"It worked out fine, thank you, Evans."

Evans smiled and left the room.

"I don't know what I'm going to do with you," Pekach said to Martha.

She met his eyes and smiled. "Oh, you'll think of something."

Martha walked to where Evans had left the beer, poured some skillfully in the glass, and handed it to Pekach.

"I love it when I can do something nice for you, my Precious," she said.

He kissed her gently, tasting her lipstick.

"I better take a shower," he said.

She came into the bathroom, as she often did, and watched him shave. She had told him she liked to do that, to feel his cheeks when he had just finished shaving.

When they went downstairs, Evans had brought her Mercedes coupe around to the portico from the garage, and was holding the door open for her. Pekach got behind the wheel and glanced at her to make sure she had her seat belt fastened. There was a flash of thigh and of the lace at the hem of her black slip.

For a woman who didn't know the first fucking thing about sex, he thought for perhaps the fiftieth time, she really knows how to pick underwear that turns me on.

He put the Mercedes in gear, drove down the drive to Glengarry Lane, and idly decided that the best route downtown would be the Schuylkill Expressway.

Just north of the Zoological Gardens, Martha asked if they had caught whoever had shot the policeman.

"No. And we don't have a clue," Pekach said. "Just before I came

… to your place"-he'd almost said "home"- "we had a meeting, and Tony Harris, who's running the job, and is a damn good cop, said all he knows to do is go back over what he already has."

"You almost said 'home,' " Martha said, "didn't you?"

He looked at her and was surprised to find they were holding hands.

"Slip of the tongue," he said.

"Nice slip, I like it."

"You too."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I like your slip," he said.

"Oh," she said. "Thank you."

She raised his hand to her mouth and kissed it.

There was the howl of a siren. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw a Highway car behind him and dropped his eyes to the large round speedometer of the Mercedes. The indicator was pointing just beyond seventy.

"Shit," he said, freed his hand, and moved into the right lane.

The Highway car pulled up beside him. The police officer in the passenger seat gestured imperiously for him to pull to the curb, the gesture turning into a friendly wave as Officer Jesus Martinez, a stricken look on his face, recognized the commanding officer of the Highway Patrol. The Highway car suddenly slowed and fell behind.

"I hate that," Pekach said. "Getting caught by my own men."

"Then you shouldn't speed, Precious." Martha laughed. "You should see your face!"

"It's this damn car," Pekach said. "They don't know it. If we were in my car, that wouldn't have happened."

"Then you should drive this car more, so they get to know it."

"I couldn't drive your car to work," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because it's yours."

"Let me give it to you, then."

"Martha, Goddammit, stop!"

"We've been over this before," she said. "It makes me happy to give you things."

"It's not right," he said.

"I love you and I can easily afford it, so what's wrong with it?"

"It's not right," he repeated.

"Sorry," Martha said.

"Honey, you always giving me things…"He searched for the words. "It makes me feel less than a man."

"That's absurd," she said. "Look at yourself! As young as you are, being a captain. Commanding Officer of Highway. You're worried about being a man?"

He didn't reply.

"And that's not the only manly thing you do very well," Martha said. She leaned over and put her tongue in his ear and groped him.

"Jesus, honey!"

"You must be getting tired of me," Martha teased. "I remember when you used to like that."

"I'm not tired of you, baby," he said. "I could never get tired of you."

"So then let me give you the car."

"Will you ever quit?"

"Probably not," she said, and caught his hand and held it against her cheek. Then she asked, "Where are we going? Not that it matters."

"Ristorante Alfredo," he said, trying to pronounce it in Italian.

"I hear that's very nice."

"Peter Wohl says it is," Pekach said. "I asked him for a good place to go, and he said Ristorante Alfredo is very nice."

"You like him, don't you?"

"He's a good boss. He doesn'tact much like a cop, but from his reputation and from what I've seen, he's a hell of a cop."

What Peter Wohl had said specifically were that there were two nice things about Ristorante Alfredo. First, that the food and atmosphere were first-class; and second, that the management had the charming habit of picking up the tab.

"The Mob owns it, I guess you know," Wohl had said. "They get some sort of perverse pleasure out of buying captains and up their meals. You're a captain now, Dave. Enjoy. Rank hath its privileges. I try to make them happy at least once a month."

Dave Pekach had made reservations for dinner at Ristorante Alfredo because of what Wohl had said about the food and atmosphere. He wasn't sure that Wohl wasn't pulling his leg about having the check grabbed. If that happened, fine, but he wasn't counting on it. He even sort of hoped they wouldn't. It was important somehow that he take Martha someplace that she would enjoy, preferably expensive.

There was a young Italian guy (areal Italian, to judge by the way he mangled the language) in a tuxedo behind a sort of stand-up desk in the lobby of Ristorante Alfredo. When Pekach said his name was Pekach and that he had made reservations, the guy almost pissed his pants unlatching a velvet rope and bowing them past it to a table in a far corner of the room.

Dave saw other diners in the elegantly furnished room looking at Martha in her black dress and pearls, and the way she walked, and he was proud of her.

The Italian guy in the tuxedo held Martha's chair for her and said he hoped the table was satisfactory, and then he snapped his fingers and two other guys appeared, a busboy and a guy in a short red jacket with what looked like a silver spoon on a gold chain around his neck. The busboy had a bottle wrapped in a towel in a silver bucket on legs.

The guy with the spoon around his neck unwrapped the towel so that Dave could see that what he had was a bottle of French champagne.

"Compliments of the house, Captain Pekach," the Italian guy said. "I hope is satisfactory."

"Oh, Moet is always satisfactory," Martha said, smiling.

"You permit?" the Italian guy said, and unwrapped the wire, popped the cork, and poured about a quarter of an inch in Pekach's glass.

I'm supposed to sip that, to make sure it's not sour or something, Dave remembered, and did so.

"Very nice," he said.

"I am so happy," the Italian guy said, and poured Martha and then Pekach each a glassful.

"I leave you to enjoy wine," the Italian guy said. "In time I will recommend."

"To us," Martha said, raising her glass.

"Yeah," Dave Pekach said.

A waiter appeared a minute or so later and delivered menus.

And a minute or so after that the Italian guy came back.

"Captain Pekach, you will excuse. Mr. Baltazari would be so happy to have a minute of your time," he said, and gestured across the room to the far corner where two men sat at a corner table. When they saw him looking, they both gave a little wave.

Dave Pekach decided the younger one, a swarthy-skinned man with hair elaborately combed forward to conceal male pattern baldness, must be Baltazari, whom he had never heard of. The other man, older, in a gray suit, he knew by sight. On a cork bulletin board in the Intelligence Division, his photograph was pinned to the top of the Organized Crime organizational chart. The PhiladelphiaDaily News ritually referred to him as "Mob Boss Vincenzo Savarese."