Karen said, "You'd better."

He frowned at her and then he got out of the LeBaron and got into his limo and drove away. Karen watched him go. "Do you think he can?"

I nodded. "Yes. He's learned a lot."

"I hope." She let out a sigh. "I hate this. I hate it that once you let someone into your life, they're part of your life forever."

I said, "Part, maybe, but not all. You're still you. You're vice-president of the bank. You're twice president of the PTA. You're a Rotarian and a member of the Library Committee. Maybe, without having gone through what you went through with Peter, you wouldn't be any of those things. Maybe you would be less."

She turned and looked at me, and then she leaned across and kissed me, and then she turned in the seat and kissed Joe Pike. She said, "I'll do what's best for Toby. I've always been able to do that. What happens now with the DeLucas?"

I looked out the window at the house and the basketball hoop and Toby's bike leaning against the garage wall. Then I looked back at her. "I don't know. Sal and Charlie aren't running the family anymore. They'll have a new boss."

She made her lips into a little rosebud and then she nodded slowly. "Do you think he'll try to make me keep doing this?"

Pike leaned close to her and patted her arm. "Go live your life. You let us worry about that."

Karen Lloyd took a deep breath, let it out, and got out of the car.

CHAPTER FORTY

Pike and I collected our things, said our good-byes, and drove down to the city where we took a fourteenth-floor room at the Park Lane Hotel on East 59th Street. It was a nice room with a view of Central Park.

We took turns in the shower, then dressed and walked to the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd. They call it MoMA for short, which is dumb, but they had Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, which is anything but. Score one for New York. I had always wanted to see it, and now sat for the better part of an hour staring into its depths and textures. Pike said, "I know how he felt."

"They say he was mad."

Pike shrugged.

We walked up to West 7lst Street and had an early dinner at Victor's Café 52. Cuban food, which rivaled and in some ways surpassed the excellent fare found at the Versailles on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles. I had the chicken steak and black beans. Pike had the white bean soup and fried plantains. We both had beer. Score two.

It was still light when we finished, so we walked across the three long blocks of Central Park, past the lake and Bethesda Fountain and something that called itself the Boathouse Café. The café was closed. People were jogging and riding bikes and a couple of kids were flying a model airplane. No one seemed about to do crime, but the mounted police were in high profile. After the sun went down, it might be different. I asked Pike, "Are you afraid?"

He shook his head.

"Would you be afraid at midnight if we were alone?"

He walked a moment. "I have the capacity for great violence."

I nodded. So did I. But I thought that I might still be afraid.

Pike slipped his hands into the pockets of his parka and we walked past a smaller pond where an older man and a couple of young girls were sailing a model sailboat. A man and a woman decked out in serious biking apparel were standing with a tandem bike, watching them. We stopped and watched them, too, and I wondered how deeply into winter the pond could venture before it would freeze. The brisk fall wind carried the boat well across the pond. Pike said, "Elvis?"

"Yeah?"

"I remember being afraid. I was very young."

We watched the old man and the girls and the boat, and then we left the park and walked down to the brownstones that used to belong to Sal DeLuca. There were no limos at the curb or thugs hanging around the stoop. There was a black bow on the door.

Joe stayed on the corner at Fifth Avenue and I went up to the door and rang the bell once. In a little bit Freddie opened the door and looked out at me. His face was flat and without expression. "Yeah?"

"You hear about Charlie?"

"We heard."

"I'm at the Park Lane."

"Swell. Have a party."

"Tell Vito. Tell Angie. I'll be there until this is squared away."

Freddie gave me the patented tough-guy sneer. "We got no business with you."

"That's where you're wrong. Tell Vito and Angie. The Park Lane."

The next morning there was a three-inch article on page six of The New York Times. It reported that a prostitute named Gloria Uribe and a man believed to be her pimp, one Jesus Santiago, were found shot to death in a warehouse in lower Manhattan. Authorities had no leads as to the circumstances of their deaths. In a separate article on page eighteen a Jamaican national and known drug dealer named Urethro Mubata was found murdered in the front seat of his late-model Jaguar Sovereign in Queens. His throat was cut so deeply that the head was almost separated from the body. Police speculated his death to be the result of a drug deal gone sour. The New York Post reported that Richard Sealy, a drug addict, had been found dead in a Port Authority men's room with multiple fractures of the head, neck, both arms, and left leg. Guess junkies don't rate the Times.

Loose ends were being tied.

Two days later, in the afternoon, I was walking down Central Park West across from the Hayden Planetarium when a blue Cadillac Eldorado pulled up beside me. Pike was maybe forty yards back and across the street. Vito DeLuca opened the door and looked out at me. "Get in."

I got in. Freddie was in the front seat, driving. Vito was in back, alone. Vito said, "I'm capo de tutti capo. You know what that means?"

"You're Marlon Brando."

Vito smiled, but there was something hard and tired in it. The weight of responsibility. "Yeah. You killed a lot of our guys."

"Charlie's people."

"Some of the capos, they don't like it. They think something should be done."

"What do you think?" Out the window, past Vito, I could see Joe Pike moving closer, talking to a guy who was selling Middle Eastern food from a little cart.

Vito looked out the window but saw only people on the street. "I think Charlie came very close to bringing dishonor to the family. He was my nephew, my blood, but Sal was my brother. Sal knew how a man acts. You behaved like a man behaves. These guys, they talk about California and granola and Disneyland, I say, Christ, he put ten of our guys in the ground. If he was Sicilian, I'd kiss him on the mouth. He could be a made guy."

"What about Karen Lloyd?"

Vito turned back and looked at me. He said, "Sal DeLuca was capo de tutti capos, and when he spoke, he spoke for the family. The DeLucas honor their word. Capisce?"

"Charlie wouldn't."

"Charlie's dead."

I nodded.

"She's out. She will never be seen by DeLuca family eyes again. The DeLuca family will always honor that."

He put out his hand and we shook. When we shook, he squeezed my hand hard, so hard that it cut off the blood. More than one rock in the family. He said, "The agreement works both ways. Does the woman know that?"

"Yes."

"Does her husband? The movie guy?" Peter Alan Nelsen, the movie guy.

"Yes. I'll be responsible for them."

He nodded. "That's right. You will. For the rest of your life."

He let go of my hand and I got out of the limousine and walked across the street. Joe Pike and I went back to the hotel, called Karen Lloyd at her bank, and told her what Vito DeLuca had said. We checked out that afternoon.