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“Around three okay with you?”
    â€œYeah.”
    Tannenbaum touched his finger to his hat, then turned to walk away.
    â€œMiss Covallo,” Frank said quickly. “She says you don’t like her much.”
    Tannenbaum turned toward him instantly, his eyes slowly darkening. “Is that right?”
    â€œThat’s what she said.”
    â€œI don’t know a thing about Covallo, Frank,” Tannenbaum said. “But I know about the rag trade. I know plenty about that.” His face suddenly took on a slowly boiling resentment. “My mother worked her fucking heart out in one of those goddamn sweatshops they used to have down on the Lower East Side. You know what she got out of it? Nothing. They used her for a while, then they flushed her down the toilet.” He shook his head. “Sometimes, between you and me, I hope there is a God. A real God, mad as hell. You know why? So you can say to a guy, ‘Don’t do this. Don’t do this, you fuck. Because if you do, you’ll rot in hell.’”
    He turned quickly, as if to hide his face, and as he walked away, his long black overcoat flapped wildly in the cold, hissing wind.

5
    It was only a few blocks back to the office on 49th Street, but Frank walked it slowly, taking his time. The cold winter air was refreshing, and it reminded him of his first weeks in the city. It had been a happy time, those first days when he’d spent his time discovering New York with Karen as his guide. He could recall long, lingering afternoons in the park or strolling through the galleries on Madison Avenue or down in Soho. Karen had never seemed closer to him, and this closeness had appeared to lend both their lives a strange, somber happiness.
    But although, as the days passed, the dark memory of her sister’s murder had slowly disappeared from Karen’s mind, it had clung tenaciously to Frank’s, and there were nights when it all came back to him with a sudden, irreducible fury, and he saw Angelica’s body sprawled across the weedy lot, her hair spread out around her head, a clump of dirt lodged beneath her tongue. Then, in an instant, Caleb was dying in his arms, and an instant later Toffler was beneath him and he was plunging his fists downward again and again until Toffler’s cold blue eyes had been transformed into small bloody pools. He had felt a terrible joy at that moment, and the memory of it disturbed him now as much as it had in the days following Toffler’s arrest. To escape it, he let his eyes drift up toward the towering buildings and the vast, unpopulated blue which hung above them. Slowly, as he walked southward down Ninth Avenue, the immense brick high-rises gave way to the ancient tenements of Hell’s Kitchen until, at 50th Street, an entire city block had been torn down, and looking across the shaved ground of the construction site, Frank could see the little iron gate that led down to his office.
    Two young men in denim jackets were leaning next to it, their short-cropped blond hair all but gleaming in the light. They eyed Frank suspiciously as he moved toward them from the corner of 49th Street. One of them tucked his hand beneath his jacket, and in his mind Frank could see its stubby, pale fingers wrapped around the grip of a .38. They could be anything, and as he continued to walk toward them, he tried to find some small detail that would clear things up. In the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, they could be a couple of undercover cops working out of Midtown North, or they could be two mean-tempered Westies, members of a local gang of mostly Irish thugs. Frank hoped they were cops, but as he came steadily nearer and stared into their eyes, he thought Westies a better guess. They had the look of men who would, according to the word on the street, smoke absolutely anybody for two thousand a pop, and as he came up to the iron gate, he felt his own hand tense suddenly and crawl upward toward the .45