by Justin Scott
She arrived like a windstorm, black mane flying, arms laden with packages, perfumed, flashing eyes. A rich little Italian princess, and one hell of a piece of ass.
Lucia smiled at her. “How you doing?”
She gave him a cool nod. Sex might be written all over her, if you knew how to read it, but she wasn’t giving any away. Dropping her packages on the empty chair, she sat beside Eddie and kissed him.
Tommy Lucia smiled again. She was his answer! Daddy’s little go-between. Old Don Eddie was dealing from jail. His daughter would report. Must gall the hell out of Eddie to have a woman sit in on his meet. Relieved that at least he had an idea who was leaning on him, Lucia said, “I think I’d like that red wine now, Eddie, if you don’t mind.”
“No problem.” Eddie flagged down a waitress and asked for the wine list. “How about you, hon? Something to eat?” Helen took her brother’s arm like a little kid. “Can I have an espresso?”
“If they don’t got it,” said Eddie, “I’ll make ’em send out.”
Tommy figured Eddie would surely turn to business when he had finished ordering, but to his annoyance, Helen resumed the amenities that her brother had stalled with. “We hear Don Richard is well.”
“Don Richard amazes us all.”
“Aren’t the old guys great?” Eddie asked innocently.
“They’re not old when they have their health,” Lucia parried, for he saw clearly where this was going. Fucking Rizzolos.
“Health is all,” Eddie agreed.
“And freedom,” said Lucia, jabbing Eddie with a reminder that his father was in prison.
A dark shadow floated over Eddie’s broad face and he looked dangerous. But Helen nudged him lightly and he controlled himself. Lucia grinned; in the clubs the coke dealers’ girlfriends used to hold the drugs to fool the cops, but now the girls sold the stuff themselves. Eddie better watch it or Helen might take over, he thought. Wondering whether she would join the discussion or merely report to her father, he said, “There’s a lot going down I don’t understand.”
“Look at it this way,” said Eddie, tearing off another piece of bread and passing the basket to Lucia. “If I wanted to kill you, I’ve had two chances today. Atlantic Avenue, where you had breakfast, and Woodhaven Boulevard, lunch. “Knickerbocker Avenue.”
“I already told you, that wasn’t me.”
“Guys have found out I’m not so easy to kill.”
“Three, if you count I coulda gotten you on the sidewalk a minute ago. Four, if I cut your head off with this butter knife.”
“So you’re doing me favors. Why?”
“I want to talk.”
Lucia made his face blank. No way he was going to put himself in the position of dealing with the Rizzolos behind the Cirillos’ backs. Bad enough sitting in public with them. “You’re talking to the wrong guy. Don Richard—”
Eddie cut him off, switching to Sicilian, a language that conveyed multiple possibilities. “Why don’t we talk about Don Richard later?... Funny thing. Your boss getting shot kind of clears your way to running Brooklyn for the Cirillos. Doesn’t it?”
“It’ll go to Mikey,” Lucia replied in English, still wary.
Helen’s Sicilian was as fluent as Eddie’s, and more subtlely insinuating. “Crazy Mikey is busy selling dope in the city. What does he care about making book?”
Lucia couldn’t help but nod agreement. Gambling was big and steady money; they had built empires on it, but it didn’t turn guys on like dope. Mikey was hooked on the insane profits.
The restaurateur brought the wine Eddie had ordered, a ’71 Bordeaux as rich as cream, and confided it was one of his last. Eddie waited until a waitress brought his sister’s espresso. Then he tilted his glass toward Lucia. “The future.”
“What future?” Tommy asked coldly, determined to stop their advance before it got out of hand.
“Our future. We’re in the same business, by and large. So we’re dumb to compete when we could pull together. We got the same problems with the blacks and Spanish throwing their weight around. We got the same problems turning dollar bills into clean C-notes. We got the same problems laying off bets.”
“Russia and China got the same problems too. I don’t see their future together.”
“Books and numbers,” Helen interjected quietly, “don’t do well in a war.”
“What war?”
Eddie held up his maimed hand. “We got nothing but trouble if we keep shooting up each other’s stores.”
“So what do you want, Eddie?”
“You.”
“Me? You want me to work for you?”
