“Hands up!” the man said, and then, louder, “Hands up!”
His voice registered. Until now, the customers in the dining room were unaware of what was happening near the front door. But the gunman’s voice cut through the steady hum of polite conversation, the click of silverware against plates, the tinkle of ice in cocktail glasses. Everything stopped. Even the mandolin stopped.
The first man moved toward the dining room, his gun extended.
“Everybody stay where you are,” he said. “No noise.”
The same peculiar accent again. Not Spanish, but something else, something Ralph still couldn’t identify. The second man turned from the bar, where Ralph’s son now stood with his hands over his head, backed up against the mirror and the whiskey bottles.
There was a moment of hesitation, of seeming uncertainty.
At the rear of the restaurant, the three men who sat at a corner table with their backs to the wall watched silently. One of the men reached into his jacket. The man sitting on his right gently placed his hand on his arm and shook his head almost imperceptibly.
In the small archway that led from the dining room to the front entry, one of the gunmen still stood with the pistol in his hand. The other gunman looked from Ralph to his son. “You,” he said. “Who are you? Your name?”
“Mark. Mark D’Annunzio.”
The man turned to where Ralph stood with his hands over his head.
“And you?” he said.
“Ralph D’Annunzio.”
“Go there,” he said, gesturing with the gun.
Ralph turned toward the bar.
The gunman standing in the arch turned at precisely the same moment.
Sadie winced when she heard the shots.
Four of them.
Four quick explosions shattering the brittle night.
She blinked and looked across the street at the restaurant.
The front door flew open, and the two men wearing the ski masks came running out onto the sidewalk and then across the street to where the Mercedes was parked, its engine idling. From inside the restaurant, Sadie heard someone scream. The car doors slammed. There were loud voices from inside the restaurant now. The Mercedes pulled away from the curb, tires squealing. People were running out of the restaurant now, shouting.
Sadie picked up both her shopping bags. She left her stacked newspapers, and her rags, and her corrugated cardboard bed where they were.
She did not even glance at the restaurant across the street as she moved swiftly out of her doorway.
The moment she turned the corner, she began running.
In Chinatown, not two blocks from the restaurant, Santa Claus was coming out of a souvenir shop on Mott Street. The front window of the shop displayed fans and sculpted figurines and little brass ornaments and beads and abacuses and a large poster of a Chinese girl standing beside a willow tree. Santa Claus’s sack was brimming. He carried the sack over his shoulder, and he carried a bell in his left hand, and the moment he came out of the shop, he began shaking the bell and singing. The street outside was ablaze with neon and thronged with tourists and shoppers on this Monday night, ten days before Christmas. Santa Claus was fat and jolly-looking, dressed in the traditional red suit and hat, the black belt and boots, the white mustache and beard. Santa Claus was singing merrily.
“Jingle bells,” he sang, “jingle bells, jingle all the way. Oh what fun it is to ride...”
“Hold it right there, Santa.”
The voice came from behind and slightly to the left of Santa. He turned at once to see a man holding a pistol in his right hand. The man was perhaps thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old, and he was wearing dark corduroy slacks and a black leather jacket and a seaman’s woolen watch cap. The man had red hair and blue eyes, and he was holding a police detective’s shield in his left hand. Santa turned to run, and came smack up against another man holding a gun.
“What’s your hurry, Santa?” the other man said.
He was maybe fifty years old, wearing blue jeans, a blue plaid mackinaw and a peaked baseball cap. His hair was gray, and his eyes were the darkest brown Santa had ever seen. Santa stood between the two men, wondering which of them would be more reasonable.
“Hey... uh... what is it?” he asked. “What’s the beef?”
“Your reindeer’s overparked,” the man with the gray hair said. “Let’s see what you got in the sack.”
“The sack?” Santa said, as if discovering it in his hand for the first time. He grinned a sickly grin. “What’s with you guys?” he said. “I’m with the Salvation Army.”
“Put the sack down, Santa,” the one with the red hair said.
Santa put the sack on the sidewalk.
“Now open it for us,” the redhead said pleasantly.
Santa opened the sack. The redhead holstered his gun, and put the leather fob containing his shield back into his pocket. He took his time doing this. The gray-haired one watched him as if this was something of enormous interest. Then the redheaded one reached into the sack. The first thing he pulled out of the sack was a radio.
“Well, hello,” he said.
Santa smiled.
The redhead reached into the sack again and pulled out a toaster.
“Nice,” the one with the gray hair said.
A crowd was gathering on the sidewalk.
The redhead reached into the sack again and pulled out a pair of Chinese fans, and a camera, and a woman’s sequined cocktail jacket, and a wristwatch, and a fountain pen, and a silver tray and a silver sugar bowl and a silver creamer.
“Little early to be flying over the rooftops, ain’t it, Santa?” the gray-haired one said. “This is still only the fifteenth.”
“Hey, come on,” Santa said, “what’s with you guys? I was doing my Christmas shopping.”
“You hear that, Bry?” the gray-haired one said. “He was doing his Christmas shopping.”
“I heard it, Chick,” the redhead said, and reached for the handcuffs at his bell. “Mister,” he said, “you were shopping for a Class-E felony.”
“They’re busting Santa Claus!” an eight-year-old kid said.
A radio voice said, “Five P.D., auto Four-Oh-Three,” and Santa turned to where an unmarked car was parked at the curb, the door open.
“Hands,” the redhead said, and Santa automatically put his hands behind his back.
“Five P.D., auto Four-Oh-Three,” the radio voice said again.
“I’ll get it,” the gray-haired one said, and walked toward the car.
“You guys are making a terrible mistake,” Santa said.
The redhead was already leading him toward the car. The gray-haired one was picking up the walkie-talkie on the front seat.
“Four-Oh-Three,” he said.
“Hoffman,” the radio voice said, “you’ve got a Ten-Twenty on Mulberry and Hester, the Luna Mare restaurant. Gunshot victim. D.O.A.”
“A terrible mistake,” Santa said again.
The auction at Sotheby’s on Seventy-second Street and York Avenue was scheduled to start at seven-fifteen P.M. The movable walls of the main salesroom on the second floor had been rolled back to accommodate what was expected to be a larger than usual crowd, but even so there were hundreds of people standing in what normally served as a sort of reception area. A television crew had finally set up its equipment at the top of the stairs leading from the main entrance below, and Julio Garcia — the station’s roving reporter — was waiting impatiently to do an interview with a man who, at the moment, was surrounded by newspaper reporters. Garcia thought of himself as an investigative journalist, and he was miffed first that he was covering an art auction, and second that the newspaper reporters had managed to collar Robert Sargent Kidd before he had. There wasn’t any pressing deadline or anything, that wasn’t the point, this wasn’t a hot newsbreak, and the interview would be taped. It was just that he considered television newsmen superior in every way to newspaper reporters, and it irked him that they were maybe getting stuff from Kidd that would later sound rehearsed instead of spontaneous and on-the-spot.