The Company

by Robert Littell

  Macy, a wiry man with a square Dick Tracy jaw and cauliflower ears, the result of a hapless welter-weight college boxing career, shook his head in despair. “My pulse is still beating, if that’s what you mean,” he said. He threaded his fingers through his thinning hair. “Getting tossed to the dogs after twenty-nine years of loyal service—twenty-nine years, Harvey—really hurt.”

  “No question, you got a rough deal,” Torriti agreed.

  “You can say that again.”

  “What’d Hoover hold against you?”

  Macy winced at the memory. “One of Bobby Kennedy’s people wanted the file on Hoffa and the Teamsters, and I made the mistake of giving it to him without first checking with the front office, which had already refused the request.” Macy polished off the last of his drink as the waiter set two new ones on the table. “Hoover hates the Kennedys, Harvey. Anyone who gives them the time of day winds up on his shit list. I had to hire a lawyer and threaten to sue to collect my pension.”

  “Kennedy wasn’t born yesterday. If Hoover hates them so fucking much, why is Jack keeping him on as Director?”

  Macy rolled his eyes knowingly.

  “He has something on him?” Torriti guessed.

  “You didn’t hear it from me,” Macy insisted.

  “What kind of stuff?”

  Macy looked around to make sure they couldn’t be overheard. “Broads, for starters. There’s that Hollywood sex queen, Marilyn Monroe. One of Sinatra’s girlfriends, an eyeful name of Exner, is bed-hopping—when she’s not holding Kennedy’s hand she’s thick with the Cosa Nostra boss of Chicago. When the regulars aren’t available the President-elect invites the girls who lick envelopes up for tea, two at a time.”

  “Didn’t know Jack was such a horny bastard,” Torriti said with a certain amount of admiration; in his book it was horniness that was next to godliness. “What are you up to these days, Martin?”

  “I do some consulting for district attorneys who want to make a name for themselves going after local Cosa Nostra dons. If Jack listens to his father and names Bobby Attorney General, I’ll do some consulting for him, too—Bobby’s going to take out after Hoffa and the Teamsters, bet on it.”

  Torriti fitted on a pair of reading glasses. “Figured out what you want to eat?” he asked. They glanced at the menu. Torriti crooked a finger and the waiter came over and took their orders.

  Macy leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “Isn’t that your house paranoid sitting over there?”

  The Sorcerer peered over the top of his eyeglasses. Sure enough, James Angleton was holding the fort at his usual table, his back to the restaurant, a cigarette in one fist, a drink in the other, deep in conversation with two men Torriti didn’t recognize. While he talked, Angleton kept track of what was going on behind him in the large mirror on the wall. He caught Torriti’s eye in the mirror and nodded. The Sorcerer elevated his chins in reply.

  “Yeah, that’s Angleton, all right,” he said.

  “Doesn’t sound like there’s any love lost between you.”

  “He’s ruining the Company with his goddamn suspicions. A lot of good people are being passed over for promotion because they’re on Angleton’s short list of possible moles, after which they say ‘fuck it’ and head for the private sector, where they make twice as much money and don’t have an Angleton busting their balls. Trust me, Martin, this is not the way to run a goddamn intelligence shop.”

  For a while they both concentrated on the plates of cassoulet that were set in front of them. Then Macy raised his eyes. “To what do I owe this lunch, Harvey?”

  “Do you think you could fit another consulting client into your schedule?”

  Macy perked up. “You?”

  “My money’s as good as Bobby Kennedy’s, isn’t it?” Torriti uncapped a pen and scratched the dollar sign and a number on the inside of the match-book, then passed it across the table.

  Macy whistled through his teeth. “Retirement’s looking rosier by the minute.”

  “I’ll pay you that every time we have a conversation. In cash. No bills. No receipts.”

  “You could have picked my brain for free, Harvey.”

  “I know that.” The Sorcerer scratched his forehead in embarrassment. “We go back a long way, Martin.”

  Macy nodded. “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure. Does the name Mooney mean anything to you?”

  Macy’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not rubbing shoulders with the Mafia rubes again, Harvey? I thought you got that out of your system in Sicily during the war.”

  The Sorcerer snorted. “I had a conversation with a joker named Rosselli in a park in Brooklyn. He’s fixing me up on a blind date with another joker called Mooney.”

