by Justin Scott
“Somebody’s got to pay for it.”
A Morgan Guaranty vice president Bunker had introduced him to said, “I saw that piece in Christie’s last month. I wondered what lucky devil would get it. Very nice, Chris. Very, very nice.”
Even the cold-eyed Bunker was impressed. “Yet another reason to get richer sooner.”
Chris reported to Chryl and Victoria that it was working. “For a ten-thousand-buck desk the guy’s talking about syndicating a sixty-million-dollar condo. People want to believe.”
“Did he ask how old you are?”
Chris touched her mouth. “I said you two could vouch for me.”
Victoria sprawled on the leather ottoman and laid three lines of coke in the etched grooves of a gold thirties Dunhill cigarette case. She held it toward him.
He shook his head.
“Do you guys ever try sex without dope?”
Chryl peeled off her designer jeans, stepped out of her panties, and pressed a button that simultaneously closed the drapes and lowered the bed. “Chris, you’re a credit to your gender, but often nobody’s home. Something’s in your head. So we put something in ours.”
“What do you mean?”
Their ménage dated from the night they celebrated finishing the office. They had taken a sort of possession of him, like a mutual Christmas gift, and the several years they had on him often made him feel like a kid. He watched Victoria squirm out of her slacks and tried to concentrate on saying, “Hey, I resent that. I really like you. I’m half in love with both of you.”
Chryl touched another switch and the light turned golden, flickering on her shapely legs as she crossed the carpet and stretched over the ottoman with a silver straw.
“There are times I don’t know where one of you begins and the other ends.”
Victoria smiled over her shoulder. “Don’t think we re complaining. We’re quite capable of filling in the spaces. We also like you dearly.”
“I get lost with you.”
Victoria looked unusually serious and said quietly, “I wish that were true, Chris. We’d make you a bigamist. But you’re lost in something else.”
For fiery moments, time disappeared with them, and memory dissolved. Their first night he had lain spent, unable to remember why he had gone to England. But the next day, when they showed the office to their parents, he had ached that these well-dressed strangers should see what his father would have loved.
7
CHAPTER
He began to revel in his work, moving surely and swiftly again, as when he first took over his father’s building, fueled by the larger goal. Now everything he did served the single purpose of creating wealth and power to destroy the Mafia.
Uncle Vinnie offered to bid partners for a Newark Airport runway contract if Chris would front the project. Chris suspected Vinnie was holding hands with somebody in the Port Authority who had foreknowledge of the bids, but he didn’t ask because he needed the money. He bid what Vinnie told him; Taglione Concrete undercut the local competition and landed the contract.
He rescued another half-built derelict on upper Broadway for a song, and he continued scouting Columbus Avenue properties between Lincoln Center and Seventy-second Street. When his accountant iterated the banker’s contention that it was “a wasteland,” he extended the search to Eighty-sixth Street.
“I have heard,” Henry Bunker complained when Chris hit him up for mortgage money, “that the one decent restaurant above Seventy-second Street maintains an armored car for its customers’ convenience.”
“How about another walk?”
After a twenty-minute walk from Bunker’s Sixth Avenue office, and an excellent meal, Chris showed him the bill. “Expensive restaurants mean expensive apartments. The waitress says the armored car’s in the shop for reloading, but I want to show you something.”
He led Bunker up grim-looking blocks of Columbus to a basement bar he had discovered on Eighty-sixth Street. The bar was called Strykers, and Chico Hamilton was playing that night. Bunker, who regretted admitting to Chris that he had a severe weakness for jazz, agreed to stay for a few beers. After three sets he was making noises about getting up in the morning, when Chet Baker walked in with his trumpet.
Baker played “The Thrill Is Gone.” Then he put down his instrument and sang it. And Henry Bunker, wiping his eyes and complaining about the cigarette smoke, promised to review Taggart Construction’s proposal for a Columbus Avenue apartment tower.
On the way out they ran into a black narcotics detective-sergeant Chris knew who invited them to a narc party in a Village loft. The detective shared a bottle of Southern Comfort she had in her purse in the cab downtown, and they landed thoroughly ripped on Washington Street at two o’clock in the morning. Upstairs was wall-to-wall cops—NYPD, DEA, Treasury. Taggart introduced Bunker to some friends. Suddenly he stared at a group laughing loudly.
“What’s the matter?” asked Bunker.
“Want to meet my brother?”
Tony had a beer bottle in his hand and a sharp grin on his face. He said something and four cops cracked up. When Chris approached him, his grin faded and he looked as astonished as Chris had felt. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“What about you?”
“I’m a guest of that lady over there. This here’s Bunker, my banker. Bunker, meet Tony Taglione, first-class prosecutor on the make and number one brother.”
Later, when they were alone in an all-night coffee shop on West Fourth, he asked Tony, “Are you on a case with these guys?”
“Cops bring their investigations to prosecutors they want to work with,” Tony said. “I’m making friends.”
“Drugs?”
“Drugs make the best cases. The wise guys get crazy around the money. And freaked by the prison terms.”
