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Rampage

Page 37

by Justin Scott


  “I also did it for him.”

  “Don’t jerk me around.”

  “I didn’t tell the Rizzolos. I told Tony Taglione.”

  “Taglione?”

  “He had me by the balls. I had to give him something.”

  “What do you mean you had to give him something?” Mikey screamed. “What do you mean ‘something’? Guys take their lumps. Since when is it okay to squeal?”

  “I did it for a lot of reasons, not just for myself.”

  “You better name a few good ones fast.”

  “First of all, to guide you when you take over. I’m no good to you in jail. We’ve got eight hundred soldiers, Mikey. We’d be in the Fortune Five Hundred if they counted people like us. Half your capos think they should have the job. The older guys who’ve been around, they think you’re a kid.”

  “I wouldn’t have to take over if my father wasn’t dead.”

  “I didn’t mean for him to get killed. I did it to save his life. The Rizzolos would have hit your father sooner or later. How was I to know they had somebody inside the Strikeforce?”

  “The Rizzolos couldn’t put somebody inside the Strikeforce if he was invisible.”

  “Are you saying the Feds shot your father?”

  Mikey slammed his fist on the table. “Don’t you understand yet? There’s somebody else doing this. Somebody else inside the Feds. Somebody else got my father.”

  “Who?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” Mikey glared at Ponte and calmly returned to the first subject. “There’s another reason you ratted on my father, you know? With him you were only his adviser. With me, you’re older and smarter, and you think you can run me. With my father out of the way, you figure you’re almost boss.” He smiled. “Admit it, Sal, you must have thought that a little.”

  With nothing to lose, Salvatore Ponte took a chance on honesty. “A little.”

  Crazy Mikey looked out the window. His silence stretched to a minute, then two. Ponte watched the second hand creep a third time around the kitchen clock. When he couldn’t bear it any longer he asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “Call up Eddie Rizzolo and stop this fucking war.”

  “Eddie Rizzolo?”

  “Why not? I know he didn’t kill my father. He’s been trying to get in touch for some time. Wants to do some dope. Why not? We’re both young guys. There’s plenty in New York for the two of us. And if there is somebody else, we’ll get him. What do you think, Consigliere? Let’s stop the war before the Strikeforce blows us away.”

  “Your father thought his sister’s running things.”

  “Nobody told me that.”

  “That’s what he thought.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Maybe. She has the brains.”

  “Fuck Eddie.” Mikey laughed. “I’d rather do it with her.”

  “I don’t advise that.”

  “I was joking. But why not, Consigliere?”

  “Your father had me get a guy to take care of her.”

  “Jesus Christ. Was that your idea?”

  “No.”

  “Does Eddie know?”

  “The guy missed. I don’t know what Eddie knows. I don’t know if she told him.”

  “She probably didn’t. He wouldn’t be offering peace.” He laughed softly. “Guy like Eddie, killing his father and brother is one thing, but if you even look like you wanna hit on his sister, he’ll challenge you to a fucking duel.”

  “So now you know.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Mikey said, and fell silent again.

  Ponte inched his eyes to the window, fixed on a sailboat beating across the water. The day looked so beautiful. He hoped—

  “You know all the stuff I can do to you, Sal?”

  “I know.”

  “To your girlfriend?”

  “I know,” Ponte said, wondering how Mikey knew about her; but by now he was beyond surprise.

  “Even your family, if I have to.”

  “My family?"

  “Sal. You killed my father.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  Mikey stood up and stretched, rippling muscle through the arms of his cashmere pullover. Ponte saw him suddenly as the new man events had made him, the warrior prince turned king.

  Ponte couldn’t stand the silence. Hating the fear in his voice he asked. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m gonna get in touch with Eddie Rizzolo.”

  “What about me?”

  Crazy Mikey stepped close to his godfather and Ponte thought he was going to kiss him. Instead, he took his coke spoon, extended it the length of the chain, and gently placed the miniature barrels of the replica sawed-off shotgun between Ponte’s lips.

  “Add it up, Sal. The best thing for you and me and your wife and your girlfriend is for you to jump in front of a subway.”

