DiBennedetti shook his head. “No. Nobody noticed that.” The others smiled. He patted Devlin on the shoulder. “Be grateful you’re alive with your traveler’s checks. You want me to tell you about this, eh? How we got frogmen to hold the jerk under? A drowning is quick, quicker than you think.”

“I want to hear this thing that goes back so many years,” Devlin said. “I thought you said the Brennan boys were killed because they were planning to go after organized crime …”

“That’s a joke. You can’t hurt us that way, we’re too big, too tough. Nah! That had nothing to do with it. Nah, nah.” He looked at Devlin. “I tell you this, you tell us where the gun is?”

“I’ll take you to where the gun is.”

“Whatever,” the old man said, and laughed. He sounded like a jungle bird, an ugly one. “First I’ll tell you how we killed Joe Brennan, then I’ll tell you why.”

Devlin had been as crazy as this.

Maybe he hadn’t sat around planning how to drown a guy in the ocean outside his own house, but as a cop, a young man about town, a member of the Brennan family, Devlin had lived for years as close as this to the violent heart of the city, guys who had been shot, chorus girls who had poisoned themselves, people who had died for no reason at all, except maybe being on the wrong street corner on the wrong afternoon. Devlin had been this crazy, wanting to hear how people died. Maybe his eyes had lit up like this old man’s.…

Maryellen remembered him when. Ho, ho, she had said. He remembered himself. Yes, this crazy. Old man DiBennedetti had maybe months to live, yet he remained obsessed with events of fifty years ago. He was still laughing over suckering Devlin into going to Maryellen’s convent. Brennan had been like this, and in their separate ways, so had his kids. A nest of them, Ann Elizabeth had said. A nest of what? You saw them everywhere. What had attracted Maryellen to him? What had been so great about Devlin? Who are you?

What had Brennan feared?

A young American on the make?

“When I came over here from the other side,” DiBennedetti said dreamily, with a faint smile, “before the war, I moved in with my father’s cousin, Bruno Ippolito.”

Bruno was in his sixties, with four daughters and a son, Vinnie, who was younger than DiBennedetti, but as tough and streetwise as they came. Vinnie Ippolito was going to be a big success in his father’s organization. His father’s fear was that Vinnie was too eager, not smart enough about people, too trusting.