“Pretty sure, ma’am.”
“Okay, there may be something else. Charlie had four close friends from childhood. And maybe, long time ago, these friends, they pulled a little prank.”
“What kind of prank?”
“Just meet him, meet my Charlie. He can’t come into city no more, but he can be nearby. We set up meeting point for you already.”
“A bit presumptuous, don’t you think?”
“New Jersey. Ocean City boardwalk, Seventh Street. He be there tonight at nine.”
“I don’t know.”
“At nine. Do for me, Victor. As favor.”
“As favor, huh?”
“You do for me, Victor. Work it out, make deal, do something so my boy, he come home and say good-bye. To say good-bye, yes. And to fix his life, yes. You can work that?”
“I think that’s beyond a lawyer’s brief, Mrs. Kalakos.”
“Bring him home, and you tell your father after this we’re even.”
I thought about why the FBI might be so interested still in Charlie Kalakos fifteen years after he fled his trial. Charlie was a thief, had said his mother. And long ago Charlie and his friends had pulled a little prank. That van outside told me it must have been a hell of a little prank. Maybe there was an angle in Charlie’s long-ago prank and the FBI’s strangely keen interest in it for me to find a profit.
“You know, Mrs. Kalakos,” I said after I did all that thinking, “in cases like this, even when I take it on as a favor, I still require a retainer.”
“What is this retainer?”
“Money up front.”
“I see. It is like that, is it?”
“Yes, ma’am, it is.”
“Not only a Greek face but a Greek heart.”
“Thank you, I think.”
“I have no money, Victor, none at all.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“But I might have something to interest you.”
Slowly, she rose from the bed, as if a corpse rising from her grave, and made her way creakily, painfully, to a bureau at the edge of the room. With all her strength, she opened a drawer. She tossed out a few oversized unmentionables and slid open what appeared to be a false bottom. She reached both hands in and pulled out two fistfuls of golden chains glinting in the candlelight, silver pendants, broaches filled with rubies, strings of pearls, two fistfuls of pirate’s treasure.