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Finley gestured Continue with his hand.

“The members of the city council’s Public Safety Committee,” Stein explained, “each get to appoint someone to a term on CPOC. The job pays eighty grand a year.”

“What! Eighty thousand dollars? For doing nothing? No wonder this city is about to be broke! What was it that the great Iron Lady said? ‘Patronage would seem all well and good—until you run out of someone else’s money.’ This is depressing. Beyond all else, you and I have to fight this culture of corruption, too? Try putting a happy face on that!”

Ed Stein grinned. He liked Finley, and especially admired his solid, fiscally responsible viewpoints. The fact that Finley voiced them was hardly surprising—Finley after all was a Master of Business Administration graduate of Penn’s prestigious Wharton School—but what usually caught people off-guard was the flamboyant manner with which he expressed them.

Stein said, “What Maggie Thatcher said was: ‘The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money’ . . .”

“Whatever. Close enough.”

“. . . But, yeah, agreed. Your point’s painfully valid.”

He looked back at his laptop.

“Damn. Cross is in his last year on CPOC. Which explains why he’s now chairman. It always goes to the member who’s in their fifth year.”

“You know,” Finley said, “final year or not, it still would be very embarrassing to lose midterm such a prestigious position. It could adversely affect possible future income, including other patronage positions.”

“Yeah, that and the eighty grand right now. The trick is first getting Badde to agree to put pressure on Cross, then for Cross to back off. If Cross doesn’t, the challenge becomes getting Badde to force Cross’s resignation. I don’t think Badde actually has the power to relieve him.”

Stein picked up the receiver, flipped through a phone directory of City Hall offices, found the number, and then started to punch it in. Then he said, “Damn it! I forgot it’s Saturday!” He put the receiver down and looked at Finley. “Badde’s not going to be in his office.”

“I hear he’s hardly ever in City Hall,” Finley said as he dug his cell phone from the pocket of his bright green sweater, “no matter which day it is.”

Finley tapped on its screen, then put the phone to his ear.

“Constantine? James Finley. How are you? . . . And a Merry Christmas to you! Listen, I need a fast favor. Can you please share with me our dear friend Rapp Badde’s cell number?” Finley paused, then laughed loudly, and after a moment went on, “Yes, that was both terribly unintentional and possibly prescient. And, for the record, you know I don’t embrace the ‘dear friend’ part, either. Anyway, I seem to have lost his cell phone number, if I ever had it.”

Finley reached across the desk, grabbed a pen, flipped to a blank page on Stein’s legal pad, and then jotted “Rapp Badde cell” and a ten-digit number. Stein noted that he’d done it so swiftly and in a perfect penmanship that could only be described as elegant.

“Thank you,” Finley said. “See you soon, Con.”

“Con”? Stein thought.

He said, “May I ask who’s Constantine?”

“Constantine Christofi,” Finley said, gently tucking his phone back in his sweater pocket. “He’s in your line of work—a lawyer—but in commercial property development and marketing. He’s truly a dear old friend.”

“How is it that he had—and you knew he had—Badde’s cell . . . cellular number?” Stein then chuckled. “Although I wouldn’t mind if it actually was a prison cell number.”

“That snake in the grass is rather adept at pissing people off, isn’t he? A classic example of an equal opportunity offender.”

“I’m not in any way trying to excuse him,” Stein said, “but he does come about it honestly, for lack of a better word. The entire city council is pretty much that way. Rapp’s simply had a head start at perfecting it having learned from his father.”

—

City Councilman (At Large) H. Rapp Badde Jr. was the thirty-two-year-old son of Horatio R. Badde Sr., a onetime South Philly barber who had also served on the city council before being elected mayor of the City of Philadelphia.

The younger Badde, who saw himself moving up in political office in a similar manner, could be at turns arrogant and charismatic. He carried on the elder’s tradition of an above-reproach attitude, including the fevered application of deny-and-spin when confronted with anything that might appear unseemly.

Learning that skill at the master’s feet had come in handy months earlier, when the bow-tied politician had been spotted on the tiny island of Bermuda. The fact that the usually publicity-happy Rapp Badde had been there attending a conference on—of all things in such a place—urban renewal hadn’t been his biggest problem. What had set his deny-and-spin into high gear had been the photographs of him that had been leaked to the local media back home. Apparently someone had recognized Badde and snapped a series of images of him on the beach in a compromising position with his gorgeous twenty-five-year-old executive assistant.

That proved to be a bit much to swallow for even Philadelphia’s tough-skinned taxpayers—not to mention Badde’s wife of seven years. There was outrage. At least at first.

Like his father, Rapp Badde managed once again to deflect his detractors.

—