“When you were talking about selling it, Joe, you didn’t know what was in it,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to sell it now.”
“The hell I wouldn’t!” he blared. “Whaddya think we are, the goddammed National Guard or somethin’?” He stabbed a pointing finger at me. “If we got it back, what would you do with it? Go on, say it!”
“Well, speak up, man,” Carlo said to me in his throaty rasp as I hesitated.
“I’d give the federal a chance to prove he wasn’t lying to me about its importance,” I said at last. “What the hell — what country are we living in, anyway?”
“See? See? What did I tell you?” Bonigli exclaimed. “We’re supposed to shoot our way in down there an’ then give it away. Crazy!”
“Speakin’ of shootin’ our way in,” another new voice said, “it could be quite a proposition. I don’t think they changed a brick in that old fort since I used to hop bells down there forty years ago.”
“The crowd down there has three suites on the second floor, nearly the whole west wing,” Silvio contributed. “There’s usually five or six of ’em there, an’ others comin’ an’ goin’. It wouldn’t be drop the handkerchief down there, now you better believe me.”
“There’s an unused back staircase with a locked door at the street level in the back, though,” Carlo said thoughtfully. “When I was a young punk four of us — ”
“You mean last week, Carlo?” somebody jibed.
The thick-bodied Carlo continued unruffled. “ — kept a broad in an empty room on the third floor for two weeks before the management caught wise.” He grinned reminiscently. “I lost fifteen pounds.”
“Listen, what’s all this who-struck-John about?” Bonigli argued. “Do we vote on the thing or don’t we?”
“Aside from everything else, I keep thinkin’ a blood debt is a blood debt,” the gray-haired Frank said. He sounded almost apologetic.
“I say not in no case like this,” the curly-haired fat man said promptly.
“An’ I say the same thing,” Bonigli seconded him. “I say let’s vote, an’ I vote no.”
I had counted noses. There were eight men in the chairs, Bonigli behind the desk, Silvio standing. I had a feeling Silvio was with me. I might have Sal. I might have Carlo. Frank was on the fence. Bonigli was dead against, and so was the fat man. About the rest I had no idea. Blood brotherhood could help, but it was no guarantee. I couldn’t mention the girls. If this gang ever suspected they were expected to pull that chestnut out of the fire for me, that was the end of the line.
There was only going to be one vote.
It was time for the clincher.
I faced away from Silvio and lifted my jacket up around my waist. “In my hip pocket,” I said over my shoulder to him.
I could feel him pulling out the other package of fifty tightly-banded hundred-dollar bills. When I turned around, he was tossing it across the desk to Bonigli, who turned it end over end, grunted, and lobbed it to the nearest chair where it started to make the circuit. No one spoke until it reached Carlo, the last man. He riffled it back and forth and pitched it back at Bonigli. “Looks good to me,” he said. “If this is an auction, I’ll bid six bits.”
“It’s good,” I said. “And there’s a suitcase full of it down at the San Marco.”
“Cash?” someone exclaimed.
“Cash. Hundreds are the smallest, and you have to work to find them.”
“Naturally you believe him, Biggie,” the fat man jeered.
Biggie ignored him. He was a wiry little man with pop eyes and a scar that ran from beneath one ear halfway under his throat. “How much cash in real money?” he asked me.
“Better than $700,000.”
There was a whistle of disbelief from the armchairs. “Now you lost me,” Frank complained. “Talk sense, man.”
“No, wait!” Bonigli said excitedly. “This thing is finally beginnin’ to make sense. When the guy from the San Marco made his pitch to me, he made the fifty-fifty split sound like real money. What threw me off was this joker talkin’ about twenty-eight thousand dollars.” He frowned at me. “’Course if the cards fell right for them, they prob’ly had no intention of splittin’ at all.” He glanced around the armchairs. “Neither did I.”
“But you’re sayin’ the guy offered to split that kind of money if he had to for these damn papers everyone’s yakkin’ about?” Sal demanded.
“It’s a lot of money,” Bonigli admitted. “Karma cut the figure once. Maybe he’s boostin’ it now.”
