Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  AF: I have something more important in mind down the line, Petey. I don’t want to rock the boat just now.

  PB: This wouldn’t be boosting the Colombians, you understand …

  AF: I know that. But the balance is pretty shaky right now, and I don’t want anything upsetting it further.

  RF: You want my opinion, the fuckin’ spics are gonna do away with the people in Harlem entirely. Who the fuck needs a middleman? They got their own distribution setup, the Harlem people are like a fuckin’ fifth wheel.

  AF: I think so, yes. That’s all part of it.

  Michael kept reading the transcript.

  On another day, in another month, there was a philosophical discussion about the very real services these noble gangsters provided. Present at this lofty seminar were Anthony Faviola and his laureate brother, Rudy, “Fat Nickie” Nicoletta, who never went to the movies anymore, Peter Bardo, the consigliere, and Felix Danielli, who had the gorgeous wife Rudy would have loved to boff.

  AF: When you think of it, what are we doing that’s so terrible?

  RF: What are we doing, right?

  AF: Why is gambling against the law? Is it such a sin to gamble?

  LN: They gambled in the Bible, even. I saw a movie, they were gambling for Jesus’s robe.

  PB: You’re right, Anthony, gambling should be legal.

  AF: It should. But meanwhile, it’s against the law. So what do we do? We provide what the people want. They want to gamble, we give them the means to gamble.

  LN: His robe they were shooting dice for. The robe he was wearing.

  AF: What’s the lottery, if not legal gambling?

  RF: What’s OTB?

  AF: It’s all legal gambling. But when we run it, it’s against the law. Why? We’re giving the same odds, no? We’re not rigging anything, we run a fair game. We take our vig, sure, but doesn’t the state take a vig?

  The vigorish, or the percentage, or the house cut, the edge that made any gambling a winning proposition for the mob. Even when they lost; they won. Bet a hundred bucks on a football game, the bookie paid you the hundred if you won, but if you lost he collected a hundred and ten.

  PB: How about lending money? You know what the banks are getting legally now? The interest rate on a legal loan?

  RF: Through the fuckin’ roof, I bet.

  PB: Close to what we’re asking, that’s for sure.

  AF: But what’s a man supposed to do when a bank turns him down? Is it a sin to have bad credit?

  RF: Make a guy feel like a fuckin’ scumbag, the banks.

  LN: Turn you down no reason at all.

  AF: They come to us, their credit is always good.

  At three to five percent a week, compounded, Michael thought. Put that on your calculator, see what the interest on a ten-thousand-dollar loan comes to after a few months of five-percent interest.

  RF: It’s a service, plain and simple. Like you said, Anth.

  AF: Sure, but they make it illegal.

  LN: A service we provide!

  RF: Where else can a guy needs money go? Temporary.

  LN: Who’s gonna lend it to him?

  RF: Also, they say we bust a guy’s head he don’t pay. So what does a bank do? A bank takes the fuckin’ guy’s house away, is what the bank does.

  AF: One way or another, they’re out to get us.

  RF: Make our fuckin’ lives miserable.

  LN: The cocksuckers.

  Michael almost missed the first mention. It came during the second week in June. It was in a monitored two-way telephone conversation between Anthony and his brother. Michael’s eyes passed right over the word because it wasn’t an exact match. The transcript read:

  AF: What bothers me, Rude, is they may really have something this time. They’re acting as if they’ve got something.

  RF: It’s the same old shit, Anth. They always come in blowin’ wind, they ain’t got a fuckin’ thing on you and they know it.

  AF: All those indictments.

  RF: They ain’t got shit.

  AF: Murder, Rudy. That’s heavy.

  RF: You never murdered anybody your whole life.

  AF: Never let up.

  RF: Cocksuckers.

  AF: Mick-a-lino’s worried, too.

  RF: I’ll go talk to him.

  AF: Calm him down, tell him I’ll be okay. He’s worried.

  RF: Sure he is. But don’t you worry, huh, Anth? Nobody’s gonna hurt you.

  AF: Yeah.

