"I'm convinced of that," Mologna said. "Get out of my office, I got work to do."

Zachary would have stayed, struggling for a dignified exit, but Freedly opened the door and said, "Good morning, Chief Inspector."

"Good mornin," Mologna ordered.

"We'll talk later," Zachary threatened, and at last the FBI assholes left and Leon cantered in, saying, "They do overstay their welcome."

Mologna brooded at him. "Who wears black corduroy pants?"

"Nobody I know. Captain Cappelletti's here."

Frowning, Mologna said, "That's what couldn't wait? Tony Cappelletti?"

"This time you'll like it," Leon said, and went away, returning half a minute later with Captain Anthony Cappelletti, Chief of Burglary Detail, a heavy-shouldered, big-handed, bushy-eyebrowed, bad-tempered son of a bitch with a huge blue jaw and with great spiky growths of black hair all over his person. "Good morning, Francis," he said, and pounded his feet toward the chair lately occupied by Zachary, while Leon winked over the captain's shoulder at Mologna and again exited, snicking the door shut as quiet as anything.

Early in Anthony Cappelletti's police career, it had seemed to somebody in a position of authority that he'd be an excellent man to put on the Organized Crime Detail. Not only was he Italian, he even spoke Italian, he'd grown up downtown in Little Italy, he'd gone to school with the sons and nephews of the capos and button men (who would some day be the next generation of capos and button men), and most important of all, Anthony Cappelletti hated the Mafia. Hated it. Just flat-out couldn't stand the whole idea of it. That of all the nationalities simmering together in this wonderful melting pot of New York City only the Italians should have their own major organized crime syndicate with its own name struck him as a personal affront. Was Dutch Schultz Italian? No. Was Bugsy Siegel Italian? No. Was Dion O'Bannion Italian? Hell, no! But do the Germans, the Jews, the Irish have to walk around under a cloud of suspicion, as though all Germans, all Jews, all Irish are mobsters? They do not! Only the Italians have to live with this general assumption that all Italians (with the possible exception of Mother Cabrini) are in the Mafia. Anthony Cappelletti found this intolerable, as though he were locked into a really bad marriage—himself and his ethnicity. It had been revulsion from the Mafia that had directed him into the police force in the first place, and the sheer obvious sincerity of his revulsion that had led the force to assign him to the Organized Crime Detail.

Where he lasted four months. "I give 'em what they understand," Cappelletti told his superiors on one of his trips to the carpet during those four months, and he sure did. He gave them so much of what they understood that in only four months he created an absolute crisis of law and order in the city of New York. Because what Cappelletti gave them, crystal-clear to their understanding, was: planted evidence, false testimony, intimidated witnesses, simple frameups, re-suborned jurors, illegal wiretaps, strongarm interrogations, and the occasional shotgun blast through a restaurant window. What he seemed to have in mind was to eliminate the Mafia completely from the Earth—that is, from New York—to do it single-handed, and to finish the job by Christmas. Within four months, though Cappelletti hadn't quite killed anybody, he'd broken so many bones, demolished so many automobiles and funeral parlors, and railroaded so many Mafiosi behind bars that the mob leaders got together at a very special private meeting in the Bahamas and there decided on the most drastic counterattack in mob history.

They threatened to leave New York.

The word got around, whispered but clear. New York might think it had lost this and that in the past—the New York Giants left for the Jersey swamps, American Airlines left for Dallas, dozens of corporate headquarters left for Connecticut, for a while even the Stock Exchange threatened to leave—but if you want real trouble, imagine New York if the Mafia got up and left. Think of all those mob-infiltrated businesses—with the gangsters gone, who would operate them? The same clowns who'd run them into the ground in the first place, bailing themselves out with the black-money loans that had made the mob infiltration possible, that's who. Think of all those restaurants, linen services, finance companies, automobile dealerships, private garbage collectors, supermarkets, truck lines, and janitorial companies without the discipline, expertise, and financial depth of mob control. Think of what New York would be like with its businesses run by their nominal owners.

Beyond that, think how many policemen, politicians, newspapermen, union officials, city inspectors, attorneys, accountants, and public relations men are on the direct mob payroll. Would the City of New York like to lose that large an employer, disrupt the workforce to that great an extent?

At first the threat wasn't believed, as it hadn't been when the Stock Exchange used to talk the same way. Where would the mob move? the smart guys asked. And the answer was, anywhere they liked. The offers came in, unofficial but very tempting: Boston would be delighted to switch over from its present unreliable mix of Irish and black mobs. Miami would be overjoyed to give its Cubans the boot. Philadelphia, with nobody in charge for hundreds of years, was so desperate by now they offered to pay all moving expenses, and Baltimore was prepared to turn over four solid miles of waterfront, no questions asked. But it wasn't until Wilmington, Delaware (the "anybody-can-be-a-corporation" state), opened negotiations for the transfer of the Metropolitan Opera that New York City officials realized this was serious. "Anthony," they told Cappelletti, "you've done such a fine job on Organized Crime that we want you to take on a really tough assignment. Burglary Detail." Unorganized crime, in other words.

Cappelletti had known the truth, of course, but what could he do about it? He considered quitting the force, but a few tentative inquiries showed him that in all of America, only San Francisco's police department would consider hiring him, and then only to head their Flying Saucer Detail. No other police force, fire department, or any other uniformed organization in the country would touch him with fire tongs. As for a job anywhere in mob-infiltrated private industry, that was obviously hopeless. So Cappelletti grimly accepted the change of assignment (and the sop of promotion) and took out his annoyance on every small-time, unorganized, un-influential burglar and peterman and second-story artist who came his way, with such great effect that within a couple of years he was head of the entire Detail, where he could quietly wait out his pension and brood upon injustice.

This was obviously not Chief Inspector Francis Xavier Mologna's sort of guy; they didn't hang out together much. It was, therefore, with a rather forced and false joviality that Mologna watched Cappelletti thump across his office and take a seat, glowering like a man falsely accused of being the one who farted. "So how are you, Tony?" Mologna asked.

"I could be better," Cappelletti told him. "I could use more people in Burglary."

Mologna, disappointed, said, "Is that what you're here to talk about?"

"No," Cappelletti said. "Not this time. This time I'm here on the Byzantine Fire thing."

"You found it," Mologna suggested.

"How would I do that?" Cappelletti was a very literal sort of person.

"It was a pleasantry," Mologna told him. "What have you got for me, Tony?"

"A stoolie," Cappelletti said. "He belongs to a man of mine, named Abel."

"The stoolie? Or your man?"

"My man is Abel," Cappelletti said. "The stoolie is called Klopzik. Benjamin Arthur Klopzik."