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  Gray saw a bank of microphones set up near the sidewalk. The reporters had known they would get an interview irrespective of the verdict, because had the jury convicted De Sallo, bail pending appeal would have been immediately posted.

  Anna shaded her eyes against the glaucous midday light. "A world record, I swear. Must be forty mikes."

  A mob of reporters was gathered around the microphones. A dozen videotape cameras on tripods surrounded the mikes. Furiously working their cameras, photographers flanked De Sallo as he descended the steps.

  "This way, Chinaman," some shouted. "Just a few more."

  "He's usually camera shy," Anna said, descending the stairs next to Gray. She carried her briefcase in one hand and three volumes of the US Code under her other arm.

  Gray replied, "This is his chance to make you and me and especially Frank look like dunces. He won't pass it up."

  Behind them, the thirty-two stories of the United States Court House rose to the gold-leafed pyramid roof. The building had been designed to blend with the neoclassic structures on both sides. Foley Square was a collection of traffic islands, each with ragged hedges and a few uneven trees. Across the square was the United States Court for International Trade. The cabbies had stopped their vehicles to gawk at the commotion.

  De Sallo stepped down to the microphones. Many reporters pushed their hand-held recorders toward him. Questions were shouted until he held up both hands.

  "I just got a couple of things to let you guys in on," he said in his street accent.

  When Gray and Anna started away, a reporter from the swarm yelled, "You're next, Owen. Stick around, will you?"

  Gray knew better than to duck the press. Part of his job at times like this was damage control. He gripped his briefcase handle with both hands and waited his turn.

  The Chinaman's soldiers gathered around their boss. A short distance from the microphones Pete Coates also waited. He would give the NYPD's version of the verdict.

  Wind tugged at strands of De Sallo's wig. He patted them down with a hand. He began, "Let me first say that America is a great country."

  A flock of pigeons lifted from Foley Square, passing over the Chambers Street subway station, then toward Federal Plaza. To the south was the Municipal Building.

  De Sallo held forth magnificently, "I would like to thank my beloved father, whose memory I carry with me like a wallet. And my mother, still alive but on the brink, who gave me the courage to be—"

  At that instant the Chinaman's head ruptured. Brains and bone blew out the back of his head in a spray of crimson and gray gore. Slivers of De Sallo's skull and brain and shreds of his toupee rained on his soldiers.

  The body, its face now a mask with nothing behind it, fell heavily to the steps. It rolled against the microphone stand, the flap of face dragging after it, streaking the steps in red.

  Screams and oaths filled the square. A dozen handguns and one Uzi abruptly appeared in the hands of the agents and detectives. Pots Asperanti pulled out a .38 snubnose, having somehow snuck it in and out of the courthouse. Pots waved his pistol at imaginary targets, then quickly slid it back into his coat, nervously scanning the FBI agents.

  Spectators ran for cover, some up the steps into the courthouse, others toward the subway station. Several taxis drove onto the sidewalk trying to flee the scene. One yellow bounced into a USA Today dispenser, crumpling the box.

  The agents scanned the crowd, then the rooftops and windows, looking for the killer. They had heard nothing, no shot. And now they saw nothing.

  Asperanti rolled De Sallo's body over. A hole the size of a dime had been punched between his eyes. Detritus from De Sallo's head oozed down the steps.

  Asperanti said softly, "Son of bitch, Boatman, we better—" He turned to find Garbanto.

  Garbanto had also collapsed to the steps, where he sat with his hand over his suit's wide lapel. Blood oozed between his fingers. The bullet that had ended De Sallo's life had also clipped Garbanto's shoulder. He blinked rapidly but made no sound. He was splattered with his boss's blood and brains.

  "Goddamn, Boatman, I've seen you look better." Asperanti tried to lift Garbanto to his feet, but the wounded man swayed, then sank back to the steps. Asperanti sat next to him to wait for help.

  Anna Renthal dropped to the steps, books falling from her arm. Her mouth fished open. Her breath whistled. "This time I mean it. I'm going to be sick."

  Holding his revolver near his ear, Pete Coates said with ill-disguised glee, "I'll take that over a guilty verdict any day."

