“You have no title now,” he said. Among “men of honor,” to be called Mister when you had a title was a calculated insult. Federal investigators sometimes used it to belittle mob suspects, dispensing with the more formal Don or Tio.

“I understand no insult is intended, Don Ferrera,” I said. He nodded and was silent.

As a detective I had some dealings with the men of honor and always approached them cautiously and without arrogance or presumption. Respect had to be met with respect and silences had to be read like signs. Among them, everything had meaning and they were as economical and efficient in their modes of communication as they were with their methods of violence.

Men of honor spoke only of what concerned them directly, answered only specific questions and would stay silent rather than tell a lie. A man of honor had an absolute obligation to tell the truth and only when the behavior of others altered so far as to make it necessary to break these rules of behavior would he do so. All of which assumed that you believed pimps and killers and drug dealers were honorable in the first place, or that the code was anything more than the incongruous trapping of another age, pressed into service to provide a sheen of aristocracy for thugs and murderers.

I waited for him to break the silence.

He stood and moved slowly, almost painfully, around the room and stopped at a small side table on which a gold plate gleamed dully.

“You know, Al Capone used to eat off gold plates. Did you know that?” he asked. I told him that I hadn’t known.

“His men used to carry them in a violin case to the restaurant and lay them on the table for Capone and his guests, and then they’d all eat off them. Why do you think a man would feel the need to eat from a gold plate?” He waited for an answer, trying to catch my reflection in the plate.

“When you have a lot of money, your tastes can become peculiar, eccentric,” I said. “After a while, even your food doesn’t taste right unless it’s served on bone china, or gold. It’s not fitting for someone with so much money and power to eat from the same plates as the little people.”

“It goes too far, I think,” he replied, but he no longer seemed to be talking to me and it was his own reflection he was examining in the plate. “There’s something wrong with it. There are some tastes that should not be indulged, because they are vulgar. They are obscene. They offend nature.”

“I take it that isn’t one of Capone’s plates.”

“No, my son gave it to me as a gift on my last birthday. I told him the story and he had the plate made.”

“Maybe he missed the point of the story,” I said. The old man’s face looked weary. It was the face of a man who had not enjoyed his sleep for some time.

“The boy who was killed, you think my son was involved? You think this was a piece of work?” he asked eventually, moving back into my direct line of vision and staring away from me at something in the distance. I didn’t look to see what it was.

“I don’t know. The FBI appears to think so.”

He smiled an empty, cruel smile that reminded me briefly of Bobby Sciorra. “And your interest in this is the girl, no?”

I was surprised, although I should not have been. Barton’s past would have been common knowledge to Sciorra at least and would have been passed on quickly when his body was discovered. I thought my visit to Pete Hayes might have played a part too. I wondered how much he knew, and his next question gave me the answer: not much.

“Who are you working for?”

“I can’t say.”

“We can find out. We found out enough from the old man at the gym.”

So that was it. I shrugged gently. He was silent again for a while.

“Do you think my son had the girl killed?”

“Did he?” I responded. Don Ferrera turned back toward me, the rheumy eyes narrowing.

“There is a story told about a man who believes he is being cuckolded by his wife. He approaches a friend, an old, trusted friend, and says: ‘I believe my wife is cheating on me but I don’t know with whom. I have watched her closely but I cannot find out the identity of this man. What do I do?’

“Now his friend is the man who is cheating with his wife, but to divert the other’s attention he says that he saw the wife with another man, a man with a reputation for dishonorable conduct with other men’s wives. And so the cuckold turns his gaze on this man and his wife continues to cheat on him with his best friend.” He finished and gazed intently at me.

Everything has to be interpreted, everything is codified. To live with signs is to understand the necessity of finding meanings in seemingly irrelevant pieces of information. The old man had spent most of his life looking for the meanings in things and expected others to do likewise. In his cynical little anecdote lay his belief that his son was not responsible for Barton’s death but that whoever was responsible stood to benefit from the concentration of the police and FBI on Sonny’s assumed guilt. I glanced at Bobby Sciorra and wondered how much Don Ferrera really knew about what went on behind those eyes. Sciorra was capable of anything, even of undermining his boss for his own gains.

“I hear maybe Sonny has taken a sudden interest in my good health,” I said.

The old man smiled. “What kind of interest in your health, Mr. Parker?”

“The kind of interest that could result in my health suddenly ceasing to be good.”

“I don’t know anything about that. Sonny is his own man.”

“That may be, but if anyone pulls anything on me, I’ll see Sonny in Hell.”

“I’ll have Bobby look into it,” he said.

That didn’t make me feel a whole lot better. I stood up to leave.

“A clever man would be looking for the girl,” said the old man, also standing up and moving toward a door in a corner of the room behind the desk. “Alive or dead, the girl is the key.”

Maybe he was right, but the old man must have had his own reasons for pointing me toward her. And as Bobby Sciorra escorted me to the front door, I wondered if I was the only person looking for Catherine Demeter.

There was a cab waiting at the gates of the Ferrera house to take me back to the East Village. As it turned out, I had enough time to shower and make a pot of coffee at my apartment before the FBI came knocking on my door. I had changed into tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt so I felt a little casual next to Special Agents Ross and Hernandez. The Blue Nile was playing in the background, “A Walk Across the Rooftops,” causing Hernandez to wrinkle his nose in distaste. I didn’t feel the need to apologize.

Ross did most of the talking, while Hernandez ostentatiously examined the contents of my bookshelf, looking at covers and reading the dust jackets. He hadn’t asked if he could and I didn’t like it.

“There are some picture ones on the lower shelf,” I said. “No Crayolas, though. I hope you brought your own.”

Hernandez scowled at me. He was in his late twenties and probably still believed everything he had been taught about the agency in Quantico. He reminded me of the tour guides in the Hoover Building, the ones who herd the Minnesota housewives around while dreaming of gunning down drug dealers and international terrorists. Hernandez probably still refused to believe that Hoover had worn a dress.

Ross was a different matter. He had been involved with the feds’ Truck Hijack Squad in New York in the seventies and his name had been linked to a number of high-profile RICO cases since then. I believed he was probably a good agent, but a lousy human being. I had already decided what I was going to tell him: nothing.

“Why were you at the Ferrera house this evening?” he began, after declining an offer of coffee like a monkey refusing a nut.

“I’ve got a paper route.” Ross didn’t even grin. Hernandez’s scowl deepened. If I’d had a nervous disposition, the strain might have proved too much for me.