“We’re looking for good people, Tommy.”
“I appreciate the compliment. But I am content where I am. What would I get that I don’t already have?”
“Better than the Cirillos gave your boss,” Eddie answered. “And better protection, too.”
“But only if you bring the best people with you,” Helen added. “That’s important. You must deliver your best. We’ll take good care of them. Nobody will lose.”
“Except my friends the Cirillos.”
“The Cirillos are going to lose anyway,” Eddie sneered. “Brooklyn, for openers.”
Lucia hid his contempt. The boast was Eddie Rizzolo at his loudmouthed worst. A man shouldn’t talk about it, a man should simply do it. Nor should he give away his whole plan. He said, “You’re talking about a big step. I could lose everything. The Cirillos are big, and you’re not. I don’t see them giving Brooklyn to you or anybody else.”
“Think about it,” said Eddie. “Think about it till Tuesday.”
Lucia had a sudden, funny thought. If he were legit, this would be extortion. He stared at Helen, who was watching him intently. “Give your tough brother’s mouth a rest,” he said coldly. “Why don’t you tell me what happens Tuesday?”
She touched Eddie’s beefy forearm, silencing him, and held Lucia’s gaze so hard and so long that he felt a strange shiver in his spine. He knew three kinds of women in the world—whores, wives, and mothers. But there was something dark in Helen Rizzolo’s eyes that said she was a thousand years old, the fourth kind—maghe, a witch.
“Somebody might not tell you to lie on the floor Tuesday.”
Don Eddie couldn’t have put it better, Tommy Lucia conceded grudgingly; the old bastard had himself one hell of a go-between. “You’re strong-arming me,” he protested, “like I was a fruit stand buying protection.”
Helen returned a smile and the dark years receded slightly into the cool depths of her eyes. “Look at it this way, Tommy. We’re offering a choice you can live with.”
Taggart and Reggie watched the Café des Sports from a rented limousine, parked in a row of similar black, white, and silver cars waiting for the theaters to let out. They were in a block of tenements hung with fire escapes. Several had restaurants on the ground floor. An hour after Helen had gone into the café, Taggart noticed a man come out of a neighboring building, glance up and down the street, and hurry toward Eighth Avenue, swinging his attaché case as if proud of a good day’s work.
“Reggie, hand me the phone, please.”
Reggie gave it to him, shooting looks up and down the street for the source of the trouble. “What’s wrong?”
“Not a thing.” Taggart swiftly dialed the home number of a real estate broker who worked for him. “Elliot, you’re going to make us both rich. I just saw a broker for Wootten coming out of a tenement on West Fifty-first near Eighth. Unless he’s screwing a hooker, they’re doing an assemblage. Buy me a store with a long lease.”
Reggie retrieved the phone with a broad smile. In the past two years with Taggart he had learned enough of the Manhattan land business to know that when the developer-clients of Jones Lang Wootten had almost got their parcel assembled, they would find Christopher Taggart owning a leasehold in the middle of it, ready to negotiate a sale, a construction contract, or a trade for a deal on some other property they were developing elsewher
e in Manhattan.
Moments later Tommy Lucia emerged from the restaurant followed by Eddie Rizzolo with his sister holding his arm. Taggart watched Helen, whose gaze wandered about the street as she closed her cape against the evening chill of a midsummer Canadian high. Eddie and Lucia shook hands to conclude their business.
“It’s working,” Reggie marveled.
“Of course it’s working. They’re like sharks. All they know is to keep moving... Okay. It’s time to make Crazy Mikey crazier. Have somebody drop a hint that the capo we’re supplying is a big money earner.”
13
CHAPTER
A Cirillo bodyguard was paid four thousand dollars to drop the hint, and Reggie promised to double his fee if Crazy Mikey got demonstrably angry. At the risk of overkill, the spy chose a moment they were snorting cocaine in the stalls of Sunsets, an oceanfront Hampton Bays summer dance club. He knew Mikey to get a little paranoid scaling Colombian heights, and indeed, when he mentioned casually that a certain capo was making some very impressive heroin buys, Mikey turned white through his suntan, the golden spoon fell from his fingers, and he bolted out the men’s-room door. Seconds later, his big black Mercedes convertible was scattering parking-lot attendants and burning rubber onto Dune Road. He sped back to New York, shouting on the car phone that the capo in question had better join him at the Flushing brothel if he knew what was good for him.
