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street, looking for one.” He hung up. “Good luck, Mr. Fratelli. I don’t suppose we’ll be meeting again.” Stone leaned a little on that.
    “Yeah, right,” Fratelli said. He put some more hundreds on Stone’s desk and left.
    Stone’s private line rang, and he picked it up. “Hello?”
    “It’s Dino. You up for dinner tonight?”
    “Sure.”
    “Eight at Patroon?”
    “See you there.”

5
    Stone arrived at Patroon as Dino was getting out of his car, a large black SUV. He clapped his friend on the back. “No more town car?”
    “They stopped making them, and the department got these tanks to replace them.”
    A moment later, after a warm greeting from Patroon’s owner, Ken Aretzky, they were seated at their usual table. There was really no replacement for Elaine’s, without Elaine, but Patroon was serving pretty well.
    Drinks arrived without being ordered.
    “So where’s Viv?” Stone said, asking after Dino’s wife.
    “Working, where else? Mike Freeman keeps her busy.” Viv was a retired detective sergeant, now working for Strategic Services.
    “Oh, shit,” Stone said, “I forgot, I was supposed to be at Strategic Services an hour ago. Kate Lee is stopping by to get acquainted with the board.”
    “You want to leave?”
    “No, it’s too late, it was just for drinks.” Stone looked around to see if anyone was close enough to overhear them. “Can you keep a secret?”
    “You ask me that after all these years?”
    “You have a wife, now.”
    “So I can’t tell Viv whatever this is?”
    “Not a word—not until you see it in the papers, if you do.”
    “Okay, okay, unburden yourself, or you’ll explode.”
    “K. is going to run for president.”
    “President of what?”
    “Not so loud. The U.S.”
    “Can she do that?”
    “She’s a natural-born American citizen.”
    “But, I mean . . .”
    “I know what you mean, and the answer is yes, she can do that.”
    “But the primaries?”
    “She’s going to wait until the convention.”
    Dino gave that some thought. “Oh, I see, Will doesn’t think anybody will get a majority?”
    “Not on the first ballot.”
    “Sounds tricky.”
    “Only if someone pulls way ahead during the primaries, and the polls don’t show that happening.”
    Dino thought some more. “She’d make a terrific president.”
    “That’s what she said.”
    “Stone, can this work? Can she raise the money?”
    “She’s already raised twenty-one million: twenty other people and me.”
    “She can’t run on that.”
    “And each of the twenty-one has agreed to raise another twenty-five million.”
    Dino flinched. “Don’t look at
me
.”
    Menus arrived, and they ordered.
    “So,” Dino said, “what are you going to get?”
    “Get?”
    “For raising all this money. Ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s? Or will you have to settle for some banana republic?”
    “Nothing but the satisfaction of seeing Will Lee’s policies continued, and I expect Kate will have a lot of her own.”
    “What about the other twenty guys?”
    “Men and women. They can fend for themselves.”
    “Yeah, I guess they can.”
    “Something else came up.”
    “Is it a secret?”
    Stone thought about that. “Yes, I guess so. Attorney-client privilege is involved.”
    “Oh, the shyster’s seal of the confession.”
    “More or less. You remember that big heist at Kennedy, what, twenty-five years ago?”
    “Buono,” Dino said. “Eduardo Buono.”
    “What a memory!”
    “Who could forget a fifteen-million-dollar heist? And less than half of it recovered.” Dino took a swig of his scotch. “Hey, you didn’t find the money, did you?”
    “No, and I don’t know where it is, but someone with whom I have recently become acquainted has, ah, stumbled across some of it.”
    “Wait a minute,” Dino said, screwing up his forehead. “John Fratelli.”
    Stone gaped at him. “I didn’t say that,” he said, looking furtively around.
    “He got sprung a couple of days