“I’ve been speaking English a lot longer than you, kid. Figure it’s going to take me at least twenty minutes to get downtown.”

“You have a car, don’t you?”

“Yeah, and it’ll be in one piece when I get there.” Devlin hung up. After Mariano had told him to be quiet, Devlin had been tempted to say something about Mariano and Levine calling John Lord. Was that being quiet? But that wouldn’t have done John any good, and there was no sense in letting Mariano focus on what Devlin might know about him.

Advancing the message tape on Fast Forward so it wouldn’t be erased by calls to come, Devlin heard one set of mouse squeaks in a higher register than the others. Eileen. She liked to leave gag messages. As much as he wanted to hear her voice, he didn’t want to be distracted from his concentration on what he had just heard from Mariano.

Devlin was sure Harry Levine had been listening to Mariano’s every word—and probably Devlin’s, too, for that matter. The chief wants to know … Levine had heard that, no question about it. As Chief of Detectives, Harry Levine liked to think he wore a velvet glove. When instructing or chastising one of his detectives, he liked to lean back, smile, and chomp the dark, spitty end of a big, green cigar. Devlin’s crack years ago—that Levine’s breath smelled like cat shit—got back to him, and he called Devlin. “My wife agrees with your assessment of my breath, but she wants to sic Internal Affairs on us to find out how you know.”

Levine had inherited that wonderfully resonant bass voice: his grandfather had been a cantor, and his great-grandfather before him. Devlin knew a lot about Levine. That branch of the Levine family went far back in the history of New York, with Levinskys buried in the oldest Jewish cemetery in the city, a tiny triangular plot not far from Police Plaza, its tarnished brass plaque shadowed by the dark, rough brick of the surrounding tenements, tilted pebble-garnished tombstones angled against the surrounding stiff, yellow weeds: Levensky, Levinski—uniform spelling did not begin until the nineteenth century, and the stones went back to the seventeenth. In those days, and until the late nineteenth century, when their overwhelming numbers more or less dissolved the issue, the Jews were as startling to New York’s ruling English, Dutch, and Scots as the many nationalities of Arabs were to the Jews, Irish, and Italians who ran the city today, and the Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Asians who, Devlin was certain, were going to run the city tomorrow.