Hades

by Russell Andrews

  Justin was out of bed now, too. He had to struggle to pull on his pants. But he managed. He picked up Reggie’s gun, stepped gingerly and silently down the stairs, his own gun held in front of him, pointed forward. As the living room came into view, so did the intruder. Justin yelled, “Freeze! Police!” The force of his voice made his ribs throb.

  The intruder was sitting on the couch, leafing through one of the Melman Prep yearbooks that Justin had brought back from his meeting with Vince Ellerbe. He looked up, saw Justin, shirtless, wearing jeans, pointing the gun straight at him. He tapped the yearbook he was perusing, said, “Interesting reading.”

  Justin sighed and lowered his gun. Went back upstairs and opened the bathroom door. Reggie was standing in the middle of the small room, looking lost and despairing. He said softly, “You can come down now.” She said nothing, only stared at him, and he said, “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head, said, “How could you think that?”

  He said, “I had to think that. I couldn’t think anything else.” And then he said, “I’ll never think it again.”

  She said, “I understand. But I don’t know if that’s good enough.” Then she stepped around him and headed downstairs. Justin followed her. When they both came into view, the man on the couch started shaking his head slowly.

  “Unbelievable,” Bruno Pecozzi said, looking at the two of them. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

  “So word reached me that you want to talk,” Bruno said.

  Justin wanted to ignore the big man, wanted to put his arm around Reggie, to kiss her, to make her understand what had happened, why it would never happen again, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have time. He had to focus and deal with what he had in front of him, so he faced the man on the couch. He was amazed that there was no difference between the Bruno who’d been sitting there with a loaded pistol pointed at him and the Bruno who was sitting there now, a beer in his hand. Justin and Reggie had quickly dressed; she had put on her outfit from the night before, and Justin managed to get a long-sleeved button-down shirt on. Bruno had taken careful note of Justin’s injuries and asked about them. Justin told him what had happened. Bruno never changed expression. Violence did not faze Bruno or even interest him all that much. It was simply a part of his daily life; he had the same perspective on it that commuters had about their rush-hour train ride from and back to the suburbs.

  “I thought you were coming to talk a while ago,” Justin said. “Right after I saw you.”

  “I had to be a little careful,” Bruno said. “Perhaps you might recall the circumstances under which we last met.”

  “I recall,” Justin told him. “Pietro Lambrasco.”

  “Was that his name?” Bruno didn’t seem surprised that Justin knew it.

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” Bruno said, “I didn’t much care what his name was.”

  “You just cared why he was there.” When Bruno nodded, Justin said, “And did you find out?”

  “I told you, there were a few possibilities. Turned out, I’d done something he didn’t like.”

  “Back in the old country, maybe? When you took your relaxing vacation?”

  “Could be.”

  “Where you from again, Bruno?” Justin asked. “That place where your aunt has the beautiful villa, up on the cliffs? What part of Italy is that? I don’t think you ever told me.”

  “The south,” Bruno said.

  “As south as Sicily?”

  “As south as that, yeah.”

  “And this villa, does it happen to be on an island?”

  “How official is this conversation?” Bruno said. “I’ll talk to you”—he jerked his thumb at Reggie—“but she makes me nervous. Bein’ a Fed and all.”

  “You should be nervous, Bruno,” Justin said. “You killed Evan Harmon. And I don’t know how the hell you did it, but you sunk a ship near Sicily. And Wanda Chinkle knew about it.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes, she did. She left me kind of a note about it.”

  “What kind of note?” Bruno asked.

  “She left me the name of the boat. Reggie’s associates just confirmed it. Sometimes it’s not so bad bein’ a Fed and all.”

  “That right?”

  “That’s right,” Justin said. He turned to Reggie. “You want to tell him?”

  “Hades,” she said. “You sunk a ship called Hades off the coast of the Sicilian island Favignana. Named Hades because he wasn’t just the god of the underworld, or even just the god of wealth. Hades is the god of precious metal. And the ship had a lot of precious metal on it. That’s what it carried on a regular basis.”