“Even if he’s boostin’ it by half, it kind of makes you wonder what’s in those papers,” Silvio said dryly.
“Damned if it doesn’t,” Frank chimed in emphatically. “Nothin’ that ought to stick to them, from the sound.”
“I think you guys are nuts,” the fat man protested. “You realize how much money he’s talkin’ about? He’s nothin’ but a cheap Jack con artist. He never saw as much as $7,500 at one time in his life.” He waved a hand angrily when Bonigli picked up the package of bills from his desk and shook them at him. “Awright, awright, that’s the bait. He can’t get us down there one way, so he tries another. Ask yourself what the hell’s in it for him? An’ if the cash part is on the level, why didn’t we hear about it before?”
“You’re forgetting I had the cash,” I said. “A week ago I had it all spread out on a bed. Even looking at it, it’s hard to believe. I may have come in the back door on the thing, but was I going to toss it over my shoulder? And once I’d lost it, if I could get you down to the San Marco without telling you about it and get another shot at it myself — well, what would you have done?”
Somebody laughed. “Go on, Willie. Tell him what you’d have done.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m doin’,” the fat man bit off. “I’m takin’ a walk. The whole thing stinks.”
“No, it adds up.” Bonigli said. He sounded almost unhappy about it. “Like I said, he could be lyin’ about the amount, but the cash is down there. You can bet me on it.”
“Well, let’s hear somethin’ from the rest of you jerks,” Frank said briskly. “Do we go down there or don’t we?”
“I say we go down there an’ take ’em apart,” Sal said. “Put it to a vote, Joe.”
“You mean we send the boys down,” Bonigli said.
“We send the boys after that kind of cash?” Biggie wanted to know. His throat scar worked as he spoke.
“Well — ” Bonigli looked around the chairs “ — maybe not.”
“I say forget the whole damn thing,” the fat man persisted. “What’ve we lost down there?”
“How can you say that, Willie?” Frank argued. “How long you think we can keep it quiet we let this kind of touch get away from us while it was right under our noses?”
“He’s right,” Carlo insisted. “It could give too many people wrong ideas. Besides, I think we ought to do it, anyway.”
“Why?” the fat man shot back at him.
“Just — ” Carlo looked from face to face and shrugged “ — I’m against lettin’ ’em get away with it, that’s all.”
“So you’ve been vaccinated with the patriotic needle, too?” the fat man exclaimed.
“I never said that,” Carlo denied.
“The hell with this patriotic noise,” another voice said. “If the cash is really there — ”
“If it isn’t,” Silvio said brightly, “we’ll have Karma right there with us to talk to him about it, won’t we?”
“Yeah,” someone said. “That’s a fair-sized guarantee if he don’t change his story when he realizes it.” I remained silent under the inspection of turned faces. “Okay, let’s go.”
“You slobs are crazy,” Willie, the fat man, said disgustedly. “Bonigli, you goin’ along with this damn foolishness?”
The hawk face looked morose. “I’ve heard deals I liked better, Willie,” Bonigli admitted. “For one thing, I don’t like bein’ rushed into this. But I’ll go along with the majority. J
oey, how do you vote?”
“Who needs to vote?” Carlo growled. He got to his feet, settling the wide shoulders of his jacket. “Ain’t you clowns forgettin’ somethin’? If Tony Falcaro was sittin’ in one of these chairs, how do you think he’d vote?”
“He’s right, by God,” Frank said. He hoisted himself up out of his chair. “Silvio, break out the cannons.”
“You think this is thirty years ago?” someone complained.
Frank laughed. “Your blood’s gettin’ thin, man. How long since you had a rich pigeon in your sights couldn’t run to the cops?”
“You could have somethin’ there,” Biggie said. He rose to his feet, followed by Sal.
“Silvio?” Bonigli asked.
“Oh, I’m in,” Silvio said.
Two of the other men stood up. I hadn’t heard their names mentioned. Behind the desk Bonigli stood up. Only the fat man, Willie, and a sharp-featured older man remained seated. “Okay,” Sal said, looking around. “Onward, Christian soldiers.” He laughed heartily.
