by Justin Scott
She could have added, but didn’t because she didn’t want to make her mother miserable, that she couldn’t have a straight guy because her life would be secret from him, and she couldn’t have a rackets guy because he would try to take it away from her.
Her brothers trooped into her bedroom, closed the door, and stood around the bed looking very uncomfortable, as she intended them to. She had set the stage, propped up against the pillows in a fluffy bed jacket, sipping a glass of white wine. “What happened?”
“Have you swept the house?”
“This morning, like always. No bugs. What happened? Who grabbed you?”
“The whole thing was a setup. They just wanted to talk.”
“Talk?” Eddie exploded. “They grab a girl off the street to talk?”
“Who are they?” Frank asked quietly.
Taggart had suggested an explanation. Helen modified it, hoping that a promise of independence linked to an opportunity to destroy the Cirillos would prove so tempting to Eddie and Frank that they would accept dealing with people they didn’t know. She said, “You know what the Italian police are doing to the Sicilians.”
“I know they got a big guy to squeal.”
“And what the Sicilians are doing to each other.”
“They’re killing each other, just like the Cirillos are killing us. What does it have to do with who the fuck snatched you?”
“There’s a new group of Sicilians who survived. They’re getting out of Italy and going international. They’re setting up the money in Switzerland and Luxembourg. They’re recruiting the best from each country to join them. Italy, France, England, Jamaica, Canada, the United States.”
“Recruiting?” Eddie asked belligerently. “Who the fuck they think they are?”
“The future.” She held his gaze until he looked away. “They don’t trust the Cirillos. They want us to take New York.”
“Tomorrow soon enough?” Frank asked.
“They’ll back us with everything we need. Hitters. Weapons. Information on the cops. Laundry—”
“Dope?”
“No dope. There are better ways to make money.”
“What do they want from us?”
“Partners they can count on; a door into legit corporations; and a skim on the laundry. But first we have to get rid of the competition. That means the Cirillos and everybody else.”
“The rest will fall in line after the Cirillos,” said Frank. “Whad you tell ’em?”
“I told them I would tell you guys what they said. That’s all.”
“What if me and Frank don’t agree?”
She shrugged. “I guess no deal.”
“But why’d they grab you?” Eddie demanded. “Why not me or Frank?”
“They knew about me seeing Pop. I think they had contacts up in the jail. So they knew I knew the business.”
“I know the business, too. So does Frank.”
Helen hung her head and replied contritely. “But you weren’t dumb enough to go running every day. I was easy. Sorry.”
“It’s a trick,” said Eddie. “They’re Feds.”
“They took me to Ireland, Eddie. They kidnapped me. They’re not Feds.”
“It still could be a trick.”
Helen had leaped at that opening, ensuring that they would never deal with Christopher Taggart. “I’m the go-between. If it’s a trick, what do they get? Me. As long as I’m the only one who talks to them, they can’t touch you guys or the family.”
“I’m not letting my sister take a rap.”
“Nobody’s taking a rap. It’s no risk.”
Eddie made a face. “Pop wouldn’t buy that.”
“He already has,” she lied smoothly—her second lie about her father in less than a week. “I went to the jail before I came home. I ran the whole thing by him and he said, go for it. Eddie, don’t you see? These are smart people and they like the kind of tight family we are. We’re natural partners.”
“I know we’re good. What are they going to do for us?”
“We can tap into an international cash-and-information system,” she answered, embroidering the lie with details that might actually come to pass in the future when her family controlled New York. Christopher Taggart was right. Internationally organized activities were the future. “They’ve got scams going with government money that make heroin look like sand.”
“What kind of information?”
Helen had paused to sip from her glass. “They warned me the Strikeforce has a tap on the bus phone. They’re in the street vault on the corner.”
Eddie and Frank had liked that, had liked it a lot...
She turned now to Taggart. The wind drew a silken veil of black hair across her face. “They’re still going along, but they’re getting impatient. They want results damned soon.”
