Chapter 4
Falco was capable.
He was standing at the alley mouth with his gun drawn when Petrov's man cocked the revolver behind me, and for one specific moment the geometry of the situation had a quality that was almost elegant, which was that the person everyone in the alley had underestimated was the only person in the alley who understood what the alley actually was.
I took Petrov's man down first because the revolver was the immediate problem and Petrov was the documentation I needed conscious and articulate. The man with the revolver had watched too many films and had developed the habit of cocking before pointing, which is cinematically satisfying and tactically generous to the person being pointed at, because cocking produces a sound that provides approximately three-quarters of a second of advance notice, and three-quarters of a second was considerably more than I required for the specific movement I made.
He hit the pavement in a way that would produce significant bruising and no permanent damage. I had been precise about this. Gerald's team needed him functional for the subsequent proceedings.
Petrov raised his hands.
The recording was running.
From the alley mouth, Carmine Falco said, very quietly: "You set the trap."
I looked at him over my shoulder. He was still holding the gun but it was no longer raised, because a man of Falco's operational experience understood, within approximately four seconds of watching what I had just done, that the gun was not going to resolve the situation in his favor and that there were therefore other considerations to weigh.
"No," I said. "I was the trap."
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The silence after that had the specific quality of a space in which several people are simultaneously revising very large assumptions.
Falco looked at the two men on the pavement. He looked at Petrov with his hands up. He looked at me in the pale blue waitress dress and the old army jacket with the recording equipment in it. He was calculating, the way men of his particular intelligence always calculated, and the calculation was producing an output that was becoming clearer to him with each additional second he spent looking at the alley.
