"Maspeth," he said. "Can any good thing come out of Maspeth? By God, there we sat watching the niggers punching each other and all the time there's a money laundry beneath our feet. Is that why you went out there then? And brought me along for company?"

"No, it was work took me out there, but I was working on something else at the time."

"But you kept your eyes open."

"You could say that."

"And put two and two together," he said. "Well, it's just the kind of situation I can use. I don't mind telling you, you've surprised me."

"How?"

"By bringing this to me. It seems unlike you. It's more than a man does out of friendship."

"You pay a finder's fee," I said. "Don't you?"

"Ah," he said, and a curious light came into his eyes. "That I do," he said. "Five percent."

He excused himself to make a phone call. While he was gone I sat there and looked at the bottle and the glass. I could have had some of the coffee Burke had made but I didn't want any. I didn't want the booze either.

When he came back I said, "Five percent's not enough."

"Oh?" His face hardened. "By God, you're full of surprises tonight, aren't you? I thought I knew ye. What's the matter with five percent, and how much is it you think you ought to have?"

"There's nothing wrong with five percent," I said. "For a finder's fee. I don't want a finder's fee."

"You don't? Well, what in hell do you want?"

"A full share," I said. "I want to be a player. I want to go in."

He sat back and looked at me. He poured a drink but didn't touch it, breathed in and breathed out and looked at me some more.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said finally. "Well, I'll be fucking damned."

Chapter 22

In the morning I finally got around to stowing The Dirty Dozen in my safe-deposit box. I bought an ordinary copy to take to Maspeth, then began to imagine some of the things that might go wrong. I returned to the bank and retrieved the genuine article, and I left the replacement cassette in the box so I wouldn't mix them up later on.

If I got killed out in Maspeth, Joe Durkin could watch the cassette over and over, searching for a hidden meaning.

All day long I kept thinking that I ought to go to a meeting. I hadn't been to one since Sunday night. I thought I'd go at lunch hour but didn't, and then I thought about a Happy Hour meeting around five-thirty, and finally figured I'd catch at least the first half of my usual meeting at St. Paul's. But I kept finding other things to do.

At ten-thirty I walked over to Grogan's.

Mick was there, and we went into his office in the back. There's an old wooden desk there, and a safe, along with a pair of old-fashioned wooden office chairs and a Naugahyde recliner. There's an old green leather sofa, too, and sometimes he'll catch a few hours on it. He told me once he has three apartments around town, each of them rented in a name other than his own, and of course he has the farm upstate.

"You're the first," he said. "Tom and Andy'll be here by eleven. Matt, have you thought it over?"

"Some."

"Have you had second thoughts, man?"

"Why should I?"

"It's no harm if you do. There'll likely be bloodshed. I told you that last night."

"I remember."

"You'll have to carry a gun. And if you carry one-"

"You have to be willing to use it. I know that."

"Ah, Jesus," he said. "Are ye sure ye have the heart for it, man?"

"We'll find out, won't we?"

He opened the safe and showed me several guns. The one he recommended was a SIG Sauer 9-mm automatic. It weighed a ton and I figured you could stop a runaway train with it. I played with it, working the slide, taking the clip out and putting it back, and I liked the feel of it. It was a nice piece of machinery and it looked intimidating as all hell. But I wound up giving it back and choosing a.38 S amp;W short-barreled revolver instead. It lacked the SIG Sauer's menacing appearance, to say nothing of its stopping power, but it rode more comfortably tucked under my belt in the small of my back. More to the point, it was a close cousin to the piece I'd carried for years on the job.

Mick took the SIG for himself.

By eleven Tom and Andy had both arrived, and each had come into the office to select a weapon. We kept the office door closed, of course, and we were all pacing around, talking about the good weather, telling each other it would be a piece of cake. Then Andy went out and brought the car around and we filed out of Grogan's and got into it.

The car was a Ford, a big LTD Crown Victoria about five years old. It was long and roomy, with a big trunk and a powerful engine. I thought at first it had been stolen for the occasion, but it turned out to be a car Ballou had bought a while back. Andy Buckley kept it garaged up in the Bronx and drove it on occasions of this sort. The plates were legitimate but if you ran them you wouldn't get anywhere; the name and address on the registration were fictitious.

Andy drove crosstown on Fifty-seventh Street and we took the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge into Queens. I liked his route better than the one I had taken. Nobody talked much once we were in the car, and after we crossed the bridge the silence was only rarely interrupted. Maybe a locker room's like that in the minutes before a championship game. Or maybe not; in sports they don't shoot the losers.

I don't suppose the trip took us much more than half an hour door to door. There was no traffic to speak of and Andy knew the route cold. So it must have been somewhere around midnight when we reached the arena. He had not been driving fast, and he slowed down now to around twenty miles an hour and we looked at the building and scanned the surrounding area as we coasted on by.

We went up one street and down another, and from time to time we would pass the arena and take a good look at it. The streets were as empty as they'd been the night before, and the lateness of the hour made them seem even more desolate. After we'd cruised around for twenty minutes or more Mick told him to give it a rest.

"Keep driving back and forth and some fucking cop's going to pull us over and ask if we're lost."

"I haven't seen a cop since we crossed the bridge," Andy said.

Mick was up front next to Andy. I was in back with Tom, who hadn't opened his mouth since we left Mick's office.

"We're early," Andy said. "What do you want me to do?"

"Park near the place but not on top of it," Mick told him. "We'll sit and wait. If somebody rousts us we'll go home and get drunk."

We wound up parked half a block from the arena on the opposite side of the street. Andy cut the engine and shut off the lights. I sat there trying to figure out which precinct we were in so I'd know who might come along and roust us. It was either the 108 or the 104, and I couldn't remember where the boundary ran or where we were in relation to it. I don't know how long I sat there, frowning in concentration, trying to picture the map of Queens in my mind, trying to impose a map of the precincts on top of it. Nothing could have mattered less, but my mind groped with the question as if the fate of the world depended on the answer.

I still hadn't settled it when Mick turned to me and pointed at his watch. It was one o'clock. It was time to go in.

I had to walk in there alone. That figured to be the easy part, but it didn't feel so easy when it was time to do it. There was no way to know what kind of reception awaited me. If Bergen Stettner had decided reasonably enough that it was cheaper and safer to kill me than to pay me off, all he had to do was open the door a crack and gun me down before I so much as set eyes on him. You could fire a cannon and no one would hear it, or give a damn if they did.