  Owen Gray bent to help Anna, but his gaze remained on the growing congregation around the body. He said quietly, "I'm going to bring up Pots on a weapons charge. He's got no license for that pistol."

  Her eyes wide, Anna looked up at him. "Owen, a man just died. Murdered. And you're worried about a weapons charge on a two-bit hood?"

  Gray's face was as cold as a carving. His eyes were shadowed and remote. His impassiveness, his refusal to register the slightest emotion, had abruptly given Gray an aura of uncontrolled violence.

  He said, "Pots blew me a kiss once too often."

  She touched his sleeve. "Owen, goddamnit. We've just witnessed a killing."

  She yanked her hand back from a particle of De Sallo's head that had landed on Gray's jacket.

  Anna swallowed repeatedly, fighting sickness. Then her voice rose. "I'm shaking from head to toe. Doesn't this get to you?"

  Gray looked down at his sleeve, then casually brushed the scrap away. "Pots has a sheet, so he's looking at two years."

  "Owen, listen to me," she cried out. "You . . . you're frightening me."

  "Anna, I'm not going to get misty-eyed over some mafioso getting shot, probably by some other hoodlum." He gathered her books and helped her to her feet. "Come on. We deserve a couple of beers."

  The wail of bubbletops and an ambulance trying to enter Foley Square resonated between the buildings. Down the block cabdrivers honked angrily at the delay.

  "Owen. . ."

  Gray moved down the steps toward Pearl Street, leaving the baffled assembly behind. Anna unsteadily hurried after him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The hand-printed sign on Owen Gray's apartment door read "U.N. Security Council" and was stuck there by two Sesame Street Band-Aids, one of Big Bird and the other of the Count. Gray could hear the sparkling notes of a piano through the door.

  He had spent that entire day at his desk replaying the Chinaman's trial in his mind, re-introducing the evidence and re-questioning the witnesses, trying to alter yesterday's acquittal. He had been unable to leave his frustration at the office and had worn it home on the subway like a yoke, but at the piano's bright sounds it suddenly lifted.

  He twisted a key in the dead bolt. Pushing open the door, he called out, "I'm home and, no, we aren't having a Security Council meeting."

  The twins slid off the piano bench and rushed to greet him. Gray dropped his briefcase and hugged one in each arm.

  Carolyn giggled. "We already had a vote."

  Julie added, "And you lost three to one."

  They kissed him, Julie always on the right cheek, Carolyn always on the left.

  "I want a recount," he said. "I'll bet I can change the tally."

  "You lost fair and square," Carolyn countered. "We get the new piano."

  This lobbying had been going on a month. One piano apparently was not enough for four hands. The twins, twelve years old, practiced with adult stamina on the old Clarendon upright, encouraging and competing with each other. Gray was tone deaf, but even he could hear they were talented.

  The twins were Korean, adopted by Gray eight years ago. They had lately begun to revel in their heritage, frequently pointing out to Gray the advantages of Asian ancestry ("We're better looking and there's more of us"), and naming the doorway to their bedroom the DMZ.

  When Gray had challenged Julie and Carolyn to find a place in the apartment where another piano would fit, they proposed putting one on rollers a
cross the doorway to the bathroom and moving it aside whenever anyone needed to pee. Occasionally during this campaign they would taunt him by switching to Korean and wagging their fingers. He suspected they didn't remember a word of Korean and were inventing it on the spot, but he couldn't prove otherwise.

  The twins were identical and blossoming. Gray knew that in a few years he would be sweeping neighborhood boys out of the apartment with a broom. The girls had wide cheekbones, teardrop eyes, and sculpted lips. Their teeth were as white and even as the keys on their piano, and their smiles were glorious.

  His son John always got the third hug. The boy never charged his father, always waiting until the girls were done. John smiled shyly from the kitchen doorway, half an Oreo in his good hand.

  Gray crossed the small room to him. He lifted the boy so their noses touched and accused, "Did your sisters buy your Security Council vote with that cookie?"

  John laughed wildly and held the Oreo away from his father. "Three cookies," he crowed. "I already ate two."

  "Does Mrs. Orlando know you've been pigging out on Oreos?"

  The boy looked with transparent guilt toward the kitchen, then crammed the cookie into his mouth. He shook his head and laughed again, showing a mouth full of mashed cookie.

