"Somebody gave him tickets for the Yankees game and, man, was I psyched. He got off duty at eight a. m., slept a couple of hours, took my buddies and me out on the street to pitch to us so we could play stickball, see how far we could whack the ball. Three manhole covers or more."

Mercer nodded his head, familiar with the New York City street game.

"Something you never did in the burbs, right, Coop? It was before cell phones. My mother shouted him in from the stoop to take an emergency call from his boss. When he got back out, my dad pulled me aside and asked me if I wanted to take a ride. Told me he wouldn't be able to go to the game after all, 'cause something had come up with work. He knew how unhappy that made me, except he told me I could come along with him this time. Me, I'd give up every Yankee from the Babe to Mantle to Guidry to Piniella-and throw in Jeter and A-Rod now, too-just to hang out on the job with my pop."

"I know what you mean," I said.

"He let me choose what I wanted to do, so I gave the other kids the ball-game tickets and we got in his jalopy, drove over and parked on Amsterdam Avenue, right behind Lincoln Center. I remember coming in the back door that day, through the garage, everybody stepping aside as soon as he palmed the gold shield. 'On the job'-I still hear his voice saying that to people. He told me a girl was missing, a musician who played in the orchestra, and that lots of guys were already here looking for her. The big boss was interviewing her husband back at the squad. They needed every cop they could get because of the size of this place."

"She went missing like Natalya, in the middle of a show?" Mercer asked.

But I had my own question. "Why'd your dad take you into a breaking case?"

Mike answered me first. "'Cause he had the same logical thought that you did, Coop. It's the Metropolitan Opera, for chrissakes. The Big House is what they called it. Four thousand people-four thousand-were sitting in that very room on one side of the curtain," he said, pointing to the auditorium door, "four hundred more working their asses off to make the show go on, and somebody disappears from the orchestra pit without one person in the whole joint hearing a peep? Not possible."

I nodded at him. I understood what his dad had been thinking.

"She must have been upset about something and walked out between acts. That's what he and every other cop thought. Same as her friends in the orchestra. The woman behind her just moved up and shoved the girl's violin under her seat, and the conductor kept right on going with the show. Hey, you know the stats as well as anybody. Women are far more likely to be hurt or killed by someone they know and love than by a stranger in a crowded theater."

"That's why they were grilling the husband at the same time the cops were searching the place," Mercer said.

"You bet. Garden-variety domestic violence is what he figured it was. You're missing the point. This wasn't about the case-not about the police work," Mike said, looking at me.

"What then?"

"My old man had never been inside the Met. Didn't know the first thing about stuff as grand as opera or ballet. My house, you heard Sinatra and Dean Martin, Judy Garland and Dinah Shore. No Pavarotti or Caruso or Callas. Entertainment was the living room television set, big deal was going out to an occasional movie or a night at the fights.

"This was a chance for my father to show me some culture, Ms. Cooper, something as foreign to me as stickball and warm beer are to you."

Mike liked to underscore the differences in our upbringings. My mother was trained as a nurse, but stopped working after she married my father and gave birth to my two older brothers and me. Their middle-class lifestyle changed dramatically when my father, Benjamin, and his partner invented an innovative medical device that thereafter was used in most cardiac surgery for more than thirty years. The tiny Cooper-Hoffman valve was responsible for providing me with a superb education at Wellesley College and the University of Virginia School of Law, an old farmhouse on Martha's Vineyard that was my refuge from the turmoil of my job, and lots of small luxuries that wouldn't have been affordable on the salary of a young public servant.

I knew Mike loved and respected his father as deeply as I did my own. That thought took me back to his story. "He must have delighted in having you by his side," I said.

"I remember how he brought me through the corridors-endless gray cinder block walls with doorways going off in every direction. It's the size of a football field and a half from the front door to the back. Somehow, we wound up in the wrong place-on the main stage, looking out into the empty house, tier after tier of seats. I had to crane my neck to see to the top row."

"You remember that?" Mercer asked.

"Like I was inside St. Peter's for the first time. That it was the most magnificent place I'd ever seen in my life. There was so much gold on every surface, and the biggest crystals in the chandeliers- well, I thought they were diamonds the size of baseballs. I'd never been near anything like this. People were walking around backstage in costumes-the girls hardly had anything on and the men were dressed in tights with bare chests."

"What did your father do with you?"

"I guess he thought he'd sit me down and let me watch a rehearsal while he worked," Mike said to Mercer, "but most of the artists were too distracted to perform with the searches going on in every corner of the building. So I went along with him. He wasn't expecting any trouble, right? And all the guys knew me-you remember Giorgio and Struk, don't you? It was their case."

Two of the smartest detectives I'd worked with as a young prosecutor, they had handled major cases long before I came on the job.

"Sure. Didn't Giorgio train you?" I asked.

Mike nodded at me. "Jerry G. was just breaking in at the time. Asked Dad to go up to the fourth floor. Along the way, every time we passed somebody in a costume, my old man'd stop them and introduce them to me. I don't know what the hell he was thinking, but he wanted me to shake hands with people he thought might be famous, like maybe the class would rub off on me," he said, laughing at the memory of it.

"Sweet," Mercer said, smiling back at him. "Sweet idea."

"Those girls were something else. They all looked so soft and so beautiful. Each one he put a hand out to greet had creamier shoulders than the next, with jewelry sparkling on their ears and in their hair."

Mike smiled at Mercer as he talked on. I hadn't seen him this animated and happy since before Val's death. "I don't think I'd ever seen women in makeup before, elegant women-not all that much older than I was-who tousled my hair and stroked my cheek as they went past me; each of them seemed like a fairy queen to me. You ever dress up like that?"

"Only for our recitals," I said. "My favorite day at the end of the year."

"We got up to the fourth floor and it was like a city unto itself. There was the scenic design room, with a few guys building a palace for some opera and others making a fantastic tree out of Styrofoam. There were Roman columns and castle parapets, papier-mache mountains, Egyptian pyramids and Hindu temples, like a giant playroom. Cops were everywhere, looking behind plywood frames twenty feet high, stacked against every surface.

"Then came a clothing studio where thousands of costumes were made, with tailors and seamstresses hunched over drafting tables. Life-size figures were standing in the hallways, and a pole-a spaghetti rack, they called it-hung from one end of the corridor to the other. There were soldiers' uniforms and kings' robes, and still cops sticking their noses in every nook and cranny 'cause you could have hidden ten bodies just about anywhere up there and not found 'em for years. And me? I was mesmerized by the costumes-touching the gold braid and holding the different fabrics against my skin, wondering if I'd ever feel anything that silken again."