“Tommy Greeley?” I said.

“Yes, of course. He was a law student, that was all. His family was once firmly middle class but it had fallen on hard times, so you would expect him to be struggling to pay even his tuition. But tuition was paid, he had a condominium apartment, a fancy car, a beautiful girl, a huge circle of friends. He took his friends on vacations in Hawaii, was well known in the casinos at Atlantic City for throwing lavish and risqué parties. It was all too obvious to ignore. When I brought it to my superiors, they added three agents and a prosecutor to the case, three hero types and a lawyer with a fetish for free publicity, all of whom tried to elbow me out. That is the way that type works, but you see I wasn’t so easy to get rid of. They began presenting the case to the grand jury, they thought they could do it themselves, but they were wrong. You see, I had something they needed. I had the books.

“More tea, Mr. Carl?”

“I’m fine,” I said. I watched Telushkin carefully as he poured himself another cup, dropped in one sugar cube, then another, swirled in the milk. Something about him riled me. Maybe it was his utter fatuousness, or maybe it was the way his voice colored judgmental as he talked about everyone else in his story. There was a not-so-hidden subtext to all his comments, as if he assumed, for some reason I could very well imagine, that he and I were so ideologically simpatico that much of what he wanted to express need not be said. His very discretion seemed to put us in the same jolly conspiracy. His self-satisfaction was so evident, I wanted to knock his glasses off.

“I brought in Babbage and his lawyer,” Telushkin continued. “His understandable position was to say not a thing, to plead the Fifth. He was there only to listen, said his lawyer. So I showed them both what I discovered in the books, the raw numbers that had told me everything. Page by page, entry by entry, I went through it all, and when I was through, both he and the lawyer realized with absolute certainty that Babbage was caught. Tax evasion, of course, and money laundering, yes. But then, when I told him in my quiet way that there was more, that I could twist my reading of the books to tab him with being an integral part of whatever Tommy Greeley was part of, and when the penalties of that became clear, he blanched. And he turned. And he exposed everything that had been going on.”

“And what was that, Mr. Telushkin?” I said.

“Call me Jeffrey. Please. I insist. And I’ll call you Victor, is that all right?”

I smiled at him like we were in a league together and nodded and gripped my teacup ever tighter.

“It was drugs, of course,” he said. “Cocaine. Massive amounts brought up from Florida and distributed through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, as far north as Boston, as far west as Phoenix. It was more than a business, Victor, it was an empire. We thought we were seeing all the enterprise’s profits being run through Babbage, but he was only working with some of the money from only one of the participants, from Tommy Greeley. But there was another leader too, and others were taking out huge amounts of money. They were selling sixty million dollars a year of drugs, Victor. Sixty million dollars. A year. And it had been going on for half a decade.”

I put down my cup because it had started to shake atop its saucer. This was big, bigger than I had ever imagined, and it fit perfectly with what Joey had told me, about what Tommy was carrying when he was killed, and the cool way he handled the threat before Joey’s first swing with the bat. And something else, the thing that made my cup shake on the saucer. There was suddenly more than the suitcase at stake. Only Tommy Greeley’s money had gone through Babbage. Where was the rest of it, and was that the reason Tommy was killed? And was that the reason Joey too, twenty years later, was killed? My contingency fee agreement with Mrs. Parma began to glow with a fabulous heat.

“But, as could be expected, Victor, even with all that business, the heroes were having trouble breaking into the organization, the heroes were finding themselves stymied. This was more than a business organization, all the participants were friends, comrades. They had, all of them, made each other rich. And they weren’t talking, not a word. The grand jury was getting nowhere. They couldn’t prove up the drug charges. We would get some of them for tax evasion, yes, but it was looking like only a tax case. Until I brought Babbage into the grand jury room.

“I can’t tell you everything he told me, Victor, or what he told the grand jury, that would be improper, not to mention illegal, but he broke it open, did our Mr. Babbage. His testimony was like the wedge that split everything apart. The indictments are public record, and the results were well publicized in the press. There were two indicted as so-called kingpins, eligible for stiff sentences without parole. One was a fellow called Prod, Cooper Prod. He is still in jail, don’t know when he gets out. The other was Tommy Greeley.”

“The one that got away,” I said, almost pleased that this trophy had eluded Telushkin even though I knew what had really happened to him.

“Yes. I had wanted him especially, with his high living and his haughtiness. You know, once when I went to talk to him, to see what I could see, he laughed at me. He laughed, as if it was inconceivable that someone like me could corner someone like him. And then he leaned over and quietly, in my ear, said ‘You’re not smart enough.’ I wasn’t sure I had caught what he had said, I asked him to repeat it, it was too much to believe that someone could be so arrogant. But he just laughed at me and walked away.”

“What happened to him, do you know?”

“Of course I know.”

I peered at him closely. “What?”

“He ran,” he said. “He took what he could and he ran. But he didn’t get far.”

“How do you know?”

“He was a troubled man dealing with dangerous people. There was a tremendous amount of money involved and he owed as much as he was owed. Not a healthy situation. When someone runs away he always slips up somehow. After a few months, or a few years, his arrogance gets the best of him, he thinks he has won, he has escaped, that his pursuers have lost interest. He will make contact with old friends, with family, he will make a mistake. But Tommy Greeley never did. I spent the rest of my career searching for him, checking the mail to his parents, his girlfriend, keeping tabs on those of his friends released from jail. It became something of an obsession. Call me Ishmael, I suppose.”

“It was Ahab obsessed with the whale,” I said.

He clapped. “So it was. So it was. But there was nothing, nothing. Tommy Greeley wasn’t clever enough or modest enough to pull it off. All that time searching for him was not wasted, it gave me the certainty that I sought, the certainty to conclude that something happened early on, that somehow his run to freedom failed at the start. He got his, along with the rest, only he got it worse. Well now, Victor. Anything else? More tea?”

“No thank you,” I said, standing. “I appreciate your time. One more question. This Babbage, the informer. What kind of sentence did he get?”

“Seven years probation.”

“Sweet.”

“It was a necessary evil, I assure you. He was offered witness protection but he refused it, said he didn’t need it. And he did quite well after everything passed. Apparently there was some money unaccounted for, which he discovered after the case was over. But pursuant to the terms of his cooperation agreement, there was nothing we could do about that. I still don’t know how we could have missed those moneys,” he said, even as his wink let me know that he certainly did, that the man who had studied Babbage’s books with the care of a Rockefeller knew where every penny had been buried, so the money left to be discovered was all part of Telushkin’s deal for his prize witness’s testimony. “He had a nice plastics business later on, did Babbage, recycling, with a big house and a pool in Gladwyne. Was still political, but had been turned by his experience, I suppose. Became a great supporter of Clinton, if you can believe that?”