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that the agency had used at one time to finance its backdoor operations. Dante himself seemed clean now. Or clean enough. Anyway, Cicero had hired worse. Mancuso was a good investigator, and the Antonellis had requested him. Because Dante had been close to their daughter. Because their families had known one another and there’d been a romance of some sort back when Dante and Angie were kids.
    “How well did you know the girl anyway?”
    “Pretty well,” said Dante.
    Cicero waited for more but it didn’t come. Himself, he had seen the Antonelli girl, three, maybe four times, when her family still lived in The Beach. He had a memory of her—twelve years old, or thereabouts, on the cusp of bigger things, skinny legs and big brown eyes, restless in Washington Square with her mom and dad, but that could have been any mom and dad strolling with their just-blossoming kid in the park on a North Beach Sunday.
    “I’ll talk to the boyfriend this afternoon,” said Dante.
    “All right,” said Cicero. “Let me know how it goes.”
    Dante left, and Cicero put his feet back onto the desk. He closed his eyes. It was a morose business, his line of work. Maybe he should go on the cruise after all. It might be a pleasant thing. He could lean back in a deck chair with the sea breeze in his face. He could listen to the ocean, to the rattle of the ship and the clinking glassesat the bar, and not worry about conversations like the one he’d just had. Missing persons. Infidelities. Business deals gone rotten. Whatever it was people whispered about, he need not pay attention. He need not listen. It would all be someone else’s concern, details lost in the churning of the wake, in the cawing gulls, in the sound of the hot tub and the not-so-young honeymooners playing Ping-Pong on the deck. He could get some sleep. Even now, thinking about it, he began to nod off. He heard the foghorn out in the bay and smelled the sea air through the window. That was the thing about North Beach. It might not be a port town anymore, but the memory of what had once been mingled with the present. As he got older, this kind of thing seemed to happen more often. The brain got soft, and in his dreams the living mingled with the dead. People said this was a sign of deterioration, but maybe it was the opposite. Maybe he was moving toward something. Some reconciliation.
    He remembered a time some forty years ago, a Christmas Day in the little house down in San Bruno, his first wife and himself and his son around a brick fireplace, an image like something from a Polaroid, and all of the sudden now he gasped, like his father had, maybe—short of breath, a palpitation in his chest—a gasping set off, though he didn’t realize it at first, by the ringing of the phone.
    It was Nick Antonelli. Again.
    “I just talked to the police,” said Antonelli, and Cicero knew what was coming. He could hear it in the man’s voice. “My daughter …”
    “I know,” said Cicero. “I’m sorry.”
    “What do you mean, you know? What do you fucking know?”
    “What did the police say?”
    “If you knew, why didn’t you tell me? I am not paying you to learn things from the police.”
    “We had our fears… but the police, the final determination … We couldn’t say more until the identification was definitive.”
    “Yeah, well, fuck you.”
    Cicero let it pass. The man was in the throes of grief, and people said funny things. Except, in Cicero’s opinion, Antonelli had always been somewhat of an asshole.
    “They want me to take the body. This is the first thing the cops say, I have to make arrangements. But how can I do that? These bastard police—they’re not interested in what really happened.”
    “They wouldn’t release her if they hadn’t completed the lab analysis. If there’s some other tests you want to run, in case of a criminal trial—”
    “No one’s rushing me. I am not burying her until I goddamn know what happened.”
    Cicero knew better than