  “Platinum,” Justin said. “On this trip, over fifty million dollars’ worth.”

  “You landed in Palermo five days before the boat went down,” Reggie went on. Her voice got stronger as she spoke, although she still wasn’t looking at Justin. “You took a ferry from Trapani to Favignana. And you left the island three days after the ship sank.”

  “Your visitor Pietro Lambrasco. He was here for something personal, not just business,” Justin took over. “We got the list of sailors working on the ship. All present and accounted for. No deaths among the crew. But apparently there was one stowaway. No one knows how he got on board but he was there. A young kid. And he drowned. His name was Angelo Tornabene. You want to know the name of Pietro Lambrasco’s wife? Her maiden name, I mean?”

  “No,” Bruno said. “I know it. Giovanna Tornabene.”

  “Angelo’s older sister.”

  Bruno said, taking another long swig of beer, “You didn’t answer my question. How official is this conversation?”

  “It’s official,” Justin told him. “It’s official on her part and on mine.”

  “How official is it if I didn’t kill Evan Harmon?” the mobster wanted to know. “’Cause I didn’t,” he said. “I would’ve. No problem. But before I could, somebody else beat me to it.”

  33

  Bruno drank his second beer and then his third while he talked.

  He confirmed most of what Lenny Rube had told Justin and Reggie, but he was able to elaborate and provide more detail.

  Bruno had indeed started going to Ronald LaSalle because of his stellar reputation as a financial adviser and money manager. He explained that he wasn’t exactly in a business that provided long-term health care and retirement funds, so he wanted a legit place to stash his money—of which there was a considerable amount—and help it grow. He wasn’t getting any younger, and he knew he couldn’t depend solely on muscle forever. So he gave a couple of hundred g’s to LaSalle, who did a hell of a job. Bruno made money, probably the first legal money of his life, he said, except once when he was a kid and he washed cars. Even then, as he thought about it, he used to steal anything inside the cars that wasn’t nailed down—including once taking a spare tire from someone’s trunk while the person was still sitting in the car—so he guessed that didn’t really count.

  He got Lenny Rube involved, he said. At first, just with the mob boss’s own money. Also totally legit. And just as profitable as Bruno’s initial investment. LaSalle had started his own business and was definitely looking for investors, so Lenny went to him and said they were putting together a fund and wanted LaSalle to handle it. This was Lenny’s idea. Several families from around the country needed a place to put their cash; Lenny had the rep and the clout, so the other families knew he’d look after them. It was a good deal all around. Everyone made money; it was a good way to pay taxes and make everything look nice and tidy; and Len took a sweet little cut off the top for brokering with the broker. But then LaSalle began to realize what he’d gotten into. At first, he really believed that Lenny’s businesses were legit. Then he was asked to do things, Bruno said.

  “What kind of things?” Reggie asked.

  Bruno said, “Things a guy like LaSalle wasn’t used to. Doctoring profits, moving money around. Mostly he was asked to guarantee our investments. We got
a monthly statement one time and the pot had gone down. Lenny didn’t like it. LaSalle said he couldn’t do that. Lenny told him, ‘Sure you can.’ Lenny figured that if LaSalle was taking an automatic cut of our investment, he could guarantee us a certain profit. LaSalle said, ‘That ain’t the way this thing works,’ and the Rube said, ‘That’s the way it works now.’”

  When Reggie asked why LaSalle went along with it, Bruno said, “We had him by the short and curlies. All I had to do was point out that he’d been doing business with some members of a known criminal organization. It didn’t matter whether he knew about it or not, it wasn’t gonna be good for his reputation. But the thing is, the guy had some stones. He still didn’t go along with it.”

  “What did he do?” Reggie wanted to know.

