"Why don't we just focus on the Russians and the years you worked them with Paul Caruso. I'm betting there's something hinky buried in there somewhere."

"He was the best cop I ever worked with."

"Funny," she said. "I heard he was a no-good thieving bastard."

"That, too."

The Priest was almost too good a cop. Eddie always said that if his life was in danger, he'd want him on the case. The Priest not only saw through every lowlife's con, but knew how much swag they had in their pockets, and when it would be his. But everything he did, he did to excess; one drink was too many, a thousand not enough. He lived his life with a kamikaze recklessness, as if trying to guarantee an obit listing every cause of death known to modern man. Although beheading would not have been on Eddie's list of predictions.

"Boland said the reason you resigned is because IAB asked you to wear a wire to bring down Caruso."

"In those days, you didn't entrap your partner," Eddie said.

"What I get from you is, He's my partner, right or wrong."

"I didn't say that."

"They had a picture of his villa in Sicily in the Daily News today. Right on the water. Worth over a million dollars. Sounds dirty to me, Eddie."

Grace moved from the ring to a line of beer kegs, making noise just to hear it. She played some kind of clanging song with an old rusted hammer. Pipes ran from the kegs up to the taps at the bar. Kevin had put some of the kegs into a refrigerated locker-mostly for the younger crowd, the light-beer lovers. The old-timers didn't like their beer that cold, so Kevin let a few kegs sit out. Kevin claimed that tap beer was better years ago, the heads fuller, when you had to pump the lines by hand. Now with compressed-air systems, it came out flat. The new nitrogen and CO₂ combination tanks were hard to keep in balance. Clean the lines often and wash the glasses in hot soapy water, that was Kevin's simple rule. Either way, the basement still smelled like a brewery.

"What do you want me to say?" Eddie said, stopping for breath. "Paulie was a guy who would take a hot stove and the kitchen sink. And maybe he did work for the Gambino family. The bottom line is, I don't care. All I care about is getting Kate back."

"That's all I want, too, Eddie. But Paulie Caruso is the bottom line. Paulie and you. What's happened here is not coincidence."

"I know that. I've thought through all the old cases. We pissed a lot of people off. But we're talking about fourteen years ago." Eddie grabbed a towel and wiped the sweat out of his eyes. "You know anyone in customs?" he asked.

"Don't change the subject."

"I'm not. You mentioned customs before and it got me thinking. You know anyone who could expedite a passport?"

"Why do you need a passport?"

"I don't," he said, pointing a gloved hand at Grace. "I have a passport, but I've been thinking about a trip to Ireland this summer. My mother has never seen Grace. We've got a slew of cousins over there."

After she sold the bar to Kevin, Teresa Dunne took the proceeds and her Social Security checks back to Ireland, where she bought a drafty two-story stone house in Dungarvan, County Waterford, the town of her birth. Always content alone, Teresa now spent her days walking among her ancestors in the windswept St. Mary's graveyard and staring out at the Irish Sea.

"This came up suddenly," Babsie said. "Some people are going to think the wrong thing. Like maybe, say, your son-in-law makes a move to gain custody. You're planning to whisk her out of the country."

"Who cares what they think?"

"I know somebody," Babsie said. "But you gotta promise me you won't do anything stupid."

"Stupid was dancing with you when you were fourteen years old. We didn't do any Irish dancing, did we?"

"Are you kidding? In my father's house? No, it was a slow dance. Johnny Mathis, 'The Twelfth of Never.'"

"Jesus. Your brother should have shot me."

Friday, April 10

9:00 A.M.

City cops brought their own coffee into the FBI building, even though they knew the rich kids had everything. Eddie Dunne found Matty Boland at the dingy lunch wagon wedged under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge, directly behind NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza. They were both due at the FBI's New York headquarters for a hastily called meeting of the joint task force investigating Russian organized crime in the United States.

"Why the hell are we here?" Eddie asked. "Why aren't we out knocking on doors?"

"Buyer's remorse," Boland said. "It's the whole thing with Paulie Caruso, Eddie. Guys like the Priest make them nervous."

The sudden appearance of the severed head of Eddie's old partner had injected doubt into the task force's plans to use him as the foundation of their assault on the Russian mafiya in New York. He couldn't blame them for being careful; the feds didn't need another embarrassment. But shouldn't his daughter's life outweigh their anxiety?

Eddie bought a container of black coffee and a buttered bagel at the wagon. Today, they'd run a hard-nosed Q &A, "give him a scare," as Paulie the Priest used to say. Then, he hoped, it would be back to the business of finding his daughter. The caffeine jolt would help him stay sharp through the barrage of fedspeak he was sure to hear.

"Maybe you should give some serious thought to calling a lawyer," Boland said. "They're going to screw you around up there. I don't have to tell you the horror stories; you know them as well as I do."

"I need these people to help me, Matty. I'm willing to listen to what they have to say."

"I know what they're going to say. They're going to put this case on hold until they can figure out exactly how you and the Priest are involved. The feds are great for holding off and hoping the problem goes away. And remember…" Boland put his hand to his ear in the universal sign for a phone call.

"They're already tapping my phone," Eddie said.

"Then check your house for bugs. They're going to protect their own asses. That's priority one with the high-level feds. By the time they jump back in this case, the Russians will have sold the Lincoln Tunnel to the Iranians. We'll be swimming to Jersey."

"I'll swim to Jersey. Just find Kate."

Eddie had parked his Olds in the underground public garage at Madison Street and the Avenue of the Finest. The garage was located directly underneath NYPD headquarters. Uniformed cops stood at the entrance, checking for car bombs. Eddie wound up parking three levels below the building. It marked the closest he'd been to headquarters since the day a civilian clerk had flipped his detective shield into a cardboard box containing the badges of the recently quit, fired, retired, or dead. The guy just tossed it on the anonymous pile with dozens of numbered metal pieces engraved with the seal of the city of New York. Clink, it's over. Finality bestowed by some overweight desk jockey treating each shield as if it were a meaningless chunk of tin. The lazy bastard couldn't have cared less that each one of those shields had spent the last few decades pinned to some cop's breast pocket and was therefore witness to the unspeakable. Each could tell a million stories. He should have genuflected in their presence.

"The guy who called this meeting is a pretentious bastard," Boland said. "Last month, we were at the Ninth Precinct with the two uniformed cops who locked up that diplomat's kid. We needed to get downtown quick for a press conference, so we grab the subway. We get to the platform and this guy hears the bing-bong-you know, the signal that they're closing the subway doors. He tells everyone that the bing-bong is a descending major third-like an E to a C-like the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth. The cops looked at him like he was a Martian or a stone fag. I was embarrassed to be with the guy."