by Justin Scott
Taggart laughed. “Is that a yes?”
“Your terms sound generous, but you’re asking a lot back.... My family is very fortunate to put such a powerful friend in our debt.”
Taggart smiled at the old-fashioned Sicilian belief and thrust out his hand. Gravely she slipped her fine and pliant fingers between his. He held them for a moment, savoring the victory. He had won an army.
11
CHAPTER
On a warm June night, two weeks after returning from Ireland, Taggart met Reggie high atop the bare steel of the Taggart Spire to assess their response to the heroin shortage. Work lights illuminated the columns and headers that framed the space Taggart had chosen for his triplex penthouse, and the great derricks stood silent against the stars. Below and beyond, New York sprawled, its lights a dense carpet in the center, thinning gradually north and west and south into the suburbs. Easterly they stopped abruptly at the dark wall of the sea. Jets descended on the edges and long trains flowed in measured procession.
Taggart walked into the wind; Reggie trailed like a cat, reporting on feelers extended into the Cirillos’ heroin pipeline. Taggart listened with a heady feeling that for each light scattered in their millions there was a switch that he and he alone could turn on or off as he pleased. For in the dark between the lights, the men and women of his Shadow Mafia were making temptingly generous overtures to the hard-pressed Cirillo drug traffickers.
Among them, Taggart and Reggie decided that night, a Californian named Ronnie Wald looked best.
“We’re talking pure,” Ronnie Wald told the Cirillo soldiers sent to check him out. “Pure and plentiful.”
Reggie Rand’s agents had discovered the slick West Coast dude in a California prison. Essentially a con man, and a good actor as any con man had to be, Wald was tough enough to survive fourteen of his twenty-eight years inside. He wore three broad rings on his right hand, which served as knuckles in a pinch, and was good with the knife he carried in his alligator boot.
The Cirillo soldiers didn’t like him, his suntan, his fancy boots, or his bleached jeans, and didn’t trust him. But the street said he had stuff to sell in heavy-hitter quantity.
“Ninety-four point eight percent. Run it through your box.” Wald opened his hand and flashed a generous sample in a baggie. “If you like it, we can talk numbers.”
The Cirillos recoiled. The Strikeforce, the DEA, the Federal Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Taskforce, the NYPD and State Police, half the fucking world, were busting wholesalers left and right, and this Wald clown was flaunting heroin in broad daylight like it was coke in a pitch-dark disco and they were a couple of girls who’d fuck for it.
They looked up and down the West Side block for the fourth time in a minute. It was a hot, sticky evening; the Puerto Ricans were drinking beer on the stoops and young executives were walking home with paper bags of takeout food and their jackets slung over their shoulders. Half the buildings on the block were being renovated and the gaping windows and lattice scaffolding made a thousand hiding places for Feds with binoculars and gun mikes.
“Let’s go for a ride.”
Wald shrugged.“If you got the time, I got the time.”
They got in the Cirillos’ car, a rented T-bird, and headed up Amsterdam, outta there before the Puerto Ricans and junior executives whipped out machine guns and FBI badges. Wald took his bag out again and dangled it like he was pushing Carvel flavors. “This’ll stand forty. You know?”
“I know how to cut junk.”
“So what’s your problem?”
The soldiers exchanged looks. The one not driving said, “I’m gonna pat you for a wire.”
Wald showed his teeth. “You can’t be too careful.” He leaned forward while one of them hung over the seat and frisked his back and waist and legs. When he was done, Wald dropped the baggie on the front seat. “Check it out. Meet me at a Hundred-fourth and Broadway tomorrow.”
“If it’s good.”
“If it’s good,” Wald mimicked amiably. “Listen, my men, you better get used to dealing with class.” He got out and walked away, glad to put space between him and the dope; Reggie’s guarantee that the street he had met the Cirillos on was free of cops had ended when he got in their car.
“Gotta be a Fed,” was the Cirillo reaction.
