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Remo began walking again with 'the half-loopy, half-gliding motion that walking on water requires. It took him only fifteen seconds more to get to the massive stone pier.

At the end of the pier was a large, squat wooden building with red neon beer signs in its windows. The Venetian blinds were closed. This was the place.

The assignment had been in the making for weeks. The Cleveland mob was having a summit, which meant that all the local gangs—the Mafia, the Jews, the Irish, and the Lebanese—were getting together in a sort of United Nations of mobdom to work out some problems they were having. And each of the gangs in the mob had called in cousins and in-laws and brothers who operated the feudal dependencies for them: feudal dependencies called Detroit and San Diego and Buffalo and Arizona and Central Florida and Louisville and Indiana.

Word of the meeting came to CURE in the usual fashion—isolated bits of data that individually meant nothing, until some intelligence had arranged them into a pattern and a picture: The secretary to the head of a large holding company in Southern California made airline reservations for her boss to fly to Cleveland for a two-week winter' vacation, then quietly tipped off the publisher of a financial insiders' newsletter; the publisher thought he was working for the CIA and passed the information along to a bland, well-mannered voice at an 800 area-code telephone number. A pimp in Las Vegas was told to send an assortment of two dozen of his prettiest boys and girls to Cleveland for a convention, and he mentioned it in passing to the cop he had on his pad; the cop informed an assistant district attorney he was reporting to; and the assistant D.A. thought

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he was reporting to the FBI when he passed this item along to a well-mannered voice at an 800 area-code telephone number. A Cleveland distributor of fine wines received a rush order for several cases of a particularly rare, typically expensive French wine, and to get the wine quickly, he bribed a customs inspector; another customs inspector reported the bribe to an 800 area-code telephone number, thinking that the number was a direct link to the White House.