  Weary, fed up with himself, Jack Warner lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling and waiting for Tony Taglione to figure out who leaked that Don Richard was hiding in Miami. The New York Post lay unopened on the rug. The front page had a picture of an E train for those readers who hadn’t seen one, and another of Sal Ponte, described as “Murdered Mob Kingpin’s Adviser, Sally Smarts.”

  Once the Strikeforce chief eliminated himself and the new assistant, Sarah Gallagher, and maybe his senior assistant, Ron Koestler—all of which would take about five minutes—he might hit on one of the FBI agents assigned to search for Don Richard. Establishing that an FBI agent hadn’t blown it deliberately or just plain screwed up might buy a few days. But in the end, Warner was screwed; or, more accurately, he thought with disgust, he had screwed himself, allowing himself to get suckered by Taggart and Reggie Rand. Of course, they were hunting Don Richard. Why else would they have paid him three hundred and fifty thousand bucks? At least, they had paid. He had checked his Swiss account. A lot of good it did him, with him lying on the bed in the fifth-floor studio apartment on East Ninth Street, a block from the tenement where he had grown up. Every time the stairs creaked he looked at the door, expecting his partners to break it down, waving guns and warrants—in that order. He had locked his own gun in his gun safe, a two-hundred-pound steel cube under his bed. Goddamned if he was going to kill one of the guys.

  When they came he was dozing; it wasn’t through the door and it wasn’t anyone he knew. A guy swung through the window on a rope, like Tarzan. He was wearing leather, head to toe, which protected him from the broken glass. His eyes gleamed through slits in the mask. He held a gun on Warner, while he unlocked the bars on the fire-escape window, opened the sash, and offered a hand to the Englishman. Reggie Rand dropped lithely from the sill and told Tarzan to leave by the door.

  “No,” he told Warner, when they were alone. “I didn’t come to kill you.”

  “You dropped in to apologize?”

  “I gave you my word,” Reggie replied. “Events moved out of my control. I’ll do what I can to make it up.”

  “How about a Presidential pardon?” Warner hadn’t moved an inch, nor did he intend to. He lay there, hands behind his head, wondering why the Brit was going to so much trouble to kill him when Tarzan could have done it for him.

  “Tonight, I’ll get you to Europe. You’re a fairly wealthy man abroad. You’ll want a plastic surgeon. It could be worse.”

  “Jail would be worse,” Warner admitted. “Death would be worse, too.”

  “You speak Russian, don’t you?”

  “Da. I picked it up in the neighborhood.”

  “Not to worry,” the Brit said, and Warner began to think maybe he was telling the truth. “If you get bored with your money, there’ll be plenty of interesting work.”

  “Let me get this straight. You’re saving my ass because you broke your word about that prick Ponte getting killed. And I don’t have to do anything.”

  “One small service.”

  Here it came. “What’s that? Hijack the plane?”

  “When you land at Orly
a lady will point out an American who keeps track of comings and goings for the CIA. You will let him intercept you and, before you vanish, you will volunteer the information that Crazy Mikey Cirillo has a narcotics deal going down on the Hudson River.”

  “What does the CIA care?”

  “You will make it sound like an apology to your former colleagues.”

  “What if this guy doesn’t let me vanish?”

  “The lady will deal with him.”

  Warner swung his feet off the bed and regarded Reggie with interest. Now he knew why Reggie wasn’t going to kill him. And at last he had an inkling of what Taggart was up to—though still no clue why—but he had run out of time and was in too much trouble himself to use his theory against Taggart.

  “It sounds to me like Taggart’s setting up Mikey.”

  “Can you think of a more deserving soul?”

  Tony Taglione passed a glossy black-and-white photograph around a gang of agent supervisors who had crowded into his office. Papers had been removed from tables, chairs, and windowsills and restacked in the hall. Cigarette smoke loomed in the fluorescent lights. He didn’t allow his attorneys to smoke around him, but cops and investigators had different needs.

  “What’s wrong with this one?” he asked.

  Four mobsters were getting out of a limousine. In the background others were standing around the baroque iron gates of a New Jersey cemetery where family and associates had gathered to bury Don Richard.