  Bruno told them that LaSalle came to Bruno and Lenny with a proposition. He said he’d find someone else who could do the job. Someone who’d go along with what they wanted. Someone who might fit in with them better. They could move their money from LaSalle’s investment company into this new person’s company. All LaSalle wanted was to untangle their business relationship. He had a wife and they were thinking about starting a family and he was too honest for this kind of work. It was because he was honest that he said he’d get them an acceptable replacement.

  “I thought the Rube would never go for it. But he liked this guy. And, between you and me, I think he gets off now on bein’ this kind of benevolent godfather type—you know? He’s startin’ to think he might actually be a respectable businessman, you know, with all his Palm Beach shit and joinin’ country clubs and all that. So he said okay. With one condition. He said that for the first year, LaSalle had to keep his hand in and make sure whoever this new guy was wouldn’t fuck up. Lenny said he’d make sure that the new guy hired LaSalle—so LaSalle wouldn’t be doin’ business directly with us but he could still look after our interests. And still make some money for his new company. And LaSalle agreed. Not that he had a lot of choice—you know what I mean. He knew he was gettin’ a good deal.”

  “And so the person he came up with was Evan Harmon,” Justin said.

  “Harmon jumped at it,” Bruno told him. “Len met him down in Palm Beach and said the guy had greed written all over him. So we cut a deal.”

  “The same kind of deal Ron LaSalle wouldn’t go along with.”

  Bruno nodded.

  “And what went wrong?” Reggie asked. “What happened?”

  “You get in business with a rattlesnake, you can’t be surprised when he bites you. And then you really can’t be surprised when the bite turns out to be poison.”

  “Which side are you referring to as the snake?” Justin asked.

  “I’ll give you your point, but I’m talkin’ about Harmon. He was the rattler.”

  “Give us the specifics,” Justin said.

  “It started out as a sweet deal. He did a lotta business with the Chinks. Family ties, business ties, all that shit. He was investin’ a lot of money for ’em. And he knew what they were gonna be investin’ in. He said the Chinese car business was gonna take off. The numbers were amazin’. I mean, we’re talking huge. Puts us to fucking shame. I saw the numbers. They more than tripled the number of cars over there in the last five years—from somethin’ like six million to twenty million. And that’s gonna keep goin’ up like crazy. They’re sellin’ a thousand new cars a day in Beijing. A thousand a day! I didn’t even know that was a city! And you know what’s gonna happen over here? We’re fucked and Europe’s fucked and the Japs are fucked most of all. I’m talkin’ good passenger cars for ten grand and an SUV for under twenty.”

  “Okay,” Justin said. “You’re hired. You can do the infomercial.”

  “I’m just sayin’, this is a business that had our name all over it. Harmon said he could move a few things around, take our money and invest in platinum, which had to keep goin’ up because all of a sudden China needed it—and needed a lot of it. They had to have it for all those fuckin’ cars! It’s makin’ me crazy just to fuckin’ think about it!”

  “Try to keep your head in the game, Bruno.”

  Bruno did his best to calm down. “Yeah, yeah, all right. So Harmon said that if we put money in with his fund, he could arrange it so that we always made a profit. Other people could go up and down but we’d always stay up. He’d keep us strictly in platinum and slant cars.”

  “Why was he so willing to make that deal?” Reggie wanted to know. “His fund had plenty of money.”

  “It wasn’t just our money,” Bruno said.

  “What was it?”

  “It was our . . . expertise.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Justin said.

  “Again . . . off the record. But it’s not so complicated. Harmon’s tied into China big-time. China doesn’t want to just import cars and import car parts, they want to make their own fuckin’ things, right? That’s what they do. They take things over. They make ’em themselves ’cause that’s where the money is. They’re takin’ over the whole world! So Harmon’s helpin’ them. He’s shippin’ parts to them on the sly. ’Cause Ford and Chrysler and nobody in the fuckin’ U.S. governments wants to be helpin’ them take over the whole car industry. So the exportin’ is a little, let’s say, dicey. I mean, they’re gonna do it, you don’t stop the Chinks once they get rollin’, but the good ol’ USA wants a share, right? They don’t want ’em makin’ all the parts we know how to make ’cause then what do they need us for?”

