I said, “We won’t go to the police. We’ll go to Charlie. He isn’t just stealing money and hiding it from his father and the other capos in his own family, he’s stealing from another family in direct violation of a treaty that the DeLucas made with the other families.” I gave her what Rollie George had given me, how the families had divided up territory and crime, and how nobody much liked it but everybody had been living with it. “Until now.”

She nodded, seeing it as a banker would see it, IBM and Xerox negotiating a market arrangement. “All right. He’s violating a trade agreement.”

“Yeah. Only he’s got more to worry about than the Securities and Exchange Commission. If the Gambozas found out that Charlie DeLuca was stealing from them in collaboration with the Jamaicans, they’d kill him and they’d probably try to kill Sal, too.”

Karen blinked at Pike, then at me. “Does Sal know?”

“Probably not, but it doesn’t matter. If he doesn’t know, it makes things cleaner because we only have to deal with Charlie. If Sal’s in on it, then we have to deal with him, too. A little more complicated, but the outcome is the same.”

She wet her lips, getting anxious with it, thinking it through and seeing the potential, but unwilling to commit until all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed. She shook her head. “Even if he goes along, we’ll still know. Charlie’s going to think that. He’s going to think that the only way to keep himself safe is to kill us.”

I said, “He’ll think about it, but we’ll set things up so that he can’t. We’ll bring in Rollie George. We’ll make sure that other people know what we know, and we’ll prove it to Charlie so that he knows it, too. If he kills us, he gets screwed. Do you see?”

She wet her lips again and made a very small nod, still thinking it through. “We go to Charlie, we say that he has to let go of me or we tell the Gambozas.”

“Yes.”

“We tell him that people we trust know, too, so that if anything happens to us, the Gambozas will still be told.”

“Yes. If we die, he dies. We make this deal, it’s a deal we honor forever. We can’t change our minds. Do you see?”

She nodded again, stronger. “Of course. When are you going to do this?”

“I’ll call Rollie this evening and maybe drive down to the city to talk with him. He knows people in publishing and on the cops we can trust. We’ll have to get together with them and set up what we know and how to prove it to Charlie. It’ll take a couple of days.”

“And then we do it.”