Mafia Fix td-4

by Warren Murphy

  But the buyers were angry and they confirmed a suspicion. It was all Mafia and the capo Mafioso was Dominic Verillio. A solid confirmation. No doubt about it.

  Harold Smith picked up his special phone and dialled. The phone rang and then was answered. There was squawking. Remo was either having trouble or playing games with the scrambler again. Almost by the month, the man showed signs of psychological deterioration.

  Remo did not know it but CURE had twice tried to get men as standbys. Same method. But the drug that simulated death had produced death. Twice. The laboratories examined it and came back with the report that indeed it was a deadly poison.

  "Could a man take it and live?"

  "Doubtful. And if he did live, you'd have a vegetable," was the answer.

  Smith never revealed this to Remo and especially not to Remo's trainer, Chiun. The old man already babbled on too much about Oriental gods taking the bodies of dead people and seeking revenge on evildoers.

  Remo was a typical, overemotional, spiritually self-indulgent, American wise guy. Nothing Oriental about him. The only communing he did was with his stomach, sex organ and ego. He had all the calm Eastern spirituality of a hamburger and coke, to go.

  A click on the phone and then a voice.

  "Yeah. Whaddya want?"

  "It's Verillio. He's definitely the Mafia man."

  "It's 7:30 a.m."

  "Well, I didn't want to miss you."

  "Well, you didn't."

  Click.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Don Dominic Verillio arrived at his office early that morning. He did not say hello to his secretary. He walked into his office, shut the door and without taking off his straw hat, sat down behind his desk and began drawing diagrams and plans, with arrows and boxes, much as he had learned in Officer's Candidate School during the Second World War. He had refined his strategy much since being mustered out in 1945 as a major with three battle citations.

  He was going to play it smart. He would hold back Gaetano Gasso for the writer, Remo Barry. Barry knew something, was responsible for something, or belonged to something or someone. Gaetano Gasso would find out exactly what.

  The winner, however, is usually he who commits his reserves last. That would mean sending in lightweight people first against Remo Barry's old Oriental servant. They would seize him, have him phone Barry. The gook's life for information from Remo Barry.

  And if that did not pry out the information, then Gasso would take it out of Remo Barry's flesh. In pieces. So much for that.

  To the other capos, he would say, wait. Yes, there had been trouble with delivery. There would be a new, better method of delivery shortly. Hold on. Your money is safe. So much for the capos.

  He picked up the phone and dialled, apologized for the break in procedure and asked for an appointment because of an urgent matter. His voice was tender and respectful.

  "I'll tell you everything when I get there. Yes. Well, I don't know. Okay, I'll meet you there."

  On his way to his car, Don Dominic Verillio met Willie the Plumber Palumbo at a prearranged corner. Willie stood there coughing, next to his car.

  Don Dominic explained what he wanted done, what Gaetano Gasso should do, what the other men would do.

  "I'd like to go after the little gook myself," said Willie the Plumber when he heard that Mr. Gasso would not be going.

  "No, I need you here."

  Willie the Plumber bowed to Don Dominic Verillio and walked dizzily around the front of his car, to begin to deliver the messages. His footing was never good at this time of the day because of what he called "the mornings."

  For a while he had asked people if they suffered from "the mornings" also-this to prove that losing consciousness when walking during the morning was a normal occurrence. When he received negative responses and advice that he should see a doctor, Willie the Plumber Palumbo stopped asking people if they, too, had "the mornings."

  Verillio watched Willie the Plumber drive away, then continued walking to his own car. He drove off to the western side of the city, then through a large set of stone gates and parked his four-door gray Lincoln Continental Mark II before a crypt with a winged statue in marble.

  He waited, then saw the familiar black car pull up behind his. He got out, walked around and sat in the passenger's seat.

  His conference took only minutes. Then he strolled back to his car, opened the door and eased himself into the soft leather cushioning. He picked up the telephone, as he watched the black car move away in his rear-view mirror. He dialed his office number.