Bonigli tossed a bunch of keys to Silvio, shaking his head dubiously as if questioning his own judgment. Silvio opened a wall cabinet, displaying a row of revolvers and automatics and a drawer of ammunition. The men crowded around him, talking and laughing for a moment. Then the only sound in the room was the snick and click of chambers and magazines being loaded. “I must be in my second childhood,” Bonigli announced into the silence. He was busily thumbing bullets into a .38. “I ain’t had a gun in my hand in fifteen years.”
“Your hand ain’t forgot what it feels like,” Frank said. “Come on, let’s hit the road.”
“I’ll take one of those,” I said to Carlo, the last man at the cabinet.
He looked at Silvio. “Load one up for him but you carry it,” Silvio told him. “If the play looks right, you can give it to him down there.”
Carlo loaded up another revolver and dropped it in his jacket pocket. I could sense a change in the aura of command in the room. Bonigli might be the desk chieftain, but from the looks of things Silvio led the war parties. “Last chance, you two,” Carlo called to the fat man, Willie, and the sharp-featured older man who had pushed their chairs together and were talking in low tones. “If you can’t lose, you can’t win on the payoff.”
“We know,” the fat man said. “We’re out.”
“Out it is,” Carlo said, stuffing an automatic in his belt and buttoning his jacket over it. “Silvio? How we gonna do this?”
“We’ll take three cars,” Silvio said. “You take Biggie, Carlo, an’ get to that locked door you had so much experience with.” He looked at his watch. “At three o’clock sharp the rest of us ‘ll be outside it. You have it open if you have to take it off the hinges. Frank, you drive a car. I’ll drive a car. Three of you go with Frank, the rest with me. You, Karma: you’re with me.”
We marched out of the library down the corridor to the elevator. There were nine of us, counting me. It was an odd-looking group considering its purpose. Gray hairs and paunches predominated. I was afraid someone would pipe up and say something that would bring them all back to reality. Then, as I looked at the faces around me in the descending elevator, the lack of excitement in the dark, stolid features reached me. These were businessmen off to business, Bonigli would have said. And I was damn glad to have them.
Down in the garage there was a flurry of activity as automobiles were run out of stalls. Open curiosity showed on the faces of the younger, revolver-wearing men in the garage, but nobody asked any questions. Carlo and Biggie — who despite his nickname was dwarfed by his companion — left first. I got into Silvio’s car, in the back seat. Bonigli climbed in behind me. Sal climbed into the front seat and turned to grin at Bonigli in the back. “Well, old man Joe,” he needled him, “you think this mornin’ you’d be earnin’ an honest dollar this afternoon?”
“Damned if I can see what you’re so happy about,” Bonigli grumped. “This could be a rough go.”
Silvio stripped the cellophane from a cigar before rolling out under the big door and down the driveway. “Depends on whether they’re expectin’ company,” he said.
“These types are always expecting company,” I said. “Another thing: every one of them I’ve seen except one is a real gorilla. Except for Carlo and maybe Frank you boys are outmuscled about four to one. Close quarters is out.”
“Level with me, Karma,” Sal said, still facing us in the back seat. “Willie was right, up to a point. What’s in it for you?”
“I haven’t had any excitement lately,” I said.
He laughed. “You an’ Joe,” he said.
Silence fell in the automobile.
I was in better shape than had seemed possible five hours ago. I didn’t think the man from Washington, Pavel, had had time to get to the San Marco yet, and I didn’t think much of anything was going to happen until he did. I hoped he wasn’t there. I didn’t like to think of him finding the packets missing while the girls were available to him. I willed the automobile down the road a little faster. With jets these days —
“Right on time,” Sal said with satisfaction as Silvio eased through the business district and approached a drab-looking architectural stone pile that sat solidly on a corner. The gray walls were chipped and sooty. “Sil, there’s Frank parked second from the corner.”