“I want to meet your man’s boss.”
“I don’t know if he’s got a boss.”
“He’s got a boss. Just like you have a boss. Set it up!”
Reggie seemed appalled when the capo approached him with Mikey’s demands. “Such a thing just isn’t possible.”
The point of being a boss, he explained with infuriating deliberation, was that one did not take risks one could pay others to take. Why would his boss want to get involved?
The capo said, “Mr. Cirillo wants to buy a hundred keys a shot. But he don’t want to pay up front. He agrees consignments are for friends, so he wants to make friends.”
“And he’s a little touchy about you getting all the action, too, isn’t he?” Reggie asked innocently.
The capo shrugged, but his dark eyes turned private.
Reggie decided he might be a man with a future in Mr. Taggart’s service. He held him off two weeks before announcing that his boss had agreed. “But with tighter security than the Pope. Your boss is allowed one companion. I will be with my boss. If they have anything to discuss they will do it alone. Third Avenue and Sixty-eighth.”
Reggie’s spy reported that Mikey was having second thoughts; he was worried that Reggie might be an undercover FBI agent and that the buys, as big as they had been, could all be part of a huge government sting operation. At the same time, Reggie learned from his British sources that Mikey’s people were expecting an immense heroin shipment from London. Thus neither he nor Taggart was surprised when Crazy Mikey did not show for their meeting.
Taggart sent Reggie to Paris. He had befriended Kurt Spiel-man in the aftermath of the massacre during the 1972 Munich Olympics when eleven Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists. The disillusioned Israeli had left Mossad to freelance. Like Reggie, he had kept his body in shape and his contacts current. He had a deep affection for the dapper Englishman based on mutual tastes and Reggie’s kindnesses over the lean years. Somehow, whenever things were hard, Reggie Rand could be counted upon for a job.
Summoned to Versailles, Spielman met his friend in a tourist restaurant which served an astonishingly good lunch. After they helped the waiter recalculate a bill equally astonishing for its creative currency exchange, they went for a walk in the palace gardens.
“What mayhem?” Spielman smiled.
“A hijacking... with a twist.”
Reggie gave him details, airline tickets, expense money, and passports, and wished him luck.
Two days later, Spielman found himself with two hired hands in a bogus yellow taxicab trailing an Emory Air Freight truck around Kennedy Airport at two in the morning. Slipping out of the North Freight Terminal, the step van stopped at British Airways, then sped out of the airport onto the Belt Parkway and into the streets of Brooklyn. Spielman spotted a Mercedes leading the truck and an Oldsmobile taking up the rear, and he had his doubts about the dirty van following his own car. His men were veterans he had used often; nonetheless he repeated his orders to keep the violence to a minimum. “Chase them, don’t kill them, unless you have to.”
The car and the weapons—pump shotguns and automatic pistols—had been waiting in a long-term parking lot when they got off the plane. God willing, they’d be back in Europe in less than twelve hours. Ahead was a mile-long straight road that cut between bulldozed blocks of abandoned factories. There were few lights and no traffic.
Spielman’s driver blinked his high beams and pulled ahead of the Oldsmobile, the air freight truck, and the Mercedes. Spiel-man and his partner rolled down their windows. A quarter-mile along, the driver jammed on the brakes, slewed screaming through a U-turn, and sped back toward the convoy. Spielman and his partner shotgunned the Mercedes, shot out the truck’s windshield and tires. Then, while the Oldsmobile fled, Spielman climbed out, shot the padlock off the back of the truck, and lifted the door.
“Chara!”
The smugglers had buried their heroin in a legitimate truckload. There were easily a hundred packages, stacked floor to ceiling. At that moment, the van he had wondered about raced up, decanting men with guns.
Spielman jumped to the road, firing his automatic, while his men laid down accurate fire to hold the Mafiosi at bay. Spielman opened the taxicab door. A bullet tore through it, inches from his hand. He tossed a thermite grenade into the back of the freight truck and got in the cab. “Go!”
