“Tancred Palmieri was sitting in the Green Dolphin thinking about how best to dispose of a black diamond he’d stolen from a house on the Bridle Path.”
“A particular memory preoccupies me. A theater party in Santa Fe. I don’t know many people and walk to the back patio, where, in the porch light, two young actors are reciting lines from Shakespeare. Turning and seeing me standing at the open French doors, one of them goes down on his knee and bows to me.”
“Wielding an instrument onstage has the potential to elevate an ordinary person to the level of a deity.”
“There’s no absolute way of knowing how people smuggling began. But if you take into account that it’s possible to undertake such a task with just three people, it’s possible to go way back in human history. The only rewarding line in an otherwise useless book I read years ago was: The first tool man used was another man. So I don’t suppose it was a very long time before somebody put a price on that earliest tool and sold it to others.”