We turned the sofa around so the splatter wouldn’t show and began moving boxes and chairs and other shit to fill in the pathway we’d cleared to get the milk crates back to the wall where they couldn’t be seen. It took much longer than we expected and Norm was getting more and more anxious as the fifteen minutes I had expected turned into more than an hour. It seemed like I had to keep reassuring him every three or four minutes.
Our final move after I told Norm to come get us was to push the cases of booze up next to the stairs where they could more easily be found by the light coming in from the club when the door to the basement was open, and then reach up to break the basement light bulb.
We were over an hour late getting out of the place. The sun would be coming up shortly on another muggy, sunny, summer day in the Bronx.
******
“What happened? What took so long? ” demanded an anxious Norm as Tommy and I got in the van and moved straight to the back to begin changing out of our bloody clothes and disguises and into clean and very different clothes and shoes from our soft overnight bags.
“I’ll tell you about it when we have more time,” I said.
Epilogue
The gang war that the media had breathlessly anticipated after thirty-seven members of the Bonanno crime family and several innocent Wall Street executives got blown up a couple of weeks ago had not yet gone beyond a few scattered shooting and disappearances. The “experts on organized crime” the talk shows hurriedly called in to discuss the explosion and its ghastly aftermath were mostly a bunch of authors and hurriedly recruited retired FBI agents along with a few scattered professors and a couple of semi-famous directors and actors who had once worked on a television series about the Mob.
Initially, the talk show hosts and their guests were certain that they would soon have even more exciting events to talk about. After all, they pointed out to each other and their audiences with sincere and concerned looks on their faces, a major upheaval was obviously underway in the world of organized crime, one that would most likely lead to gang warfare reminiscent of the 1930s.
The Mob fascinated the media’s viewers and readers and the press followed the story quite avidly. Press conferences were held by the Director of the FBI and other important officials, numerous interviews were given by various “experts” and law enforcement agency “spokespersons,” the president and various politicians forthrightly called for the end of violence and the banning of automatic weapons. It was a major news story for the better part of three days.
Pencie and I missed most of the media coverage because we’d taken off on a vacation; we’d flown to Rwanda because Pencie had seen a show on the National Geographic Channel and wanted to see mountain gorillas in the wild before they got wiped out. We watched gorillas for three days as they ate green plants and scratched their fleas. They reminded me of some guys I’d worked a couple of jobs with back in the States. Then we flew back to Amsterdam and took a river cruise.
******
We were newly returned from our vacation and had just finished a round of golf on Pencie’s favorite course when it happened. A somewhat elderly man wearing shorts and a short-sleeve red shirt was waiting patiently as we climbed out of the cart and started to unload our bags of golf clubs.
“Oh, Mister Cage, may I speak with you privately for a moment?” He had a business card in his hand. I’d never seen him before, and he knew my name? Someone at the club must have told him. But why? I looked at him with a question in my eyes.
“About Arthur Avenue and the Social Club,” he said with sort of a smile. Alarms and sirens went off in my mind, and it took all the self control I could muster not to looked look around to see if I was about to be arrested or shot down.
He quickly spoke to reassure me. Pencie heard him and saw the intensity in my eyes. She looked at me, then at him, and then back at me. I motioned for her to go ahead without me. Maybe I could run for it. But how? I’d given my car to the parking attendant.
“Oh dear, I didn’t mean to upset you,” the man said. “There’s no problem, there really isn’t. Quite the contrary, actually. Here, please take my card. I’m here all alone as you can see.”
******
I stood there dumbfounded for a moment as Pencie disappeared into the pro shop; then I reached out and took the card as the man beamed at me. Donald Carlson, Chief Technical Officer of the Mass Data Program of a technology company located in San Jose. It meant nothing to me.
“You must be mistaken. I don’t know anything about Arthur Avenue.” And if you’re really here all alone I’m going to kill you as soon as I get a chance.
He smiled at me and said, “Of course you do. It took Sam more than thirty minutes to find you, you know.”
“I don’t know anyone by the name of Sam; sorry, but you’ve got the wrong guy.”
“Ah, well, perhaps I do. But what if I told you that Sam says that next month, somewhere in the San Antonio area, the Mob is going to use almost thirty million dollars of good, used twenties and hundreds from its Indian casinos to pay for an entire planeload of heroin. The Venezuelan army is selling it so they can pay their troops. That money interests my company because Sam says there is at least one bank in Switzerland, and maybe two, which will buy all the dollars for their overseas cash stations and send my company enough money so that we won’t have to go to the thieves on Wall Street for another round of financing and give up control of our company to get it.”
“Who are you?” I asked with an incredulous sound in my voice as I cocked my head and leaned forward to look at him closely.
“I’m Sam’s designer and chief technical officer. Sam’s the new next-generation supercomputer my company is developing. It’s a powerful computer, the most powerful computer so far, and it’s already doing things that have never been done before—like visual and voice recognitions and simultaneously reading and analyzing things like all FedEx and UPS shipments, security camera images and aircraft radar tracks of the past few years, and all the bank deposits, cell phone calls, and emails that have been made or sent in the past couple of years.
“That’s how we found out who hit the Bonanno Family and its jewelry store; not by finding you as you might imagine, but by eliminating everyone else.”
To say I was surprised and dumbfounded at what the man had just told me would be seriously understating the thoughts racing through my mind. But then I pulled myself together.
“Thirty million in used twenties and hundreds? You don’t say. Well now, my friends and I are always interested in hearing about new technologies and job opportunities; perhaps we should have a beer and talk.”
I said it with a smile and gestured towards the staircase leading up to the bar.
—The End—
Publishers Note: Raymond Casey is the pen name for Martin Archer. He hopes you enjoyed this story and would like to read more stories about Cage and his crew. If so, he respectfully requests that you click on Amazon’s review link and give the book as many stars as possible. It’s the number of stars that determines the extent to which Amazon places an author’s book in its search engine and where it will appear in the Kindle library. Raymond Casey can be reached at [email protected]. He would very much like to hear from you with your comments and suggestions.
Cage's Crew Page 14
