Wednesday

7:00 A.M.

Southbound traffic on the West Side Highway, always jammed during rush hour, crawled more deliberately in the early-morning fog. The steady blur of oncoming headlights flickered like processional candles in the gloom. Eddie Dunne's swollen right eye enhanced the surreal haze as his northbound traffic lane moved freely, leaving Manhattan. Most of his life, he'd made his exit at this time, before the sun and normalcy arrived.

This particular morning, Eddie owed his freedom to Russian practicality. The business manager of the Eurobar, rousted from his bed, didn't want any official reports of a scuffle gumming up a spate of license applications he had before the city government. He wouldn't press arson charges if Eddie was willing to walk away quietly. A sweetheart deal, too good to pass up. Live to fight another day.

Eddie squinted, trying to maintain a distance from the taillights ahead of him. He didn't need a car accident on top of everything else. After passing the entrance to the George Washington Bridge, the escaping traffic thinned to a handful of nocturnal misfits. He took the Saw Mill River Parkway, then went over the hill of Roberts Avenue. Eddie had called Babsie and arranged a breakfast meeting, but he had nothing to report. He'd lost the Battle of Eurobar, beaten by a sucker punch from Richie Costa. In the confusion, he'd lost his gun, and the best chance of finding his daughter.

The Eurobar's business manager had told Eddie he'd hired Misha as weekend kitchen help. The confrontation in the VIP room that Eddie had witnessed resulted from the security people catching Misha dealing drugs in the men's room. Sergei Zhukov, whose management duties seemed undefined, was merely in the process of banning him from the Eurobar. The Russians never cared whether or not you believed their lies; they just told the story and stuck to it.

The only good thing that came out of the incident was that if Eddie had ever had any doubts Borodenko was involved, they were gone now. He'd been approaching this all wrong. He needed to forget about the stolen car and go after Borodenko at a higher level, start taking down some of his key associates. Misha, even if he had confessed, might not know what had happened to Kate. And "she," whoever "she" was, probably didn't know, either. Too low-level for the big secrets.

An old boxing truism says that if you attack the body, the head will die. He'd been attacking the body. Now he realized he didn't have time for that strategy. After a nap, some food, he'd be ready to hunt for the head. He parked his Olds in back of Christ the King school.

The Yonkers neighborhood where the Dunne brothers were bora and raised was known as "the End of the Line." The "End" got its name when it was the northernmost trolley stop in the city of Yonkers. The Yonkers trolley line took local residents to and from their jobs in New York City, connecting them with the subway station at West 242nd Street in the Bronx. In the early fifties, the Yonkers trolleys were replaced by buses, and the burnished steel tracks had been paved over with blacktop. Kieran Dunne, father of Eddie and Kevin, was one of several old trolley motormen who never got the hang of driving a bus. Out of work, he took the next step in Irish logic. He bought a bar.

The North End Tavern was located just steps from that last bus stop. Every evening, dozens of workers coming off the bus from their "city" jobs stopped in for "just one" before going home to face the bride. For three decades, Kieran Dunne's North End was the social center of the neighborhood's bustling business district, a two-block thoroughfare on Palisade and Roberts avenues. But times changed. Kids went to college, then moved to tonier parts of the county, old-timers died, or retired to the Sun Belt. The neighborhood hung tough, but fewer and fewer people piled off the bus each evening.

Almost all the stores were still mom-and-pop concerns, many of them remaining in the same family for generations-among them a pharmacy, a small supermarket, a barbershop/beauty shop, and two bars. The glory days of the North End Tavern were in the past, but the new owners, Kevin and Martha Dunne, had somehow managed to keep the place afloat.

With all his heart, Kevin Dunne believed the city of Yonkers would rise from the ashes. The waterfront alone was too valuable to leave dormant for long. The City of Gracious Living had beautiful treed hills sloping down to the Hudson, and a fabulous view of the Palisades of New Jersey. Yonkers was an easier commute to Manhattan than Staten or Long Island, and closer than most of Brooklyn and Queens. Just ask Uncle Kev-o.