“Tomorrow,” he promised, gazing with satisfaction at the shimmering city.
“Tomorrow?”
“Do you know the new Cirillo Brooklyn underboss?”
“He tried to kill my brother Eddie.”
“Do you know Tommy Lucia?”
“I know he’s a Cirillo crew leader. A gambler. Number two to the Brooklyn underboss.”
“Tell your brother Eddie to make a deal with Tommy.”
“What kind of deal?”
“Ask him to join the Rizzolos.”
“You’re crazy. Tommy Lucia won’t talk to Eddie.”
“It would double your book and numbers.”
Helen considered it. “Yes, but only if Tommy Lucia brings the right people with him. What makes you think he’ll break with the Cirillos?”
“Can Eddie handle it?”
“Of course he can handle it,” she said sharply. And then, in softer tones, “I’ll stay close. We’ll be ready... How do I get down?”
“I’ll take you.”
In the elevator he asked, “Would you like a drink?”
“No, I gotta go.”
Taggart found her a cab, and she was gone.
Slightly dazed by his own audacity, he walked slowly toward Third Avenue to the Old Stand, where he could usually count on finding some off-duty cops from the Seventeenth Precinct. He stood at the bar, sipping an Irish coffee and thinking that he was glad he had done it.
Helen’s cab driver was not pleased with a fare to Canarsie, and less so when she told him to take the Belt Parkway. “Lady, we’re a lot better off going from Flatbush to Eastern Parkway to Rockaway Parkway.”
“I want to see the water,” she said, staring out the window and ignoring his surly remark about the ferry.
Christopher Taggart was shaping up as a very lucky break. He had given her a chance to protect her family from the Cirillos, even as she consolidated her own power with her brothers. She would call the shots, and by the time she got her father home on a medical and Eddie and Frank finally realized he was no longer capable of being the boss, they would have already accepted that she was in charge.
When her cab crossed the Manhattan Bridge, the driver headed for Flatbush Avenue.
“I said I want to go on the Belt.”
“Screw you, lady. I don’t make anything riding around Canarsie. And I can tell just looking at you you’re not gonna tip.”
“Because I’m a woman?”
He slammed on the breaks, reached back, and opened the door. “Hop out. I don’t need this shit.”
Helen glanced up and down the barren stretch of shops with closed gates and thought, This guy would really throw me out of the cab and leave me here if he could. She supposed she would be frightened if she were alone; but she was never alone and she said in a voice low with suppressed anger, “Call your dispatcher, please. Tell him I’m a friend of Johnny Carroccio.”
The driver looked at her and the sheer certainty in her voice made him do it.
“Be nice,” the dispatcher radioed back. “Be very nice.” The driver turned the car around and took the Belt Parkway. When the harbor came into view, he asked politely, “W
ho’s Johnny Carroccio?”
“He lends money for taxi medallions to people who can’t go to the bank.”
“Good friend?”
“He works for my brother,” she replied and the driver fell into a profound and lasting silence.
Yes, Taggart had come along at a good time. Though tonight, she had to admit, he had worried her. He was lunatic to come and see her, and she wondered whether he was an amateur playing at the rackets. But the kidnapping had been masterful precision work by a powerful international enterprise.
Belatedly it occurred to her that she should have said yes to his drink invitation to find out what was going on in his head. Nice-looking guy; nice manners. And he moved gently for a man his size. She had said no automatically. It was habit by now.
Tommy Lucia was a tough survivor of the Brooklyn gambling rackets. Longevity being one route to power in an unstable world, patience another, Tommy had gotten ahead by going along and by choosing his opponents carefully. His long career with the Cirillos reminded Taggart of his own Uncle Eamon’s successes in the Police Department. But while his uncle had retired after thirty years, Tommy Lucia still reported daily at the Caffè di Tullio on Knickerbocker Street in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.
The di Tullio had a front room with a long, clean counter, a modem espresso-cappuccino machine, and four-color posters of the Italian World Cup soccer team. In the back was a second, larger room where the regulars played cards at round tables. At six in the evening it was like a village square as Sicilian men from all walks of life stopped in on their way home from work. Among them was the new Brooklyn underboss of the Cirillo family.