From the night they bumped into each other wooing the cops, Christopher Taggart followed his brother’s law career with wary fascination. Tony, it seemed, was advancing in a sort of legal parallel with Chris’s his own march for revenge. Congressman Costanza had helped get him the summer internship in the Southern District U.S. Attorney’s Office and Tony had been asked back the next summer. By that time he had transferred from Harvard to Columbia Law School, claiming he wanted to be near the New York action. The next summer he had interned with the public defender. He worked for the Manhattan DA, ground out good enough grades to clerk for a federal judge, a former crusading organized-crime prosecutor, passed the New York Bar examination, and then landed a job with the Justice Department in Washington.
For two years the brothers met at Christmas and weddings and funerals. Then one day Tony telephoned from Washington, as excited as Chris had ever heard him, and announced he was coming back to New York.
“Gonna work for me, Bro?”
“No way! Criminal Division of the Southern District. I want you to come to my swearing-in.”
Taggart managed to stammer congratulations, but when he hung up the telephone his heart was pounding. He went to the window. As usual, Chryl and Victoria had moved his office to the building he was currently erecting. Madison Avenue was streaked cement-gray a hundred feet in both directions from the gate. His heart was still going like a jackhammer. He saw a dangerous opportunity, risky as hell, but too good to resist.
He was clear in his conscience that he had never pushed Tony in this direction, that his brother had arrived in the U.S. Attorney’s office of his own free will. But he had promised his father he would take care of him, so he said, the morning of Tony’s swearing-in, “Before you go and pledge your life away, I’m asking you again—please join up with me as general counsel and a full partner in Taggart Construction.”
Tony looked at him with fiery eyes.
“Four hundred grand a year,” Taggart persisted. “Hot and cold running secretaries. We’ll make a great team, man.”
“No! You’ve asked me before and I’ve told you before, I don’t want corporate practice. I’m a prosecutor.”
“S
till gunning for the Mafia?”
“Don’t ask me again.”
“I promise,” said Taggart. He threw his arm around Tony’s shoulders and they went upstairs to the executive floor for photographs with the U.S. Attorney.
Taggart had met Arthur Finch at the last Al Smith dinner and had been impressed. Scion of an old New York railroad family, Finch had ignored the careers of foundation directorships, Foreign Service, or Ivy League academia traditionally favored by inheritors of huge private incomes. And though he looked like a clubman in his staid Brooks Brothers suits and dull neckties, and spoke in a voice that evoked elite boarding schools, he had waded into government lawyering with a steely determination the equal of any striving Italian or Irishman. The youthful prosecutor regarded himself as conservator of his office’s eighty-year-old tradition of disinterested law enforcement. He was famous for icily correct rages when confronted by incompetence, laziness, or any hint of political subversion of the legal process. He was also, persistent rumor had it, running like a cheetah for governor of New York State.
Finch administered Tony’s oath of office before a hundred assistants in the office library. Taggart’s eyes filled as Tony pledged to uphold the United States Constitution and the laws of the land. The casual gathering of the prosecutors to welcome another to their band was strangely moving, but the source of his emotion was a sudden fantastic vision of his father alive beside him, wearing his blue meeting suit and a broad grin and stage-whispering proudly that from now on they had better be damned careful talking business around the breakfast table.
Finch announced that Tony would be specializing in organized crime business extortion, then joked, with a wink at Taggart, that any plans to convert the U.S. Attorney’s St. Andrews Square offices to a high-rise condominium had to be cleared by Washington.
Chris saw Tony’s face mask up and the mark his ring had gouged on his cheek turn angry red. Tony had long ago put his inherited share of the company in the blind trust required of public servants, but Christopher Taggart had become too flamboyant a New York character for his name change to distance Taggart Construction from Tony Taglione. The delicious irony was that from the day he took his first job with the Justice Department, few wise guys dared demand a payoff from Tony Taglione’s brother.
They went down to Tony’s new office. It was cluttered with cartons of books, his backpack, and the former occupant’s desk, chairs, and telephone. Tony told his paralegal assistant he would greatly appreciate a typewriter before lunch, and turned to Chris. “Lunch is out. I have to get to work.”
Taggart handed him a gold-wrapped package he had stashed with the receptionist. “Happy new job.”
“Since I’m on the public payroll, I gotta be careful what I accept from rich businessmen.” It sounded like a joke, so Chris kidded back dutifully, “If you report it on your income tax, it’s going to knock you into another bracket. Go on, open it.”
Tentatively, Tony removed the wrapping and opened the box, revealing a dark leather briefcase with solid gold corners. He turned it slowly in his hands.
“I figured it’s time you stop carrying a backpack,” Chris said. He pointed out the combination locks and Tony’s initials, A.M.T, embossed in gold. “The hinges suck, like on all of them, but Saks’ll fix ’em. Do you like it?”
Tony set it on his desk, crossed his arms, and stared. “I’ll look like a defense counsel.”
“Look inside.”
“Cheri and Vicky pick it out?”
“I did.”
“Seems more their style.”
Stung, Taggart said, “Hey, what do you have against Chryl and Victoria?”
“Nothing.”
“You hit on every other girl I had since I was twelve,” he said heatedly. “Why won’t you even talk to them?”
