aggressive jut of his jaw.
“Well,” Ed stammered, “I think I—”
“Jesus H., Ed. I don’t believe this.” Frings was back moving again, as if he had springs in his joints, weaving through desks on his way to the editor’s office. Ed was still trying to say something, two strides behind, but Frings made no attempt to isolate his voice from the general din of the newsroom.
Frings pushed through Panos’s office door to find the fat, slovenly Panos smoking a cigar and humming a painfully off-key aria.
“What the hell’s going on?” Frings asked, closing the door before Ed made it to the threshold. Adrenaline was flowing.
“Didn’t that twerp tell you?” Panos growled. He stuck his cigar back into his mouth, under an unruly, overgrown mustache.
“He told me. But, Ian Block’s place? How certain are we?”
“How certain are we ever until we see for our own eyes?”
Frings was used to the warmed-over philosophizing. “Okay. I’ll get down there right away and call it in once I figure it out. You going to hold the presses until you hear from me?”
Panos grunted. The sweat stains blossoming from his underarms would soon overwhelm the dry areas of his shirt. “Don’t screw around Frankie.”
Frings winked at Panos. “Stay by that phone.”
The mayor had a small circle of wealthy businessmen friends. In his columns, Frings called them the Oligarchy. If the membership of this group was somewhat fluid, the core people at least—Ian Block, Tino Altabelli, and Roderigo Bernal—were a constant. They bankrolled Red Henry’s mayoral campaigns and received what to Frings’s eye was a scandalous return on their investment.
So strong was the association of Block, Altabelli, and Bernal with Henry that an affront to one of them could only be seen as an affront to the mayor himself. That was what made labor action against any of their companies a dicey proposition. Effectively, the Oligarchs had the use of the City’s police force if and when they felt they needed it. More important, they could use the Anti-Subversion Unit, which entailed a whole other layer of coordination and firepower. Certainly, the mayor would be using the ASU to track down whoever planted the bomb.
Order was beginning to emerge from the chaos at the bombsite. Rivers of water, gray from the ash, flowed through gutters on either side of the street. Smoke billowed from the hole that had been blown out of the brownstone. Most of the building façade was gone, too, so there was no street number. Frings figured the number from the two adjacent houses, however, and compared it to the address he had for Ian Block. It checked out.
He found an officer named Losman, whom he had met on a couple of previous assignments and did not seem particularly busy at the moment.
“Frank Frings with the Gazette,” Frings said, offering the cop a Lucky. “Anybody inside when it went off?”
“No one that we know of. We located Mr. Block at his club, and he said that there might have been a cleaning woman today, but that he didn’t think so. He didn’t have his calendar with him. But we haven’t found a body.”
“What was Mr. Block’s reaction to the news?”
Losman gave Frings a funny look. “I wasn’t there. Why? How’d you take it if someone tossed a bomb through your window?”
“What type of bomb?”
“Sticks of dynamite, wrapped with rope. Found fibers on some of the wrapping down the street. Probably used a long fuse, lit it, tossed the bundle through the first-floor window, and had about a minute to get out of there.”
Frings nodded, taking it in. “Any idea who?”
“Usual suspects, I guess. Don’t print this, of course. Anarchists. Communists. Always the ‘ists’ though, right?”
“No one specific, though.”
“Not yet. You can print that. But we’ll find them soon enough. No doubt there.”
You’d better, Frings thought, or there’s going to be hell to pay with the Mayor. Which, from any remove, was hardly a pleasant thought.
Frings walked back outside the perimeter and talked to a few bystanders, trying to find an eyewitness or anyone with something interesting to say. Failing in this, he thought of Panos growing more annoyed and began searching for a phone booth.
Frings dictated the story to one of the secretaries back at the paper and thought about trying to get a quote from the Chief or maybe even the mayor himself. But then Frings began to feel its onset: daggers of pain behind his eyes, the feeling of a cold spatula slowly separating his brain from his skull. Soon his vision