Tommy, his number one crew leader, stood by, pleased. With the RICO conviction of the underboss’s older brother, the mantle of Brooklyn leadership had fallen on powerful shoulders. A handsome man in his sixties, Tommy’s boss wore a fine blue suit, and a ring of snowy white hair circled his otherwise bald head. He greeted friends and neighbors amiably, embraced an old baker—laughing with him at the flour marks pressed on his suit—and sat down at a card game while younger men scrambled to bring him espresso.
Tommy knew a winner. Their gambling enterprises were flourishing as the new man extended books and numbers into parts of Brooklyn which were previously Rizzolo territory. When the hotheaded Eddie “the Cop” had struck back, the new underboss’s counterpunch had been masterful—suckering the greedy slob with a phony cocaine deal to lower his guard.
The fact that Eddie had lost only his fingers instead of his life could fairly be attributed to luck, and luck, Tommy Lucia knew, was never more than a brief lowering of house odds. In the end, the new underboss would destroy Eddie and reclaim the rest of Brooklyn from the breakaway Rizzolo clan. He might even edge out Crazy Mikey for boss of the underbosses, and from there? Maybe when Old Don Richard died, overall boss— carrying Tommy on his coattails.
The pay phone between the front and back room rang. A kid leaped to answer and handed it to Tommy. He listened, went back to the card table, and whispered, “Somebody torched one of the Rizzolos’ Blue Line buses.”
“Call your friend in the Rizzolos. Say I’m concerned they might misunderstand. Tell them we are sorry, and we had nothing to do with it. And put a couple of men out front, in case they don’t believe you.”
Tommy dispatched some men to the sidewalk, then got on the phone. He had just made contact with his “friend,” who sounded skeptical, when the front door opened on three blond men in blue suits. “The fucking FBI just walked in. I’ll call you back.”
The men stepped up to the counter, set their briefcases on the floor, and ordered cappuccino.
“To go?” the counterman asked hopefully.
“Here. You got a men’s room?”
“Middle door in the back.”
One of them strolled between the card games, went into the bathroom, and strolled back a few minutes later. He and his companions spooned sugar into the cappuccino and sipped it until a black sedan with a government seal on the door double-parked in front. Moving in swift concert, the men in blue suits opened their briefcases and unfolded stock-mounted machine pistols. Two stepped into the rear room and shot the underboss. A bodyguard tried to pull a weapon from his jacket and they blew him across the room. The third gunman turned his automatic on Lucia, who pressed against the wall and opened both hands, palms out; he thought he was dead for sure.
“On the floor.”
Tommy dropped to the linoleum, waiting for the bullets. But the guy just looked at him like he was covering him, while his partners sprayed the walls. When everyone else alive was flat on the floor they backed out to the waiting car, from which protruded a gun covering Tommy’s men on the sidewalk. The car pulled away, running red lights and speeding north.
The Italian neighborhood gave way to Spanish. Then Knickerbocker Avenue entered a barren industrial district of canals and railroads. Less than a mile from the shooting, the driver turned into a deserted rail yard, raced alongside a string of flatcars, and stopped behind a warehouse. The men in blue suits got out, climbed into a shiny steel shipping container on a flatcar. The automobile drove away. Shortly, a switch engine coupled onto the flatcars and hauled them through Brooklyn to the Atlantic Basin, where cranes swung the containers aboard a Swedish Mersk Line container ship, which sailed on the evening tide.
Tommy wasn’t too surprised to get a message that evening from his “friend” in the Rizzolos. He returned the call expecting threats. His friend sounded bewildered. “I don’t know what’s going down. But I got messages for you.”
“What?”
“First, Eddie Rizzolo says he didn’t do it.”
“Yeah? What’s second?”
“There’s a guy wants to eat dinner with you. Ten o’clock. Café des Sports.”
