I said. The man sitting across from me wasn’t buying it. He was a police detective, with the dour, cynical view of life that big-city cops get. “You’re in deep shit.” It was the second time he had characterized my situation that way. I was in an interrogation room in a police station on Centre Street. In police custody. Not of my own volition but under suspicion of a large number of vague charges. The fact that saving me from being murdered had blown a police surveillance particularly incensed him. This wasn’t the first time I’d been told by an art theft cop that I was in deep trouble. I should have taken being arrested again as just rolling with another punch, but beneath my brave smile my heart hammered and my knees shook. Emotionally I was torn between breaking out in sobs … and flying across the table to strangle my tormentor. “I have so many charges to file against you, it’s going to look like an indictment of the whole Soprano mob.” Michelangelo was the name of my interrogator.