“I don’t do that stuff anymore,” Tony replied seriously. He startled Chris by putting a hand on his arm. “Chris, I’m not as crazy as I used to be.”
“If anyone in this family is crazy it’s me, not you.”
“Chris, they all see me straight arrow, but you know. Come on, Bro, we’ve been places.”
It was as intimate an exchange as they had shared since the night of their father’s funeral, six years ago, and Chris shook his head in disbelief. Tony was such an innocent—Kathleen Taggart’s altar boy son—thinking that their Greenpoint escapade and the occasional Queens Boulevard drag race was heavy-duty sin.
“But I’m over that,” Tony continued earnestly. “Now when I have to prove something to myself I do it right here at this desk and in that courthouse across the plaza. Kicking criminal ass beats stealing my little brother’s girlfriends.”
Tony took his stunned silence for argument. “Bro, it doesn’t matter anymore that you’re bigger than me now, or Pop liked you better, or I didn’t want the business. Okay? We have our own lives. Our own women.”
“Pop didn’t—”
“Drop it. Please. Pop’s not here to defend himself and you can’t speak for him.”
“Okay. But would you do me one favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Try to be nice to Chryl and Victoria? Whatever you think, they are magical women and they’re very, very important to me. Like, I would have really liked to bring them here today.”
Tony flashed a teasing grin that flung him back to childhood. “Do they switch mother and playmate roles? I mean who makes breakfast and who stays in bed?”
“Is rapping a brand-new Assistant United States Attorney in the mouth against federal or city law?”
“God’s law.” Tony glanced at his watch. “Listen, this is a real nice briefcase, but I gotta get to work.”
“Not yet.” Chris shut Tony’s door and locked it. “Open the briefcase, Bro. Look inside.”
Tony gave him a puzzled look and shrugged. The catches released with a soft click.
“Calfskin, so wrap your lunch in plastic. The salesguy said they taught you at law school what to put in the pockets. See the secret compartment?”
Tony traced a line of stitching that rimmed the inside of the lid. His finger went unerringly to the release, the maker’s seal, and it popped open.
“How the hell did you figure that?”
“I’m a sneaky guy. What’s this?” Tony pulled a manila envelope from the compartment.
“Your real gift. Check it out.”
Tony opened the envelope and spread a half-dozen sheets of typed paper on his desk. “What is this?”
“Your first case.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Names.”
“I can see that.”
“With addresses and phone numbers.”
“Who are these people?”
“Guys in the Concrete Workers and the Teamsters who’ve been hitting contractors for payoffs and kickbacks; and contractors who’re buying sweetheart contracts.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“And they’re hitting on the union pension funds.”
“I said, Where’d you get it?”
“I’m around. I hear stuff.”
“Rumors.”
“It’s better than rumors. I hear one thing, I hear another. I put a few pieces together. Sometimes they add up.” He picked up the last sheet of paper. “See this?”
“What is it?”
“Codes.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. But this guy, I’m told, imports heroin.”
“This says anchovies.”
“Look who he sells the anchovies to.”
Tony turned the page. “Vitelli Pasta ’n’ Things. Atlantic Avenue.”
“Owned, I hear, by a guy named Eddie Rizzolo.”
Tony reached for the phone. “Let’s sit down with my boss.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“Keep me out of it.”
“I can’t just take this.”
“Why not?”
“I have to tell the Crim D
iv chief where I’m getting it.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You’re telling me the rules?”
“Wait a minute,” said Chris. “Just hold it a second.” Even if the chief of the Criminal Division didn’t throw him out on his ear, his plan to betray certain mobsters to the U.S. Attorney required a degree of secrecy that only Tony could supply him. “What if I were a street hood who you turned stoolie? You think I’d risk talking to more than just you? What would you do if I said, ‘I ain’t talking to no boss.’ You must have some method of protecting a confidential informant.”
“‘Deep Throat,’” Tony admitted. “No attribution, no testimony.”
“Call me your Deep Throat. If I hear anything else, I’ll inform you, and only you. In the meantime, maybe you can get probable cause on this. Maybe get a wire up.”
“Kind of cozy with the vernacular, aren’t you?” Tony asked shrewdly, and Taggart realized he had gotten to him just in time. Two years tougher and his brother wouldn’t buy it.
“Treat this like when an agent brings you a case. All you have to ask is, ‘How can I make a case?’”
Tony looked at the door. “Chris.”
“What’s the matter? I’m a legitimate source. You can vouch for me if they ask. Tell ’em you’ve known me your whole life. I’m sure there are plenty other noncriminals who pass information to your office.”
“But usually with a reason. Like they want to get even or knock off a competitor. Or they want what someone has.”
“Clowns like these killed Pop.”
“I remember.”
“So I’m getting even. What’s the matter with that?”
Tony divided the papers into two piles, crossed his arms, and stared at them as he had at the briefcase. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter. The construction stuff is one thing. I imagine you get hit for payoffs. I pray to God you’re not paying them. But I understand that you know who’s crooked and who’s straight.”
“I know who’s crooked,” Taggart agreed with a smile.
“But this dope stuff.” Tony picked up a typewritten sheet. “This is like an agent affidavit. How do you know this?”
