but it would not be of any use to the police.
He parted with Alice, giving her one hundred dollars for the night and telling her to go home and keep her head down for a day or two. Then he walked home, every passerby sending his adrenaline spiking. Some actions you can’t backtrack on, and he was now committed to chiseling one of the most powerful men in the City. Poole was about to find out if Bernal’s ruthlessness in business translated to other facets of his life.
He saw a tower of blue smoke rising into the blue and yellow neon of the Theater District across town, but it did not register in his preoccupied mind as anything of significance.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Red Henry sat in his favorite leather chair, feet on the matching ottoman, reading the Gazette. Occasionally, when he read something particularly annoying, he snorted in disgust or took quick, deep breaths to calm himself. It was not that the Gazette actually ran anything untrue—they were a respectable paper. It was not even their seemingly insatiable need for sniffing around City Hall trying to catch the scent of corruption. Scandal sells papers, and he certainly understood the profit motive. No, what left him particularly aggrieved was that they did not seem to see that when the City did well, the Gazette did well. And the City did best when Henry was given some goddamn latitude to make things work.
“That shit-ant Frings,” he mumbled half-audibly.
“What’s that?” His mistress, Siobhan, was stretched across his couch reading Nietzsche or some such crap. She was wearing a green silk sleeping gown that a previous mistress had left. It was alluringly snug and accentuated her long red hair.
Henry looked at her; then decided it was worth answering. “Frings. He wrote a column, thinks he’s going to tie my hands.”
Siobhan returned to her book. “Nobody ties your hands, sugar,” she said evenly.
Henry gave her a heavy-lidded look, then put the paper down, and rose out of the chair, wearing only his slacks from the day, his suspenders hanging loose around his knees. His bare upper body was massive without being particularly fat or muscular. There was simply a lot of him. He stood at the window, taking in his fourteenth-floor penthouse view of the City. Actually, it was the thirteenth floor, but the elevator skipped straight from the twelfth to fourteenth floor. It disgusted him, indulging people’s ridiculous superstitions. Still, one must pick one’s battles and he had plenty.
Henry pressed his palms against the window, slightly farther apart than his shoulders. It looked as though he were holding the City between his hands.
The phone rang, and Henry turned slowly to watch Siobhan’s body moving beneath the silk as she went to the set. She answered, listened, then held out the phone as if she were offering him a martini. He walked slowly across the room.
“Yeah,” he grunted, taking the phone.
“Sir, there’s been another bomb.”
Henry didn’t answer.
“Sir?”
Henry remained silent.
“It was Altabelli’s apartment.” Altabelli ran a meat-processing factory. Along with Block and Bernal and a few others, he was part of Henry’s inner circle.
“Was he there?”
“Sir, yes, he was. But he’s okay. He was in the john, I guess, and now he’s at the hospital, but they said it was only a precaution.”
Henry’s skin prickled with heat. “Call the Chief. Tell him my office in an hour.” He hung up the phone.
“What was that?” Siobhan asked, without looking up from her book. Henry ignored her and walked into his bedroom, where he had a better view of Altabelli’s neighborhood. Sure enough, a spire of smoke was rising up over the Theater District. He watched the smoke for several minutes, its undulations focusing his thoughts somehow, as he considered just how furious his response would need to be to maintain order in the City.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
At this very hour of the night, in an airless sitting room illuminated by the flickering light of an oil lamp, Joos Van Vossen flipped through page after page of his tight, meticulous script. Something he had come across needed attention; a detail that had eaten at him throughout the afternoon and evening, its implication unclear. Only as he prepared to retire for the night did the context finally come to him, and now he found the pertinent passage, several hundred pages back.
Typical of a certain type of criminal known colloquially as a “block boss” is Reif DeGraffenreid, who held sway over four blocks on Delft Avenue between Trafalgar and Wellington streets. As with others