“I see him,” Silvio said. “We’ll go around the back to Carlo’s door.” He found a parking place in the rear and slipped the big car into it. Twenty feet ahead of us a heavy, green-painted metal door was set flush in the building wall. “That should be it,” Silvio went on. “I’ll take a look. If I get in, don’t none of the rest of you try it till I wave you on. Tell Frank I said so, Sal.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said, opening the door on my side. He opened his mouth, and closed it again. I walked around the car and joined him on the sidewalk. Together we walked up to the door. In its upper portion it had a foot-square window with glass-enclosed wire. As we came abreast of it, it was unexpectedly opened by Biggie, who held it for us. I breathed easier.
“Got something to show you,” Biggie said to Silvio, and started off along the dusty cement passageway past a stairway on the left.
Silvio followed him. On his heels, I unbuttoned my shirt. Ten yards beyond the stairway we passed a dirty-looking fire extinguisher set head-high in a recessed niche in the cement wall. Without breaking stride I snatched the oilskinned packet from off my ribs through my unbuttoned shirt and jammed it between the back of the extinguisher and the wall. A thick layer of dust puffed up and started to settle to the floor.
The passageway took an abrupt dogleg to the right, and we came upon Carlo standing over a thick-bodied man sitting on the floor. There was a trickle of blood visible in the part of his hair. Carlo showed us a foreign-looking automatic. “He was watchin’ the outside door, an’ he wasn’t watchin’ for mice. He didn’t expect no action down this old tunnel. He ain’t said a word since I welted him except when he could see again he spit out the one word polizei.”
“The watch at the door shows they’re organized,” Silvio said. He leaned down over the man, whose wide, flat features remained blank. “You speak English?”
“You are making a mistake,” the man said arrogantly. “You will have to let me go. I have immunity.” Only the short “a” sounds betrayed the foreign accent.
“Where’s the next lookout?” Silvio asked him. “Inside the door at the head of the stairs?”
The man spat on the floor close to Silvio’s shoe and turned his head away.
“Biggie,” Silvio said. Without my seeing how it arrived there, a knife appeared in Biggie’s right hand. The white ridge of his throat scar stood out against his smooth olive complexion. He reached down and jabbed the man on the floor on the lobe of the ear. The man flinched and looked up in surprise. “One more time,” Silvio told him when his widening eyes had focused on the knife. “Where’s the lookout?”
The man swallowed but remained silent.
The slender Biggie grabbed the man by the hair, and his right arm went back and forth across the pale face in a whipping motion. Ribbons of blood sprang up on the broad features. Despite the hand in his hair the man threw his head back as his breath sucked in for a reflexive scream. Carlo kicked him in the ribs, and the scream emerged as a choked cough. “Where is he?” Biggie snarled down at him, and raised the knife again.
“Inside — suite door — end of hall,” the man gasped.
“What’s the signal?” Silvio rapped at him.
“Two — knocks, then — three.”
“Get ready to lug him up there, Carlo,” Silvio said. “He’ll knock for us. I’ll get the rest of the troops.” He started off around the elbow of the tunnel. As I took my first step after him, Carlo put a hand on my arm. When I looked down, he was offering me the extra .38 he’d loaded back at Bonigli’s.
“Be a little careful which side you line up on with that thing,” he said to me. “You won’t get no explanations.”
“I won’t need any,” I said. The solid butt felt good in my hand. I was surprised to see a smile on Biggie’s usually taciturn face. As I hurried after Silvio the man on the floor was sitting with his hands covering his slashed face.
“You cannot do this,” he was whimpering. “You cannot do this.”
I came upon Silvio at the door issuing instructions to the five men surrounding him. “ — an’ make sure it’s open when we want to use it, Rico,” he was saying. A tubby man with a crest of nearly white hair took up a station by the door. “The rest of you come on with me.”
Carlo and Biggie met us at the foot of the stairway leading upward. They were half-leading, half-supporting the bloody-faced Russian. No one seemed surprised or alarmed at his appearance. “Up the stairs one at a time, an’ quiet,” Silvio ordered. “Wait on this side of the second floor corridor fire door, in case this one’s lyin’ about no one bein’ on the door.”
“Not hardly likely there would be,” Frank put in. “A man posted there would attract the attention of anyone else usin’ the corridor.”
Strongarm (Prologue Crime) Page 16
