listening to the route, hearing his guys tell him the details, and had even examined some of the equipment. The presentation had been impressive. They had shown him how the stop-stick worked. He could easily accept the idea that the device probably didn’t look like anything when headlights shone on it at sixty miles an hour. When the guys waiting out of sight beyond the reach of the headlights pressed a button, a row of spikes popped up from the flat base and punctured all the tires. Then a picked team of men would swarm over the bus like ants on a dead carcass, blow the doors at both ends with explosives, toss in a couple of grenades, and spray the interior with MAC-10s until the blood in the aisles was up to their ankles.
He had listened politely and thoughtfully. It was probably the only time in a generation when that many heads of families had been in one small, enclosed space all at once. But something in the back of his mind had remained hungry and unsatisfied. The men in front of him were credible. He knew they were not likely to be hesitant in the execution, or likely to panic afterward and fail to slip back into the darkness and escape. All of them had dropped the hammer on people before. They exuded fitness and strength and competence. He just didn’t trust military-style operations that required perfect timing and mechanical efficiency. Once in a while they worked for armies, but not always. If any detail of the plan went wrong, Delfina was dead. And creating devastation around him was not even what he wanted.
“No, I don’t think so,” he had said. “It’s not for me.”
They had all looked at him like dogs that had smelled rabbit and then heard the click of the clasp as the chain was snapped onto their collars.
It had reminded him that he was alone. He could get people like this to take risks for him, but he couldn’t get them to grapple with the complexity, the subtlety of events. Each act set off a series of reactions, and each of the reactions caused some divergence in other sequences of events. Yes, he wanted to get his hands on the money Bernie the Elephant had hidden. Yes, if most of the other people who had a realistic chance of getting to it were dead, it would increase his chances. But no, he didn’t want to do it.
A massacre would have brought on a period of anarchy across the whole country, and that was not good for anyone. A few thousand soldiers in a dozen cities would suddenly be cut adrift without leaders. Undoubtedly they would regroup and reconfigure, but not instantly, and not in predictable ways. Everywhere there would be internal fighting to determine who would take the places of the dead men, and Delfina could not exert influence to determine the winners. When the struggle was over, there would be a dozen new faces, or even three dozen—who could say that the big families wouldn’t split?—for Delfina to try to deal with.
While the fighting was going on, the rivals who were always waiting on the fringe for the Mafia to weaken would be eagerly streaming into pieces of territory, making inroads into businesses everywhere. The value and security of the mob’s holdings would be drastically eroded.
Delfina’s family would be more vulnerable than anyone’s. The others had fixed, solid ground that they could defend. His empire was a network of filaments extending vast distances, like a spider web. He didn’t have collectors and bagmen, he moved money on the Internet. He depended on the slow, lumbering dinosaurs to keep his enterprises safe. When he sent five of his people to visit a business competitor in Cleveland, what he was doing was invoking in the competitor’s imagination the hundred soldiers that Al Castananza had within a mile of that office, and who would never go away. The fact that Castananza had no knowledge of what Delfina was doing or interest in it was not something the competitor could know.
Delfina had held his hand. But now he squinted under the glare of the New Orleans sun and wondered. He drove along Iberville Street looking for the corner, then realized that he must have missed it at least a block back. He spotted a big old Buick pulling out of a parking space and decided to take it. He eased his rental car into the space, then sat still for a moment in the air-conditioned atmosphere while he checked his street map. Yes, it had to be about a block behind him. He glanced in the rearview mirror, and he could see the four-story building just as he remembered it. He had come from his hotel south of here this time. Last time he had approached it from the north, so he had been looking on the wrong side of the street.
He folded the map, turned off the engine, and got out of the car. The weight of the hot, humid air came down on him as he glanced at his watch and began to walk. He still had fifteen minutes, and that was good. Being late would have negated the effect he had constructed in coming alone and driving himself.
He walked into the yellowed marble lobby of the building and looked around for the elevator. There was only one, and it fit with the ornate, old-fashioned decoration of the place. There was a pair of shiny gold doors with a folding gate behind them and an elderly operator sitting on a high stool who pushed a lever to get you to the right, unmarked floor. The building had been a bank when Chi-chi Tasso was a child, and it still had that substantial, heavy look. Tasso had told him that he had owned it for a year before he noticed that the designs on the pillars and pressed into the plaster along the edge of the ceiling were copied from the filigrees and swirls on a one-dollar bill.
Delfina stepped into the elevator, and the white-haired operator said, “Top floor, sir?”
He nodded, and the man cranked his lever all the way down and jolted him upward. He could see the floors moving from floor to ceiling, first old brick and then a horizontal stripe of concrete and gold doors, then brick. The elevator came to a quick stop below the floor, and the man nudged it upward in little jerks until the concrete stripe was roughly the same level as the floor of the elevator, then pulled back the iron fence as the gold doors parted.
Delfina stepped out and walked along the shiny floor of the empty hallway. The door at the end swung open and a man in his thirties studied him with an expressionless face. “Hello, Mr. Delfina. Would you mind if I … ?”
Delfina held his arms up and let the man pat his shoulders, ribs, legs, then run his hands along his belt and the small of his back.
“Thank you, sir.” He stepped aside and let Delfina walk into the next room. It was a reception area that had probably once contained a desk for a secretary, but now it was furnished with only a set of long couches along the walls, where six men sat smoking cigarettes and talking. They did not stir while Delfina walked to the open door, but when he had entered, one of them stood and closed the door behind him.
Tasso was sitting behind a big desk, his head wreathed in smoke from his cigarette, the sunlight that shot through the blinds illuminating some layers of it and leaving the others invisible. He half-stood to shake hands. “Frank,” he said. “It’s really nice of you to come all the way down here to see me. I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you someplace, but it’s hard as hell for me to travel now.”
“It’s okay, Chi-chi,” said Delfina. “It’s like a little vacation. My business never takes me down here, so —”
“It better not,” said Tasso. His wide grin showed the way his teeth had come in at odd angles.
Delfina smiled. “I’ll bet sometime you and I could do something together,” he said. “It wouldn’t have to be anything based in New Orleans.”
Tasso nodded politely. “I’ve given it some thought,” he said. “I always had you picked out as the smartest one of the guys coming up, but it’s probably too late. I’m old, and the time when I could have done much for you is about over. You’re established, and you probably know everything I know and a few things besides.”
Delfina kept his smile unreadable and waited.
Tasso’s wide, jowled face assumed a worried look. “The reason I wanted to talk to you is that I think I caught sight of a little problem the other night.”
“Problem?” Delfina feigned a low-level alarm. “Another one. First it’s Bernie Lupus, and now what?”
“Actually, we’re still not past the Bernie Lupus problem. This is part of it. The other night, a bunch of us had a sit-down.”
Delfina’s low-level alarm appeared to intensify. “You did? You mean the Commission?”
“No,” said Tasso, looking up at the ceiling. “Just the heads of families that had money that Bernie Lupus was holding for us.” His eyes suddenly settled on Delfina. “I was kind of wondering why you weren’t there.”
Delfina said, “I wasn’t invited. Nobody said anything to me.”
Tasso muttered, “Well, that takes care of that question. But it does raise another issue, doesn’t it? You had money with Bernie, didn’t you?”
Delfina nodded solemnly. “Sure.”
“Why?”
Suddenly the sharp little eyes were on him, but to Delfina it felt as though the big, thick fingers were poking his chest. “Why?” Delfina repeated.
“Yeah. By the time you had any, he was already getting old. The guys of his generation, like me, he bought us
