"Thank you."

"Amy will be there."

"I have just been sandbagged."

"Yes," Brewster Payne said. "I had that in mind when I mentioned the lamb." He handed Matt the Flamingo check. 'Take this, and the cash, to the bank. Cash this, and have them give you a cashier's check for the entire amount of money, payable to First Philadelphia. Give it to me tonight, and I'll take care of it from there."

Matt nodded, and took the check back.

"How much in taxes are they going to get?"

"You don't really want to know. It would ruin your lunch."

"I'll have the vegetable soup and the calves' liver, please," Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein told the waiter.

"Shrimp cocktail and the luncheon steak, pink in the middle," the Honorable Jerry Carlucci ordered.

When the waiter had gone, the mayor said, "You should have had the shrimp and steak. I'm buying."

"Most of the time when you say you're buying I wind up with the check. Besides, I like the way they do liver in here."

"I had a call from H. Richard Detweiler this morning," the mayor said.

"And?"

"And he said he wanted me to know he was very grateful for our letting the Payne kid go out there and bring his daughter home, and if there was ever anything he could for me I should not hesitate to let him know."

"You should hold off calling that marker in until you're running for governor or the Senate. Or the White House."

"All I want to do is be mayor of Philadelphia."

"Isn't that what you said when they appointed you police commissioner? That all you wanted to be was commissioner?"

"What is this, Beat Up On Jerry Carlucci Day?"

"You want a straight answer to that?"

"No, lie to me."

"I sent word to Payne to meet me in my office at half past one. I' m going to tell him, when he goes back on the job, that what he was doing was paperwork in the Roundhouse, not running out to Las Vegas, for Christ's sake, baby-sitting Detweiler's daughter. He's going to have a hard enough time proving himself over at East as it is…"

"I've been in a detective division. Right there in East Detectives, as a matter of fact. You don't have to tell me about detective divisions."

"…without us pulling him out of there every time somebody like Detweiler wants a favor from you," Lowenstein finished.

"I'm not as dumb as I look, Matt," the mayor said. "I'm even one or two steps ahead of you."

"Are you?"

"Yes, I am. I thought you and Denny Coughlin did a dumb thing when you sent him to East Detectives in the first place."

"He made detective. What you do with new detectives is send them to out to the Academy to learn the new forms, and then to a division, to learn how tobe a detective. You tell me, why is that dumb?"

"Because he is who he is."

"You tell me, who is he?"

"He's the guy who took down the Northwest Philadelphia serial rapist, and the guy who shot it out with that Islamic Liberation Army jackass and won. That makes him different, without the other things. Like I said, I've been in a detective division. They're really going to stay on his ass to remind him he's a rookie, until he proves himself."

"He's a good kid. He can handle that."

"Sure he can, and what have we got then? I'll tell you what we'll have-one more detective who can probably work a crime scene about as good as any other detective."

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"The Good of the Department is what I'm talking about."

"Then you have lost me somewhere along the way."

"Do you know how many college graduates have applied for the Department in the last year?"

"No."

"Fifty-three."

"So?"

"Do you know how many college graduates applied, in the three years previous to this one?"

"I have no idea."

"Seventeen. Not each year. Total."

"Now I'm really lost."

"Public relations," the mayor said significantly.

"What does that mean?"

"That a lot of young men, fifty-three young men, with college degrees, with the potential to become really good cops, saw Payne's picture in the newspapers and decided they might like being a cop themselves."

"Do you know that? Or just think that?"

"I checked it out," the mayor said.

"So what are you saying, Jerry? That we should put Payne on recruiting duty?"

"I'm saying you and Coughlin should have left him right where he was, in Special Operations."

"A," Lowenstein said, "you always transfer people who get promoted. B, there are no detectives in Special Operations."

"A, that 'transfer people when they get promoted' didn't come off the mountain with Moses, engraved on stone, and B, as of today there are two detectives assigned to Special Operations."

'Two detectives who should have been sent back to Homicide where they belong," Lowenstein said.

"If you mean Jason Washington, he's a sergeant now. He got promoted, and he didn't get transferred out of Special Operations. I said twodetectives. One of whom is Tony Harris, who would probably go back to being a drunk if we sent him back to Homicide."

Lowenstein took a deep swallow of his Jack Daniel's and water. He was impressed again with Jerry Carlucci's intimate knowledge of what was going on in the Department.

Detectives Jason Washington and Tony Harris, in Lowenstein's judgment the two best Homicide detectives, had been "temporarily" assigned to the then newly formed Special Operations Division when Mayor Carlucci had taken away the Northwest serial rapist job from Northwest Detectives and given it to Peter Wohl.

Other special jobs had come up, and they had never gone back to Homicide, which had been a continuing source of annoyance to Matt Lowenstein. The only good thing about it was that Tony Harris seemed to have gotten his bottle problem under control working for Wohl. Until just now, Matt Lowenstein had believed that Harris's boozing was known to only a few people, not including the mayor.

"You said 'two detectives,'" Lowenstein said, finally. "The other one's name is Payne, right?"

"You're a clever fellow. Maybe you should be a detective or something," Jerry Carlucci said.

Lowenstein did not reply.

"He can learn as much watching Washington and Harris as he could have learned in East Detectives, and probably quicker," Carlucci said. "And he'll be available, without a lot of bullshit and resentment, the next time the Department needs to do somebody who can do the Department a lot of good a favor."

"Oh, shit," Matt Lowenstein said.

"You don't like it?" the mayor said. There was just a hint of coldness in his voice.

"What I don't like is that you're right," Lowenstein said. "It wasn't fair to either East Detectives or Payne to send him there. I don't know if he'll stay on the job or not, but if he does, it wouldn' t be at East Detectives."

"I thought about that too," Carlucci said. "Whether he would stay. I decided he would. He's been around long enough, done enough, to have it get in his blood."

"You make it sound like syphilis," Lowenstein said.

Mr. Ricco Baltazari had his luncheon, a dozen cherrystone clams, a double thick lamb chop, medium rare, with mint sauce, and a sliced tomato with olive oil and vinegar in his place of business, the Ristorante Alfredo, in Center City, Philadelphia, three blocks east of the Union League.

A table in the rear of the establishment had been especially laid for the occasion, for Mr. Gian-Carlo Rosselli had called Mr. Baltazari with the announcement that Mr. S. thought he would like to have a little fish for his lunch and was that going to pose any problems?

Mr. Baltazari had told Mr. Rosselli that it would be no problem at all, and what time was Mr. S. thinking of having his lunch?