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looked as hard as rock barricaded each side of the downtown street. Wade saw the long dark car that Scandura had driven up in. He saw two men sitting in the front.
    “You can scare the old guy, but you don’t lay a finger on him. Understood?”
    Scandura said, “You have my word.”
    • • •
    Victor Scandura, who would not go into any house with dogs in it, stayed in the car. The two men in front got out and trudged through the cold to the front door. They looked like bill collectors, the sort a finance company might send out. One was Ralph Roselli, whose large, baggy face reddened in the wind. His eyebrows were bushy, and his eyes seemed deceptively unalert. He was in his forties and burly. The other man was Sammy Ferlito’s young nephew, Augie, who was doing his first piece of work for Anthony Gardella, which made him a little nervous. He was angular and furtive and had little eyes and no chin. They rapped on the door, and when no one answered, Ralph Roselli put his shoulder to it.
    Victor Scandura hunched his shoulders as the wind gusted against the car and tried to get in. He hated winter. Thirty years ago in Korea he had nearly lost his feet to frostbite, and twenty years ago during the Boston gang wars his older brother had been garroted and the body dumped in the path of a snowplow, which had buried it. Narrowing his eyes, he peered out at boundless snowscape and naked trees, and then he consulted his watch. He had given them ten minutes, which he considered only slightly unreasonable.
    Inside the house Ralph Roselli wrenched the old rifle out of Silas Rogers’s hand and, looking at it bemusedly, asked, “What the hell were you going to do with this?” The dogs began to yap. “Shut ’em up,” he said, and Silas Rogers did. Roselli’s approach was oddly phlegmatic. After searching the depths of his coat, one inner pocket and then another, he produced a nickel-plated .32-caliber revolver and pushed the tip of the barrel against Silas Rogers’s forehead. Then abruptly he wrinkled his nose. “He’s unloading.”
    Augie nodded. “I’m used to it. We get bodies do it all the time.”
    Lowering the revolver, Ralph Roselli grimaced with disgust and purposely hooded his eyes as if the old man were no longer worth looking at. “I’m going to ask you some questions. I don’t get the right answers, I’ll shoot a dog. That doesn’t work, I’ll shoot you.”
    The questions were asked.
    Silas Rogers spoke with his whole face, everything moving, lines jiggling, cracks deepening, watery eyes rolling over the dry and frantic pull of his mouth. He answered everything.
    Outside, Victor Scandura sounded the horn. The ten minutes were up.

4
    M OTHER AND DAUGHTER returned from the Caribbean, and Anthony Gardella met them at the door. The mother, Mrs. Denig, said with an edge, “I’d have brought her back right away if you’d gotten in touch,” and the daughter, his wife, said beseechingly, “Why
didn’t
you, Tony?” He could have given several answers, but he let one suffice.
    “I wanted to spare you.”
    “Spare her? She’s your wife.”
    He tolerated the mother because he adored the daughter, whose eyes reached out to him. She stepped toward him on long, lively legs. Jane Denig Gardella, a conspicuous beauty from the day she was born, was tall and fair, long-necked and tight-waisted, with sea-blue eyes that focused wistfully on her husband. She was half his age. “Didn’t you need me?” she whispered.
    “Yes,” he said, and she clung to him.
    “It’s so horrible.”
    “Yes.”
    Mrs. Denig said, “We should’ve at least been here for the funeral.”
    “I wasn’t thinking,” he said with perfect control and watched his mother-in-law rearrange the collar of her coat. She wore expensive clothes, confined her brindled hair in combs, and bore vestiges of a beauty that age and certain disappointments had coarsened and roughened. A deep disappointment was her daughter’s marriage to a man who was