  “Come on, guys. Four hoods getting out of a car.”

  “Well, for starters,” a woman answered, “Eddie ‘the Cop’ Rizzolo and Crazy Mikey are not shooting at each other.”

  “Good. What else?” he asked, and the others joined in.

  “Eddie’s hand is healed.”

  “What’s left of it.”

  “He looks like a punch-press operator ordering four beers.”

  “Knock it off! Since last summer, when the New York families went to war, the body count includes five chiefs dead: Imperiale, Conforti, Bono, Rizzolo, and Cirillo. Between us destroying the council and them killing each other, the whole New York mob’s been turned inside out.”

  “In fact,” a police detective interrupted, “the guys we indicted turned out to be the lucky ones.”

  That got a laugh, and a wit from the DEA got another by calling, “With the possible exception of Eddie Rizzolo, Senior.”

  Taglione cut it off savagely. “None of us can be proud of a jailhouse murder. It reflects as badly on the Strikeforce as goddamned Jack Warner. So let’s not pat ourselves on the back.” He iced the room with his piercing eyes. “But that’s water over the dam. The thing is now to capitalize on this bloodletting by continuing to go after the successors while they’re still off balance—hopefully before citizens get caught in the crossfire. But we’ve got to know who the new leaders will be. Who’s taking over?”

  “Look at that grin on Eddie the Cop’s face, an agent ventured. “Pretty happy for a guy whose father and brother got killed.”

  “The Rizzolos are really throwing their weight around.”

  “I hear Eddie’s looking for dope again.”

  “So do I.”

  “Right, right.”

  Taglione asked, “What do you say we shift a ton of people onto Eddie Rizzolo? Let’s find out who he’s connecting with.”

  They went out gung-ho, but he still wondered. When in trouble, as he feared he was now, Tony Taglione turned to his boss and mentor, the patrician United States Attorney, Arthur Finch. He left telephone messages. Arthur dropped by the Strikeforce floor, winced as always at the chaos, and asked, “Time for a drink?”

  “No way. Look at these transcripts from taps starting last summer.”

  “It’s customary in the real world to say, ‘Not this evening, thank you, Arthur.’”

  “Look at this.” Taglione shoved him a transcript at random. “Pay phone outside a Rego Park pizza joint.”

  Arthur donned half-moon glasses and read in Harvard tones the line highlighted with yellow Magic Marker. “‘Pay the fucks what they want. They’re connected with the Rizzolos.’”

  Taglione handed him another. Arthur read, “‘I got some postage on Frankie Rizzolo.’” He handed it back. “I’m always astonished how lazy racketeers are. Why won’t they simply get in their car and drive half a mile to a safe phone?”

  “Arrogance. Here’s another.”

  “‘We’re doing good. We got to the Rizzolos.’”

  “And... ”

  “‘You know any Rizzolos? So ask them.’”

  “Rizzolos, Rizzolos, Rizzolos. Suddenly, in less than a year— while we re chasing Cirillos—Rizzolos are big time, number two in New York.”

  Arthur cleared the edge of a chair and sat down. “Back up. Are you saying the Rizzolos killed Tommy Lucia’s boss and Vito Imperiale and Joey Reina and Harry Bono and A1 Conforti and Richard Cirillo?”

  “The Rizzolos benefited.”

  “Until Edward Senior and his son Frank were murdered.”

  Taglione held up the cemetery shot. “But here’s Eddie ‘the Cop,’ big as life at the funeral, as much as saying, Let’s make peace.”

  “Statesmanlike.”

  “Eddie’s a hood. The FBI expected him to be across the street with a rifle.”

  “So,” said Arthur, folding his glasses and straightening his lions-rampant necktie, “we ask, how did a hood get so smart?”

  Taglione found another picture. “His little sister.”

  Arthur read Helen Rizzolo’s dossier, which covered major events in her life: marriage, annulment, college, visits to her father in prison, and the rumored kidnapping. Then he looked up with a kind smile. “I presume you haven’t tried this theory on your staff.”

  “You heard about Chris?”

