Event three was Gina's choice, and she chose the Christmas tree lot on Halsted and Thirty-first, which was run every December by a man named Augie Pucci out of a trailer with a space heater and a portable radio permanently tuned to WGN. The rules were simple: each of them would pick a tree, and whoever paid the lowest price for the better tree won.
Graham went first. He walked the rows of firs and spruces with his hands clasped behind his back like a general reviewing troops, and he selected a seven-foot Fraser fir with a perfect conical shape and a straight trunk and not a single bare patch, and he carried it to the trailer, where Augie looked at him, looked at his peacoat, looked at his glasses, and said, "Sixty dollars."
"Sixty dollars," Graham agreed, and reached for his wallet.
Gina put her hand on his arm.
"Wait in the car," she said.
"I don't have a car here. We took the bus."
"Then wait at the bus stop."
He did not wait at the bus stop. He stood twenty feet away, between a row of Scotch pines and a stack of wreaths, and watched with his mouth slightly open as Regina Castellano conducted what he would later describe to his secretary as the most ruthless negotiation he had witnessed in seven years of practicing law.