“Yeah?”
“His kid works for AT&T, he gets a break on the equipment, you know?” Bobby said, and winked. “You want me to send him around the office?”
“What for?” Andrew said.
“Fix your phones,” Bobby said, still ogling the waitress.
“There’s nothing wrong with my phones,” Andrew said.
“Put in new ones,” Bobby said, and shrugged. “You’d be surprised, the stuff these phones can do nowadays. He gets a good break on the equipment,” Bobby said, and winked again. “Anyway, the office, it’s a business expense, am I right? I had him go to La Luna, you know? On Fifty-Eighth? He put in new phones every place, the kitchen, the front near the cash register, the table where Sal the Barber sits in back, the office, all over the restaurant. Sal gave him a coupla hundred bucks and this crummy black ring he says came from Rome when there were emperors there. I ought to send him around, Andrew, check out the place, see what he can do for you.”
“I like the phones I have now,” Andrew said.
Bobby signaled to the waitress. She came to the table at once.
“Can I get another cappuccino here?” he asked, smiling.
“Certainly, sir.”
“Andrew? Another cappuccino?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Just one, then,” the waitress said.
“What’s your name, miss?” Bobby asked. “So I don’t have to keep yelling ‘Hey, you!’ all the time.”
“Bunny,” she said.
“Bunny. That’s a nice name, Bunny. Is that your real name, or did you make it up?”
“Well, my real name’s Bernice,” she said.
“Bernice,” he said, weighing the name gravely. “Is that Jewish, Bunny?”
“No, I’m Italian,” she said.
“’Cause I always thought Bernice was a Jewish name.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Bunny said. “Both my parents are Italian, and they named me Bernice. So I guess it’s Italian, too.”
“Bunny, tell me something. How old are you?”
“Twenty-two,” she said.
“I woulda said nineteen,” Bobby said.
“Oh, well, thank you.”
“Tell me, Bunny, do you live down here in Little Italy?”
“No, I live in Brooklyn.”
“What’s your last name, Bunny?”
“Tataglia.”
“Really?” Bobby said. “That’s a nice name. Bunny Tataglia. Very nice.”
“Well,” she said, and shrugged.
“Bunny Tataglia in Brooklyn,” Bobby said, nodding.
“Mm-huh,” she said.
“I’m Bobby Triani,” he said, and extended, his hand.
“Nice to meet you, Bobby,” she said, and took his hand. He was wearing a big diamond pinkie ring. Bunny looked at the ring as they shook hands. “I’d better get that cappuccino,” she said at last, and let go of his hand and went swiveling away on her black high heels, in her little black flounced skirt and white scoop-neck peasant blouse.
“Don’t call her,” Andrew said.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Don’t call her.’”
“What?” Bobby said. “What?”
“You cheat on my cousin, I’ll break your fuckin’ head,” Andrew said. “Capeesh?”
“Hey, come on, Andrew.”
“Enough said.”
“I mean, what kind of person do you...?”
“Enough said, Bobby.”
Bobby shook his head and tried to look hurt and amazed. When Bunny brought his cappuccino, he didn’t even glance at her. She went off looking really hurt and amazed.
“So you want me to send him around or not?” Bobby asked. “Lenny’s kid. Take a look at your phones.”
The pay phone on the tailor shop wall was an antique with a rotary dial. Whether or not Mr. Faviola decided to go along with a new communications system, Sonny Campagnia would suggest that he contact New York Telephone and ask them to replace the unit with new equipment. That’s if he was thinking of adding the tailor shop phones to whatever he did upstairs, if he decided to do anything.
Mr. Faviola had told him he’d be here at one o’clock to unlock the door and take him upstairs for a look at the system he now had. It was now a quarter past, and he still wasn’t here, and the old guy who owned the tailor shop had asked Sonny three times already if he wanted a cup of coffee or anything, but Sonny had seen how filthy the cups looked, and each time he’d said, No, thanks, really.
It was while he was checking out the wall phone that he made his first discovery. What it was, a wire had been dropped from the phone to the baseboard, disappearing into it. Sonny followed the baseboard around the room, trying to figure out where the wire was leading, and saw that it came out of the baseboard alongside a door, where it was tacked up the wall and over the doorjamb molding, and then down the wall again into the baseboard, where it finally surfaced under a long table. The wire ran up from the baseboard into a 42A block that didn’t have any phone plugged into it. Sonny was on his hands and knees, wondering about this, when Andrew walked in.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking of putting any new phones in the tailor shop, if that’s why you’re...”
“No, I was just wondering about this wire, that’s all,” Sonny said, getting up and dusting off the knees of his trousers.
Andrew was already unlocking the door that led upstairs. He had no particular interest in changing all the goddamn phones in the place, except that Lenny Campagnia was a well-respected capo, and letting his kid install a new system would be a favor to him. He just hoped looking over the place wouldn’t take too much time. Sarah would be here sometime after four, as usual.
“This won’t take too much time, will it?” he asked.
“No, no. I just want to see what you’ve got, maybe take a look outside at the terminal box.”
“What’s that?” Andrew asked.
“Where the lines come in.”
“Just so it doesn’t take too long. I have to drive up to Connecticut this afternoon.”
“No, it shouldn’t take too long, Mr. Faviola.”
Sonny looked at all the phones on every floor upstairs, commenting that this was really very old equipment, Stone Age stuff, you know, and suggesting that he could install a state-of-the-art system, at very little cost, that would make Andrew’s life much simpler. Andrew told him he didn’t want his telephone service interrupted while all this was going on — if he decided to go ahead with it — because the telephone was very important to him, he did a lot of business on the telephone. Sonny assured him that once he’d designed a system for him, the actual installation would be a very simple thing, and he could promise that at least one phone would he completely functional all the while he was working inside the building and out. He told Andrew he’d like to take a look at the terminal box now, which he guessed would be on the rear wall of the building, or perhaps on a pole outside.
The box was, in fact, on the rear wall of the building. Sonny opened it and began studying the various wires inside it, and that was when he found the slave Freddie Coulter had installed there on the last day of January.
The first thing Michael thought was that Sarah had told him.
Regan was saying that all at once everything went dead.
“We’re listening to Faviola talking to some guy about putting in a new phone system, and the guy says he’s going out back, take a look at the terminal box, and next thing you know, everything goes dead. I figured you ought to know about it right away.”
The bitch told him, Michael thought.
“So what do we do now?” Regan asked. “We turned on the backup receivers the minute everything quit, but so far we haven’t heard a thing.”