When Elephants Forget (Trace 3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

room, and when they had been seated, Trace told Chico, “I like this place a lot.”
    “Why? You haven’t been here three minutes yet, Mr. Rascali.”
    “Because it’s not like New York restaurants. We’re sitting by ourselves. Usually in a New York restaurant, they jam you shoulder and jowl with other people and they’re always talking about the stock market. Or what’s in New York magazine. Who gives a shit? And then they always order smelly disgusting food. They’re sitting so close you have to smell it, and it’s awful but they wolf it down anyway, splattering juice everywhere. New Yorkers all eat like pigs. I think they give out stars on how many people a restaurant can jam into one room without any of them being comfortable.”
    Chico leaned over and said softly, “You said it’s a Mafia place. Maybe that’s why. Maybe the Mafia doesn’t like people listening in on their conversations.”
    “You kidding? That’s what they like best. That’s why they do all that ring-kissing and that phony yap-yap. ‘I am honored, Don Duck, that you have chosen to grace my humble establishment with the eminence of your august presence,’ and ‘It is a mark of the high esteem in which I hold you and your family that after many years, it is good to return to such a place of warmth and friendship,’ and they go on like that forever. They want everybody to hear them.”
    “How do they get any business done, then?” Chico asked.
    “On the telephone, the way everybody else does. They come here at night and they talk all that crazy shit, and the next day they get on the phone and they call Louie McGurn-Gurn and they say, ‘Louie, go shoot Pasquale in the fucking head. Right. He owes me forty dollars and I’m tired of waiting for the cheap bastard. Plug him.’ That’s why they’re always getting arrested. The FBI has all their phones tapped, but they wouldn’t waste three cents tapping a joint like this. Nobody ever says anything that means anything.”
    “I didn’t know you were such a big expert on the Mafia.”
    “I know everything,” Trace said. “The real Mafia decisions, they’re made by some guy eating fried peppers out of a paper bag in a plumbing office somewhere. The stuff they do here at night is just for show. It’s to impress each other.”
    It was still early in the evening but most of the restaurant’s tables were filled. The room held about one hundred diners, Trace figured, but the walls were covered with heavy fabric and tapestries that muffled sound. Even the piano player at the far end of the room was unobtrusively muted. Most of the groups that were eating were four men, no women, and a lot of the men spent a lot of time glancing across the room at Chico.
    Trace was used to it, and whenever his eyes met theirs, he smiled a lot and shot his sleeves so that his cuff links showed.
    “I wish I had worn my nine-pound cuff links with the engraved map of Sicily,” he said. “That’d get us some respect around here.”
    The waiter seemed disappointed when Trace ordered only a beer and Chico Perrier water, and was crushed when Trace said he would pass on the wine list for now and they would just like to look at menus.
    As was normal, Chico seemed to order one of everything. Trace settled on a salad and a steak. He noticed a man in a tuxedo who was working the room like a politician, going from table to table, smiling, talking, shaking a lot of hands, then moving on.
    The man was average height, but even the well-cut tuxedo did not hide the fact that he was lumpily muscular. His neck was that of a football player and his chest was thick. His hair was black, streaked with gray; he was well-tanned, well-manicured, and his smile was so white his teeth looked as if they had been sandblasted to an almost inhuman level. Killer Dobermans wouldn’t mind having teeth like that, Trace thought.
    Trace picked at his salad while Chico polished off her spiedini appetizers, soaking up the anchovy sauce with