  “I saw them at the Governor’s Ball. Quite the striking couple, his Adonis to her dark Persephone.... ‘Woe, woe to Adonis.’”

  “What about my theory?”

  “I like it. She starts out as her father’s messenger. She’s intelligent, has some education and a head for business, and she lets her bloodthirsty brothers do the dirty work.”

  “Except for one thing. Jack Warner lands at Orly Airport, pulls a James Bond, and disappears. Right? By the time Interpol gets on it, some thirty-nine-year-old burly Irish-American guys who look like New York cops are reported crossing Swiss, Italian, and Spanish borders, shipping out of Channel ports, and cruising the Mediterranean. How the hell did the Rizzolos get Jack out of the country?”

  “And why did they take the chance?”

  “They have their claws into freight forwarding at Kennedy, so maybe they could get him aboard a plane—maybe.”

  “But off in Paris? That’s what I can’t understand. What do they know of the French?”

  “And who got Jack papers? The State Department swears there’s no way he can flounce around Europe without topnotch forgeries.”

  “Actually,” Arthur replied mildly, “these are questions the Attorney General’s been asking me. How, as he put it, did a bunch of Brooklyn ‘wops’ turn into international spymasters? He thinks the Rizzolos have established international contacts.”

  “Brilliant. But with whom?”

  “Someone she might have met in Europe. Did you know she’d been to Italy for earthquake relief?”

  “Years ago.”

  “Still, the AG thinks it’s worth investigating a Sicilian link.”

  “Bullshit. That’s the first thing I thought of, but this is much classier.”

  Arthur raised an eyebrow.

  “Look at the murders,” Taglione retorted. “Joe Reina killed by a radio-controlled car bomb like in the Mideast. Imperiale shot by Berettas in the Israeli two-shot pattern. The agents told me Imperiale looked like he’d been bitten by a bunch of snakes. Something about how the Israelis teach their killers to shoot.”

  “But weren’t they black?”

  “Then they were trained by Israelis, who’re all over Afri
ca. And what happened to Joey Cirillo’s goon squad in the Bronx with a rocket launcher? Doesn’t this sound way too sophisticated for Brooklyn ‘wops’ or even for Sicilians?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here’s something else the AG doesn’t know. A woman I worked with in Washington, who’s since moved to the CIA, told me Jack Warner sent a message. Kind of a parting gift—or shot— I’m not sure which.”

  “What?”

  “Before he disappeared, Warner sought out the CIA agent at Orly to tell him he heard that Mikey Cirillo buys most of his heroin right here in New York, from a guy he meets once a week on a boat in the Hudson.”

  25

  CHAPTER

  Two ocean racers floated side by side in Taggart’s Tarrytown boathouse, the stealthy black doper boat Taggart used for his meetings with Crazy Mikey Cirillo, and a bright-red luxury model. The newcomer, stolen the night before from the Hawk Racing Yard in Mamaroneck, was built on similar lines, though its hull was made of aluminum—which made it a radar beacon.

  Reggie had pulled the head off one of the black boat’s V-8s, while Taggart was busy stowing kilos of heroin under the floorboards of the red boat. The Englishman was wearing a white shirt and his Drumnadrochit Piping Society tie, and though he was adjusting the valves with socket wrench and calipers, his cuffs were as white as the heroin.

  “I’m going to miss you, Reggie,” Chris said.

  “Why don’t you simply kill Mikey?”

  “Because someday—probably not when he’s arrested, but maybe on the way to court, during the trial, or even on the way to jail—he’ll start talking. He knows enough to destroy the whole Cirillo organization and what’s left of the Confortis and Imperiales.”

  “Why would he talk?”

  “Mikey’s all that’s left of his own blood. His brother’s in jail, his father’s dead, and Ponte’s dead. The rest of the bosses and capos are his enemies. And if he doesn’t talk, he rots in jail for the rest of his life. So me and my pop come out even, either way.”

  Reggie bolted the head back in place and inspected the wiring to the explosives in the bilge of the black boat. Then he climbed out of the compartment, started the engines, and closed the box. Turning to Taggart, he submerged him in the flat pools of his eyes.

 

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