It was after 9:00 a.m. when Eddie Dunne walked through the open doors of his brother's bar. The front doors of the North End stood open until noon in all but the worst weather to allow the night's accumulation of smoke and stale beer to escape. Eddie paused to allow his pulse to slow down and let his eyes adjust to the dark. A trio of elderly men sat together in the far corner of the bar, each reading his own newspaper. The TV above them was set to CNBC, the financial channel, the stock market ticker tape running nonstop. Their father, Kieran Dunne, had never allowed the television on unless it was boxing, the World Series, or a NASA space shot. Behind the bar, a full-figured brunette washed glasses.

"I'll get some ice for that eye," Martha Dunne said. Steam rose from the low sink as Eddie's sister-in-law dried her hands on a bar towel.

"I don't need ice," Eddie said. "Is my brother here?"

"You should get yourself up to St. John's and have that looked at."

"I'm glad you're concerned about my eye, but right now I'm looking for Kevin."

Martha had a gravelly voice and long brown hair that hung in bangs, almost covering her eyes. Some said she had the sexy manner reminiscent of an actress filmed only in black and white. Eddie thought they mistook cunning for sexy.

"Then how about coffee?" she said. "I've made fresh coffee."

"Martha. Where is he?"

"At the market, squeezing the tomatoes, or so he'll tell us. A regular comedian, your brother."

"Why didn't you tell me Scott's sister was here?"

"Is that how it's going to be, Eddie? No chitchat, get right to the fighting."

"You know damn well you should have called me."

"I thought Grace would tell you."

"She didn't. She hardly said anything last night. But you definitely should have."

"It was too late when I got home," she whispered, trying to keep the volume down.

"Nine o'clock is too late? You knew that son of a bitch sent her here, and you didn't think it was important enough to call me?"

"Kevin and I needed our sleep, and I didn't want you to frighten Grace. I knew you'd be furious, flying out the door. I thought it could wait until morning."

"You decided that on your own."

"At least we all got a night's sleep."

"Kevin didn't know, did he?" Eddie said. "You didn't tell him last night because you knew he would have called me."

"I saved you both a night of lunacy."

A chin-high wooden partition separated the bar from the back room. The back room consisted of half a dozen wooden booths hidden along the far wall. At night, they were used only by sleeping drunks and cheating spouses, but Martha and Kevin had been building a respectable lunch trade, and the booths were now getting some daytime use. He could see Babsie Panko's blondish gray hair in a back booth.

"You going to tell me what my ex-son-in-law wanted?" Eddie said. "Or do I have to ask Grace?"

"Your ex-son-in-law wasn't here," Martha said. "His sister was. And if you ask me, she's a nice person. Scott asked her to find out how Kate was, and that's what she did."

"Suddenly, he's concerned."

"Grace is still his daughter."

"Jesus Christ, whose side are you on?"

Eddie's voice hung in the sudden quiet of the bar. A scraggly brown mutt named James Joyce padded through the door and flopped down near the heat register. Eddie knew his brother wasn't far behind.

"I'm on Grace's side," Martha said softly. "One of us has to be realistic… for her sake. I think the average person would agree that the father has his rights, too."

Eddie wanted to lean across the bar and shake his brother's wife until a sense of family loyalty filtered into her head. He hated when Martha cited her personal opinion of what the "average person" would do as unarguable evidence for her narrow-minded views. He knew deep down that Martha was worried that the responsibility of caring for Grace might fall to her. Eddie told her he'd wait for his brother in the back booth.

"I heard it all," Babsie said. "When did you find this out?"

"I stopped at school before I came over here. Father Quakers said he saw her talking to Martha. Makes me wonder how the hell Scott found out in the first place."

"Yonkers is still a small town, Eddie. Besides, it's in the paper today."

