Promising talent tended to appear there on their way up and then reappear without much fanfare when they were serious headliners. This evening, a local jazz pianist named Coe Pierce and his quartet were playing, the place was half-filled and sleepy, and Kurtz had his usual small table, in the corner as far from the door as possible, his back to the wall. The nearby tables were empty. Occasionally the proprietor and chief bartender, Daddy Bruce Woles, or his granddaughter Ruby would come over to chat and see if Kurtz wanted another beer. He didn't. Kurtz came for the music, not for the booze.

Kurtz did not really expect Pruno's friend, Mr. John Wellington Frears, to show. Pruno seemed to know everyone in Buffalo—of the dozen or so street informants Kurtz had used back when he was a P.I., Pruno had been the gem of the lot—but Kurtz doubted if any friend of Pruno's would be sober enough and presentable enough to make it to Blues Franklin.

Angelina Farino. Other than Little Skag—Stephen or Stevie to family members—she was the only surviving child of the late Don Farino. Her older sister, the late Maria Farino, had been a casualty of her own ambition. Everyone Kurtz knew believed that older sister Angelina had been so disgusted by the Family business that she had removed herself to Italy more than five years earlier, presumably to enter a convent. According to Pruno, this was not quite accurate. It seems that the surviving Ms. Farino was more ambitious than her brothers or sister and had gone back to study crime with the family in Sicily even while getting a master's degree in business administration from a university in Rome. She also got married twice while there, according to Pruno—first to a young Sicilian from a prominent La Cosa Nostra family who managed to get himself killed, then to an elderly Italian nobleman, Count Pietro Adolfo Ferrara. The information about Count Ferrara was sketchy—he may have died, he may have retired, he may still be in seclusion. He and Angelina may have divorced before she returned here, but perhaps they had not.