Burns signed off, so I didn’t get the chance to ask any questions. It was obvious that he didn’t want me to. Around seven-thirty I arrived at the Hoover Building and was told to go to the SIOC conference area on five. They were waiting for me there. Not exactly waiting, since a shirtsleeves meeting was already in progress. Ron Burns was at the table, which wasn’t a good sign. Everybody looked tense and exhausted.

“Let me bring Alex up to date,” Burns said when I entered the room. “Have a rest, kick back. There’s been a new wrinkle. None of us are very happy about it. You won’t be either.”

I shook my head and felt a little sick as I sat down. I didn’t need new wrinkles; I had more than enough already.

“The Russians are actually cooperating for a change,” Burns said. “It seems that they’re not denying Andrei Prokopev has Red Mafiya connections. He does. They’ve been monitoring him for some time themselves. They hoped to use him to penetrate the huge black market still coming out of Moscow.”

I cleared my throat. “But.”

Burns nodded. “Right. The Russians tell us—now—that Prokopev is not the man we’re looking for. They’re certain of it.”

I felt completely drained. “Because?”

It was Burns’s turn to shake his head. “They know what the Wolf looks like. He was KGB, after all. The real Wolf set us up to believe he was Prokopev. Andrei Prokopev was one of his rivals in the Red Mafiya.”

“To be the Russian godfather?”

“To be the godfather—Russian or otherwise.”

I pursed my lips, took a breath. “Do the Russians know who the Wolf really is?”

Burns’s eyes narrowed. “If they do, they won’t tell us. Not yet, anyway. Maybe they’re afraid of him too.”

Chapter 116

Chapter 116

LATE THAT NIGHT I sat at the piano on the sunporch with one of Billy Collins’s poems running around my head. It was called “The Blues.” It inspired me so much that I sat at the piano and made up a melody to go with the poem. We had lost to the Wolf. It happened a lot in police work, though nobody wanted to admit it. Lives had been saved, though. Elizabeth Connolly and a couple of others had been found; Brendan Connolly was in jail. Andrei Prokopev had been caught. But we seemed to have lost the big one—for now, anyway. The Wolf was still out there. The godfather was free to do what he did, and that wasn’t good for anybody.