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  Freddie got up and his chair fell over. He looked down at it as if surprised to see it there. He went to the opposite side of the roof and gazed out over the buildings into the fading light.

  Loretto and Dom turned to Augie, who gestured in a way that said there was nothing to be done about Freddie. He'd be okay, but they should just leave him be.

  "Anyway," Dominic said, "we were thinking Loretto might stay with you till I can see my uncle and get this business with Richie Cabo straightened out."

  Augie said, "You think Gaspar can take care of Cabo?"

  "Don Maranzano can," Dominic said. "Cabo don't want trouble with the Castellammarese."

  "Oh," Augie said. "Sure." He thought about it another moment and added, "You think Gaspar can get Maranzano to stand up for somebody maybe's not even an Italian?"

  "Yeah," Dom said. "Besides––" He took Loretto roughly by the chin and turned his profile toward Augie. "Look at that face! Of course he's Italian!"

  To Loretto, Augie said, "You'll have to sleep on the floor between me and Freddie. I'd give you the couch, but Gina's stayin' the night and that's where she's sleeping."

  "That's fine," Loretto said. "I don't think it'll take long to get this all straightened out."

  Dominic pressed his hands together as if in prayer. To Augie he said, "He don't get it. Even if my uncle can keep Cabo in line, that still don't solve the problem with Vince." To Loretto, he said, "You don't know what a mess you're in."

  Loretto said to Augie, "He thinks Vince'll bump me off."

  "Because you can identify him?"

  "Yeah," Dom said. "Loretto saw the whole thing."

  "Dom's right," Augie said. "That could be a big problem."

  "See?" Dom said. "Now you believe me?"

  "I've known Vince most my life," Loretto said. "He likes me."

  "He liked Carmine and May, too," Augie said.

  "See?" Dom yelled. To Augie he said, "I told him the exact same thing."

  Freddie, who had been motionless on the other side of the roof, turned suddenly and joined them. A breeze mussed his hair, and he smelled as if he hadn't bathed in a while. "So now everybody with a gun in this city," he said, "is looking to kill Vince Coll, and Mike's right there with him."

  Dom, Loretto, and Augie all watched Freddie with the same confused expression. Between the three of them they couldn't come up with a thing to say.

  9:58 p.m.

  Patsy DiNapoli walked arm in arm with his girlfriend, Maria Tramonti, and every time he pulled her gently toward the shadows she resisted and pulled him back to the middle of the sidewalk. They were in Brooklyn and the stoops on both sides of the street were busy with families escaping the heat of their apartments, though it was getting late and a wave of clouds had closed over the city, blocking out the moon and stars so that the slate sidewalk was especially dark between lampposts. Everyone, it seemed to Patsy, was watching him, and he was getting more and more frustrated with Maria for telling him to act naturally and walk with his head up and quit trying to hide in the shadows. They'd parked Maria's car in a garage a half-dozen blocks away because it was actually Maria's husband's car and she felt better with it out of sight.

  "Come here," Maria said. She kissed Patsy on the cheek and whispered in his ear, "Try not to look so worried."

  Patsy laughed in a way that he imagined was lighthearted. He wasn't familiar with this neighborhood, though the tenements here looked like the tenements everywhere: faded red brick facades and black fire escapes with clothes hung out to dry. The people, too, the families, they looked the same all over, with their worn clothes and busted-up faces. It was probably Maria they were all looking at because her dress was new and bright and she filled it nicely, though Patsy couldn't shake the feeling they were looking at him. His ears strained as they passed every stoop and its congregation of people. He listened to hear if they were talking about Vince.

  "Is that it over there?" Maria asked. They were under a lamppost and she was looking at a scrap of paper in the palm of her hand.

  "Is that the address? I ain't been here before."

  Maria nudged Patsy toward the street, around a parked car, and as she did so a woman on a nearby stoop jumped up, pointed in their direction, and yelled, "Get over here! I'll break your neck if you don't break it first!"

  Patsy reached for the gun under his jacket and Maria clamped down on his arm. Above them, a boy of eight or nine straddled the top of the lamppost like he was riding a pony.

  "Madre mia!" the woman yelled again––but not until a man in an undershirt and suspenders appeared behind her from out of a hallway did the kid swing and leap like an acrobat and shin down the pole to the street.

  Maria yanked on Patsy's arm and he followed her across the cobblestones and up a concrete stoop where a family was sitting quietly: a young woman with a baby asleep in her arms and a toddler sleeping with his head in her lap, a brawny mug in a work shirt sitting on the step above them. Patsy nodded to the guy, who nodded back, and then he followed Maria through a pair of open doors and up a flight of stairs. When they reached the right apartment, Patsy knocked twice, paused, knocked three times, paused again, and then knocked once.

  Sally opened the door. She squealed and did a little dance at the sight of Maria before throwing her arms around her and dancing her into the apartment.

