by Justin Scott
The Palestinians dropped their binoculars and transmitter into a sewer and walked to the subway station on West Broadway, where a girl who worked for one of Reggie Rand’s agents led them onto the E train and helped them change to the JFK Express at West Fourth Street. At the airport, the Palestinians boarded the seven o’clock Northwest Airlines flight to Hamburg.
In New Jersey, a rival heroin importer named Vito Imperiale was crawling around his lawn uprooting crabgrass when he heard the news on the radio. The bombing sounded to him like a Cirillo move since Reina had covered maybe a fifth of the New York market. Imperiale figured he would pick up some of the slack, but Crazy Mikey Cirillo was bound to take most. On the other hand, Mikey’s eyes were bigger than his stomach, and soon he would be short of product. When that happened, Mikey would have several options: He could go out to Kennedy to meet the Lebanese and Pakistanis who stepped off the air-plane with dope in their clothing, he could buy synthetic stuff and kill half his customers, or he could do business with old reliable Vito Impériale.
As the radio reports got more specific throughout the afternoon, Impériale was surprised to hear it had been a car bomb, which had caused damage up and down the block. That was pretty heavy-duty stuff, but then, it paid to remember that Crazy Mikey Cirillo wasn’t called crazy for nothing. Impériale had mixed feelings about his prospects. Being needed by Mikey Cirillo wasn’t necessarily wonderful.
That evening a crew leader arrived at the heavily guarded suburban mansion. Impériale was on the patio, slapping mosquitos and frowning at tufts of grass he had pulled from the lawn; it had separated like straw because the Japanese beetle grubs were tearing up the roots.
“A Cirillo guy called me,” the crew leader reported. “He said that Mikey says he didn’t have nothing to do with the bomb.”
“Right.”
“He says Mikey might be interested in buying from us.”
“Sell the greedy bastard what you can, but keep him away from my sources.”
14
CHAPTER
The upper decks of the Taggart Spire were still bare steel, reddish and dull in the cold light of an autumn morning, but now, at the very top, a shiny ribbon of glass wrapped Taggart’s penthouse and its cantilevered living room. Capped by glass, the tall, slim spire impaled Park Avenue like a diamond stickpin.
Taggart inspected the penthouse work, trailed by Ben Riley, the superintendent, who was taking notes and eyeing his watch as if it were a poisonous snake. Riley wore a quilted vest against the cold; Taggart had on a three-quarter coat of leather by Claude Montana. Steel girders shook as one of the V-shaped roof derricks fetched up another huge plate of reinforced insulated glass from a truck on Park Avenue.
“The city ain’t gonna give you a CO until the building’s done,” Riley protested, trying to get him to change his mind about finishing the apartment early. He was having kittens while trying to sheath, wire, and lay pipes in the penthouse before that work was completed on the lower floors. “You can’t live up here till the building’s done anyway.”
“Fuck a certificate of occupancy,” Taggart shot back. “It’s my building and it’s my apartment. The Mayor can shove his paperwork. All that’s standing between me and living in my apartment is you.”
Across the city Taggart could see his current projects in varying states of completion—a half-erected frame of an apartment tower on upper Madison, another rising above Central Park on Columbus, and a dark hole on East Forty-seventh Street where a poured concrete substructure was nearing street level like a stack of bones. Those notches on the skyline were ordinarily a deeply satisfying sight, but this morning he was more interested in Reggie Rand, who had stationed himself behind the elevator and was dialing calls on a car phone he had brought up from the street.
The elevator clanged its arrival and Chryl and Victoria stepped off in hardhats, blue jeans, and black leather jackets, capturing the full attention of the glaziers and riggers who were manhandling a ten-by-twenty-foot sheet of glass that the derrick had hoisted alongside the deck. “Christ on a crutch, the decorating broads,” groaned Riley. “That’s all I need.” He fled to the edge of the roof, bellowing at the riggers to steady the glass.
Taggart distractedly kissed each cheek offered. “Ben’s falling behind. Are you ready to decorate?”
“Decorate?” asked Chryl.
