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I have a prior commitment to attend to. My counsel will speak for me as the negotiations go forward. Thank you.”
    He smiled with empty warmth at the Polish congregation as the translator spoke his words in Polish. The Poles nodded and smiled back to him, then stood as he shook hands with each of them in succession, their hands like so many children’s in the grip of his gigantic paw.
    He left the room to find Peja waiting for him in the hallway. “Get the Chief for me. My office in an hour. And call Feral. I’ll meet him tonight by the bridge. Ten thirty.”

CHAPTER SIX

    “Who is this?”
    “You know who it is.”
    “What do you want?”
    “We need to meet.”
    “Okay.”
    “You know that phone booth across the street from your office?”
    “Yes.”
    “Be there in three minutes. I’ll call you.”
    Poole left the phone booth and strode two blocks to a different one. He was not worried about being watched. Yet. The danger would come later. Just now he was worried about people listening in on the other end of the line, specifically the cops. Or tracing the call, which he’d heard that the police could now do with the help of an operator.
    The streets were alive with people rushing about on this weekday morning. The sky was obscured by low, gray clouds and the City seemed to reflect its narrow range of hues. People walked with their shoulders hunched and heads down against a cold wind that swept through the canyon of buildings like a glacial river. Leaves and litter danced crazily in the street and around the legs of seemingly oblivious pedestrians.
    He arrived at the second phone booth and entered, pulling his gray fedora down to hide his face, then dialed the number for the phone booth outside Bernal’s building.
    “Yes?” Bernal was breathing hard. Poole guessed that he had taken the stairs down.
    “Listen carefully because I am not going to stay on the line long. We need to meet face-to-face. Do you know Greer Park?”
    “Yes.”
    “The pond in Greer Park. On the west side there’s a gazebo.”
    “I know it.”
    “Tomorrow night at eleven p.m. You will bring five thousand dollars insmall bills. We’ll talk for five, maybe ten minutes. Then I’ll blindfold you and leave you with a timer set for five minutes. When the timer goes off, you will take off your blindfold and go home. I have people who will be watching the area, so if you’re not alone, they’ll know and the pictures will be sent to every newspaper in the City and to your wife. If you leave before the timer goes off, the same thing will happen. Do you understand everything that I have told you?”
    “Yes.”
    Poole hung up.
    Carla was not home when he returned to the apartment. She was at Bernal’s factory helping organize the strike that had begun that day. As always when she was out on these endeavors, he worried about the City’s leading capitalists’ capacity for violence and, perhaps more to the point, that of the mayor and the police. It gnawed at him.
    Carla had found him at the end of their time at State, a time when everyone was either vilifying Poole or indebted to him for actions that he himself found repugnant. Carla was oblivious to all of this, however. She didn’t follow football. She was a Red, spending her free time selling ads to keep the City’s underground Communist paper in production or trying to organize workers who did not even share a common language.
    Poole liked her because she had a clear vision of right and wrong. She could assess a situation and make the kind of confident judgments that he found he could not. And there was something else. A moral fierceness. A commitment to making things change married to a sense of how they should be. It was a daunting example.
    Why had she chosen him in the first place? he sometimes wondered. Some women liked to have the initiative, maybe. Certainly, Carla drove their relationship. That was the way she wanted it and that was the way he wanted it, too. Then there was