  "Close the feckin' door!" Florence was seated at a round table next to a pair of windows that faced the street. Thick yellow shades were pulled down over both windows. Frank, Vince, and Mike crowded around the table along with Florence's husband, Joe Haley. A few bills and coins were scattered next to three open whiskey bottles, all of them about half full. Except for the table and a dozen folding chairs, the apartment was unfurnished, with dingy, smoke-stained white walls. Florence held cards in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other. She was tall and skinny with scraggly blond hair, a haggard face, and pasty skin. At age thirty-eight, she looked a dozen years older. To Frank she said, referring to Sally, "You brought around some dumb gashes before, but this one takes the cake."

  Frank and everyone else ignored Florence while Sally pulled Maria into the kitchen, where Tuffy was sitting on the stove. He'd been in the middle of telling the girls a dirty joke when Patsy's knock interrupted him.

  "Fellas!" Maria said. "Somebody open a window!" Everyone in the apartment was either holding a lit cigarette or had one burning in a nearby ashtray. A gray cloud fed by lines of ascending smoke from each cigarette hovered at the ceiling and drifted toward the back of the apartment, where a hallway led to more rooms.

  "Yeah," Sally said. "It's boilin' in here!"

  Vince pointed to Tuffy. "Open the kitchen window a little." To Mike, he said, "See if all the windows are open in the back rooms."

  Before getting up from the table, Mike threw down the last of his whiskey and stubbed out a cigarette. He was a rough-looking kid with a nasty scar above his right eye, wide and dark as a second eyebrow. He'd gotten it as a boy in a street fight with a bunch of Polacks. Someone had hit him in the face with the pointed end of a spade. Later, his brothers Augie and Freddie found the guy, roped him to a chain-link fence, and broke one of his legs with a baseball bat.

  In the kitchen, Lottie, still in her red dress and high heels, took Maria's hand and kissed her on the cheek. "Ain't you a doll?" she said, and stood back to look her over.

  Maria posed for Lottie and then turned to look after Patsy as he joined the others at the table. "Give me a cigarette, will ya, beautiful?" she asked Lottie. "My husband don't let me smoke."

  Lottie tapped a cigarette out of her pack and placed it between Maria's lips. "Why don't you just walk out on the fat bastard?"

  "The girls at Madam Crystal's call him Fatty McMoney," Sally said. She hoisted herself onto the stove and put her arm around Tuffy.

  Tuffy said, "Don't be saying nothing bad about Madam Crystal's."

  "I ain't!" Sally said. "I'm just saying what they all call Maria's husband!"

  Lottie li
t Maria's cigarette. "Why do you want to stick with a guy spends every night at a whorehouse?"

  Maria exhaled and watched the smoke disrupt the cloud hovering over her. "What do you suppose I'd do?" she said. "Move in with Patsy and his mom?"

  Sally and Tuffy laughed, but Lottie was suddenly angry. "Look," she said, lowering her voice. She glanced behind her to Tuffy as if checking to see if she could speak freely with him nearby. "If things go right," she said, "none of us will have to worry about stuff like that."

  "Yeah," Tuffy said. He slid down from the stove as Mike came out of the back rooms and rejoined the others at the table, where Flo was complaining about her cards. "Except things didn't go right today at all." He'd been half drunk all day and was only now getting sober. He hadn't had a drink all night.

  "This'll blow over," Lottie said, "long as none of those kids dies."

  Tuffy wanted to believe her. He was twenty-two, a year younger than Vince, but he looked even younger with his baby face and unmarred skin and not the slightest hint of a beard. "We'll see," he said and pulled a chair behind him from the kitchen to the table, where Mike squeezed over and made room.

  Florence tossed a half dollar into the pot, said, "Call" to her kid brother.

  "You're calling me?" Vince was smiling in a way that lit up his face and warned Florence she was about to lose the hand.

  "Fuck you. Didn't I just say I'm calling?" She slapped her cards down, showing two pair. "What do you got?"

  "Straight." Vince laid his cards down on the table, a straight to the king, and pulled the pot to him. Tall and solidly built, with a natural curl to his sandy-blond hair, he had a dimpled chin under full lips, and eyes that seemed to search wherever his gaze fell.

  "Ah, but you're a miserable bastard, Vincent Coll." Florence tossed her cards away and poured herself more whiskey.

  Vince brushed his hair back, stretched, and looked around the room. "Sally," he said, "be an angel. There's a radio in the back room. Why don't you go entertain yourself?"

  "Sure," Sally said. She hopped down from the stove. "Maria, you want to come?"

  At the table, Patsy caught Maria's eyes and gestured toward the back room.

  "Yeah, why not?" Maria went to Patsy and gave him a hug before exiting the room with Sally.

  Vince winked at Lottie as she took Sally's place up on the stove. "We made a mess of things today," he said. He took a whiskey bottle by the neck and filled his tumbler. "Dutch has got the upper hand now."

  "I can't believe you idiots missed Cabo again," Florence said. "Again!"

  "Say, put a lid on it, Flo!" Lottie leaned over the stove as if she was thinking about leaping at Florence.

  "Ah, now the queen bitch puts in her two cents!" Flo pushed her chair back from the table.

  "Stop it," Vince said to Florence.

  When Florence started to say something more, Joe cut her off. To Vince he said, "Cabo won't show himself out in the open like that again. Not after today."