Victoria gazed thoughtfully into the glass room, framed it with her gloved hands. “I see a single picture frame on that wall.”
“Off-center,” Chryl agreed.
“Empty.”
“Not another stick of furniture.”
“Oh God, no! Total minimal.”
“A very thin frame.”
Knuckles rapped a shoulder; heads bobbed. “An icy black line.”
“All right, all right,” Taggart said. “I’m sorry, I meant design.”
Victoria slipped her hand inside his coat.
“Mr. Taggart!” Reggie called.
Taggart hurried to his side. Reggie unhooked a pager from his belt and showed him the number on its one-line screen. “Bronx exchange. This might be my chap in Joe Cirillo’s crew. I’m running down to find a coin box.”
“But if he’s calling from a pay phone,” Taggart demanded impatiently, “can’t you use the car phone?”
“You pay me not to take chances.”
While Taggart had penetrated the heart of Crazy Mikey’s heroin distribution, his parallel, and equally vital, campaign to overthrow Cirillo bookies and loan sharks and to replace them with Helen Rizzolo’s people was moving more slowly because gambling and shylocking were less centralized than heroin. The betrayals and apparently random attacks that Reggie had engineered had begun to unsettle the numerous Cirillo bookies and shylocks, but not yet sufficiently to convince many to shift allegiance to the Rizzolos. Taggart had called for another attack on the scale of the Caffè di Tullio shooting that had induced Tommy Lucia to change sides. Reggie selected the biggest Cirillo shylock enforcer in the Bronx, and the most vicious—Crazy Mikey’s cousin Joe.
When Reggie returned, Taggart joined him again at the elevator. “What’s up?”
“Joe Cirillo is planning a sort of public punishment for a Bronx industrialist. I think it’s for us. With your permission, I’ll bring in soldiers. I need a top team. No bolshies or starving natives.”
“That’s your decision. But I’m coming along to watch.”
“I don’t recommend that.”
“I’m coming anyway,” Taggart snapped, unaware that he had used the same tone of voice in overriding his superintendent.
Joe Cirillo slid his fingers into a chrome knuckle-duster. Working himself up, he ran the razor edge along the fleshy part of his other hand, drawing a thin line of blood which he tasted with his tongue.
“I’m making an example of this guy,” he told the six hitters crammed shoulder to shoulder behind him. “When you borrow from us, you pay.”
A second van was parked behind them, awaiting his signal. Across the street was a long, low, mustard-yellow brick factory, a modern windowless building. It was just after the lunch hour and they had watched from a distance until the employees had finished their stickball game and had gone back to work.
The hitters were big, well-dressed men nearing middle age, trusted soldiers, who were ordinarily years senior to a routine beatup. But in the past few weeks half a dozen Cirillo enforcers had been arrested while collecting outstanding debts, doubtlessly set up by informers, so until they somehow cleared their street crews of Strikeforce informers, a job like this was best done by guys who had a stake in the family.
“When money was tighter than virgin twat,” Joe reminded his soldiers, “this joker borrows to build his factory. When he has union trouble, we get him a sweetheart contract. When he’s got chemical shit, we make it disappear. But now he tries to fuck us.”
The factory owner was expected to carry a dozen Cirillo soldiers on his payroll, supply specially hollowed-out plastic toys to ship hero
in, and make off-the-books cash interest payments weekly. He had performed until he got suckered into a high-stakes poker game in Atlantic City. The rest was history, to the tune of two hundred grand outstanding, and, finally, a weekly interest he could not pay.
“The whole Bronx is gonna hear him scream.”
Joe’s men looked as if they wished to discuss the fact that suddenly it was getting unhealthy to enforce collections. Not only were guys being arrested right and left; others were attacked in the streets. Two days ago a Cirillo crew leader overseeing a beating had been attacked himself by a black street gang; from his hospital bed he swore that it was a setup. They were waiting for him. Nor had the gang come to the defense of the welsher, who was a roundly hated white landlord.
One of the hitters summoned up the courage to say, “Something’s going on, Joe.”
Joe Cirillo looked at the guy. “You got a problem?”
