'I couldn't drive your car to work,' he said.
'Why not?'
'Because it's yours.'
'Let me give it to you, then.'
'Martha, Goddammit, stop!'
'We've been over this before,' she said. 'It makes me happy to give you things.'
'It's not right,' he said.
'I love you and I can easily afford it, so what's wrong with it?'
'It's not right,' he repeated.
'Sorry,' Martha said.
'Honey, you always giving me things…'He searched for the words. 'It makes me feel less than a man.'
'That's absurd,' she said. 'Look at yourself! As young as you are, being a captain. Commanding Officer of Highway. You're worried about being a man?'
He didn't reply.
'And that's not the only manly thing you do very well,' Martha said. She leaned over and put her tongue in his ear and groped him.
'Jesus, honey!'
'You must be getting tired of me,' Martha teased. 'I remember when you used to like that.'
'I'm not tired of you, baby,' he said. 'I could never get tired of you.'
'So then let me give you the car.'
'Will you ever quit?'
'Probably not,' she said, and caught his hand and held it against her cheek. Then she asked, 'Where are we going? Not that it matters.'
'Ristorante Alfredo,' he said, trying to pronounce it in Italian.
'I hear that's very nice.'
'Peter Wohl says it is,' Pekach said. 'I asked him for a good place to go, and he said Ristorante Alfredo is very nice.'
'You like him, don't you?'
'He's a good boss. He doesn'tact much like a cop, but from his reputation and from what I've seen, he's a hell of a cop.'
What Peter Wohl had said specifically were that there were two nice things about Ristorante Alfredo. First, that the food and atmosphere were first-class; and second, that the management had the charming habit of picking up the tab.
'The Mob owns it, I guess you know,' Wohl had said. 'They get some sort of perverse pleasure out of buying captains and up their meals. You're a captain now, Dave. Enjoy. Rank hath its privileges. I try to make them happy at least once a month.'
Dave Pekach had made reservations for dinner at Ristorante Alfredo because of what Wohl had said about the food and atmosphere. He wasn't sure that Wohl wasn't pulling his leg about having the check grabbed. If that happened, fine, but he wasn't counting on it. He even sort of hoped they wouldn't. It was important somehow that he take Martha someplace that she would enjoy, preferably expensive.
There was a young Italian guy (areal Italian, to judge by the way he mangled the language) in a tuxedo behind a sort of stand-up desk in the lobby of Ristorante Alfredo. When Pekach said his name was Pekach and that he had made reservations, the guy almost pissed his pants unlatching a velvet rope and bowing them past it to a table in a far corner of the room.
Dave saw other diners in the elegantly furnished room looking at Martha in her black dress and pearls, and the way she walked, and he was proud of her.
The Italian guy in the tuxedo held Martha's chair for her and said he hoped the table was satisfactory, and then he snapped his fingers and two other guys appeared, a busboy and a guy in a short red jacket with what looked like a silver spoon on a gold chain around his neck. The busboy had a bottle wrapped in a towel in a silver bucket on legs.
The guy with the spoon around his neck unwrapped the towel so that Dave could see that what he had was a bottle of French champagne.
'Compliments of the house, Captain Pekach,' the Italian guy said. 'I hope is satisfactory.'
'Oh, Moet is always satisfactory,' Martha said, smiling.
'You permit?' the Italian guy said, and unwrapped the wire, popped the cork, and poured about a quarter of an inch in Pekach's glass.
I'm supposed to sip that, to make sure it's not sour or something, Dave remembered, and did so.
'Very nice,' he said.
'I am so happy,' the Italian guy said, and poured Martha and then Pekach each a glassful.
'I leave you to enjoy wine,' the Italian guy said. 'In time I will recommend.'
'To us,' Martha said, raising her glass.
'Yeah,' Dave Pekach said.
A waiter appeared a minute or so later and delivered menus.
And a minute or so after that the Italian guy came back.
'Captain Pekach, you will excuse. Mr. Baltazari would be so happy to have a minute of your time,' he said, and gestured across the room to the far corner where two men sat at a corner table. When they saw him looking, they both gave a little wave.
Dave Pekach decided the younger one, a swarthy-skinned man with hair elaborately combed forward to conceal male pattern baldness, must be Baltazari, whom he had never heard of. The other man, older, in a gray suit, he knew by sight. On a cork bulletin board in the Intelligence Division, his photograph was pinned to the top of the Organized Crime organizational chart. The PhiladelphiaDaily News ritually referred to him as 'Mob Boss Vincenzo Savarese.'
Jesus Christ, what's all this? What's he want to do, say hello?
The Italian guy was already tugging at Dave Pekach's chair.
'Excuse me, honey?'
'Of course,' Martha said.
Dave walked across the room.
'Good evening, Captain Pekach,' Baltazari said. 'Welcome to Ristorante Alfredo. Please sit down.'
He waved his hand and a waiter appeared. He turned over a champagne glass and poured and then disappeared. Then Baltazari got up and disappeared.
'I won't take you long from the company of that charming lady,' Vincenzo Savarese said. 'But when I heard you were in the restaurant, I didn't want to miss the opportunity to thank you.'
'Excuse me?'
'You were exceedingly understanding and gracious to my granddaughter, Captain, and I wanted you to know how grateful I am.'
'I don't know what you're talking about,' Dave Pekach said honestly.
'Last June-defying, I have to say, the orders of her parents-my granddaughter went out with a very foolish young man and found herself in the hands of the police.'
Pekach shook his head, signifying that he was still in the dark as he searched his memory.
'It was very late at night in North Philadelphia, where Old York Road cuts into North Broad?' Pekach continued to shake his head no. ' There was a chase by the police. The boy wrecked the car?' Savarese continued.
Dave suddenly remembered. He had been on the way home from his Cousin Stanley's wedding in Bethlehem. He had passed the scene of a wreck and had seen a Narcotics team and their car and, curious, stopped. What it was, was a minor incident, a carful of kids who had bought some marijuana, been caught at it, and had run.
There had been four kids, the driver and another boy, and two girls, both of them clean-cut, nice-looking, both scared out of their minds, in the back of a district RPC, which was about to transport them to Central Lockup. He had felt sorry for the girls and didn't want to subject them to the horrors of going through Central Lockup. So, after making sure the district cops had their names, he had turned them loose, sending them home in a cab. 'I