Wald’s sample checked through the hot box at ninety-four point eight on the nose. The Cirillo soldiers discussed Wald and his dope with their capo, who relayed the information in veiled terms to Mikey Cirillo. Crazy Mikey drove around Manhattan half the night, cruising the clubs, worrying. Even the heroin’s purity seemed damning. If Wald was a Fed, wouldn’t he supply a top sample? On the other hand, Wald’s name had popped up in other deals and no one yet had a bad word for the prick. What it came down to, Mikey knew, was he needed product. The whole fabric of supply was falling apart like a rotten towel, and his distributors were looking elsewhere. He telephoned the capo: “Keep going.”
“Keep going” meant find out how much Wald could deliver. And if it all hit the fan and the capo got caught and the Feds waved twenty years in his face, what could he testify? Crazy Mikey Cirillo said, “Keep going”? Maybe his smart brother, Nicky, should have been this careful.
Taggart and Reggie concluded that Wald had tapped a direct line through the Cirillo insulation, which just might lead to Mikey Cirillo himself. While others continued courting Cirillos, they decided to let Wald sell five kilos of heroin at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a kilo, and repeat the sale in a few days.
Then the Cirillos soldiers asked Wald if he could supply larger amounts.
“Five keys a pop is plenty private enterprise for me, thank you. My boss hears I’m diddling around with these little side deals and I’m in trouble.”
The Cirillo soldiers looked at each other. “Side deals?”
“Hey, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean he doesn’t know I did it. But enough’s enough.”
“We’d like to meet this guy.”
Wald laughed. “Forget it.”
“Well, maybe my boss would like to meet him.”
“If your boss can buy fifty keys a pop, you send him around.”
“Tomorrow.”
Wald looked surprised.
“Tomorrow,” the soldier repeated. Who the hell did Wald think the Cirillos were?
“I’ll see what I can do. Riverside and a Hundred-sixth.”
Their capo was wary and insisted on cruising the meeting spot for an hour ahead of time. He didn’t like the spot. It was a busy intersection at the wide junction of 106th, Riverside Drive, and a service road. Tough to keep track of the traffic and sidewalks and the park. He said, “Drop me off at Broadway. Pick them up, make sure they got no tail, then come back for me.”
“What if they won’t come?”
“Fuck ’em. This looks like a setup. Don’t say anything stupid. And if he has stuff with him, leave.”
The Cirillo soldiers dropped their boss on Broadway and drove back to Riverside. Wald was waiting, “Where’s your guy?” he asked.
“Where’s yours?”
“Waiting for us.” Wald waved up a cab. “We figured you for this paranoid shit.”
Reggie Rand stepped out of the cab wearing light slacks, a shirt unbuttoned down his hairless chest, a gold chain, sunglasses, and a gray-flecked beard. He slipped into the Cirillo car, too quickly for a photograph. Wald climbed in front. The soldier floored it and raced up Riverside on the yellows, scattering pedestrians.
Wald said, “You’re gonna get a ticket.”
“Funny.” He doubled back and picked up his capo on Broadway. The capo got in back next to Reggie. “Pull onto a side street,” he told the driver. “Check ’em out for wires.”
“Wait,” said Reggie.
“What?”
“I said wait.”
Shortly after he had joined up with Christopher Taggart, he had studied with one of the New York theater’s top voice coaches to call up a flat American accent on occas
ions like this. “Let’s shake hands hello first.”
He extended his hand. The capo took it warily, trying to probe his sunglasses with his glittering black eyes. Reggie smiled. The whole purpose of this meeting, and of the transactions to follow, was to impress the Cirillo hierarchy with his ability to import heroin on the top level. If this capo didn’t eventually lead Taggart to Crazy Mikey, the whole scheme was a waste.
“Okay. Frisk us and get it over with.”
The capo patted him down thoroughly. When he found the gun on his ankle, Reggie said, “Look, but don’t touch.”
“Mine’s clean too,” said the soldier at the wheel.
“Drive.”
“How much do you want?” Reggie asked bluntly.
“Huh?”
“How much do you want to buy? What quantity?”