  “Make sure you’re armed,” Macy advised. “Make sure someone’s backing you up. Mooney goes by the alias of Sam Flood but his real name is Sal ‘Mo-Mo’ Giancana—he’s the Cosa Nostra boss of Chicago I told you about, the one who’s sharing the Exner woman with Jack Kennedy.”

  “Like they say in Hollywood, the plot thickens!”

  Macy, who had been one of the FBI’s experts on the Cosa Nostra, leaned back, closed his eyes and recited chapter and verse: “Giancana, Salvatore, born 1908. On his passport application he listed his profession as motel operator. Motel operator, my foot! He’s a foul-mouthed Cosa Nostra hit man who murdered dozens when he was clawing his way up the mob’s ladder. Eventually he reached the top of what people in Chicago call The Outfit. He’s the godfather of the Chicago Cosa Nostra—they say he has six wards in his hip pocket. Back in the fifties he skimmed millions off mobrun casino operations in Havana and Las Vegas. When he’s not in Chicago he hangs out with Sinatra, which is where he met Judy Exner.”

  The Sorcerer’s small eyes burned with interest.

  “There’s more,” Macy said. “We’ve been bugging Giancana for years—his telephones, his home, his hotel rooms when he’s on the road, also a joint called the Armory Lounge, which is where he hangs out when he’s in Chicago. We have miles of tape on him. That’s what Hoover really has on Kennedy. It’s not the women—even if he leaked it nobody would print it. It’s the Giancana tapes.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “We have Joe Kennedy on tape asking Mooney to get out the vote for his boy’s election. Joe owns the Merchandise Mart in Chicago; when he talks people listen, even people like Giancana. Mooney’s hoods turned to in his six wards. Jack Kennedy won Illinois by nine thousand or so votes. He won the election by a hundred thirteen thousand out of sixty-nine million cast. It was no accident that the three states where the Cosa Nostra rule the roost—Illinois, Missouri and Nevada—all wound up in Kennedy’s column.”

  “The mob doesn’t work for free. There must have been a quid pro quo.”

  “Papa Kennedy promised Giancana that if his son became President, he’d appoint Bobby Attorney General. On paper at least, Hoover reports to the Attorney General. Joe indicated that Bobby would take the heat off the Chicago Cosa Nostra.” Macy reached for the bottle of Sancerre in the bucket, refilled both of their glasses and took a sip of wine. “Hoover has other tapes. Last August, a few weeks after he won the nomination in Los Angeles, Jack disappeared from the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan for twenty-four hours. The Secret Service guys assigned to him went crazy. We happened to pick him up on tape—he was in Judy Exner’s hotel room. There was the usual screwing around. At one point Jack told Judy that if he didn’t win the election he was probably going to split with Jackie. The tryst turned out to be coitus interruptus—the doorman called up to announce a visitor named Flood.”

  “Kennedy met with Giancana!”

  Macy nodded. “It was all very innocent. Judy excused herself to use what she called the facilities. Jack opened the door. The two men chatted in the living room for a few minutes. They talked about the weather. Mooney described Floyd Patterson’s knockout of Johansson in the fifth—turns out he had a ringside seat. Jack said he’d heard from his father that Sal—“ />
  “They were on a first-name basis?”

  Macy nodded. “Sal, Jack—Jack, Sal, sure. Jack said he’d heard Sal would get out the vote in Chicago. He thanked him for his help. Judy returned and made them drinks. When it came time for Mr. Flood to leave there was talk of a satchel in a closet—Judy was asked to bring it and give it to Sal.”

  “What was in it?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Money, probably. To pay off the people who come out to vote early and often in Giancana’s six wards.”

  The Sorcerer stole a glance in Angleton’s direction. The counterintelligence chief had turned away from the mirror to talk to someone passing next to his table. Torriti produced an envelope and slid it across the table to Macy, who quickly slipped it into a pocket.

  “Walk on eggshells,” Macy said. “Rosselli, Giancana—these guys play for keeps.”

  “This is turning into a fucking can of worms,” the Sorcerer muttered. “I think we’re barking up the wrong tree—we maybe ought to give some serious thought to taking our business elsewhere.”

  Dick Bissell signed off on a message being dispatched to Jack McAuliffe in Guatemala. He went over to the door and handed it to his secretary. “Doris, start this down the tube right away,” he said. He closed the door and made his way back to the seat behind the desk and began torturing a paper-clip. “Where’d you get this information, Harvey?”