She showed him a copy of the Westchester News Journal. The story was on page one. A new picture of their house, and an old one of Eddie in boxing trunks-a posed shot taken when he was barely twenty years old. Inside, a group photo of Kate's nursing class, a circle around the face of his daughter.

"You were a little hard on Martha," Babsie said. "It wasn't your most attractive moment."

Coming from a huge clan, Babsie understood family politics, but she didn't know Martha that well. Whatever had happened to Martha, she seemed unable to find joy in anything. Eddie's personal gripe with her stemmed from his belief that Martha had turned Eileen into the same rigid, unforgiving "good" Catholic she was. Kevin blamed it all on Martha's hysterectomy, and the marked change in her after the doctors "didn't put me back together right."

"That eye looks ripe," Babsie said. "But I should see the other guy, right?"

Eddie touched it gingerly. "No. Actually, he escaped untouched."

Scar tissue had permanently thinned the skin above his eyes and left it fragile. Many nights, he'd find blood spots on his pillow for no reason.

"Maybe you're just too old for the club scene," Babsie said.

He knew Babsie had noticed the welts on his hands and arms from where they'd beaten him when he was holding on to Misha. But she'd said enough about his injuries. She seemed to know the right things to say, and not to say. Eddie gave her a decent play-by-play of his night in the Eurobar, including the lost gun. He didn't mention paying money to the Parrot or the bar pro Tatiana. He told her that he'd found Misha and that he'd said a "she" forced his participation in the theft of the BMW.

"Who's 'she'?" Babsie said. "I went over Borodenko's associates list pretty good. I didn't see a woman on there, and I notice things like that."

"Women in Russia rarely have power. It's a cultural thing. I never heard of a woman in any of the Russian crime organizations. Certainly not in Lukin's operation. Not even in a minor role."

"The FBI list is based mostly on reports from Immigration," Babsie said. "She might be local talent."

"They don't like American men on the inside. I definitely don't see any Russian man taking orders from an American woman."

"What about Borodenko's wife, the model?"

"From everything I've heard, Yuri doesn't trust her to balance the checkbook. She spends her time shopping or drunk, or both."

Kevin Dunne arrived, all fuss and bluster. He was breathing hard and lugging two bags of groceries. The polar opposite of his squared-off younger brother, Kevin was the round and jolly Dunne. Kevin had inherited their father's big Irish personality, as well as the uncommon jet black hair and pale white complexion. Martha pulled Kevin into the kitchen to get her side of the story across first.

"We did have one interesting call last night," Babsie said. "About five in the morning. A guy speaking in Russian. He talked for about two seconds."

"You're sure it was Russian?"

"I made a copy and played it over the phone for the FBI translator. I can't pronounce it, but I wrote it down for you." Babsie turned her notebook around for Eddie. The words in Russian were "Prishli mne kapustu." Eddie knew more Russian by ear than in writing. "The translator said it literally means 'Send me the cabbage.' She says it's what you say when someone owes you money."

Babsie handed him the extra tape.

"Somebody is playing games, Babsie. When I hear the voice on the tape, maybe I can figure it out. In the meantime, let's concentrate on finding Misha."

"You're being straight with us about the money?"

"I do not have Anatoly Lukin's money, Babsie. Or Yuri Borodenko's. Get a search warrant if you want."

"I believe you. Just don't get your hopes up about finding this Latvian kid. He's a corpse looking for a place to lie down. Let's start thinking outside the box. What about an old PD case? Think back. Some scumbag from your past who thinks he has a score to settle."

For two nights, Eddie had done little else but think about old cases. There were a hundred possibilities: guys he'd collared, guys he'd embarrassed or beaten up, those he'd screwed out of money, or their women. He couldn't even come up with a short list. The old faces all ran together. He'd been an equal-opportunity bastard.

"The only people I can think of who might have a reason to hurt me this bad are dead."

"I guess someone came back to life," she said.