"No, sir. Sorry."

"Relatives. Friends. A brother-in-law. You want to buy a condo at the shore and you don't want to attract Internal Affairs attention, so you give your brother-in-law or your uncle Charley the money, and he buys the condo at the shore. Or you put the money in his bank account. Got it?"

"Where do I start?"

"Start with personnel records. Sergeant Sandow can set that up for you. At night, Elliot. I don't want it to get out that somebody from Special Operations or Ethical Affairs is checking personnel records."

"Yes, sir," Sergeant Sandow said.

"That'll give us some names to start with," Weisbach went on. "I don't want to start ringing doorbells until we have to. We can't afford to have somebody say, 'Hey, Charley, there was a cop here asking questions about you.' "

"Yes, sir," Payne said.

"Your first job, though, Payne, is the tapes. We need them transcribed, the sooner the better. Sandow will see that everybody gets a copy. Then I want everybody, individually, to try to make sense of them. Then we'll get together and brainstorm them. I want a brainstorm session every day or so. We all have to know what everybody else is doing, and maybe somebody will be able to make sense out of something the other guy doesn't understand."

He looked around the room.

"Any questions?"

No one had any questions.

When, accompanied by a discreet ping, one of the buttons on his telephone lit up, a look of mingled annoyance and resignation flickered on and off the face of Brewster Cortland Payne II.

The telephone would not have, as he thought of it, pinged, had not Mrs. Irene Craig, his silver-haired, stylish, fiftyish secretary, been quite sure he would want to take the call. Irene had been his secretary-and confidante and friend-from the moment he had joined his father's law firm fresh from law school. She had been the first employee of B. C. Payne, Lawyer, when he had started out on his own, and their law offices had been two small and dark rooms in a run-down building on South Tenth Street.

The law offices of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester now occupied all of the eleventh floor and most of the twelfth floor of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building on Market Street, east of Broad, and as befitted the executive secretary to the managing partner of what had arguably become Philadelphia's most prestigious law firm, Mrs. Craig's annual compensation exceeded that of seventy percent of the lawyers in Philadelphia.

She had other duties, of course, but she-quite correctly-regarded her primary function as the management of her employer's time, which included putting only those telephone calls through to him that she believed he not only would want to, but should, deal with himself.

A half hour before, she had been asked to bring him a pot of coffee and then to see that he wasn't disturbed. Under that circumstance, Mr. Payne knew Mrs. Craig would normally put through only a call from the president of the United States offering to nominate him for the position of chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, or from his wife. Everybody else would be asked if he could return their call.

He picked up the telephone.

"Brewster Payne," he said.

"Sorry to bother you," Mrs. Craig said, "but Armando C. Giacomo, Esquire, is on the line, begging for a brief moment of your time."

"The Colonel's not here?"

"I tried that. Manny wants to speak with you."

The Colonel was J. Dunlop Mawson, Esq., the other founding partner of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester, who had served as a lieutenant colonel, Judge Advocate General's Corps, U.S. Army, and loved the sound of that rank.

It was arguable whether the Colonel or Manny Giacomo was the most successful criminal lawyer in Philadelphia. Giacomo amp; Giacomo-the second Giacomo was his son, Armando C. Giacomo III-was a thirty-plus-attorney law firm with its own building on South 9th Street that did little else but criminal law.

The elder Giacomo-a slight, lithe, dapper, fifty-year-old who wore what little was left of his hair plastered to the sides of his tanned skull-was very good, and consequently, very expensive. Like Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson, he had a well-earned reputation for defending, most often successfully and invariably with great skill, people charged with violation of the whole gamut of criminal offenses. His clients in criminal proceedings were seldom ordinary criminals, however, for the very good reason that ordinary criminals seldom had any money.

The difference between them was that from the beginning it had been understood between the Colonel and Brewster Payne that their firm would not represent the mob-as often called the Mafia-under any circumstances, and Giacomo often did.

Giacomo, himself the son of a lawyer and whose family had been in Philadelphia from the time of the Revolution, was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Yale School of Law. He had flown Corsairs as a naval aviator in the Korean War. He could have had a law practice much like that of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester's, which drew most of its clientele from the upper echelons of industry, banks, insurance companies, and from familial connections.

Manny Giacomo had elected, instead, to become a criminal lawyer, and had become known (unfairly, Payne thought, since mobsters were only a small fraction of his clients) as the mob's lawyer. Payne had come to believe-he knew Giacomo's personal ethics were impeccable-that Giacomo represented the mob primarily because they had the financial resources to pay him, but also because he really believed that an accused was entitled to the best legal representation he could get.

Giacomo was also held in high regard by most police officers, primarily because he represented, pro bono publico, police officers charged with police brutality and other infractions of the law.

Payne reached for one of the telephones on his desk and pushed a flashing button, aware that he was doing so for the same reason Mrs. Craig had put the call through: curiosity why Manny Giacomo wanted to speak to him, rather than the Colonel.

"Armando, how are you?" Payne said.

"Thank you for taking my call, Brewster."

"Don't I always take your calls?"

"No, I don't think you do. Sometimes, frankly, when Mrs. Craig tells me you just stepped out of the office, I suspect that you're at your desk and just don't want to talk to me."

"You don't really believe that, do you, Armando? Isn't that the tactic of putting someone on the defensive?"

Giacomo laughed. "Did it work?"

"To a degree. But it also heightened my instincts of self-preservation. What are you about to try to talk me into, Armando, that you already know I would rather not do?"

"I need a personal favor, Brewster."

"Personal? Or professional?"

"Truth to tell, a little of each."

"My curiosity is piqued. Go on."

"I represent a gentleman named Vincenzo Savarese."

"A 'gentleman' named Vincenzo Savarese? If that's the case, your Mr. Savarese is not the same chap who immediately came to my mind."

Silver-haired, sixty-four-year-old Vincenzo Savarese was the head of the Philadelphia mob.

"Mr. Savarese, my Mr. Savarese," Giacomo said, "has never been convicted, in any court, of any offense against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania or any of the other United States of America."

"Possibly he has a very good lawyer."

"I've heard that suggested," Giacomo said.

Payne chuckled.

"What do you want, Armando?"

"Mr. Savarese would be very grateful if you could spare him a few minutes, no more than five, of your time."

"He wants to talk to me?" Payne asked, incredulously. "What about?"