“Maybe it’s more than bad luck that everyone’s getting hit at once. Our guys are—”
“You want to go home early? You can leave now.”
“Joe, what if somebody’s moving in on us? I keep hearing about the Rizzolos. I’m seeing Rizzolos where they shouldn’t be.”
Joe stared him down. Then he motioned the others out of the van. “Okay, get him ready. Remember, nobody leaves till I’m done pulping the bastard.”
Twelve men entered the factory simultaneously, converging on the front door and the side and rear loading bays. In the bright carpeted lobby, the receptionist looked up with a smile that faded uncertainly. A burly black security guard dropped his magazine and went for his gun.
Joe Cirillo’s men mobbed him, took his revolver away, and locked him to a railing with his own handcuffs. The factory owner heard the scuffle and stepped out of his office in shirtsleeves and loosened necktie. When he saw the hoods, he fled back through his door, which he locked, and pawed desperately at the telephone. They kicked the door open, rounded his desk, and slapped the telephone out of his hand. He backed against the wall, pleading and covering his face. Two Cirillos seized his fleshy arms and marched him out. Another dragged the receptionist along. Leaving a man at the door, they burst onto the low balcony that overlooked the main workroom.
The plant, covering nearly a half acre, was washed white as a desert by overhead fluorescent lights, and it reeked of the sweet, cloying odor of hot plastic. Fifty men and women were working the extruder machines, presses, and bench drills. They looked up at their boss cringing between the large men holding his arms, and a dark wave of apprehension washed over the room until they and their machines stood motionless and silent. Workers in the back started to retreat to the rear doors, but the Cirillos were there too, herding the rest of the guards, whom they had surprised at lunch.
From the front entrance the arrogant click of heel taps on linoleum broke the quiet, and Joe Cirillo strolled in. He removed his wedding ring as he surveyed the silent black and Spanish faces, and made a show of working his fingers into the chrome knucks. Then he nodded and his men lifted the factory owner off the floor. He squealed in terror. But before Joe could go to work, one of the Spanish girls, a kid eighteen or nineteen, charged up the stairs screaming and swinging a monkey wrench.
“Let her through,” Joe instructed.
“Rosa. No!” the owner cried, but she came anyway, swinging the wrench. Joe ducked under it. Her momentum dragged her to him, her hands locked on the wrench, the whole side of her body exposed from her ankles to her face. Joe measured his target and backhanded her with the knuckles, and she went down, her cheek a bloody smear. The joker actually tried to hit him!
“Balling the help?” Joe sneered. His men heaved the guy into the air again. Joe stepped between his flailing legs, the knuckles cocked.
A block away, atop a three-story bakery, the tallest building in the industrial park, Reggie Rand, who knew the police patrols down to the minute, watched his men go into action. They were French mercenaries, two brothers, and their protégé, a young German boy. Reggie had flown them in, supplied the weapons they had asked for, and tonight would fly them back to France.
Taggart stood beside him, with hands in pockets and eyes like ice. From this vantage point they could see the plastics factory’s front entrance and driveway, the Cirillos’ vans, and a lower rooftop directly across the street from the factory. Reggie had pleaded that Taggart shouldn’t be here, that his enterprise was so risky that he ought to take every opportunity to minimize his risks, but Taggart seemed more and more bent on taking chances.
Suddenly, on the low roof across from the factory, there was a hint of motion in the shadows. A moment later, shooting started inside the factory. Muffled by the cinderblock walls, the rapidfiring automatic weapon had the muffled buzzing of a highspeed printer. A year ago Taggart had ordered Reggie to put him through a basic weapons survival course, and the noise, he recalled, was terrifying. Inside the factory, Taggart knew, the shattering reports of an unsilenced Uzi on full automatic sounded like a war.
“Surprise.”
He watched the doors with grim satisfaction. A few more attacks like this and the Cirillo loan sharks were out of business. The Cirillo soldiers came boiling out the doors, white-faced, arms and legs pinwheeling as they fled. Some trailed, staggering, and one collapsed on the sidewalk. Those who could, raced to their vans. Reggie pointed ot the rooftop across the street. “Watch the German. He’s superb.”