  RF: You hear me?

  AF: Yeah, thanks, Rudy.

  RF: I’ll go talk t’ Lino.

  There it was again. Mick-a-lino the first time around, just plain Lino, with the L capitalized, the second time. The capitalization was the typist’s choice, Michael guessed, guided by the detective who’d actually listened to the conversations as they were being recorded. Listening to the sitdown talk between Frankie Palumbo and Jimmy Angels in the Ristorante Romano, Michael and Georgie had thought they’d heard the name Lena. The typist who’d transferred the Faviola tapes to the computer disk had spelled the name L-E-N-O when the matter of the Christmas gift had been mentioned in December of 1991. And now the typist doing the transcript had spelled it L-I-N-O, as in Mick-a-lino and Lino. How had this been pronounced on the original tapes? As in “wino”? If so, this couldn’t possibly be related to Lena. Michael debated consulting the tapes themselves at this point. Instead, he kept reading the transcript.

  The next time the letters L-I-N-O came up in sequence was during another telephone conversation, this time between Anthony Faviola and his wife, Tessie, during the month of August, shortly before the start of Faviola’s trial. Faviola was calling from Club Sorrento, where several bugs had been planted, and to which he referred simply as “the club.” Tessie was on the bug-free house phone in Stonington. Before the investigating detectives tuned out on this privileged husband-wife communication, they’d recorded:

  AF: I have a few more things to take care of here at the club, then I’ll be coming home.

  TF: Be careful, the weekend traffic.

  AF: Yeah, don’t worry.

  TF: What time do you think you’ll be?

  AF: Six, six thirty. For supper, anyway.

  Supper. A holdover from the Brooklyn days, when the evening meal at Stella Faviola’s table was always called “supper” and never “dinner.”

  AF: Is Lino still coming up?

  TF: He’s already here.

  AF: Oh? Good. Tell him I’ll see him later, okay?

  TF: Drive careful.

  Lino again. An apparent guest in Faviola’s impregnable Connecticut fortress. Lino. Short for Mick-a-lino? Or had this been Michelino on the tapes? The diminutive of Michele? Transmogrified by a tone-deaf WASP typist to some sort of bastardized English? Michele. Pronounced “Mee-kiy-lay” in Italian. Michael knew because “Michael” just happened to be his name, and that’s what he’d been called the one and only time he’d been, to Italy, Michele, with a hard ch as opposed to the soft one in the French “Michel.”

  Michele.

  Michael.

  Michelino.

  Little Michael.

  Anthony Faviola had no children or grandchildren named Michael. Nor had the name figured prominently in any of the trial material, any of the volumes of transcripts the U.S. Attorney’s office had studied and restudied in its successful bid to put Faviola away forever. If anyone had noticed mention of a Michael or a Little Michael, no significance had been given to the names. Until now.

  Now a Queens waiter who owed money to a Manhattan loan shark had agreed to courier some dope and had walked into a sting set up by Narcotics. And during a conversation between a pair of capos trying to save his ass, a Faviola lieutenant had said he’d talk it over with Lena—or so they’d thought. But Lena had become Leno, and from there it
was a hop, skip, and jump to Mick-a-lino to Michelino to Little Michael.

  He checked the tapes.

  The name had, in fact, been pronounced in the Italian way, Michelino, and transcribed by the typist in phonetic English. Which meant that Lino didn’t rhyme with wino, it rhymed with dean-o.

  Michelino.

  Little Michael.

  Once more unto the breach, Michael thought, and plunged into the transcript yet another time.

  Alonso Moreno was known in some circles as La Culebra, which meant the Snake. Andrew guessed this had more to do with his business practices than with his looks. He was, in fact, quite a handsome man.

  Sitting on the foredeck of a forty-eight-foot Grand Banks—not particularly known for speed, but no one was trying to outrace anyone today—Moreno offered Andrew a cigarette, shrugged when he declined it, and then lighted his own and turned politely away to exhale a stream of smoke. Turning back to Andrew, his dark glasses reflecting bright morning sunlight, he said, “I already told your people no,” and then snapped his fingers at a man wearing knee-length white cotton shorts and a white cotton sweater, and pointed immediately to the pitcher of lemonade sitting on a low table fastened to the deck with cleats. The man in white poured their glasses full again. The cigarette in one hand, the glass of lemonade in the other, Moreno alternately sipped and puffed.