  “I consulted with an old pal from Hoover’s shop, is where. Listen, Dick, Johnny Rosselli was only too happy to appear helpful. I’m supposed to meet Mooney in Miami tomorrow afternoon. He’s going to sing the same lyrics. These jokers have got nothing to lose, Rosselli and Giancana. Helping us knock off Castro—whether they succeed or not; whether they actually try or not—gives them a working immunity against prosecution. Bobby’s not going to let a federal prosecutor put them onto a witness stand and make them swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but, for fear they might.”

  “On the other hand,” Bissell said, “the Company doesn’t have a pot to piss in when it comes to Cuba. Almost all of our assets have been rolled up. These guys have contacts in Havana. And they have an incentive to help us—with Castro out of the way they’ll be able to get back into the casino business. I know it’s a long shot, Harvey. But it’s a shot. They might just get the job done, if only because they’d have more leverage with the Justice Department if they actually succeeded in knocking off Castro. And without Castro, the road from the invasion beaches to Havana will turn into a cakewalk for the brigade.” Bissell rummaged through a drawer and came up with an inhaler. He closed one nostril with a forefinger and breathed in the medication through the other to clear a stuffed sinus. “I was raised in the house in Hartford where Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huck Finn,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I’m tantalized by the idea of starting down a river on a raft—you have a rudder that can give you a semblance of control over the craft, but basically you go with the current.” He shook his head reflectively. “Someone in my shoes has to weigh alternatives. In the great scheme of things, two thugs avoiding prosecution is a small price to pay for neutralizing Castro.”

  Bissell accompanied the Sorcerer to the door. “They’ll probably get knocked off themselves one of these days,” he told him. “Keep the raft heading downriver, Harvey—let’s see where the current takes you. Okay?”

  Torriti touched two fingers to an eyebrow. “Aye, aye, captain.”

  The Sorcerer couldn’t take his eyes off Mooney’s fingers. Long and skeletal, with tufts of black hair protruding from the joints below the knuckle and a sapphire ring (a gift from Frank Sinatra) on one pinkie, they drummed across the bar, took a turn around the ashtray overflowing with cigar butts, caressed the side of a tall double Scotch, picked wax out of an ear, then jabbed the air to emphasize the point he was making. “Bobby Kennedy’s uh fuckin’ four-flusher,” Mooney sneered. “He is cross-examinin’ me in front of dis fuckin’ Senate committee last year, right? I keep uh fuckin’ smile plastered on my puss while I take duh fifth like my mouthpiece tells me to, an’ what does dis fucker say?”

  “What does the fucker say?” Rosselli asked.

  “Duh fucker says, ‘I thought only little fuckin’ girls giggled, Mr. Giancana’ is what he says. Out loud. In front of deze fuckin’ senators. In front of deze fuckin’ reporters. Which makes some of them laugh out loud. Nex thing you fuckin’ know, every fuckin’ newspaper in duh fuckin’ country has uh headline about fuckin’ Bobby Kennedy callin’ Mooney Giancana uh little fuckin’ girl.” Giancana’s fingers plucked the Havana from his lips and pointed the embers straight at Torriti’s eye. “Nobody insults Mooney Giancana. Nobody. I’m gonna fuckin’ whack dis little prick one of deze days, fuckin’ count on it.”

  The three of them were sitting on stools at the half-moon bar in a deserted cocktail lounge not far from the Miami airport. Heavy drapes had been drawn across the windows, blotting out the afternoon sunshine and dampening the sound of traffic. Rosselli’s people were posted at the front door and the swinging doors leading down a hallway to the toilets and the kitchen. The bartender, a bleached blonde wearing a flesh-pink brassiere under a transparent blouse, had fixed them up with drinks, left the bottle and ice on the bar and vanished.

  Rosselli delivered his verdict on Bobby Kennedy. “The cocksucker was grandstanding.”

  “Nobody fuckin’ grandstands at my expense.” Giancana chomped on his cigar and sized up the Sorcerer through the swirl of smoke. “Johnny here tells me you’re all right,” he said.

  Rosselli, looking debonair in a double-breasted pinstriped suit, said, “I know people in Sicily who remember him from the war—they say he is okay.”

  “With a recommendation like that I could have gone to an Ivy League college,” Torriti said with a snicker.