  “So he lets you into his fund, he promises that you’ll make a steady profit, and in exchange you provide a little smuggling expertise. For which you also get a share off the top?”

  “Hey, we’re a business just like everybody else.”

  “And where’d you smuggle the parts to?” Justin asked.

  “Mexico. There was a plant there. Auto parts. The Chinese would fly their planes in there and Harmon could ship ’em whatever he wanted to ship ’em as long as he could get it to the plant.”

  “And how about your profits in the fund? Did they stay up?”

  Bruno nodded. “Until recently.”

  “What happened?”

  “He said that some of his other investors had gotten unhappy. And he said that a couple of people had gotten suspicious of the way he was playing fast and loose with their dough. I mean, I don’t know exactly how he was working it, but he was basically taking profits from someone else and giving them to us.”

  “Did he say what people were suspicious?”

  “He tried to keep things quiet but, you know, we’re very inquisitive. I got the kind of face people eventually open up to.”

  “You are a charmer,” Justin said.

  Bruno shrugged. “He said it was his father. And a hotshot Wall Street guy. A guy who threw a lot of money his way, a guy connected big-time to China.”

  “Lincoln Berdon?”

  Bruno nodded. “The guy who runs Rockworth and Williams, yeah. Berdon had put a lot of Chinese people, including the Chinese government, into the Ascension fund. He had a lot of Rockworth dough in it, too. And he wasn’t happy with the results of his investments. Or the investments Harmon was making for his Chinese connections.”

  “Because a big chunk of the profits were going to you.”

  “Hey, he was givin’ the Chinks what they needed—the platinum and the auto parts. He was just chargin’ ’em top dollar and makin’ a profit.”

  “So what did Evan propose to do about it?” Justin asked. “How was he going to deal with the pressure from his father and Berdon?”

  Bruno raised an eyebrow. “He wanted to back off our deal for a while. Make sure a few other people got their big returns. He said he’d make it up to us in a few months. He swore it’d be bigger than ever. He said he had a scheme that would bring us into the whole Chinese car market, make us more than we’d ever dreamed about.”

  “And your reaction?”

  “I told him we were capable of dreamin’ pretty big. And I said, hey, it wasn’t anything per
sonal, we could talk about Chinese cars and shit all he wanted but we had a deal. Not for the future but for the here and now. And I explained that the people I work for like other people to respect their deals.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I’m not exactly what you call a financial expert. But I know people. Harmon thought he could negotiate a deal with anyone. He was pretty surprised when he ran into someone who had a different kind of negotiating technique.”

  “Meaning you.”

  “Meaning me. And my technique is pretty effective. But I knew this guy Harmon was going to try to cheat us. And once that—how should I say this—once that bond of trust is broken, then we’re not big on doing the repair work, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Justin said. “I do. So what happened then?”

  “We knew he’d invested us big-time in platinum. So before we . . . let’s say severed our relationship with him . . .”

  “You thought you’d make a killing. At least a figurative one. And drive the price of platinum way up.”

  Bruno nodded. “That’s pretty much it.”

  Reggie stared at him openmouthed. “You sunk a ship with how many people on it? Fifty? A hundred? More than that? Just so you could make some money?”

  Bruno didn’t look as if he was offended. “I do what I’m paid to do,” he said. “If you wanna know the truth, if things had gone right, nobody woulda died. I didn’t know about that kid who’d hidden out.”

  “If you had, would you have cared?”

  “You got me there,” Bruno said. “I’m not really a sensitive kind of guy.”

  She couldn’t sit still, couldn’t look at the huge man sitting on the couch with a can of beer. Reggie got up, began pacing.

  “Okay,” Justin said. “You sunk the ship Hades, drove the price of platinum up, made whatever percent profit you made, and pulled your money out of Ascension.”

  “That’s where it gets complicated,” Bruno said. “We didn’t get our money out.”