  “So why are you here?” he asked.

  Andrew figured Moreno had a good ten years on him, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, in there. Rudolph Valentino looks, black hair slicked back from a pronounced widow’s peak, aquiline nose a trifle too long for his face, androgynous Mick Jagger lips, puffing and sipping, calmly waiting for a reply. Too polite to say you’re wasting my fucking time here. But wise enough to realize Andrew had come all the way from New York and was not to be summarily dismissed.

  “I’m here because I don’t think this was explained properly to you.”

  “It was explained,” Moreno said, and suddenly took off the sunglasses.

  Eyes so brown they looked black.

  Maybe that’s where he’d got the Snake nickname.

  Black eyes reflecting sunlight.

  Out on the water, a speedboat towing a skier behind it appeared suddenly on the horizon.

  “Mr. Isetti explained it to me fully.”

  Slight Spanish accent. Andrew had heard someplace that Moreno was college-educated, had been studying to be a doctor, in fact. He imagined Moreno with a scalpel in his hand. The thought was frightening.

  “The business aspects,” Andrew said.

  “Every aspect,” Moreno said. “We’re not interested.”

  “We consider this a very rich deal.”

  “We’re rich enough,” Moreno said, and smiled.

  “We’re not,” Andrew said, and returned the smile.

  “Que pena,” Moreno said.

  “We figure a person can always get richer than he is.”

  Moreno said nothing. Bored, he puffed on his cigarette and sipped at his lemonade. Out on the water, the speedboat cut a wider arc. The skier behind it let out an exuberant yell.

  “We figure that a person who doesn’t want to get richer runs the risk of getting poorer,” Andrew said.

  “I don’t see that risk.”

  “Do you know how Columbus happened to discover America?”

  “What?” Moreno said.

  “I said, ‘Do you … ?’”

  “I heard you. What does it mean?”

  “He was looking for China.”

  “So?”

  “We’re bringing China right to your doorstep. You don’t have to go looking for it.”

  “I’m not looking for it. You’re the one who’s looking for it.”

  “No, we’re looking for an expanded market that’ll …”

  “Good, you go look for it. We’re happy with America.”

  “I don’t think you’re hearing me,” Andrew said.

  “I’m hearing you fine, thank you very much,” Moreno said. “That’s just a child out there, you know? The skier.”

  Andrew glanced briefly over the water and then turned his attention back to Moreno.

  “You supply your product,” he said, “the Chinese supply theirs. Our European associates turn it over, and we distribute all over America and Europe.”

  “We already distribute in America and Europe,” Moreno said.

  “Not the new product.”

  “We don’t need any new products.”

  “We think you do.”

  “Hey, really, who the fuck cares what you think?” Moreno said.

  “Mr. Moreno, I think you’d better …”

  “No, don’t ‘Mr. Moreno’ me, and don’t tell me what I better do, I do what I want to do, never mind what I better do. I told Isetti we’re not interested, he says I think you owe us the courtesy of hearing what Andrew has to say, he came all the way down here from New York. Okay, I just listened to what Andrew has to say, and we’re still not interested. I don’t know who sent you …”

  “Nobody sent me, Mr. Moreno.”

  “But whoever it was …”

  “I came on my own.”

  “Fine. Go back on your own. Tell whoever sent you …”

  “This is the last time I’ll explain it,” Andrew said, and sighed wearily, as if trying to instruct a particularly recalcitrant child. “We’re working out a three-way deal with the Chinese. If you’d like to join us, you’re more than welcome. That’s why I’m here. But if you refuse to see the merits, we’ll have to go ahead without you. I think you can understand how difficult we can make things …”

  “Listen, get off my boat, okay?” Moreno said, and then, in Spanish, to the man in the white cotton shorts and sweater, “Llevarlo de vuelta a la costa, no hay nada más que discutir aquí.” He extended his hand to Andrew, said, “Our business is finished, Alberico will take you …” and then stopped in midsentence and got to his feet and pointed out over the water, and said, “That child’s in trouble.”