  The idea seemed to amuse Rosselli. “What would you have done in an Ivy League college?”

  “Educate them as to the facts of life.”

  Giancana, a short, balding man who bared his teeth when something struck him as funny, bared his teeth now; Torriti noticed that several of them were dark with decay. “Dat’s uh fuckin’ good one,” Mooney said. “Go to uh fuckin’ college to educate duh fuckin’ professors.”

  The Sorcerer gripped the bottle by its throat and poured himself a refill. “I think we need to lay out some ground rules if we are going to collaborate,” he said.

  “Lay away,” Giancana said cheerfully.

  “First off, this is a one-shot arrangement. When it’s over we never met and it never happened.”

  Giancana waved his cigar, as if to say this was so obvious it was hardly worth mentioning.

  “Johnny here,” the Sorcerer continued, “has already turned down compensation—“

  Giancana eyes rolled in puzzlement.

  “Like I told you, Mooney, he is ready to pay cold cash but I told him if we decide to get involved, we get involved out of patriotism.”

  “Patriotism is what dis is all about,” agreed Giancana, his hand on his heart. “America has been fuckin’—“

  “—fucking good to you,” said the Sorcerer. “I know.”

  “So like you want for us to whack Castro?” Giancana gave a nervous little giggle.

  “I was hoping you would have associates in Havana who could neutralize him.”

  “What’s with dis fuckin’ neutralize?” Giancana asked Rosselli.

  “He wants us to rub him out,” Rosselli explained.

  “Dat’s what I said in duh first place—you want us to whack him. You got dates dat are more convenient than other dates?”

  “The sooner, the better,” said the Sorcerer.

  “Deze things take time,” Giancana warned.

  “Let’s say sometime before next spring.”

  Giancana nodded carefully. “How do deze people you represent see duh hit?”

  The Sorcerer understood they had gotten down to the nitty-gritty. “We imagined your associates would figure out Castro’s routine
and waylay his car and gun him down. Something along these lines…”

  Giancana looked at Rosselli. His lower lip curled over his upper lip as he shook his head in disbelief. “You can see duh Wall Street pricks don’t have no fuckin’ experience in deze matters.” He turned back to the Sorcerer. “Guns is too risky. I don’t see no one usin’ guns on Castro. For duh simple reason dat no one pullin’ off duh hit could get away with all doze bodyguards or what have you around. If we specify guns nobody’s goin’ to volunteer.”

  “How do you see the hit, Mooney?”

  Giancana puffed thoughtfully on his cigar, then pulled it out of his mouth and examined it. “How do I see duh hit? I see duh hit usin’ poison. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, you was to give me uh supply of poison. Castro likes milkshakes—“

  Rosselli told Torriti, “Mooney is a serious person. He has given serious thought to your problem.”

  “I am very impressed,” the Sorcerer said.

  “Like I was sayin’, he has dis thing for milkshakes. Chocolate milkshakes, if you want to know everythin’. He buys them in duh cafeteria of duh Libre Hotel, which was duh Havana Hilton when I was there. He always offers to pay for deze milkshakes but they don’t never take his money. Then sometimes he goes to dis Brazilian restaurant—it’s uh small joint down on duh port uh Cojímar, which is where dat Hemingway character used to hang out before duh fuckin’ revolution. Castro goes there uh lot with his lady friend, uh skinny broad, daughter of uh doctor, name of Celia Sánchez, or with the Argentine, what’s his fuckin’ name again?”

  “Che Guevera,” said Torriti.

  “Dat’s duh guy. Someone with uh fast boat could spike Castro’s milkshake in duh hotel or his food in duh restaurant an’ get away by sea.” Giancana slid off the stool and buttoned the middle button of his sports jacket. He nodded toward the two men guarding the door to the cocktail lounge. “Bring duh car around, huh, Michael.” He turned back to the Sorcerer. “How about if we meet again, say around duh middle of January. If you need me Johnny here knows how to get hold of me. I’ll nose around Havana an’ see what I can see. You nose around Wall Street”—Rosselli smiled knowingly and Giancana giggled again—“an see if your friends can come up with uh poison dat could do duh trick. It needs to be easy to hide—it needs to look like ordinary Alka-Seltzer, somethin’ like dat. It needs to work fast before they can get him to uh fuckin’ hospital an’ pump his fuckin’ stomach out.”