“It’s Harry, Martin,” said Meadows. “I know you’re in a meeting and I know you’ve got to get back to it. So just listen. I’ll be brief. Larry Vaughan is up to his tail in hock.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Listen, I said! The fact that he’s in debt doesn’t mean anything. It’s who he’s in debt to that matters. A long time ago, maybe twenty-five years, before Larry had any money, his wife got sick. I don’t remember what she had, but it was serious. And expensive. My memory’s a little hazy on this, but I remember him saying afterward that he had been helped out by a friend, gotten a loan to pull him through. It must have been for several thousand dollars. Larry told me the man’s name. I wouldn’t have thought anything about it, but Larry said something about the man being willing to help out people in trouble. I was young then, and I didn’t have any money either. So I made a note of the name and stuck it away in my files. It never occurred to me to look it up again until you asked me to start snooping. The name was Tino Russo.”

“Get to the point, Harry.”

“I am. Now jump to the present. A couple of months ago, before this shark thing ever began, a company was formed called Caskata Estates. It’s a holding company. At the beginning, it had no real assets. The first thing it bought was a big potato field just north of Scotch Road. When the summer didn’t shape up well, Caskata began to buy a few more properties. It was all perfectly legitimate. The company obviously has cash behind it—somewhere—and it was taking advantage of the down market to pick up properties at low prices. But then—as soon as the first newspaper reports about the shark thing came out—Caskata really started buying. The lower real estate prices fell, the more they bought. All very quietly. Prices are so low now that it’s almost like during the war, and Caskata’s still buying. Very little money down. All short-term promissory notes. Signed by Larry Vaughan, who is listed as the president of Caskata. The executive vice-president of Caskata Estates is Tino Russo, who the Times has been listing for years as a second-echelon crumb in one of the five Mafia families in New York.”

Brody whistled through his teeth. “And the sonofabitch has been moaning about how nobody’s been buying anything from him. I still don’t understand why he’s being pressured to open the beaches.”