  From where Sarah sat at the wheel of the speedboat, her head craned over her shoulder, she knew only that Mollie had suddenly gone under. Spills were common, though, and Mollie had been water-­skiing ever since she was seven, when her grandfather added a speedboat to his other Caribbean possessions. She was skilled and daring, and until this moment, Sarah had never felt the slightest qualms about allowing her daughter to rip up the ocean behind a boat doing twenty miles an hour over open water. In fact, for the past year now, Mollie had been skiing without a life vest, pleading greater freedom of movement and a thorough knowledge of what she was doing, and Sarah hadn’t seen any danger to it.

  She swung the boat around in a tight turn now, opened the throttle full, and headed back toward where she’d last seen Mollie. There was a moderate chop today, the boat skidded and thudded over the waves as she closed the distance, waiting for her daughter to surface, avoiding the tow-rope, the last thing she wanted now was to get the rope tangled in the boat’s … there! Mollie’s blond head popping to the surface. Mouth opening wide to suck in air, waves breaking under her chin. Some twenty yards beyond her, a man was standing at the railing of a big Grand Banks, yelling in Spanish. And then another man climbed onto the rail, hung there against the sky for just a moment, dove overboard, and began swimming toward Mollie just as she went under again.

  Sarah silently willed the speedboat forward, urging it to go faster than it possibly could, pushing it against wind and chop, the towline safely behind her, aware now of the swimmer in the water, plowing against the waves in a fast crawl to where Mollie’s head broke the surface again. Another mouthful of air, Sarah was close enough to see her face now, panic in those blue eyes. She clawed at the sky, and went under for the third time, and the swimmer dove down after her.

  Sarah pulled back on the throttle, began circling the area where
her daughter and the swimmer had gone under. There was only the sound of the idling engine now, the boat lazily circling the spot where they’d disappeared, the sky so blue overhead, the seconds lengthening, and lengthening and lengthening, and …

  She was on the edge of screaming when first Mollie’s head broke the surface of the water, and then her narrow shoulders, and then the swimmer’s hands clutching her waist. His own head broke the surface at last, brown hair flattened against his skull. He sucked in a deep breath of air, pushed aside Mollie’s flailing hands, and rolled her onto her back. Cupping her chin with one hand, he swam her over to where Sarah leaned over the gunwales and lifted her daughter into the boat.

  Two weeks before he was arrested and charged with four counts of second-degree murder, Anthony Faviola’s thoughts—and his conversation—turned to matters merely mortal. It was almost as if he knew what was coming. Knew that he’d soon be looking not only at the four counts, each of which carried lifetime sentences under the federal guidelines, but also at another possible lifetime sentence on a RICO charge.

  The conversation had taken place at the bugged corner table in Club Sorrento. The boss’s table. Reserved for Faviola and his closest cronies whenever they dropped in, which was often. In the transcript, Anthony and his brother, Rudy, were identified by the now-familiar initials AF and RF. Apparently the men were drinking; perhaps Anthony might not have been so candid were he not somewhat in his cups. And whereas Michael had never held a soft spot in his heart for anyone who broke the law, he felt something like sympathy as he read the words of this man who did not know he was being taped and could not have known what the future held in store for him, and yet who was predicting it quite sadly and accurately:

  AF: I keep thinking they’re closing in on me.

  RF: Come on, come on.

  AF: I mean it, Rude. Everywhere I go, everything I do, they’re on top of me. It’s like they won’t let me breathe.

  RF: Fuck ’em, that’s just the way they are. They got nothin’ better to do than break people’s balls.

  AF: Have some more of this.

  RF: Just a little.

  AF: Say when.

  RF: That’s enough, ay, hold it.

  AF: I don’t care for myself, you understand. I’ve had a good life.