“I’ve got a meeting,” Canidy replied, undeterred. “You a cop or what?”
The guy eyed him. “Your name Kennedy?”
When Canidy studied his eyes, he saw a no-nonsense look. “Canidy,” he said.
“Yeah. He told me to take you to meet him.” The guy looked over his shoulder at the crime scene. “Something came up.”
“Apparently,” Canidy said.
[ ONE ]
Nick’s Café
Pearl at Fletcher Street
New York City, New York
1240 6 March 1943
Major Richard Canidy, in the uniform of the United States Army Air Forces, carried his leather attaché as he followed the monster of a fishmonger two blocks south, then, turning onto Fletcher Street, another two blocks west.
We must make a curious-looking pair, Canidy mused.
“In here,” the guy said when they got to a twenty-four-hour restaurant on the corner where Fletcher met Pearl. It was all he had said the entire four-block walk from Meyer’s Hotel.
They entered, and Canidy saw that the restaurant—a diner, really, small and not brightly lit—was mostly full, with a working-class lunch crowd of truck drivers, heavy-construction workers, postmen, even a couple of street-beat cops.
There was the murmur of conversation mixed with the clanking of forks and knives on plates and, just now, the breaking of a water glass accidentally dropped on the black-and-white mosaic tile floor by the lone busboy hustling to clear a table. The smell of garlic and onion was heavy in the air.
The layout of the rectangular room was long and narrow. On the left, at the front by the plate-glass window looking out onto Pearl Street, was a wooden cou
nter with a dozen vinyl-cushion-topped swivel stools on three-foot-high chrome pedestals. Along the right wall, a series of wooden booths and tables ran from the front window to the back wall, each table set for four customers, and each with a black-framed photograph of a Greek island scene nailed to the wall beside it. At the very back, through a single swinging metal door with a window, was the busy kitchen.
A waiter, having kicked open the swinging door, came out of the kitchen balancing on his shoulder a huge, round serving tray piled high with plates of sandwiches and potato chips and bowls of soups. The light from the kitchen briefly illuminated the darkened booths near the back wall. Then the door swung shut, making a flap-flap-flap sound before finally becoming still.
For a moment, Canidy could better see, sitting in the farthest booth and facing the front door, a rough-looking Guinea about the age of fifty, with a cup of coffee in his hand and talking to someone seated across the table and out of Canidy’s view.
“Back here,” the fishmonger said.
As the guy made his way toward the rear of the restaurant, some of the workers looked up from their meals and nodded and he wordlessly acknowledged the greetings.
They reached the booth, and Canidy saw that the man was dressed like the fishmonger he had followed—long-sleeved flannel shirt, dirty overalls, rubber boots.
And Canidy saw that the man seated across from him, in a cheap black suit, was about five-eight and one-fifty, midthirties, with slight features and pale skin. He also was drinking coffee—but an espresso—and next to his tiny cup there was a copy of Il Nuovo Mondo, the anti-Fascist newspaper published in New York, with a photograph of Benito Mussolini on the front page.
“This is the guy,” the fishmonger said to the two at the table by way of greeting.
The man in the cheap suit looked up.
“I’m Joe Guerin,” he said, moving so that he was half standing with his hand out.
The lawyer, Canidy thought, remembering Murray Gurfein’s description.
He shook the offered hand and replied, “Dick Canidy. Nice to meet you.”
“This is Mr. Lanza,” Guerin added, “my client.”
Joe Socks—short and pudgy, with a pockmarked face and a bad haircut—looked at Canidy with cold, hard eyes. Canidy knew from Gurfein’s background information that Lanza was forty-one years old, but he sure didn’t look it. The hard living showed.