Mr. Savarese delicately placed a piece of the swordfish into his mouth, chewed, and nodded.

'This is very nice, Ricco," he said.

"I'm glad you're pleased, Mr. S."

"It has to be fresh," Mr. Savarese said. "Otherwise, when it's been on ice too long, it gets mushy."

"That was swimming in the Gulf of Mexico two days ago, Mr. S."

'Tell me why you told Joe Fierello to make the police officer a good deal," Mr. Savarese said as he placed another piece of swordfish into his mouth. "Tell me about the police officer, is what I want."

"I was going to call you this morning, but then Carlo called and said you was coming, and I figured it could wait until I could tell you in person."

Mr. Savarese nodded, and then gestured with his fork for Mr. Baltazari to continue.

"I try to keep my eyes open," Mr. Baltazari said. "So when I saw this cop flashing a wad in the Warwick

"How did you know he was a police officer?" Mr. Savarese interrupted.

"I can tell a cop, Mr. S.," Mr. Baltazari said, a bit smugly. "So I checked him out."

"How?"

"I happened to be with a lady," Mr. Baltazari said, just a little uneasily. "I had her do it for me."

"Can this lady be trusted?"

"She's a divorced lady, Mr. S. With a kid. She has a hard time making out on what they pay her at the phone company, so I help her out from time to time."

Mr. Savarese nodded, and Mr. Baltazari went on.

"She struck up a conversation with this guy, like I told her, and come back and told me he's a corporal, working at the airport, and that he just come home from Vegas, where he won a lot of money…"

"How much?"

"I don't know exactly, but he was talking about buying a Caddy, so I figure fifteen, twenty big ones, maybe a little more."

Mr. Savarese nodded his understanding again.

"So I figured this was one of those times when you have to do something right away, or forget it," Mr. Baltazari went on. "So I sent the lady back to the cop and told her to tell him she has an uncle who has a car lot who would give him a good deal."

"Is this police officer married?" Mr. Savarese asked.

"I don'tknow, Mr. S. He told Antoinette he's a bachelor."

"It would be better, if he was married," Mr. Savarese said.

"I'll find out for sure and let you know, Mr. S. Anyway, I figured if this wasn't such a hot idea, no harm. So I called Joe, and told him…"

"What you should have done, Ricco," Mr. Savarese said, "was call me and let me talk to Joe."

"I wasn't sure if you would have time to talk with me today, Mr.

S."

"Joe called me," Mr. Savarese said, "and asked exactly what was going on. I didn't know, and that was very embarrassing. So I told him I would talk to you and get back to him."

"If I stepped out of line, Mr. S., I'm really sorry. But like I said, I figured no harm…"

Mr. Savarese interrupted Mr. Baltazari by holding up the hand with the fork in it.

"Gian-Carlo," he said. "Get on the phone to Joe. Tell him there was a slight misunderstanding. Tell him I have absolute faith in Ricco's judgment."

Mr. Rosselli laid down his knife and fork and pushed himself away from the table.

"There's a pay station in the candy store on the corner," Mr. Savarese said.

"Right, Mr. S.," Mr. Rosselli said.

When he had gone, Mr. Savarese laid his hand on that of Mr. Baltazari.

"Ricco," he said. "This may be more important than you know. This police officer works at the airport? You're sure of that?"

"That's what he told Antoinette."

"Do you recall reading, or seeing on the television, two months back, about the police officer who was killed in an auto accident on the way from the shore?"

"I seem to remember something about that, Mr. S."

"He was a friend of ours, Ricco."

"I didn't know that, Mr. S."

"And he worked at the airport. And now that he's gone, we don't have a friend at the airport. That's posing certain problems for us. Serious problems, right now."

"Oh."

"This police officer you found could be very useful to us, Ricco."

"I understand."

"Whatever is done with him has to be done very carefully, you understand. But at the same time, so long as we don't have a friend at the airport, the problems we are having there are not going to go away."

"I understand," Mr. Baltazari said, although he had no idea what Mr. S. had going at the airport.

"I want you to let me know what goes on, when it happens, Ricco. And while I trust your judgment, whenever there is any question at all in your mind about what to do, I want you to call me and we'll decide what to do together. You understand me, Ricco?"

"Absolutely, Mr. S."

"Why don't you go get us some coffee, Ricco?"

"Certainly, Mr. S."

Marion Claude Wheatley did not own an automobile, and had not for several years. He suspected, and then had proved by putting all the figures down on paper, that it was much cheaper, considering the price of automobiles and their required maintenance, and especially the price of insurance, to rent a car when he needed one.

And the inconveniences-particularly that of getting groceries from the supermarket checkout counter to the house-were overwhelmed by the elimination of annoyances not owning an automobile provided.

Paying his automobile insurance had especially annoyed him. There were, he was quite sure, actuarial reasons for the insurance company's classifications of people they insured. They were, after all, a business, not a charitable organization. Statistically, it could be proved that an unmarried male between twenty-one and thirty-five living in Philadelphia could be expected to cost the insurance company far more in settling claims than a thirty-six-year-old who was married and lived, say, in New Hope or Paoli. But there was an exception to every rule, and they should have acknowledged that.

He had never had a traffic violation in his life, had never been involved in an accident, and did not use his automobile to commute to work. He drove it back and forth to the supermarket and every month to New Jersey to check on the farm. Sometimes, on rare occasions, such as when Hammersmith, or someone like him, felt obliged to have him to dinner, he drove it at night out to Bryn Mawr, or someplace.

But most of the time the car had sat in the garage, letting its battery discharge.

He had tried to make this point to his insurance broker, who had not only been unsympathetic to his reasoning but had practically laughed at him.

He had solved both problems by selling the car and changing insurance brokers. Marion believed that when you know something is right, you do it.

And he had learned that while renting a car wasn't as cheap as the rental companies advertising would have one believe, it was possible, by carefully reading the advertisements and taking advantage of discounts of one kind or another, to rent a car at perfectly reasonable figures.

When he returned to his office from having lunch with Hammersmith at the Union League, he spent the next forty-five minutes calling around and arranging a car for the weekend. The best price was offered, this time, by Hertz. If he picked up the car at the airport, not downtown, after six-thirty on Friday, and returned it not later than eleven-thirty on Saturday, they would charge him for only one twenty-four-hour day, providing he did not add more than two hundred miles to the odometer. They would also provide him a "standard" size car, for the price of a "compact."

It averaged between 178.8 and 192.4 miles, round trip (he didn't really understand why there should be a difference, unless the odometers themselves were inaccurate) from the airport to the farm, so he would be within the 200-mile limitation. And since he was getting a standard-sized car, that meant he could conceal the equipment he was taking to the farm in the trunk.