"She can't go with you?" Susan said.

"Hawk hates dog drool on the leather seats," I said.

"You don't care about that," Susan said. "And neither does Hawk. You think it might be dangerous going to see Gerry Broz and you don't want her to get hurt, or you to get hurt and her to be left alone." Susan was wearing a kimono with vertical black and white stripes, and she hadn't put her makeup on yet. Her face was shiny and vulnerable in its morning innocence.

"Gerry's a weird dude," I said.

She nodded and held up her face and I kissed her, and patted Pearl and went on to Hawk.

"Gonna come by someday, see a tricycle on the porch," Hawk said as he slid the Jag away from the curb in front of Susan's house.

"Maybe Paul will have a kid," I said.

"Get you one of those bumper stickers say ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDCHILD," Hawk said.

"There's a Dunkin' Donuts in Union Square, Somerville " I said. "You could get me coffee instead."

Which we did, and drank it as we drove on 93 and 128 to Beverly. We were meeting Gerry in an Italian restaurant called Rocco's Grotto on Rantoul

Street. The front of Rocco's was done in fake fieldstone. A big neon sign in the window advertised PIZZA, PASTA, MORE. There was a bicycle repair shop next door and across the street a billiard parlor. Hawk and I got out of the car and went to the front door. There was a stock sign in the window that said CLOSED on it. I tried the door. It opened and we went in. There were booths down the left-hand wall, a bar down the right, and tables in the space between. Most of the tables had chairs upside down on them. Past the end of the bar was a swinging door to the kitchen, with a pass-through window to the left of it. Beyond that was a short corridor to the rest rooms. Behind the bar was a guy with straggly blond hair and a skinny neck. He was brewing coffee. He looked up when we came in.

"You here for Gerry?" he said.

I said yes.

He jerked his head toward a booth.

"He'll be along," he said.

He had probably been a thin guy once, but as time passed he had gotten sort of plump until the only remnant of his former self was his thin neck.

Hawk ignored the head gesture toward a booth and took the barstool nearest the kitchen. Hemoved it away from the kitchen door and sat on it, leaning against the back wall. I sat at the other end, near the door. No sense bunching up. The guy with the skinny neck shrugged and looked at his coffee maker. The water had nearly stopped dripping through the filter. He leaned his hips against the inside of the bar and crossed his arms and studied it as it dripped more and more occasionally. Finally it stopped altogether. The round glass pot was full.

The guy with the skinny neck got a round bar tray from under the bar and put a coffee mug on it, a small cardboard carton of heavy cream, and a bowl filled with paper packets of Equal. He put a teaspoon on the tray beside the coffee mug. Then he put the tray up on the bar top and went into the kitchen. He came back in maybe two minutes with a plate of Italian pastries. I saw raisin cake, biscotti, hazelnut cake, and cannoli. He put the plate on the tray and then he leaned back against the bar again and folded his arms again, and looked at nothing.

Which was what I was looking at.

Then the door opened and a big guy came in wearing a tan Ultrasuede thigh-length coat. He had very big hands, and even though everything seemed to fit him fine, his hands were so big that it made him look like his sleeves were too short.

He looked first at Hawk in the back, and then at me. And then moved on into the restaurant leaving the door ajar and leaned on the wall near Hawk.

Gerry Broz came in next, and after him two more bodyguards. One wore a tan corduroy sport coat over a dark brown sport shirt. The sport coat had brown leather elbow patches but fit him so badly that I could see the bulge on his right hip where he wore a gun. The other bodyguard wore a dark blue three-piece suit.

He had on a blue and red figured tie with a very wide knot, and a trench coat worn like a cape over his shoulders. As he came through the front door, he reached back with his left hand and pulled it shut. Then he produced a double-barreled shotgun with the barrels sawed off and the stock modified, and held that, muzzle down, in his right hand.

"That it for backup?" I said to Gerry. "Nobody on the roof?"

"Hey, asshole, you asked for this meet," Gerry said.

"One of your many good qualities, Gerry," I said. "You are a master of the clever riposte."

The tall guy with the two big hands said from the back, "Why don't you just shut your fucking mouth."

"Barbarians," I said to Hawk. "We have fallen among barbarians." I looked at the guy behind the bar. "And this seemed like such a nice place too," I said.

He ignored me. He picked up the tray he'd prepared and went over to the booth along the left wall, near the door, where Gerry had slid in by himself. It was getting harder and harder for Gerry to slide into booths.

Every time I saw him he seemed to have gained another ten. He wasn't a big guy, and he obviously didn't work out, so that everypound he packed on looked like twice that and very flabby. Moreover his wardrobe hadn't caught up to his poundage, so that everything seemed tight and you had the sense that he was very uncomfortable.

The bartender poured him some coffee, and left the pot. Gerry poured some heavy cream in, added four packets of Equal, and stirred slowly while he ate a biscotto. His hair was cut long in the back and short on top, where it was spiked. He had a camel's hair topcoat on, which he wore open with the belt hanging loose. He wasn't too much older than Paul and already there were small red veins showing on his cheeks. He swallowed the last of his first biscotto, and drank some coffee, and put the mug down.

"Okay, asshole," he said. "Hawk told Lucky you wanted to ask me something."

He nodded his head toward the guy with the sawed-off so I should know which one was Lucky.

"What are you and Rich Beaumont doing?" I said.

Nobody said anything. Gerry gazed at me without expression for a long time.

The bartender cleared his throat once, softly, turning his head away and covering his mouth as if he were in church.

Finally Gerry said, "Who?"

"Rich Beaumont," I said. "You and he are involved in some kind of scam which has gone sour and now you and everybody else is looking for Rich. I want to know what the scam was."

Gerry looked at me stonily some more. It was supposed to make the marrow congeal in my bones.

Then he ate a cannoli, drank some more coffee, looked around the room with what passed in Gerry's life for a big grin.

"Any you guys know Rich Beaumont?" He made a point of mispronouncing it, putting the emphasis on the first syllable.

"You, Lucky?"

The guy with the shotgun shook his head.

"Maishe?"

Maishe was the guy with the oversized hands. "Never heard of him," he said.

"Rock?"

The bartender shook his head.

"Anthony?"

"Never heard of no Rich Beaumont." The guy in the corduroy coat mispronounced Beaumont just as his boss had.

"You got any other questions, asshole?"

"Yeah," I said. "How many more times you think you can screw up like this before your father won't let you play anymore?"

The silence in the restaurant gathered like a fog. Gerry's face got red.

His breath rasped. He leaned suddenly forward over the table. An elbow knocked over his mug and coffee puddled on the table top.