of like him, they call him Slo Mo. If they're annoyed at him, like if the pizza they sent him out for is cold, they call him Marky Moron. He's a gofer, Frank. He's also real honest, because he's too dumb to steal and he knows it, which is why the guys sometimes leave stuff with him, cash, like your bag of money, or hot property. He's got his niche, you could say, and he's happy in it. But to put it mildly, Frank, he ain't a player. So anyone who thinks that Marky knows f.u.c.k-all about what goes on in the Bollanos is stupid. You want to squeeze something, squeeze the hubcap on Eddie Catalano's Lincoln, you'll get more out of it. And anybody who thinks that Marky Moron would get tagged to whack a capo regime is . . . words fail me. Felony stupid? Besides all that, in my opinion, you're doing great."

Anselmo shot to his feet and flung his papers to the floor. "Ah, come on, Butch, what the h.e.l.l!"

"Sit down, Frank," said Karp. "Guma?"

"I apologize, Frank," said Guma instantly, in monotone.

"All right, now that we've all had our fun," said Karp, "let me remind you why we're here. Eddie Catalano was killed the day before he was scheduled to appear pursuant to a subpoena before a federal grand jury investigating Mob involvement in local businesses. This has greatly vexed our colleague on the other side of the square. The U.S. attorney believes that Mr. Catalano was slain to prevent his testimony-"

"Horses.h.i.t," said Guma.

"We're aware of your opinion on that subject, Guma," Karp snapped, "but would you put a G.o.dd.a.m.n cork in it just for now? Thank you. And since the U.S. attorney has been kept from his goal of, as he so elegantly puts it, 'breaking the Mob in New York,' he has devoted his time and talent to breaking our boss's b.a.l.l.s instead. Why is Jack Keegan not pursuing this obvious gangland slaying with more alacrity and success? Why have we not seen the Mafia sc.u.mbags dragged into court? How come his crusade is stopped in its tracks? Is it that maybe Jack Keegan's not up to the job? And so forth, as you know. Now, in order to get Tommy Colombo off our a.s.s, we need to show movement on this G.o.dd.a.m.n murder. Either we have to have a plausible defendant behind bars, or, failing that, we have to find out why the sc.u.mbag got killed. Roland, what are the cops doing besides sniffing around this Moletti character?"

Hrcany rolled his ma.s.sive shoulders in a shrug. Not as ma.s.sive as they used to be, Karp observed, but still meaty. The eighteen-inch collar of his shirt was loose on his neck.

"Well, Butch," he said, "you know how it is-they fall in love with a perp, it's forever, unless they dig up something new. I got enough for an arrest warrant and an indictment. When he's in the can, who knows? A pal of his could drop a dime-Marky didn't do it, I heard it was X. Or he could talk in jail. Maybe he knows from nothing, like Guma said, but still, he's around those guys. Even waiters pick up stuff. And then one of the regular jailhouse snitches could grab it. I don't know-"

"Roland, cut the horses.h.i.t," said Karp. "Don't give me warrants and indictments. We wanted to, you know d.a.m.n well we could arrest and indict the cardinal archbishop for this one. What I'm interested in is, do you believe that this putz is a legitimate suspect? Did he f.u.c.king do the crime?"

Hrcany looked down for a moment as if gathering himself and then met Karp's gaze. "Since you ask, I don't and he didn't. Guma's right. He's a r.e.t.a.r.d."

"Then forget him!" Karp ordered, and then, to nearly everyone's surprise, he turned to Guma. "Ray, what really happened?" he asked, almost casually. Frank Anselmo's smile became noticeably more false.

"Oh, they brought in somebody," Guma answered confidently, as if giving the correct time. "Probably a pair of guys. They picked him up in the girlfriend's lobby, hustled him out to his car, tossed him in the trunk, and drove to the scene of in two cars. Then they stuck him in the driver's seat and did him so it would look like he got popped by a buddy in the backseat. All these guys watched The G.o.dfather fifty times, so they know how it's supposed to go down. The clock's a nice touch, and it ties it to somebody who might need an alibi."

"Like Pigetti?" asked Karp.

