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isn’t your real name,” he suggested.
    Tatien laughed softly and touched his voluminous beard. “As fictional as my whiskers.”
    “You’ve been in this game for a while, haven’t you?”
    Tatien nodded. “I have.”
    “You worked with Matt Mroz.”
    “I did that, yes.”
    “You okay with his being out of the game?”
    Tatien’s smile broadened. “I like that—instead of ‘dead.’ Very good. Yes, I am okay.”
    “How about your people over here? What about them?”
    Tatien shrugged. “‘My people.’ That is maybe not so true.”
    “That they’re your people or that they’re okay that Roz is gone?”
    “Yes to both: they are not mine, and they do not care.”
    Budney considered that. He liked this man, whatever he might be called. He seemed careful and smart, and he’d been quick to respond to Alan’s invitation to meet. He was also highly regarded in the business, although not by the moniker Didry, necessarily. That had been one of the most interesting things Alan had discovered—that “the Canadian” was most widely known simply as that, and not by any particular name.When they’d spoken by cell phone just a couple of days earlier, and this man had said, “I am Eugene Didry,” Alan had immediately suspected otherwise, and hadn’t cared. The Canadian was reputed to be The Man when it came to pharmaceuticals, and that’s exactly what Alan wanted to discuss with him.
    “Do you have any idea what percentage of his trade Roz did with you?” Alan asked.
    Tatien made an equivocal expression. “I knew he did many things.”
    “Twenty percent,” Budney asserted. “The rest was divided among weed, coke, meth, heroin, ecstasy, and crack, more or less, depending on availability and market demand. And he imported it from all over, from New York to Canada to Aroostook County.”
    Tatien didn’t respond, figuring there was some point to all this.
    “Any idea what his losses were to theft, busts, bad product, and everything else?”
    “You will tell me?” Tatien prompted with a smile.
    Alan rose from his seat and began pacing the room. “A full thirty-two percent. Incredibly sloppy. Half the time, he had no clue who had or was doing what.”
    “You are well informed.” Tatien had no doubt whatsoever by now that Budney had either had Matthew Mroz killed or had done it himself. The man’s tone of voice betrayed his pride and contempt. But Tatien found such hostility curious—for all of Mroz’s possible faults as a businessman, he still had been making an extremely good living in a literally cutthroat occupation. In some types of trade, profit margins of ten percentwere seen as exemplary; in a bad year, Mroz had to have been quintupling his outlay.
    Budney stopped in midstride and stared at his guest. “I
am
well informed. I researched every aspect of his operation, talked to the people who made it work. I knew it a hell of a lot better than he ever did. I also figured out what he was doing wrong, and I know how to make it into something he couldn’t have touched.”
    Tatien scratched an earlobe meditatively. “I am listening with interest.”
    Budney leaned forward slightly for emphasis, his hands on his hips. “You should be, ’cause I’d like to make you a key player instead of just another supplier. I believe that with your sources and my new distribution network, we can make Roz look like a sidewalk peddler, even in a backwoods, mosquito-filled, prehistoric swamp like Maine.”
    Tatien laughed, not only at the allusion, but at the sense of enthusiasm he was catching from this young man. For the first time in a long while, Georges Tatien thought he might enjoy himself once more.
    He spread his hands out to his sides, as if in surrender. “You have a captive audience.”

        CHAPTER 9        
    Lenny Chapman was at once angry and motivated. Shooting people on rooftops in Boston was bad enough, the standard joke about all the paperwork being only the half of it. This