A figure popped over the parapet and leveled a short, blunt weapon on his shoulder. His captain arose easily beside him, covering with a stock-mounted automatic pistol in the unlikely event the boy should need help.
Whooom! A rocket struck the rear van, blowing the Cirillo enforcers back just as they lunged for the doors. The explosion hurled them to the street, where they writhed, burned, or were too stunned to seek cover. Joe Cirillo, the last man out of the building, gaped incredulously at the inferno. His bullet-shattered arm hung like a stick, the chrome knuckles still attached to his fingers. He shambled into his own van screaming, “Go. Go!” The van leaped forward, scattering the men who tried to get in after Joe, and squealed for the corner. Whooom!
The van turned to flame, slewed across the street, leaped the curb, and crashed into the factory wall. Joe Cirillo rolled out of the passenger door and crawled into the gutter. The burning van exploded thunderously. The explosion threw him across the street, where he lay, twitching feebly, as the flames reflected red off the chrome knucks still attached to his hand.
That night, after the police and fire department had left and he had picked up Rosa in the emergency room and put her in a cab, the owner of the plastics factory propped his feet on his desk and figured things were looking up. He was clear. Whoever had attacked Joey Cirillo had done him a big favor. Everyone knew that he had had nothing to do with it. But with all the cops around, the Cirillos couldn’t take a chance on trying to hurt him again. One of the security guards knocked on his door. He still looked embarrassed for screwing up, and the company had doubled the guard at no extra cost.
“Guy out here wants to see you.”
“Sure.” More cops, detectives, Feds; the more the better.
But he wasn’t a cop. He looked like an accountant. He opened a briefcase, revealing rows of shiny metal toggle switches, which he jiggled back and forth for an electronic sweep. Satisfied, the guy closed his briefcase and said, “I represent people who are assuming Cirillo obligations in this area.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ll be back next week to collect.”
“What are you talking about?”
“God is not coming down to save your ass a second time.”
Taggart insisted on meeting the new collector.
“On this, I put my foot down,” Reggie replied.
“I’ll wear a mask. I’ve got to watch my people.”
“But that’s what I’m here for.”
Taggart insisted. Reggie told himself that he wanted to retain strict control, but he wondered w
hether Taggart simply couldn’t resist daring the odds. It was one thing to meet face to face, masked, with Mikey Cirillo to consummate the heroin deal, but it was frivolous to tempt fate. Had Reggie the time he might have worried more about Taggart’s walk-on-water attitude, but he was too busy. Events were accelerating. No sooner had he displayed the new Rizzolo shylock to a masked Christopher Taggart than he had a meet, alone, with the outside leader of an upstate prison gang.
“I don’t get it,” said the gang leader as he counted the money that consummated their deal. “South Bronx numbers used to be strictly Cirillo territory.”
“That’s right.”
“But now the Confortis and Bonos are stirring the kiddie gangs against them, trying to take over.”
“Correct.”
“So who the hell are you?”
“I’m gentrifying the neighborhood,” Reggie replied blandly.
Bumpy Fredricks, or “Bump” to his clients, worried more about robbers than cops as he made his rounds collecting bets and noting the numbers on flimsy cigarette paper. But when a dark van started following him he didn’t know what to think. Cirillo numbers runners all over New York were getting taken off. Up until now, he had liked working for the Cirillos because they kept order. Now he wasn’t so sure, because when a Mafia family started fighting its rivals, the neighborhood gangs got bold.
The van hung back, stopped when he went into a store, started up when he came out. Being an optimist, Bumpy decided the big boys had sent the van to look out for him as he made his rounds. The dry cleaner played his regular 234 and repeated his refrain that it had to come in someday. The liquor-store clerks next door slid 285 and 314 through the money slot of their bulletproof glass, the former for his girlfriend’s apartment number, the latter for somebody’s tag scrawled on an IRT car. The girls on the hotel stoop picked numbers out of the air—417, 630, 555, 259—like leaves were falling on them, and pressed the dollars in his hand.
