“Tell me where you want to go, sir,” the driver said.

“To the home of Josef Sholokoff,” Nick replied, getting in the back. He wondered if he was actually trying to get Mohammed to talk him out of his mission. “I got the address on this piece of paper. It’s up there in the hills somewhere.”

“Not good, sir.”

“When we get there, I want you to wait for me.”

“Not good at all, sir. No, not good. Very bad, sir.”

“You’re my man. You gotta have my back.”

The driver was turned all the way around in the seat, looking aghast at his fare. “I think you have been given very poor advice about your visit, sir. This is not a nice man. Would you like to go to the baseball game? Or I can drive you by the zoo. A very nice zoo here.”

“You people blow yourselves up with bombs. You afraid of some Russian schmuck who probably can’t get it up without watching one of his own porn films?”

Mohammed pushed down the flag on his meter. “Hang on, sir,” he said.

The cab snaked its way up a mountain that was just north of a golf resort. From the window Nick could see the great golden bowl of the city, the flow of headlights through its streets, the linear patterns of palm trees along the boulevards, the concrete canals brimming with water, the chains of sun-bladed swimming pools that extended for miles through the neighborhoods of the rich. The west side of town, where the hardscrabble whites and poor Hispanics lived, was another story.

“You watch trash TV, Mohammed?” Nick asked. “Jerry Springer, that kind of crap?”

“No, sir.” Mohammed looked in the rearview mirror. “Maybe sometimes.”

“Those people, the guests, they don’t get paid for that.”

“They don’t?”

“No.”

“Then why do they do it to themselves?”

“They think they’ll be immortal. They get inside a movie or a television show, and they think they got the same magic as celebrities. Look down there. That’s what it’s about. The big score.”

“You are a very smart man. That’s why I do not understand you.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“Why you are going to the home of a man like Josef Sholokoff.”

Mohammed pulled the cab up to the locked gates of a compound that was sculpted back into the mountain. Inside the walls, the lawn was a deep, cool green in the shadows, the sod soggy from soak hoses, the citrus trees heavy with fruit, the balconies on the upper stories of the house scrolled with Spanish-style ironwork. The gates swung inward electronically, but no security personnel or even gardeners were in sight. Mohammed drove to the carriage house and stopped.

“You’re gonna wait, right?” Nick said.

“I think so, sir.”

“Think?”

“I have a wife and children to consider, sir.”

“The guy sells dirty movies. He’s not Saddam Hussein.”

“They say he kills people.”

Yeah, that, too, Nick said to himself.

By the side of the house were a flagstone patio and a swimming pool that glittered like diamonds from the underwater lighting. A half-dozen women lay on beach chairs or on float cushions in the pool. Four men were playing cards on a glass-topped table. They wore print shirts with flower or parrot designs and golf slacks and sandals or loafers. Their demeanor was that of men who felt neither threatened nor ill at ease with their role in the world nor aggrieved by tales of carnage or privation or suffering on the evening news. Nick knew many like them when he ran the cardroom for Didoni Giacano in New Orleans. They turned their lethality on and off as easily as one did a light switch, and they did not consider themselves either violent or aberrant. Ultimately, it was their personal detachment from their deeds that made them so frightening.

The overseer of their game sat in a high chair, the kind used by an umpire on a tennis court. He was a small, fine-boned man with a long jaw and narrow cranium. His grin exposed his teeth, which were long and crooked and looked tea-stained and brittle, as though they would break if their possessor bit into a hard surface. His nose was scarred by acne, his nostrils were full of gray hair, the shape of his eyes more Asian than Occidental. “There he is, right on time,” he said.

“I’m Nick, if you’re talking about me. You’re Mr. Sholokoff?”

“This is him, boys,” the man in the chair said to the men playing cards.

“I thought maybe we could talk in private.”

“Call me Josef. You want a drink? You like my ladies? Your eyes keep going to my ladies.”

“I feel like I’m at the public pool here.”

“Tell me what you want. You had a long trip out. Maybe you want to relax in one of my cottages back there. See the Negro girl down at the shallow end? She’s starting her movie career. Want to meet her?”

“I didn’t have anything to do with killing those women you were running into the country.”

Sholokoff seemed barely able to contain his mirth. “So you think I’m a human smuggler? And you’ve come out here to tell me you never did me any injury? Maybe you got a wire on you. You got a wire? You working for the FBI?”

“Hugo Cistranos had the women killed. He used to do hits in New Orleans for Artie Rooney. I wanted to get even with Artie for some things he did to me a long time ago. I thought it was him bringing the Asian women in. I thought I was gonna put them to work for me. I came to these kinds of conclusions because I was a dumb fuck who should have stayed in the restaurant and nightclub business. I don’t want my family hurt. I don’t care what y’all do to me. I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you here.”

“Get him a chair,” Sholokoff said. “Bring me the artwork, too.”

One of the cardplayers brought a white-painted iron chair from the lawn for Nick to sit in; another went inside the house and returned with a manila folder in his hand.

Sholokoff opened the folder on his lap and sorted through several eight-by-ten photos, glancing at each of them appraisingly, the grin never leaving his face.

“These guys aren’t Russians?” Nick asked, nodding at the cardplayers.

“If they were Russian, my little Jewish friend, they would eat you alive, toenails and all.”

“How do you know I’m Jewish?”

“We know everything about you. Your family name was Dolinski. Here, look,” Sholokoff said. He tossed the folder into Nick’s lap.

The photos spilled out in Nick’s hands: his son, Jesse, entering the San Antonio public library, the twin girls crossing a busy street, Esther unloading groceries in the driveway.

“Your wife’s family came from the southern Siberian plain?” Sholokoff said.

“Who took these pictures?”

“They say Siberian women rule their men. Is that true?”

“You leave my family out of this.”

Sholokoff propped his elbows on the arms of the chair, elevating his shoulders up around his neck, his face still split with a grin. “I got a deal for you. And if you don’t like it, I got maybe one other deal. But there’s not many deals on the table for you. Think real hard about your choices, Mr. Dolinski.”

“I came here to tell you the truth. Everyone says you’re a good businessman, the best at marketing the product you’re in. A good businessman wants facts. He doesn’t want bullshit. That’s what Artie Rooney and Hugo Cistranos sell, one hundred percent bullshit. You don’t want the facts about those women, I’m out of here.”

“You said you wanted to get even with Arthur Rooney. What did Arthur Rooney do to you?”

Nick glanced sideways at the cardplayers and at the women floating on cushions in the pool or lying on beach chairs. “When we were kids, him and his friends did a swirlie on me at the movie theater.”

“Explain this ‘swirlie’ to me.”

“They used my face to scrub out the toilet bowl. It was full of piss when they did it.”

Sholokoff’s laughter caused a convulsion in his cheek muscles that was like rictus in a corpse. He held a stiffened hand to his mouth to make it stop. Then his men started laughing, too. “You were paying back a guy because he washed your hair in piss? Now you’re in Phoenix bringing Josef a great truth about the operation of his business. I am in awe of you. You are what they call a great captain of industry. Now here are the deals for you, Mr. Dolinski. You ready?