“I cracked a couple of heads. Forgive me, Father, but I don’t think I’ve sinned. If I don’t learn anything new in the next couple of hours, I’m going to get the hell out of town. I’m going to wait until dark before I come for Eileen.”

“What time?” Loncaric asked.

“Figure nine o’clock. The streets are full of uniformed cops. Did you see Maryellen at Jack’s funeral?”

“I didn’t attend, Frank.”

“Why not?”

“I was on other business for His Eminence.”

Loncaric’s tone had turned flat—cold? Devlin said, “Nine o’clock,” and hung up. Almost five hours to kill. The more time Devlin spent in this place, a bar with a pizza and pasta menu, the better off he would be. He called DiBennedetti. No answer.

The waitress told him the scampi was the best thing on the menu, shrimp on a bed of linguini, in a sauce made with the real Italian green olive oil. He’d want extra bread to sop up the last of it, she said. He told her he wanted extra garlic, too, but no wine in the sauce.

She didn’t look up from her pad. “Coffee?”

“Yes.”

He kept his eyes on the television set over the bar. More Liberty celebration coverage: tall ships, the battleship Iowa, thousands of pleasure craft of all shapes and sizes, forty thousand of them expected tomorrow, lists of street and tunnel closings, warnings that tomorrow night’s fireworks were going to be heard from Brooklyn to New Jersey.

Eileen had spent years trying to get into this country, and now the man who loved her probably was going to have to get the hell out. Devlin had to stay free one more day, until the banks opened tomorrow morning. His father’s little green box had contained over twenty-seven thousand dollars—now in his son’s safety-deposit box. His insurance and Devlin’s savings brought the total to almost eighty thousand. Jail was no place for a cop, particularly one with Mafia enemies.

DiBennedetti. An old man, an evil old man. Joe Brennan had decided to go after organized crime and had died. Jack was about to announce he was going after organized crime, and he had died. Not surprising, especially if their father had run with tough guys in his youth. That was personal, all right. The old rule about not bothering the innocent, including family, existed because guys like DiBennedetti didn’t want it done to them. The new Colombian gangsters didn’t observe such niceties; when they wanted to teach a man a lesson, they strangled his child, raped his babysitter, and left his wife with a salami shoved down her throat.

At 7:30 Devlin tried DiBennedetti again. This time the telephone was picked up after the third ring.

“So you decided today that I’m crazy—”