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there. It was a January Sunday, 9 a.m., 12 degrees outside. There was dirty frost on the windows. Lavender steam poured out of the Con Ed smokestacks and blew flat away on an arctic wind whooshing down from Canada. Hawkins had been with this squad for sixteen years, the coarse hair on his temples had grown gray in service to this squad, and he knew there was no damn reason this meeting had to be held on Sunday morning, except that the supervisor, Harvey Manheim, was getting grief from the higher-ups and thought it his duty to spread the grief around.
    Now Manheim strolled into the conference room, nodded, sprayed hellos among the fifteen, eighteen agents there assembled. He had slightly bulging eyes and the deep-hinged mouth of a ventriloquist's dummy; he wore a tweed jacket and corduroy pants and carried, as always, his unlit pipe. He took up his position at a small lectern at the front of the room, between two big easels that held organizational charts of the five New York Mob families. "Gentlemen," he said, "thanks for coming. We're here for an update."
    Outside, a gust of polar air rattled the windows. An agent named Frank Padrino could not help muttering, "What's to update, Harvey?"
    He shouldn't have said it. It played right into the supervisor's hand.
    "What's to update?" Manheim parroted. "Nothing's to update. That's the point. How long's Vincente Delgatto been in place now? Coming up on three years. And what do we have on him? Nothing."
    "He hasn't made a wrong move," came a voice from the back of the room.
    "He hasn't made any moves," another agent said. "It's like some kind of Mafia gridlock out there."
    Manheim ignored the comments. "And do you recall," he went on, "the confident line we gave the press when Carti was put away—that we could now prosecute any leader?"
    Ben Hawkins shifted in his chair. He was tall, not fat but ample in his flesh, ambiguous in his features, with a narrow-bridged nose and almond eyes that nearly wrapped around his head. "We didn't say that, Harvey," he ventured. "You did."
    The supervisor raised a professorial finger. "The Bureau said it. And now the Bureau has to make good on it."
    He paused a moment to let the institutional weight of this sink in. Then he pointed to Padrino, who had the thick neck and squashed nose of an aging fullback and who knew the Mob better than the Mob knew itself. "Frank, what's going on right now—this gridlock, if you will—what do you make of it?"
    Padrino pursed his lips, put a finger on his chin. "No one really knows how strong Delgatto is," he said. "He's the Godfather, yeah, but what does that mean these days? The only other family with a legitimate boss is the Fabrettis, with Emilio Carbone. The official bosses, Delgatto's contemporaries, are mostly in jail. Some of them have figured out they're gonna die there. So why should the younger hoods accept this old man that's been forced on them?"
    Manheim liked what he was hearing; it was taking the discussion where he wanted it to go. "So you're saying they'll move against him—"
    "I'm saying they might," Padrino corrected. "In the meantime, Delgatto is probably too weak to really lead, too strong to topple. So everybody's waiting."
    "Not the other gangs," said Manheim. "The Asians. The Latins. They're already sniffing weakness."
    "Yeah," Padrino conceded, "that's already happening."
    The supervisor hugged the lectern, caressed his unlit pipe. "All the more reason we should intervene now," he said, "before there's a full-scale bloodbath."
    Ben Hawkins had small ears, ears that, like the rest of him, were as gray as they were brown, a color like that of tree bark. Those ears had become acutely tuned to political nuance in meetings such as this. He could generally tell when a conclusion had been rehearsed, had existed in advance of the evidence that supposedly led to it. "Intervene how, Harvey?"
    "Preempt a power play," the supervisor said, "by taking Delgatto off the street ourselves. We give the