  John was nine years old and of Vietnamese ancestry. Like his sisters he had been an orphan. When he was three he had found a shell in a pasture near the foundling home in the Dong Nai province and had hammered it with a stone. The explosion had ripped his hand from his arm. He had been brought to the United States by a Greenwich Village couple who somehow had not known that John's arm ended three inches below his elbow and who had changed their minds once they saw him.

  Gray had been successful adopting John when he persuaded his landlord to temporarily switch apartments for the adoption-agency interview. The landlord's place had three bedrooms. Gray's had only two. The ruse worked. Now the girls occupied one bedroom, John the other, and Gray used a hide-a-bed in the living room. Unfolding the bed every evening had proven too much trouble, so he slept on it as a couch. His back ached every morning.

  One day half a year ago John came home from school inconsolably bawling. Playmates had made fun of his arm, with its clamp prosthesis where a hand should have been. Gray had visited a friend, a sergeant who was an armorer at the 42nd Infantry Division at its armory on West Fourteenth Street. The sergeant had rigged a new prosthesis, a one-pound ball bearing on a short iron shaft. Next day when the teasing began again at school, John smashed the steel ball into his desktop, splintering the wood. The harassing stopped instantly. John wore the daunting battering ram only once a month now as a reminder.

  Gray kissed the boy's forehead. John had ebony hair. Gray had given him haircuts in the kitchen until the twins said John was looking like Moe Howard of the Three Stooges. Now John went to the same barber Gray did. His son had gaps between his front teeth, so Gray had just started writing checks in startling amounts to an orthodontist. With John's braces and prosthesis, the twins called him their Man of Steel. He loved it.

  Julie began again: "John's vote counts. Three to one."

  "This family is a monarchy." Gray lowered the boy and removed his jacket. "I'm the cruel king. You three are serfs. The king scoffs at voting."

  "Aw, Dad," Carolyn said.

  John lifted the briefcase with his hook. He showed his braces in a smile and swung the case back and forth like a pendulum.

  "Do you not hear the king scoffing at you serfs' impertinence?" Gray snorted, "Scoff, scoff, scoff."

  Mrs. Orlando emerged from the kitchen and handed him a glass of iced tea. "You must choose, Mr. Gray. Me or the kimchi. Make your choice."

  "Three more days, Mrs. Orlando," Gray said. "If I can stand it, so can you."

  "The smell." She waved her hand in front of her face. "It is killing me."

  For most of a week the apartment has smelled of kimchi. The twins had coaxed Mrs. Orlando into buying a jar of it. They both gagged at their first taste of the fermented fish, cabbage, onions, garlic, and horseradish; but in an attempt to savor Korean culture, the girls were determined to last a week of kimchi breakfasts. Julie and Carolyn had been singularly unsuccessful in getting their father to taste the dish. John had also refused to try kimchi, saying it would give him a case of the zacklies. When his father had blithely asked what the zacklies were, John had hooted, "It's when your mouth smells zackly like your butt." He had been sentenced to a night without the Nickelodeon channel.

  The apartment was normally redolent of Mrs. Orlando's Caribbean cooking. She was from Haiti. When Gray interviewed her for the job, he had asked to see her green card so he could fill out the 1-9 form. She had produced a photograph of her neighborhood in Cap Haitien on Haiti's north shore showing a row of destitute tar-paper shacks on a dusty road, an abandoned wringer clothes washer on its side near a mound of rubbish, and two ragged chickens. She had said in her melodic accent, "That's all the paper I've got." It was enough for Gray.

  Mrs. Orlando was wearing her usual riotous colors. For Christmas, Gray had given her an ornate silver necklace with a dozen tiny bells hung among stylized fish and shells, and she had not taken it off since. The necklace made her jangle like a belled cat when she walked. Her skin was bronze and her eyes were set at a laughing cant. The children adored her but were wary of the voodoo curses she threatened them with when they watched too much television. She was generous with her singing talent, and Gray credited her with instilling musical ability in the twins. She was patient and loving with John when the boy cried out against his missing hand. If she had a fault it was that she would occasionally miss an afternoon of work, always because she had met a new boyfriend, and would later claim with heavy invention that she had come down with Haitian pox, a little-known disease whose most distressing symptoms were an inability to work and a fuzziness of mind that precluded calling in sick. Gray suspected she devoured and tossed aside these boyfriends, leaving them nothing but husks.