“Fifty... uh ... units.”
“Sir. This is your car and you’ve taken the liberty of frisking me. Do me the courtesy of saying kilos.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Stop the car. Stop it, I said!” It eased to the curb at 152nd Street. “Would you be more comfortable if we walk around the block? Just the two of us?”
The capo nodded.
“Have your man follow. This neighborhood’s a bitch.”
They started down the steep slope to Riverside, trailed by the car. They walked a block, and finally, as they trudged back to Broadway, the Cirillo capo admitted that he wanted to buy fifty kilos of heroin.
At the corner, Reggie said, “Excellent. Come up with six million two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars and it’s yours.”
“We gotta work out a consignment deal. A third down?”
“I don’t mean to sound rude, but consignment is for friends, and I don’t even know you.”
“Who the fuck are you to say you don’t know me? You know who I represent. Who are you?”
“I’m a man with fifty kilos whenever you can pay for it, sir. Good evening.” He signaled Wald, aware that England had crept tartly into his voice. The Cirillo capo did not appear to notice.
“Hold it. For cash? Four million.”
“At one twenty-five a kilo you’ve already got your break.”
“Four and a half million.”
Reggie pretended to ponder the offer. “Can you save me laundry bills?”
“Bearer bonds.”
“Five million in bearer bonds. Have your chap work it out with mine.”
The capo blinked and Reggie concealed a smile. Considering the terrible shortage on the street, both the price and, equally important, the quantity were golden. The Cirillos had reason to rejoice.
The next afternoon, Wald and the Cirillo soldier checked in separately to the Palace Hotel carrying identical Lark suitcases. In Wald’s room the Cirillo soldier set up a portable lab in the bathroom, spooned random samples of the fifty kilos from Taggart’s stockpile, and heated them in test tubes. The heroin melted at 230 degrees and remained white, indicating it was at least 90 percent pure. When he signaled that he was satisfied, Wald scrutinized the stolen bearer bonds under infrared and ultraviolet light and, when he was satisfied, counted the negotiable paper with the fastest hands the soldier had seen outside Atlantic City.
That same night a Nigerian United Nations envoy in Reggie’s pay delivered the bearer bonds in his diplomatic pouch to Switzerland, where Taggart’s full system of international contacts went into play.
The diplomat turned the bearer bonds over to a broker who sold them as previously instructed and delivered the proceeds to an officer of Geneva’s Union Bank with instructions to deposit them to various accounts. Upon confirming receipt of those deposits, a Chinese heroin distributor with Dutch citizenship—a member of the Triad, Green Pangs—arranged for three hundred kilos of processed Burmese heroin to be released at a remote landing field near the Thai border in the Golden Triangle.
A Thai air taxi brought it to Bangkok airport, where it docked alongside an AirVac twin-jet air ambulance diverted from a legitimate medical run. Resuming its legitimate journey, the AirVac plane picked up a Mobil executive who had broken his back on an Indonesian oil rig and flew the injured man to American facilities in the Philippines.
AirVac was owned by a consortium of American corporations based in Luxembourg and controlled by Euroland, a real estate company held, through a string of holding companies, by Christopher Taggart. Taggart had bought the ambulance business secretly when the recession of’83 had sharply reduced the market for extremely expensive corporate-executive emergency medical care. Routinely engaged in legitimate medical evacuations, the silver jets with the green cross on the tail were a common sight in the private aviation sections of major airports. No one bothered them other than to ascertain that hospital-bound patients weren’t carrying plague, and they crossed borders with a minimum of customs inspection. Thus had Helen Rizzolo been smuggled out of Newark Airport disguised as a rich Belgian in a coma and brought into Ireland as an oil executive injured in a North Sea drilling accident.
In Manila, a fresh crew, ignorant of the jet’s hidden cargo, continued east with a New York executive in the glove trade who had been shot in a brothel. In New York the jet was visited briefly at Newark Airport by Reggie Rand, a director of AirVac Holding, who left with a panel truck full of heroin sealed in body bags worth hundreds of millions to Crazy Mikey Cirillo.
