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seriously than others. The first rule of that code was: You don’t hit a man in the company of his family unless he’s gone to ground and you just can’t reach him any other way. Vince felt fairly safe on that score. But another rule was that you never shot a man’s wife or kids or his grandmother in order to get at him. Any hit man who did such a thing would probably wind up dead himself, wasted by the very people who had hired him. Vince hoped to convince Frank Dicenziano that Velazquez was a special case—no other target had ever eluded Vince for a month—and that what had happened in Oakland on Christmas Day was regrettable but unavoidable.
    Just in case Dicenziano—and by extension, the don—was too furious to listen to reason, Vince went prepared with more than a gun. He knew that, if they wanted him dead, they would crowd him and take the gun away from him before he could use it, as soon as he walked into the restaurant and before he knew the score. So he wired himself with plastic explosives and was prepared to detonate them, wiping out the entire restaurant, if they tried to fit him for a coffin.
    Vince was not sure if he would survive the explosion. He had absorbed the life energies of so many people recently that he thought he must be getting close to the immortality he had been seeking—or was already there—but he could not know how strong he was until he put himself to the test. If his choice was standing at the heart of an explosion . . . or letting a couple of Wiseguys pump a hundred rounds into him and encase him in concrete for a dunk in the bay . . . he decided the former was more appealing and, perhaps, offered him a marginally better chance of survival.
    To his surprise, Dicenziano—who resembled a squirrel with meatballs in his cheeks—was delighted with how the Velazquez contract had been fulfilled. He said the don had the highest praise for Vince. No one searched Vince when he entered the restaurant. At a corner booth, as the first men in the room, he and Frank were served a special lunch of dishes not on the menu. They drank three-hundred-dollar Cabernet Sauvignon, a gift from Mario Tetragna.
    When Vince cautiously raised the issue of the dead wife and grandmother, Dicenziano said, “Listen, my friend, we knew this was going to be a hard hit, a demanding job, and that rules might have to be broken. Besides, these people were not our kind of people. They were just a bunch of wetback spics. They don’t belong in this business. If they try to force their way into it, they can’t expect us to play by the rules.”
    Relieved, Vince went to the men’s room halfway through lunch and disconnected the detonator. He didn’t want to set the Plastique off accidentally now that the crisis was past.
    At the end of lunch, Frank gave Vince the list. Nine names. “These people— who are not all Family people, by the way—pay the don for the right to operate their ID businesses in his territory. Back in November, in anticipation of your success with Velazquez, I spoke to these nine, and they’ll remember that the don wants them to cooperate with you in any way they can.”
    Vince set out the same afternoon, looking for someone who would remember Travis Cornell.
    Initially, he was frustrated. Two of the first four people on the list could not be reached. They had closed up shop and gone away for the holidays. To Vince, it seemed wrong that the criminal underworld would take off for Christmas and New Year’s as if they were schoolteachers.
    But the fifth man, Anson Van Dyne, was at work in the basement beneath his topless club, Hot Tips, and at five-thirty, December 26, Vince found what he was after. Van Dyne looked at the photograph of Travis Cornell, which Vince had obtained from the back-issue files of the Santa Barbara newspaper. “Yeah, I remember him. He’s not one you forget. Not a foreigner looking to become an instant American like half my customers. And not the usual sad-assed loser who needs to change his name and hide his face. He’s not a big guy, and he doesn’t come on tough or anything, but you get the feeling he could mop up the floor with anyone who crossed him. Very self-contained. Very watchful. I couldn’t forget him.”
    “What you couldn’t forget,” said one of the two bearded boy wonders at the computers, “is that gorgeous quiff he was with.”
    “For her, even a dead man could get it up,” the other one said.
    The first said, “Yeah, even a dead man.