“But there’s always gotta be some asshole who thinks he’s immortal ’cause he’s not dead yet. This guy, he’s young, keeps himself in good condition, thinks he’s gonna get more pussy than Long Dong Silver if he busts up the bank raid and saves the day. Look at him: realtor, twenty-nine, single, pulling down one-fifty a year, and he gets a hole blown in him bigger’n the Holland Tunnel. Lance Petersen.” He shook his head in wonderment. “I never met anyone called Lance in my whole life.”

“That’s ’cause they all dead,” said Louis, glancing seemingly idly around the room. “Fuckers keep standing up in banks and getting shot. Guy was probably the last Lance left alive.”

The clubs arrived and Angel started eating. He was the only one who did. “So how you doin’?”

“Okay,” I said. “Why the ambush?”

“You don’t write, you don’t call.” He smiled wryly. Louis glanced at me with mild interest and then returned his attention to the door, the other tables, the doors to the restrooms.

“You been doin’ some work for Benny Low, I hear. What you doin’ working for that fat piece of shit?”

“Passing time.”

“You want to pass time, stick pins in your eyes. Benny’s just using up good air.”

“Come on, Angel, get to it. You’re rattling away and Louis here is acting like he expects the Dillinger gang to walk in and spray the counter.”

Angel put down his half-eaten section of club and dabbed almost daintily at his mouth with a napkin. “I hear you’ve been asking after some girlfriend of Stephen Barton’s. Some people are very curious to know why that might be.”

“Such as?”

“Such as Bobby Sciorra, I hear.”

I didn’t know if Bobby Sciorra was psychotic or not, but he was a man who liked killing and had found a willing employer in old man Ferrera. Emo Ellison could testify to the likely result of Bobby Sciorra taking an interest in one’s activities. I had a suspicion that Ollie Watts, in his final moments, had found that out as well.

“Benny Low was talking about some kind of trouble between the old man and Sonny,” I said. “ ‘Fuckin’ goombas fighting among themselves’ was how he put it.”

“Benny always was a diplomat,” said Angel. “Only surprise is the UN didn’t pick up on him before now. There’s something weird going on there. Sonny’s gone to ground and taken Pili with him. No one’s seen them, no one knows where they are, but Bobby Sciorra’s looking real hard for all of them.” He took another huge bite of his sandwich. “What about Barton?”

“I figure he’s gone underground too, but I don’t know. He’s minor league and wouldn’t have much to do professionally with Sonny or the old man beyond some muling, though he may once have been close to Sonny. May be nothing to it. Barton may not be connected.”

“Maybe not, but you’ve got bigger problems than finding Barton or his girl.”

I waited.

“There’s a hit out on you.”

“Who?”

“It’s not local. It’s out of town. Louis don’t know who.”

“Is it over the Fat Ollie thing?”

“I don’t know. Even Sonny isn’t such a moron that he’d put a contract out over some hired gun who got himself wasted ’cause you stepped in. The kid didn’t mean anything to anyone and Fat Ollie’s dead. All I know is you’re irritating two generations of the Ferrera family and that can’t be good.”

Walter Cole’s favor was turning into something more complicated than a missing persons case, if it was ever that simple.

“I’ve got one for you,” I said. “Know anyone with a gun that can punch holes through masonry with a five-point-seven-millimeter bullet weighing less than fifty grains? Sub-machine rounds.”

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding. Last time I saw something like that it was hangin’ on top of a tank turret.”

“Well, that’s what killed the shooter. I saw him blown away and there was a hole knocked through the wall behind me. The gun’s Belgian made, designed for antiterrorist police. Someone local picked up a piece of hardware like that and took it to the range, it’s gotta get around.”

“I’ll ask,” said Angel. “Any guesses?”

“My guess would be Bobby Sciorra.”

“Mine too. So why would he be cleaning up after Sonny’s mess?”

“The old man told him to.”

Angel nodded. “Watch your back, Bird.”

He finished his sandwich and then stood to go. “C’mon. We can give you a ride.”

“No, I want to walk for a while.”

Angel shrugged. “You packing?”

I nodded. He said he’d be in touch. I left them at the door. As I walked, I was conscious of the weight of the gun beneath my arm, of every face I passed in the crowd, and of the dark pulse of the city throbbing beneath my feet.

BOBBY SCIORRA: a malevolent demon, a vision of ferocity and sadism that had appeared before the old man, Stefano Ferrera, when he was on the verge of insanity and death. Sciorra seemed to have been conjured up from some bleak corner of Hell by the old man’s anger and grief, a physical manifestation of the torture and destruction he wished to inflict on the world around him. In Bobby Sciorra he found the perfect instrument of pain and ugly death.

Stefano had watched his own father build a small empire from the family’s modest house in Bensonhurst. In those days Bensonhurst, bordered by Gravesend Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, still had a small-town feel. The scent of deli food mingled with that of wood-burning ovens from the local pizza parlors. People lived in two-family houses with wrought iron gates, and when the sun shone, they would sit out on their porches and watch their kids play in their tiny gardens.

Stefano’s ambition would take him beyond his roots. When his time came to take over the operation, he built a big house on Staten Island; when he stood at his rear-facing windows, he could see the edge of Paul Castellano’s mansion on Todt Hill, the $3.5 million White House, and probably, from his topmost window, the grounds of the Barton estate. If Staten Island was good enough for the head of the Gambino family and a benevolent millionaire, then it was good enough for Stefano. When Castellano died after being shot six times at Sparks Steak House in Manhattan, Stefano was, briefly, the biggest boss on Staten Island.

Stefano married a woman from Bensonhurst named Louisa. She hadn’t married him out of any kind of love familiar from romantic novels: she loved him for his power, his violence, and mainly, his money. Those who marry for money usually end up earning it. Louisa did. She was emotionally brutalized and died shortly after giving birth to her third son. Stefano didn’t remarry. There was no grief there; he just didn’t need the bother of another wife, especially after the first had produced his heirs.

The first child, Vincent, was intelligent and represented the best hope for the family’s future. When he died in a swimming pool from a massive brain hemorrhage at twenty-three, his father didn’t speak for a week. Instead, he shot Vincent’s pair of Labradors and retired to his bedroom. Louisa had been dead for seventeen years.

Niccolo, or Nicky, two years younger than his brother, took his place at his father’s right hand. As a rookie, I watched him roam the city in his huge bullet-proofed Cadillac, surrounded by soldiers, carving himself a reputation as a thug to match his father. By the early 1980s, the family had overcome an initial distaste for the drug trade and was flooding the city with every kind of poison it could lay its hands on. Most people stayed out of the way, and any potential rivals were warned off or ended up as fish chum.

The Yardies were another matter. The Jamaican gangs had no respect for established institutions, for the old ways of doing business. They looked at the Italians and saw dead meat; a shipment of cocaine worth two million dollars was boosted from the Ferreras and two soldiers were left dead. Nicky responded by ordering a cull of the Yardies: their clubs were hit, their apartments, even their women. In a three-day period, twelve of them died, including most of those responsible for the cocaine theft.