  "That's what I'm saying. We should have planned it better."

  Frank looked to each of the boys, to Tuffy and Mike and Patsy. "And

  you shouldn't have been drinking gin all day, like I said." He'd told them all to quit and they'd all laughed at him and called him an old man.

  "Yeah," Mike said. "You were right. I admit it."

  "Anyway," Vince said, "we got to go back to the original plan now. We got to get Diamond." He pushed his chair back in frustration, and the table went suddenly dead silent. "It'll be harder now thanks to those feckin' upstate coppers stickin' their noses in our business." He glanced up at the cloud of smoke as if appealing to God against the outrage of that bunch of rural cops that had found his boys in their upstate hideout before they had a chance to get Jack Diamond. "It'll be harder now," he said again and pulled his chair to the table, "but that don't mean it's impossible."

  "Irish," Frank said, "between Dutch looking to kill him and us going after him . . . Diamond's not showing his face."

  "Hell," Mike said, "it was even in the papers that we were looking to bump him off."

  "Why don't you mugs tell me something I don't know?" Vince looked across the room to Lottie, who was sitting quietly on the stove with her legs crossed. "Diamond's organization is ripe for pickin'. All we got to do is kill the son of a bitch."

  "Sure," Frank said, "but that's the point. The guy's harder to kill than Lazarus."

  "Listen, Vince . . ." Lottie pulled a folding chair to the table and opened it beside Vince while Florence stared bullets at her and the others shuffled to make room. "Legs Diamond," Lottie went on, "he don't seem to want to die—and every time the coppers think they got him, he beats the rap."

  Mike added, "He just beat a kidnapping and torture rap."

  "Got to hand it to Jack," Vince said, "the way he sticks it to the coppers."

  "That's what I'm getting at." Lottie took Vince by the arm and cuddled up to him while she talked to the others. "He's got some kind of charmed life, this fella. Nobody can get to him. So what if you make him a proposition?" She turned and spoke directly to Vince. "What if you offer to partner with him?"

  "Ah, for cryin' out loud!" Flo yelled. "Vince just tried to kill the guy, didn't he? And now you think Diamond'll partner with him?"

  Lottie went on as if Flo hadn't said a word. "When you think about it," she said to Vince, "you and him are natural partners. You both hate Dutch. He killed your brother, and he shot up Diamond's brother. The Combine's after both of you. You're both like outlaws' outlaws," she said and then grinned, pleased with herself for the turn of phrase.

  "Legs would never go for it," Patsy said.

  Frank said, "Even if we could get a meeting, you can't trust the guy. That's how Joey Noe got it. Shows up for a meeting with Diamond and gets a bullet in the head for thanks."

  "You can't trust a guy like that," Tuffy said. "There's no telling what he'll do."

  "Nah," Vince said. "Diamond hates Dutch same way I do. Lottie's got a point."

  Mike finished off his drink and poured himself another. "Cheapest son of a bitch I ever met, Dutch."

  "Boys!" Lottie put an arm around Vince's shoulders. "You're not getting the drift. Diamond's still got the feds on him for an income-tax rap, plus the prohees got a case against him for distributing. Between his legal fees and I hear he's supportin' two women besides his wife, the guy needs cash. What do you think'll happen when he gets sent up? You think the Combine will let you take over upstate? You think they'll let you control all the routes into the city?"

  Vince shrugged off Lottie's arm and nudged her back into her seat. "That's why I'm saying we got to get to Diamond now. Once we get to him and they pat the bastard with a spade, we'll be running things upstate."

  "Sure, but now we're back to where we were before," Frank said.

  "Diamond ain't showin' his face. Nobody knows where he is, and there's no way any of us are getting near him."

  Vince lit a cigarette from one still burning in a cut-glass ashtray at his elbow.

  "Honey," Lottie said, "I'm saying Diamond's got his back to the wall. You guys got the same enemies, and if you can offer him muscle to fight it out with them, and take over running his operation so he's free to take care of his legal problems and his women, that's a deal the guy's got to take."

  "I hear that Kiki dame of his spends money like water," Patsy said.

  "Once Legs gets sent up," Lottie went on, "he's looking at losing everything. If he partners with you," she said to Vince, "he knows you're tough enough to run it all without him. You can offer him a way to hold on to a piece of the action, and he can put you in control of his operation before Dutch and them can do anything about it." She turned to the others at the table. "You boys see what I'm saying? Diamond didn't get to where he is by being stupid. I'm telling you, there's a deal to be made."

  "Jesus Lord Almighty," Flo said, looking straight ahead at no one, "somebody needs to put this bitch in her place."

  Lottie said, "Can it, will yo
u, Florence?"

  "All right," Vince said. "Let me think about it." He turned to Frank. "What do you have to say?"

  "She might be on to something," Frank said. "If we could get a meeting with Legs."

  "All right," Vince said again, and he nodded at Tuffy. "Take Lottie up to Albany tomorrow and scout out a place for us."

  "Should I rent a place?"

  Flo laughed. "They just tried to kill the guy," she said to her husband.

  "You do the driving," Vince said to Tuffy. "Lottie'll pick out the place."