Service didn’t object and followed Scaffidi through the cavernous house. The man’s background was murky. A year ago Service had met him while he was investigating a case and the old man had taken to him. Rumor had it that he was a retired mobster—perhaps banished to the U.P.—but Tree had done some checking on the man and learned that he was a CPA who had done work for the mob, but was not a made man. At one time Scaffidi had been linked to Jimmy Hoffa’s legendary disappearance, but the FBI had never been able to find any evidence and eventually decided that the Mafia family in New Jersey had floated Scaffidi’s name as a red herring. The FBI told Tree that Scaffidi had gotten fed up after the New Jersey mob’s little game, closed his business and moved to the Upper Peninsula. Still, the old man always had three or four muscular young men around him, presumably his bodyguards.
The word was that Ralph Scaffidi could have been a world-class diplomat. He had a steel-trap mind and the demeanor of Mister Rogers.
Having reached the pond Service saw that Scaffidi had done more work on it, adding a sluice on both ends. Service could see a gravel bottom between the two sluices. There were large, dark shapes darting and jockeying for position on the gravel. The water level in the pond was usually seven or eight feet deep, but the level was down to three feet now.
Scaffidi handed Service a rod. “Five-weight. Try not to pick off the females,” he warned.
Service watched the fish. The females could be seen cleaning gravel, their sides flashing in the mid-morning light. The males were lined up behind them like cars in a freight train. Service saw that his host had tied a small orange yarn egg on the tippet, and added a couple of split shot to get the egg down.
Ralph Scaffidi bowed and smiled. “After you, Detective.”
His first cast was close, but the males darted out of the way of the egg bouncing along the bottom. His second cast was better and a male brookie swung over a foot and took the egg; Service lifted the rod and gave it a sharp snap to set the hook and the fish started to fight.
Scaffidi sat at a fancy lawn table and sipped espresso.
The brookie charged all over the place. It took ten minutes to bring it to the edge of the pond, extract the yarn egg, and release the fish with the gaudy orange belly and green vermiculations on its back. It was a wild fish, better than two pounds, not the sort that you often found anymore in U.P. waters.
Fish released, Service sat down and rubbed lemon peel around the rim of his small cup and tasted the bitter coffee.
“Nice?” Scaffidi asked.
“Terrific. Italian?”
The old man’s eyes twinkled. “I met a gentleman from El Salvador. He does this especially for me, which costs, but it’s worth it, right? What brings you over on such a beautiful September morning?”
“I heard that the global poaching of animal parts is second only to drugs in profitability. You know anything about that?”
Scaffidi made a face. “Scumbags makin’ a profit off endangered animals. You know that two of the world’s eight bear species are damned near extinct, with another on the brink? What’s that about? For money!”
“It’s true?”
The old man shrugged and slowly shook his head. “The Asian mobs are run by psychos. The families here, they don’t get involved.”
“But Asians don’t exactly blend into the Upper Peninsula.”
Scaffidi laughed. “They hire people who blend. This isn’t the business of the families’ personnel, you understand, but something done by punks and losers. The Asians got it organized down to the dime. Hunters acquire, sell to a middleman who, in turn, collects from several hunters and sells to a distributor on the coast. With bear populations dropping in Asia, the gangs have moved to North America. Most of them are in Canada and Alaska, but they work the other states too, if they can find the right deal.”
“What’s the right deal?”
Scaffidi smiled. “How about that brookie?”
“Beautiful fish.”
“Right. The fish are spawning, which makes them easy to get to. That’s the right deal, see. It always reduces to supply and demand. With all that September 11 crap, you got tougher gigs at the borders nowadays, am I right?”
Service nodded.
“Which means security is focused outward, not inward to the woods. They’re running around looking for Islamic terrorists. What better time to crank up business than when the opposition is looking elsewhere? I mean, you aren’t trying to ship nukes, am I right? We’re talking little stuff—galls, paws, teeth, claws. They don’t weigh anything and they don’t take up much space. Is this an academic tutorial or are you here on a specific case?”