12
CHAPTER
Visions—The Club, on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills, was an expensively redecorated movie theater with chairs in the balcony, a main dance floor of glass, and a second showcase dance floor on the raised stage. Taggart paid twenty bucks at the door and bought a five-dollar beer at a glass bar which was filled with water and goldfish and changed colors with the lights. A hot-looking joint, yet for this space and the money spent, Chryl and Victoria, who kept threatening to design a club, could have done a knockout.
It was early and the place was overrun with women who got in for half price before eleven. He danced with several who asked him to, while he located the peephole where the owner kept an eye on the action. Taggart traced it to her office, guarded by a well-dressed bouncer in a silk shirt and heavy gold chain, the kind which, Reggie said, had a weak link to break away in case somebody made the mistake of fighting the guy.
“Can I help you?”
“Tell Miss Rizzolo Chris is here.”
Her office was stark white, clean, and soundproof but for the insistent bass thumping through the wall. As the bouncer ushered him in, Helen stood up behind a table desk, which was cocked toward the smoked-glass window Taggart had spotted over the music station. She wore tight jeans and a shimmering white blouse and spike heels. Taggart wanted to tell her she had beautiful feet, but the alarm bells that had gone off in his head the moment he entered the club were clamoring that he was playing with fire.
“Come in, Chris. With you in a minute. That’s okay, Sal. Thanks.”
Sal backed out and shut the door, and she said, astonished, “What are you doing here?” She gave no sign whether she had seen him at the bar.
“You said we had to find a better way to meet.”
“I’ve been meeting with Reggie for a month. I thought that was the deal. What’s happening?”
Acutely uncomfortable wherever a tap could be installed, he asked, “Is the room clean?”
“It is and you know it.”
“What do you mean, I know it?”
“I found out who Reggie had among my people.”
“Reggie said I shouldn’t come,” Taggart replied with a smile, doubting she had found all of Reggie’s spies.
“Like another beer?”
“No, thanks. We have to talk, but not here.”
“Where should I meet you?”
He felt lightheaded and wanted to show off. “Park and Fifty-sixth. I’ll be at the main gate.”
“I’ll be in a cab.”
Taggart turned to leave. “Nice-looking club.”
“It’s okay.”
He felt her eyes on him as he crossed the dance floor. His hands were shaking. This was crazy, but he couldn’t help it— or didn’t want to. He felt like he was back in school, romping around after a pretty girl the major thing on his mind.
When she got out of the cab at the Taggart Spire, he led her into the dark work site and aboard a freight hoist. “Afraid of heights ?”
“No.”
The lights blossomed like a flower the higher the hoist rose. At the top, Taggart took her arm and walked her to the edge of the plank floor. Overhead, the derricks soared, enormous dark Vs against the sky. She looked around as if she liked it, and he was glad he had brought her.
Taggart stroked a steel column. “This is a dinosaur. They’ll all be cement soon.”
“What did you want to talk about?”
“Are your brothers still buying it?”
Helen hesitated and Taggart tensed. He needed them desperately. “Are they?” he repeated. “Reggie says he’s not sure.” She looked out at the lights. It was a month since Taggart’s people had flown her back from Ireland, but she could still see the expression of astonished relief on Eddie’s face when she walked in the front door, trailed by the FBI agents who had been waiting outside. Eddie threw them out, hugged her, and listened dubiously as she promised to explain everything after a bath. While she was still in the tub, they sent her mother to ask the big question: Had she been raped?
“No, Mom.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mom!”
“Then what happened? What did they want?”
“They had a message for Frank and Eddie.”
“That’s all?”
“Would you send them up, please? I have to talk to them.” Her mother changed the subject as only she could. “Do you have to work so much with your brothers ? Don’t you miss having a guy?”
“You mean a guy to get laid?”
“Helen, do you have to talk that way?”
“Yeah, Mom. I miss having a guy. I miss it a lot. You want to send up Eddie and Frank?”
