“Don’t do it before the meeting, though. We can’t afford a new team if anything big’s going down.”
“Not before the meeting,” Michael said, and looked at his watch, and immediately picked up the receiver and dialed his home number. The phone rang once, twice...
“Hello?”
“Sarah, it’s me. I know we’re meeting the Learys for dinner, but is it up there or down here?”
“It’s at Rinaldi’s.”
“Okay, I’ll come home, then.”
“It’s for seven o’clock, Michael.”
“Then I’d better get out of here.”
“Don’t be late, honey, you know them.”
“I’ll be home by six.”
“No later. Please.”
“I promise,” he said.
Sarah put the receiver back on the cradle and wondered if she should try reaching Andrew again. Mollie was down the hall, watching something very noisy on television. If she used the phone in the bedroom, she felt certain she would not be overheard.
She considered it for another moment and then decided against it.
Richard Leary was an attorney who wrote amusing little articles about lawyers and the law for any magazine that would publish them. Michael suspected he had a closet desire to be another Turow or Grisham. Richard told them now that he was working on a piece about criminal conversation.
“What’s that?” Sarah asked. “Talk among crooks?”
“Nope, it’s a tort,” Richard said.
“What’s a tort?” his wife asked. “Some kind of Danish pastry?”
Rosie knew damn well what a tort was; she’d been married to a lawyer for twenty years.
“A tort is, quote, any wrongful act, damage, or injury done willfully, negligently, or in circumstances involving strict liability, for which a civil suit can be brought, unquote.”
“Except breach of promise,” Michael said.
“As in a contract,” Richard said, and nodded.
“I hate lawyer talk,” Rosie said.
“Be that as it may,” Richard said, “criminal conversation is defined as defilement of the marriage bed...”
“Please,” Rosie said, “not while I’m eating.”
“... or sexual intercourse,” Richard went on, undaunted, “or a breaking down of the covenant of fidelity.”
“He means fucking with a stranger,” Rosie said, and then immediately covered her mouth in feigned shock.
“I mean adultery,” Richard said, “considered in its aspect of a civil injury to the husband, entitling him to damages.”
“How about the wife?” Rosie said. “If the husband’s playing around?”
“The tort applied only to debauching or seducing a wife.”
“So what else is new?” Rosie said, and shrugged.
“That’s exactly the point of my article,” Richard said. “I think the issue still has relevance to the women’s movement, even though the tort was abolished in 1935.”
“You mean until then...?”
“Until then, a husband could bring action against a man for criminal conversation, yes. For committing adultery with a man’s wife.”
“Funny name for fucking around,” Rosie said. “Criminal conversation.”
Sarah thought it was an entirely appropriate name.
Looking down at her plate, hearing Richard go on about the popularity of such suits in seventeenth-century England, where the tort was familiarly called “crim con,” and where damages from £10,000 to £20,000 were not uncommon, staring at the food on her plate, not daring to look up at Michael across the table, she thought Yes, criminal conversation is what I share in that bedroom with Andrew. We’re a pair of thieves plundering a marriage, and the damage is far more severe than any court in the world can ever remedy.
“But criminal conversation?” Rosie asked, and turned to Sarah for support.
Yes, Sarah thought, criminal conversation.
Aloud she said, “It does sound odd.”
The meeting took place on Tuesday morning, the twenty-third of March. Monitoring it with Lowndes in the room on Grand Street, Regan was still pissed off because Michael Welles had seen fit to read the minimization lecture to the entire surveillance team yet another time — with what you might call a veiled warning tacked onto the end of it.
“I know you all understand the importance of this case,” he’d said, “and I think you understand, too, how serious a breach it would be if any one of us provoked suppression of the material we’ve been gathering so painstakingly. So I’d like to tell you one more time: when in doubt, shut down.”
He’d also told them to pay strict attention during the days and weeks to come because the death of Rudy Faviola was sure to cause ripples. So here they were, three days after the beginning of spring, sitting in the middle of all those ripples, listening to the broken noses discussing who was going to take over The Accountant’s position in the organization.
The mucky-mucks began arriving at two that afternoon.
Benny Vaccaro no longer pressed clothes in the back of his father’s shop. From conversations between him and Andrew Faviola, earlier overheard and recorded, they knew that he was now working on a pier on the West Side, probably offloading false-bottom crates containing all sorts of controlled substances. Or so they surmised. In none of the conversations had anything illegal ever been mentioned. They had tuned out the moment they’d realized Faviola was offering the kid a seemingly honest job.
The new presser was someone named Mario.
They hadn’t yet got his last name, but they figured he had to be a cousin or nephew of a mob soldier, or the son of someone a mob soldier knew, in any event a person who could be trusted to witness the comings and goings of various higher-ups without later discussing it with anyone.
“Hello, Mario.”
“Hello, Mr. Triani.”
Mario sounded younger than Benny. They figured him to be sixteen or seventeen, a high school dropout working his way up the echelons of organized crime, starting as a presser who mistered and sirred all the big shots to death.
“Hello, Mr. Bardo.”
“Hello, Mario.”
Followed by the familiar voice on the speaker, Faviola telling each of his business associates, the fuckin’ creeps, to come on up, and then buzzing them in. By two thirty, all of them were assembled. Regan and Lowndes had counted an even dozen of them, six more than had been present the last time there’d been a meeting here, when all they had going for them was the downstairs bug. This time if a flea farted upstairs, they’d be hearing it and recording it.
The first order of business was to tell Faviola how sorry they were about his uncle and to tell Triani how sorry they were about his father-in-law, who happened to be one and the same dead gangster. Sal the Barber led off with his condolences, and he was followed by Frankie Palumbo and Fat Nickie Nicoletta, who knew Rudy from the old days and who was one of the elderly thugs present who still called Andrew Faviola by his childhood nickname “Lino.” On and on the ritual grief went, each and every wop hoodlum paying his respect to that poor, dear, departed fuck, Rudy “The Accountant” Faviola.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Regan said.
That out of the way, Faviola told the assembled mobsters that his uncle’s death left a gap in the organization which he had discussed with his father when he went out to Leavenworth last week...
“So that’s where he was,” Lowndes whispered.
“... and my father feels the way I do, we both agree on who should take Uncle Rudy’s place, may he rest in peace.”