He heard the familiar dull thud, and when he looked back the truck and its contents were an orange pillar of flame.
When he heard about the explosion, Mikey Cirillo went crazy. “They burned up the whole fucking truck!” he screamed. “What kind of fucks do that?”
The capos who had to explain things to their Harlem and Bed-Stuy distributors gazed back silently. None of them had ever heard of a hijacker destroying what he couldn’t take, but that mystery mattered not at all. Two hundred irreplaceable kilos—a quarter-ton, or two months’ supply—had gone up in smoke. The Strikeforce bust at the West Forty-fifth Street garage, arrests in Sicily, more Pizza Connection indictments, several hijackings around the world, and now this. It might not all be Crazy Mikey’s fault, but what, they wondered, would Crazy Mikey promise next?
“Mikey, the blacks aren’t standing still for this. Another few weeks I won’t be able to park my car on the street up there.”
The capo Reggie had been selling to took the blame for the screwup. His boss, Crazy Mikey, really did want to meet Reggie’s boss. Reggie said he would try to set another meeting. He made them wait a week. This time, Mikey showed. It was Reggie’s first close look, and he wondered if Taggart had bitten off more than he could chew.
Despite his reputation for impulsive violence, Mikey had the self-assured air of a man who had grown up around power. His father, the elderly Don Richard, had been securely in command when Mikey was born, and this showed in the arrogant set of his thin lips, the seemingly blase expression in his dark eyes, the authoritative manner of a man used to getting his way. Rather, Reggie thought, like the English public school boy who breezed on to Sandhurst and an Army command.
It was easy to believe the underworld rumor that Mikey was growing into the job of chief underboss, and Reggie was reminded of how young Christopher Taggart still was. In fact, he thought with a thin smile as he climbed into Mikey’s car, Mikey reminded him of Chris’s hard-eyed brother Tony, who might be better suited to deal with this sort.
“Tell him where to go.” Mikey greeted him coldly.
His driver’s broad shoulders were bulked out by a fourteen-ply Kevlar bullet-proof vest; his heavy hands and attentive, intelligent eyes tol
d Reggie he was the best bodyguard the Cirillo clan employed.
“Turn the corner... into that parking garage... down the ramp to the end. Park there.”
Mikey looked at the silver-gray Citroën-Maserati. “No way I’m getting in your car.”
“I’m sorry. It’s the only way.”
Crazy Mikey’s eyes turned black and glittery. Reggie found himself hoping he would change his mind again. But he said, “No bullshit,” then snapped some Sicilian at his driver, who lifted a powerful signal analyzer from under the seat. Reggie unlocked the Citroën-Maserati, started the engine, and warmed it up. The bodyguard sat in front with the analyzer on his lap, and Mikey sat in back.
Reggie drove up the ramp onto the street, around the block, and north on Third Avenue, searching his mirrors for the Cirillo chase car. It was a yellow cab, ideal camouflage in midtown, but less so as they passed Ninety-sixth Street and entered Harlem. He turned on the radio, which emitted a shrill beep. “Turn your transmitter off, please.”
The bodyguard looked at Mikey, who nodded.
“We agreed two on two,” Reggie said mildly. Mikey looked out the window. Reggie reduced speed until he was crossing intersections on the yellow light. The chase car followed suit, two blocks behind. Reggie nudged the accelerator; the Citroën burst to sixty. He crossed 125th, careened right down a long, dark block past the city bus barn, took another right and a sudden sharp left, hooking across three lanes of traffic into the northbound lane of the Willis Avenue Bridge. A moment later he turned onto the Major Deegan Expressway, accelerated to ninety mph, exited onto the westbound Cross Bronx Expressway, and then drove south onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. Gliding sedately into a riverside parking area at 125th, he got out of the car and motioned for them to follow.
Mikey came warily, sticking close to the bodyguard, who handed him the signal analyzer and walked with his hand in his pocket. Reggie was impressed; too few people realized a bodyguard wasn’t a servant. He led them to the edge where the Hudson River lapped a crumbling bulkhead. A big open Cigarette-type ocean racer waited in the shadows beneath a broken light, guarded at a distance by several heavyset black men with fishing poles.