  "Hello, Joan. I will be seeing this morning the editor of the Tribune, Chief Dugan and Mayor Hansen. If anyone phones, I will return their calls this afternoon."

  He hung up and drove through the city to the back of the Tribune building, where trucks were loading the first edition. It was his city. His numbers, his whores and his narcotics. And he wasn't going to give it up because a few little things went wrong.

  The brain would straighten out everything and then it would be his country, just as this was his city. He could count on that brilliant mind to do it. Even if that mind were not qualified for membership in the Sicilian Brotherhood.

  But then he was not Capo Mafioso because he listened to the old pistol Petes and their hand kissing and vendettas, codes of this and codes of that, and all the hogwash imported from Sicily.

  America still had the best killing systems and America had the best organizing systems. One should use them. And that way one could become the youngest Capo Mafioso ever. Only fifty-one and he was number one.

  Well, that one person was above him but that person didn't count, not having the qualifications for the Sicilian Brotherhood.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Willie the Plumber spotted a meek looking man with a funny tubular device standing inside a truck and pointing the device at people.

  Willie decided he didn't like the meek little man pointing that thing at his blue Eldorado. Maybe it would do something to the paint or something.

  Willie the Plumber pulled up in front of the truck and parked so that the truck could not move. Then, rocking through another attack of "the mornings," he got out of the car and walked back to the man in the truck.

  "Hey, whaddya doing in the truck with that thing?" asked Willie the Plumber.

  "Department of Agriculture. Tuber survey."

  "Those tiling’s hurt cars?"

  "No. Goes right through metal. Picks up different kinds of plants. Carrots and things."

  "What kind of things?" asked Willie the Plumber.

  "Oh, I don't know. Carrots. Turnips. Poppies, I guess."

  "Poppies? You mean them red things on veterans' day."

  "Leave me alone," the man said.

  "I'm just asking friendly questions. If you want to find out about carrots and turnips, why don't you go to the vegetable market?"

  "Don't ask me, fella. It's the government."

  Willie nodded and warned the man that the thing he was using better not hurt his Eldorado or the man would be "sucking on a lead pipe."

  Then Willie the Plumber steered himself carefully back to his car, filing away the survey of carrots, turnips and poppies as a little fact of life he would not share with anyone until he saw a profit in it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was really getting good now.

  There was no way out of it.

  Vance Masterman simply had to tell Loretta that he could not marry her because she was his daughter. That would free her to turn in Professor Singbar Ramkwat as the thief of the lymph node cure and then Loretta could marry Bart Henderson and he would continue his research work. Not even Claire Wentworth, Loretta's mother, could be dissatisfied with that, particularly since it gave her a clear field to Dr. Bruce Barton.

  But it all hinged on Vance Masterman telling Loretta. In just minutes it had to happen and Chiun was more than happy. Happiness, he demonstrated by rocking slightly back and forth while sitting in his full lotus position on the
floor of their East Side apartment. When he was really overjoyed, sometimes he hummed. Today, Chiun was rocking and humming. Ecstasy.

  He turned up the volume on the television set so as not to miss a word and then he waited for the solution to the problems of an entire community.

  Braaaawk.

  It was the door bell.

  Whoever it was would simply have to wait. There were only about eight minutes left in the show anyway. Chiun could tell.

  Braaaaaaaaaaaawk.

  This time, the loud insistent squawk of the door bell threatened to overwhelm the music, violins and organs, sobbing from the television set.

  Let him wait.

  Of course, one should never let a person wait at a front door. That was rudeness and Orientals did not believe in rudeness. On the other hand, eighty-year-old Koreans who had attained peace with themselves, did not get up and walk away from the great moment of a show that they had watched for seven years to coax to this point. Politeness or self-contentment?

