It took the attorney general’s special task force and the newspapers a full year to reconfigure the charts, and it was a year of peace. No more bodies were discovered floating face down in the Delaware, no more bodies found in the trunks of abandoned cars under the bridge in Roosevelt Park, no more corpses sprawled on the cover of the Daily News. The government sent out its informants like an infantry of spies and they came back with word that there was a new boss with support from New York and a series of interlocking agreements among the city’s mobsters that kept everything peaceful and profitable. He was a strong man, a respected man, he was called the “Big Cannoli” by the cognoscenti, he was not a man to be trifled with, but he was an honorable man who through his strength would keep the peace. In one short year he had become a legend and his power flowed from Philadelphia through Atlantic City into New York and Pittsburgh and as far away as Las Vegas. He was the most powerful man in the city, in the state, he was the Big Cannoli, and on the first Monday of every month he visited the grave of Sweet Tooth Tony and left a pig’s ear on the mound of earth rising above the specially ordered oversized coffin.

“I want you to know, Victor,” said the Big Cannoli, sitting next to me in the back seat of that Cadillac, “I want you to know that I am not a violent man by nature.” His voice was soft, genteel even with the accent, a grandfather’s voice, a voice without obvious menace. It was the voice of Geppetto. I would have thought him a harmless old man, ugly but harmless, if I hadn’t known who he was. “I think I would have been happy as an artist, painting flowers on canvases. But such was not my fortune. I tell you this so you should not be frightened of me. The newspapers, they exaggerate so. Now my friend Dominic… You know Dominic, I believe, Victor.”

“Yes.”

“Dominic is a violent man. It’s in his nature, it’s in his blood. Even though he’s retired now, it still takes everything in my power to keep him under control. And Jasper, too. Such a nice man, Jasper, but there is a streak in him that is very hard to restrain. Lenny, my driver, was a boxer for years. You’d think a boxer would be violent, but not Lenny. He’s a sweetheart. Isn’t that right, Lenny?”

“That’s what my grandchildren say, Mr. Raffaello, so long as I treat ’em to taffy.”

“What Lenny did as a profession Dominic and Jasper do for pleasure. Such is the way of mankind. But that’s not my way, Victor. I am more like Lenny.” Suddenly his voice hardened. “It’s a good thing that I have people like Dominic and Jasper because without them, Victor, without them, I tell you, I don’t think I would get any respect in a world such as this.” He was almost shouting now. “Without them, Victor, I’d just as well be baking cookies.”

“You listen to Mr. Raffaello, Sport,” said Jasper.

Raffaello threw up his hands in a kindly shrug and when he spoke, his voice was soft and grandfatherly again. “I had two children, Victor. We wanted more, of course, but two was all we had. A boy and a girl. A millionaire’s family. Anthony and Linda Marie. You might have heard about Anthony,” he said, looking at his nails. “It was in all the papers.”

“I’m sorry about your son, Mr. Raffaello,” I said in a voice as soft as a whisper.

“Yes, well, these things happen. That leaves me with Linda Marie. Linda Marie is a sweet girl, a wonderful girl. I love her totally, believe me. Do you have a daughter, Victor?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, have a daughter and hold her in your arms and then you’ll know how much I love my Linda Marie. So it is with this much love that I say in all honesty my daughter is troubled. She is married to a man who doesn’t love her, a man who’d sooner keep the company of other men than sleep with his wife. Do you know her husband, the councilman?”

“I know of him.”

“Well, he is one of her troubles. And sadly, I am another. She has difficulty accepting my current position. I pay for a psychiatrist for her, an hour a day, five days a week, but it doesn’t seem to help. You see, along with her husband and father she has another problem, the fact that she’s a slut.”

Dominic quickly said, “Enrico, no, don’t say such a thing,” and Jasper started demurring to his boss, but the Big Cannoli lifted up his hand to stop them and they quieted immediately.

“I say this with a heavy heart. It hurts me to call my daughter such a thing. But it is the truth, a truth I can live with. Now, Victor, I can call my daughter a slut.” His voice suddenly deepened. “But don’t you ever.”

“You listening, Sport?”

“You see,” said Raffaello, his voice slowly falling back into calm, “I’m very touchy about my family. What do you think of my daughter, Lenny?”

“A very fine girl, a sensitive, pretty girl,” said Lenny without turning from the road, tilting his head up as if he were talking into a microphone in the ceiling of the car. “A princess, a queen.”

“It is well known among my associates,” said Raffaello, “to only speak well of my family. There were once men who treated my family with disrespect, Victor, and they’re not around anymore. Now there was a poker game not too long ago in which you were involved, along with Dominic and Jasper and certain other friends of mine, and in that game you treated my family with disrespect.”

“I didn’t mean to…”

Raffaello held up his hand and I shut up quick.

“You sound scared, Victor, and that is not what I want. I am not a violent man. I’m more of an artist, like I said. I should have been a poet. Do you read much poetry, Victor?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. I’ll be frank with you, I don’t understand it. Seagulls and clouds. But even so I feel, in my heart, that I have the soul of a poet. I should have had an education. There is so much I wanted to do. Now in this poker game you implied that Dominic’s cousin Zachariah…”

“Second cousin twice removed,” said Jasper.

“Yes. You implied that Zachariah was having an affair with my daughter and because of that I killed him. Such a rude comment is unforgivable, really.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I stammered, but before I could go on he quieted me with a soft gesture from his right hand.

“Now one reason for our visit,” said Raffaello, “is for me to tell you that this is not true. There was an affair, yes, and it pains me to say it. Zachariah was like a dog without any control, but I didn’t have him killed. If I killed all the men Linda Marie slept with over the years the Schuylkill would run red.”

“I understand,” I said into a pause.

“Besides, if I was going to kill Zachariah it would have been for the way he butchered second base.”

Jasper laughed, like a horse with a wheeze.

“You see,” Raffaello continued, “when I was told of the conversation at the poker game I realized you might have mistaken the silence and lack of denial by my associates as agreement that I had ordered the killing. That would have been a mistake. The silence was just that, silence. My associates know not to speak about my family. They have learned that over the years.”

“I believe you, Mr. Raffaello,” I said quickly. “I do.”

“That’s good, Victor. Now you may be wondering who did kill Zachariah. Well, the answer is that we don’t know. The federal prosecutor, as usual, has it wrong. It was not part of Jimmy Moore’s extortion of Ruffing, I am certain.”

“How are you so certain?” I asked.

“Victor, Victor,” said Raffaello, shaking his head. “You have to trust me, Victor. Jimmy is not a stupid man. A passionate man, yes, which he never fails to tell me when we break bread together, but not stupid.”

“If not Jimmy, then who?”

“Dominic, tell Victor what you told me,” said Raffaello.

Dominic twisted around in the front seat so he was facing me. “Zack told me, before he died, that he was in love in a way he had never been in love before. He told me it was dangerous and he had to be careful but that he was going to stop whoring around because this girl was so special.”