“Never heard of it,” Lucia said suspiciously.
“Neither has Crazy Mikey or the Strikeforce. It’s on West Fifty-first between Eighth and Ninth.”
Lucia figured that the name meant sports, and a trophy cabinet in the brightly lit front bar confirmed it. A big guy, who acted like the owner and looked like an ex-soccer player, said, “Oui, monsieur, your friend is waiting.”
A self-assured blonde led him past customers who looked like show-biz people. Nobody connected in the joint—just people. She showed him into a cubicle couched between brick walls. Lucia was just thinking he liked the way she walked, when his eye fell on his host. There, at a table set for three in the privatemost corner of the restaurant, his back to two brick walls, his enormous hand cupping a fragile-looking wineglass, was Eddie “the Cop” Rizzolo.
Which made no sense at all to Tommy Lucia. Eddie waved him into the empty chair across the table. “How you doing?”
“What is this?”
Eddie started to extend his right hand, smiled at his missing fingers, and asked instead, “You want a drink? I got a bottle of wine. If you don’t mind French.”
The self-assured blonde produced a glass, poured, and asked if they would like to hear the specials. Eddie, apparently on his best behavior, said to Lucia, “Mind if I order? We talked about it earlier.”
Lucia glanced at the third place set beside Eddie, but apparently they weren’t waiting. “Go ahead.”
“We’ll share the pâté and the celery rémoulade.”
Lucia was impressed until he remembered that Eddie had his hooks into a lot of restaurants.
“Sound good?”
“Sure.” He wanted to throw the woman out of the cubicle, grab Eddie by his lapels, and scream, What the fuck is going on?
“What can you tell us about the scallops provençale?” Eddie asked.
Lucia listened to his head roar while she described the dish and Eddie interrupted repeatedly. He was getting the shakes, recalling the gunfire of several hours ago. One second his boss was alive, the next, dead on the floor.
“How about you?”
“You got steak?”
“Au poivre?”
“Go for i
t!” Eddie exulted.“Double french fries for both of us. They got these good-looking skinny ones—kind of like you, doll.” He grinned at the hostess. “And maybe some red wine for my friend when his steak comes.”
She left, and, as it was a large table, a comfortable space separated them from the nearest diners. Eddie grinned, inviting his questions. Lucia caught his breath and stalled. No way Eddie Rizzolo was going to make him look like an idiot.
“Classy-looking girl.”
“Her father’s the owner.”
“It shows.”
“Always.”
Eddie sipped his wine and broke off a piece of bread. He was displaying patience he had never been known for, acting like he could sit there all night. Lucia couldn’t stand it anymore. “So what’s going on?”
“We’re all well. My sister’s home safe, no harm done. My hand don’t hurt no more. Are you all right?”
“Better than this afternoon.”
“Good. My father always says things can always get better; for worst there is no end.”
Lucia forced a smile and asked, as was proper, “How are they treating Don Eddie?”
“My sister says he’s fine. She sees him regular.”
“You said she’s well. Who took her?”
Eddie looked embarrassed. “A thing in the family. Can you imagine? It was good, of course, that they didn’t hurt her. Not like getting snatched by Colombians.” He shook his head. “Would our grandfathers have imagined the things we have to worry about?”
“It’s a strange world,” Lucia agreed. He sipped the thin white wine, buying time, wondering how Eddie “the Cop” got so smart so fast. Eddie had apparently gone to a lot of expense to advance him, Lucia, up the Cirillo hierarchy by blowing away his boss. Thank you very much. But Eddie Rizzolo wasn’t smart enough, tricky enough, or even greedy enough to put such a scam together. He and his brother, Frank, had the slob tastes of your ordinary street hood—a full belly, a fast car, and friendly broads. Somebody was backing them.
The restaurant owner passed the cubicle and gave Eddie a nod. He waved back, and Lucia wondered what next. “I hope you don’t mind,” Eddie said. “My sister’s in the city and I told her to meet me here. Okay if she joins us?”