  Courtesy was a duty and in his eight decades on the planet, Chiun had never shirked his duty. He was ready to shirk now, ready to sit Vance Masterman through right until the end and if someone waited in the hall until his feet grew roots through the carpet, that was too bad. People should not come visiting when good shows are on.

  The impasse, fortunately, was resolved by up organ music, slow dissolve, momentary silence and then the appearance on screen of a lady plumber belly-laughing the stains out of sinks in New York City.

  Chiun jumped to his feet and began running. Out of the living room, through the dining room, down the hallway, his long brocaded white robe swirling about his ankles.

  Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawk.

  Chiun reached up and unlocked the door. Then he unlocked the safety dead bolt. Then he went to remove the safety chain, all of which he had been assured were absolutely necessary to keep fastened at all times if one wished to remain alive in New York City for the better part of an afternoon.

  But the safety chain was stuck and did not pull off its slide. So Chiun held the chain in his left hand and with a silent expulsion of air, brought his right fingertips down against the offending chain, searing one link as if it had been sliced by a bolt cutter.

  Then Chiun turned the doorknob, pulled the door open fractionally, turned and was racing back down the hall, through the dining room, into the living room and back into his lotus position.

  Organ music up, then fade in and enter Vance Masterman. "Dear, I have something to tell you. . . ."

  In the hallway, Johnny the Duck, Vinnie O'Boyle and Pops Smith, saw the door swing open slightly. They looked at each other with suspicion and Johnny the Duck reached into the shoulder holster under his left armpit and removed a .45 calibre pistol. He touched the door tentatively with his left hand, then waited until the door swung all the way back, stopping with a soft thud against the wall. No one behind it.

  The three men stepped inside, Johnny the Duck first as befitted his rank, then O'Boyle, followed by Pops Smith, a tall, shuffling, black man whose eternal grin was relieved only slightly by a scar that furrowed down his face from alongside his right eye to the point of his chin.

  Pops had gotten it when he tried to hold out and continue running his small independent numbers operation in the face of a stated desire by the Mafia that it take over Pops' numbers. For a consideration, of course, since it simply was not good -business procedure to allow him to pay winners higher odds than the Mafia did, because, after all, there was such a thing as unfair competition and how could man survive in such a dog-eat-dog world. They made this point clear to Pops by slashing his face with a linoleum knife and warning him that the next time it would be his genitals.

  Pops, who had been a big fish in a small pond, opted to become a fully-equipped, if small fish, in the Mafia's big gambling pond. While he still sometimes harboured suspicions that the Mafia was not truly concerned with entrepreneurship among minorities and was even at times bigoted, he did not express those opinions to anyone, especially not to Gaetano Gasso, who had sent him here today.

  Pops looked anxiously now over the shoulders of Johnny the Duck and Vinnie O'Boyle. The long carpeted hall was empty. Funny they had heard or seen no one at the door.

  The Duck nodded to Pops who fastened the two locks that still worked. Pops shook his head at the sight of the broken chain lock. A good way to get yourself killed in New York City, letting maintenance go that way.

  Cautiously, the three men walked slowly down the hall, in sort of an ethnic pecking order in the Mafia: Johnny the Duck first, followed by the Irishman O'Boyle, followed by the black Pops Smith. Despite their best efforts, their feet made small scuffing noises on the carpet and the Duck removed the safety on his gun. Up ahead, they could hear voices. Funny, O'Boyle thought, that fifty bucks to the doorman told them that the dink was here alone.

  Softly now into the dining room. The voices were louder now and O'Boyle took out his gun too, a .38 calibre police special with burned-off serial numbers.

  The dining room opened into the living room through a large archway. They smiled at each other in relief. The voices came from the television set and in front of it, squatting on the floor, enraptured by the pale gray image in the bright sunlit room, sat the dink, his back to them.

  "There's nothing you have to tell me that I want to hear," came a woman's voice from the television. The dink was rocking and humming.