  "Are you feeling better, Dad?" Carolyn asked.

  Gray removed Julie's Discman from an overstuffed chair next to the piano, then sank into the chair. He had been unable to hide from them his bitter disappointment over the De Sallo verdict. He balanced his glass of tea on the torn armrest.

  "I feel great," he said, more a sigh. He yanked on his tie, loosening it, revealing an unnatural ridge of purple skin on his neck. He leaned to the floor to pick up a schoolbook about the solar system. He laid it on the stand at the end of the couch. "Pete Coates, the lead NYPD detective on the case, is coming over in a few minutes. Will you kids pick up this place?"

  "Are you going to talk about how you blew the case?" Julie asked.

  "You are too kind." Gray sipped the tea. "We didn't exactly blow it."

  "The New York Times said you did," Carolyn teased. "You and your boss blew it, the editorial said."

  "John, stop swinging your father's briefcase," Mrs. Orlando ordered as she returned to the kitchen. "You'll break something."

  The apartment was in Bay Ridge, a Brooklyn neighborhood of Italians and Greeks, pizza joints and Optimos, fifty minutes by subway from Gray's office in lower Manhattan. The living room was about the width of John's swing. The television, a twenty-five-inch monster purchased as the result of an earlier lobbying effort by the twins, was the only item in the living room not careworn, dented, or frayed with age. The couch was sprung. The coffee table wore the marks of John's experiments with a hammer several years ago. The living-room rug was an old and fine Sarouk that belonged to Gray's ex-wife Cathryn. In a puerile fit, he had changed the lock before she remembered she had left the rug behind. She had also forgotten their framed wedding photo, and it remained on the end table. His family had never met Cathryn.

  He said, "John, the briefcase goes—"

  The door buzzer interrupted him. Gray rose from the chair and crossed to the intercom. When Pete Coates identified himself, Gray pressed the lobby door button.

  Gray had no idea why Coates wou
ld visit his apartment, unprecedented in all the years of preparation and trial in the De Sallo case.

  "Better warn Mrs. Orlando," Carolyn exclaimed, glancing into the kitchen. "It's a cop."

  Julie laughed. "Maybe she can make it down the fire escape."

  Gray waved them to silence. He tightened his tie and opened the door. Pete Coates climbed the last few stairs to the third floor. He was a large man, but his bulk was in his chest, not his belly. He moved with a lively gait despite years on the beat before earning his gold badge. He was breathing easily, a man in shape.

  Coates said, "I'd have been here earlier, but I stopped at Junior's for a couple slices of cheesecake. Too bad you weren't along to pick up the tab."

  Gray laughed as Coates entered the room. The detective had not once paid a check in the years he and Gray had worked on the De Sallo investigation. It seemed a point of honor with him. He had once told Gray, "I've never taken a nickel under the table on this job, so I've got to make up for it by stiffing people for food."

  The twins were wide-eyed. A real police detective in their apartment. John stepped quickly to his special corner beside Gray's chair.

  "Nice-looking bunch of kids," Coates said as he helped himself to the couch. A fleck of cheesecake clung to the corner of his mouth. "Looks like you got your own Third World country here."

  Early in the De Sallo probe, Gray had learned that the trade-off for Coates's legendary tenacity was his relentless unrefinement. At first Gray thought the crassness was an act, part of the detective's tough-cop routine. But Coates was so persistent in his boorishness that Gray concluded he had brought it into the world with him like a birthmark.

  Coates had proved himself again and again on the De Sallo investigation. The detective had once dug in a Staten Island garbage landfill searching for Pots Asperanti's numbers receipts for forty-eight hours without stopping, bringing in klieg lights so he could work at night. On another occasion, when his car stalled, Coates commandeered a Number 16 bus on Second Avenue and ordered it to follow De Sallo's Cadillac across the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, the passengers on the verge of a riot. On one January night Coates had posted himself down the block from De Sallo's Jamaica Bay Club while the thermometer dipped below five degrees and stayed there for the entire ten hours Coates was on duty. The next day a surgeon removed the tip of Coates's frostbitten small toe.