"Oh, either Joey was involved, or somebody wanted to make it look like Joey was involved. If he did do it, though, the important thing is, did he clear it through the don? My guess is no, he didn't. It's hard to think why Big Sally would want to take out Eddie Cat." He looked at Anselmo. "See, Little Sal doesn't have any friends to speak of. Eddie was Little Sal's baby-sitter. This is well-known. Used to be Charlie Tuna, then Eddie got the job when Charlie went upstate. Little Sal needs a lot of watching. He gets testy when he doesn't get his way, and it interferes with business. So this is perfect for the don. He got one of his capos tight with his kid, the heir, keeping him in line, but also the kid is watching Eddie, of course. Neither of them can make a move against him without the other knowing. And he's got his other capo right there in his pocket, Pigetti. Anyway, whoever did it, Pigetti, Little Sal, the don, or some combination thereof, it's a sure bet it's a family thing, got nothing to do with the federal grand jury. Eddie Cat would go to jail if he had to, but not into a witness program, which anyone who knew the guy would tell you in a second."

"So who did the deed, Guma? You probably already have a name for us." Anselmo spoke sarcastically, but Guma took the question on, knitting his brows as if trying to think of an actual name.

"Not a Sicilian, Frank. No Sicilian would hit a made guy and a capo in his own family without an order from his don, and if he was from another family, not unless he wanted to start a major war, which we got no evidence at all is what's involved here. So who? Well, if Murder Incorporated was still in business, this is the kind of stuff they used to contract out to the Jewish fellas, but I don't think Jews are into whacking anymore."

"Only whacking off," said Karp. "You're suggesting that Pigetti would reach out to one of our fine non-Sicilian ethnic groups?"

"I am," said Guma. "As far as which one . . ." He shrugged. "It's a whachamacallit . . . an embarra.s.sment of riches out there."

The meeting broke up soon afterward. Guma and Hrcany vanished into the hallway, and Anselmo walked through the door that led to the D.A.'s office. Karp finished cleaning up his notes. When he went a few minutes later into Keegan's office, he observed Anselmo talking vigorously at the D.A., in undertones, and the D.A. not liking what he was hearing, shaking his n.o.ble head. When Anselmo ran down and left, Keegan hooked a finger, and Karp followed him to the other end of the office, where Keegan sat down in his chair with a snarling kind of sigh.

"What did Frank want?"

"Oh, he was p.i.s.sed off about Ray, needless to relate. Christ, the pair of them are like a couple of brats. No, Frank, you can't be in charge of Guma, for the ninetieth time. And of course Roland set the whole thing up, just to show Frank who's got the biggest d.i.c.k. Jesus!"

"You could put Guma in charge of Frank," Karp suggested.

Keegan goggled at him until he saw Karp was joking, and then he barked out a laugh and grinned. "Oh, yeah! That'd be rare, our own junior Mafioso in charge of Rackets. Tell me, did Guma really once stash a material witness with an out-of-town wise guy?"

"I've heard that story, too," said Karp in a noncommittal tone. "You got a minute for this?"

Keegan had, and Karp epitomized what had just happened in a little under two.

"So you're telling me we got bulls.h.i.t."

"What can I say? Police baffled, as the headlines used to say."

"Well, that can't be," said Keegan, putting away all smiles. "No chance that this Marky guy was involved?" He sounded wistful.

Karp said, "It doesn't even pa.s.s the laugh test."

For an instant Karp was afraid that Keegan was going to reverse him on arresting the fool, but the man's better angels chimed in and he merely cursed under his breath and said, "This isn't your everyday public service Mob hit. Tommy is running for whatever the f.u.c.k he's running for on fighting the big bad Mob, showing that although he's an Italian-American gentleman he's not that kind of Italian-American gentleman, and if he's got to run all over me to do it, that's fine with him. This is not one we can afford to lose." A steely glare, before which Karp did not in the least flinch, and then he added, the grin returning, "Say, 'Yes, boss,' so I know you understand you have complete charge of this s.h.i.t pile."

"Yes, boss," said the good soldier.

Chapter 3.