  Johnny the Duck chuckled and put his gun back into his shoulder holster. So did Vinnie O'Boyle. They noticed that Pops had not taken out his gun and that annoyed the other two, because he would be sure to tell Gasso how stupid both of them had looked with their guns aimed at the back of the aged, tiny Oriental who could hurt nothing more than his eyes if he sat too close to the set. And Gasso would needle them about it. Maybe for weeks, maybe for months, maybe forever.

  And there was nothing you could do about Gasso's needling except take it. Maybe for weeks, maybe for months, maybe forever.

  They stepped into the parquet-floored living room, their metal cleated heels making sharp clicks on the highly polished wood.

  "Hey, you," Johnny the Duck called at the back of the brocaded, white robe. It kept rocking. Its occupant kept humming. Johnny the Duck walked around in front of Chiun and looked down into the placid Oriental face. A peaceful-looking old man.

  "Yeah, you," Johnny the Duck said. "We want to talk with you."

  In musical English, Chiun said, "My house is your house. Make yourself at home. I will be with you soon," and he moved his head slightly to see around the right leg of Johnny the Duck.

  The Duck looked at the other two men who still stood near the doorway behind Chiun and he shrugged. They grinned and shrugged back.

  "But I must tell you," Vance Masterman's voice pleaded from the television. "I have borne this secret in silence for these many years and. . . ."

  "The gook wants to watch his television show," Johnny the Duck said. "Maybe we ought to let him."

  "Why not?" O'Boyle agreed and the Duck moved out of Chiun's way.

  There were two tiling’s Pops Smith didn't like. First was calling the old man a gook and a dink. He couldn't help where he was born or what his colour was.

  Pops mentioned this to O'Boyle and the Duck. "No need to make fun of the old man. He just old, is all."

  Chiun heard the voice and the words. For that, Pops had earned himself a gift-the gift of dying last.

  Unfortunately, Pop lost all claim to the gift later when he took action on the second thing he didn't like.

  "What makes you think I would believe anything you say?" the woman's voice whined from the television.

  Chiun continued to hum, but his rocking became more rhythmical, as if he were impatiently urging the players on. Tell her, he said to himself. Just tell her, I am your father,

  Chiun would have done it. Remo would have done it. Any man would have done it. But now the picture was fading and the organ music was rising and Vance Masterman
still had not told her. Chiun sighed, a deep anguished sigh. At times, Vance Masterman was a very imperfect human being.

  If only he were more like the lady plumber who now appeared on the screen-racing in front of the camera, braying her message, demonstrating her wares and then leaving.

  Ah, but Vance Masterman had had a difficult life and men reacted differently to adversity. He had once told that to Remo at a training session.

  They had sat on the gymnasium floor at Folcroft Sanatorium and Chiun had looked at Remo's face. At first, he had despaired of ever making anything of this hard-faced, wisecracking young man. But as time went on and the legend grew, that had changed and Chiun felt for him, first kindness, then respect, then almost love, and he had shared with him a secret.

  "In the world, Remo, you will find that men will do what men must do. Learn to anticipate men and you learn to control men. Learn also not to be anticipated. Learn to be like the wind that blows from all sides; then men will look at you and never know what window of their soul to close."

  Chiun arose in one motion from his full lotus and stood up, slightly annoyed at himself for not realizing that Vance Masterman would have trouble telling his terrible secret.

  He turned to his three guests. The one who had stood in front of him: he had had to because it was the way for an inferior man to demonstrate superiority. And the one who had agreed that Chiun should watch his television. He also had had to, because he was a stupid man, and being agreeable made it unnecessary to attempt to think one's way through to a decision. And the third man, the black man who had raised his voice in protest of the verbal abuse of Chiun. Well, that-too-was preordained. He defended himself by defending Chiun.

  Chiun would have to tell Remo about these very interesting men. Remo was interested these days in why people did things.

  Chiun smiled and folded his hands inside the large, flowing sleeves of his brocaded white robe.