MARLENE CIAMPI WAS WEARING A RED T-shirt with white Chinese calligraphy on it, similar to the one her daughter owned. Unlike her daughter (as far as she knew) she was also wearing a pistol, a slim Italian 9mm semi-auto, in a nylon belt holster, and a blue cotton blazer to conceal it. This T-shirt had been a gift from Lucy on Marlene's last birthday, back when she and her daughter were still friends. The child had ordered the shirt from a copy shop on Lafayette Street, where they would turn any design you wanted into a shirt, and the calligraphy was in Lucy's own hand. It supposedly read, "What is the most important duty? The duty to one's parents. What is the most important thing to guard? One's own character." Below this was the colophon (Meng Ke) of the author, Mencius, and that of the calligrapher (Kap Luhs), the kid herself.

Marlene stared at the pay phone in whose demi-booth she stood and let the events of the previous two days rankle in her mind. The Lucy business. The Chen business, now tangled together. She thought of calling home and talking directly to Lucy. She had two potential conversations in mind: one a cold interrogation, using all her considerable investigatory skills to determine what her daughter was doing between 3:45 p.m., when she had spoken with her at Columbia-Presby, and 6:10 p.m. when, according to her husband's report, the little wretch had sashayed into the loft, or, alternatively, one that included some magical combination of frankness, wisdom, and empathy that would turn Lucy into the agreeable little girl she once was, and give to that vexed segment of Marlene's motherhood a fresh start.

She sighed, after a few dithering moments, then cursed, and turned her attention to the corner of 23rd Street and Tenth Avenue. The fire engines had left, and the crime scene unit cops were loading equipment into their van. The yellow tape that surrounded the brick storefront was by now bedraggled, drooping to the ground in places, and a couple of detectives were standing amid broken gla.s.s and blackened trash, talking to a uniformed patrolman. Above the entrance a charred sign-Chelsea Women's Clinic-was still legible. Abortions were among the services provided there, and someone objecting to the practice had, a few hours before, blasted out the storefront window with a shotgun and tossed in a gasoline bomb. The staff had been able to smother the flames with extinguishers, however, and no one, oddly enough, had been badly injured. The director of the clinic had thereafter been informed by the police that, despite the attack, the NYPD could not post a permanent guard at the site henceforward until forever. So she had called Marlene.

She crossed the street and walked up to the group of cops. She knew one of the detectives from the time she had spent some years ago as head of the Rape Bureau at the New York D.A.

"How's it going, Shanahan?"

"Marlene Ciampi! See, guys, I knew this was gonna get more interesting. I hope you're not here for an abortion, Marlene, 'cause I think they're closed for the day. However, if you're interested in a simple gynecological examination, I think Patrolman Vargas and I can accommodate you."

The uniformed kid snorted in surprise and looked nervously away. The other detective chuckled and said, "Vargas, watch this-now she's gonna sue us for s.e.xual hara.s.sment. This is good training, Vargas. Get your notebook out."

"Also, Patrolman Vargas," Marlene said, "you'll want to note that aging detectives whose s.e.xual function has been all but destroyed by excess consumption of alcohol often try to compensate by making vulgar remarks to women, including, as in the present case, decent Catholic mothers. It's something you'll want to avoid as you rise through the ranks. What happened here, Shanahan?"

The two detectives were grinning broadly. They didn't get to do this much anymore. "You wouldn't think it to look at her, Vargas, but this woman has the dirtiest mouth in the five boroughs, not excluding Margo the Transvest.i.te down by Manhattan Bridge. What's your interest?"

"I'm not sure I have any, Shanahan. The people here called me, asked me to come by. Anything cooking yet on the perp?"

"You see how these cheap P.I.s operate, Vargas? Trying to get confidential information off the Job? They use bribes, threats, even fading s.e.xual allure, like now . . . what's that on your shirt, Marlene, stick out your chest a little. Oh, yeah, Confucius say, man with erection who enter airplane door sideways going to Bangkok."

"That and, 'Kiss my a.s.s, I'm Irish,' but, really . . . ?"

"Really? Well, it's a highly skilled master criminal terrorist we got here, if you want my opinion. They didn't want to use their own vehicle for the job, oh, no, so they rented a van from Penske over in Jersey somewhere. That's 'cause Penske don't ask for any personal information or anything, you just give them your watch or your dog and drive away."

"A grounder."

"Uh-huh. They're probably closing in on the desperadoes as we speak. Too bad you won't get to use your sleuthing powers in this one, Marlene. Officer Vargas, when Marlene uses her sleuthing powers, it usually ends up with hair on the walls. You want to keep your hand on your weapon around Marlene here. So to speak."