by Justin Scott
Taggart stood up, his face turning cold. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I’ll take care of it. You have nothing else to worry about.”
“Don’t fight with Mikey,” she warned him. “That’s our job.”
“I’ll be in touch.” His hand tightened on hers, his lips parted, and she thought for a second he would plunge to her mouth. Her body coiled and she started to lift her head from the pillow. But instead of kissing her, he backed away and let go of her hand with a little squeeze.
The room started whirling faster. The doctor reappeared and shined a light in her eyes. Helen raised her throbbing head and looked past him at Taggart, who, thinking he was out of sight, had stopped hiding the fury that seared his face.
She saw in that raw expression a side he had hidden last spring on the Irish cliffs, and again the summer night atop his building. Yet it recalled vividly the night ten years ago at Abatelli’s when he stormed out after Don Richard Cirillo. Christopher Taggart was a man capable of embracing an all-consuming hatred.
It was frightening, and all the more so today because the attack on her had provoked his rage, as if Taggart wanted more than his stated intention that the Rizzolos seize the street. Coming to her club, and now racing to the hospital, he seemed to want to possess her. Helen tried to weigh coolly the additional opportunities that this might present for her family, but deep in her heart she began to fear the price. And she sagged back on the sheets, terrified by her own impulse, when he had taken her hand, to pull him down on top of her.
Outside the hospital, Reggie was waiting in Taggart’s car. “Did the police see you?” he asked.
“Set up a meet with Mikey.”
“But you’re to meet on the boat next week.”
“Now."
“There’s only one way he’ll agree to meet.”
“I know. Cut him off!”
They boarded the boat in Tarrytown at one of Taggart’s several boathouses scattered about New York, and headed downriver as night fell. The tide was receding, the Hudson flowed swiftly, and the offshore racer skimmed the water on muted engines. Reggie steered silently until he had concluded the electronic sweeps.
“You surprise me, Mr. Taggart.”
“How’s that?”
“You certainly didn’t expect the Cirillos not to fight back.”
“Right.”
“Is it possible you’re overreacting because the girl happened to be there?”
“Anything’s possible,” Taggart replied easily, and Reggie felt better until Taggart added, “He almost killed her.”
“What do you intend?”
“To make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“But you’re forgetting—”
“I forget nothing.”
When the boat passed under the George Washington Bridge, Taggart went below and locked himself in the cabin. He wedged his back into the forward V-bunk and waited, while Reggie steered into a private marina at the foot of a New Jersey condo. His anger was rising; he could taste it in his mouth. He listened to two men board and felt the boat turn and gradually pull away. A while later the engines stopped, and he heard the anchor chain rasp out of the winch. Taggart pulled the ski mask over his head just as Reggie unlocked the door.
Their meetings were ritual performances by now. Reggie came first, checked to see that only the red navigation lights were burning, and waited just inside the cabin door. Mikey’s bodyguard, a heavyset Sicilian who had replaced the wounded Buddy, made sure Taggart was alone and ran a quick electronic check, augmenting what he had already done on deck. Then he stood on the other side of the three-step companionway.
Mikey stepped between them and ducked to clear the door. His thin lips formed hard lines in his bony face. He faced Taggart with dark, angry eyes. Taggart stared back.
“Get out!” Mikey told his bodyguard.
Reggie closed the door as he and the Sicilian went on deck.
“Your people are fucking me up.”
“Sit down,” Taggart said.
“Why are they doing this?”
“People I know have a problem.”
“I’ll listen. But before I do, you listen to me. Don’t jerk me around. You promise to deliver, you better deliver.”
Taggart returned his stare and made no reply. Finally Mikey asked, “All right. What’s your friends’ problem?”
“Somebody threw ten sticks of dynamite at their bus barn.”
“That thing in the papers?”
“The Blue Line in Long Island City.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Guarantee such a thing never happens again.”
“Guarantee? How can I do that?”
“Put out the word.”
“To who? I don’t know those people. I don’t know what they’re fighting about.”
Taggart felt like he was falling backward, plunging ten years into the past. It was the night on the sidewalk in front of Abatelli’s again. Don Richard denied he had killed Taggart’s father and had joked that he hadn’t killed anybody in thirty years. He hadn’t even known the name Mike Taglione. As if it were happening now, he saw the skinny old man turn his back, heard the order, “He’s not allowed in,” and felt this same Crazy Mikey pound his face as he joined the Mafia bonebreakers in the fun. Sorrow, rage, and guilt overwhelmed his heart and overcame his mind. He could hardly form the words: “You hurt a friend of mine. Your people threw the dynamite.”
Mikey didn’t deny it. “That’s none of your fucking business. That’s got nothing to do with dope.”
“It’s got everything to do with dope.”
Mikey looked intrigued. “How’s that? The Rizzolos are gamblers and shylocks. They got freight at Kennedy?”
“If you ever go near them again, I’ll cut your heroin supply for good. That’s what it has to do with dope.”
“They’re none of your business,” Mikey repeated.
“I’m making it my business. Don’t ever go near her—ever! Or you’re dead.”
“Her? Hey, nobody knew the girl was there.... is that it?” Mikey sneered. “You got the hots for their kid sister?”
Taggart bounded off the bunk, flew the length of the cabin, and clawed at Mikey’s throat. But Mikey was fast, and hit him with a vicious right to the face. Frenzied, Taggart barely felt it as he threw Mikey against the door, which fell off its hinges. Mikey dropped to the companionway, half in the cabin, half in the cockpit. Punching and kicking furiously, Taggart drove him up the companionway, dragged him to his feet, and clubbed him back to the deck in the second it took the Cirillo bodyguard to act.
Reggie and the Sicilian had been standing in the stern, as far from the cabin as possible to allow the bosses to do their business without corroborating witnesses. The tide had turned and the boat was pulling downstream against its anchor, so that the George Washington Bridge lights shown on Taggart and Crazy Mikey. The Sicilian drew a weapon in a fluid motion as he moved closer and dropped into a crouch. Reggie chopped his neck. He fell to the deck but slammed Reggie with a scissors kick, which threw the Englishman hard against the gunnel.
Reggie cried out and staggered as he tried to stand. Astonished—in two years Taggart had never seen him hurt, much less stumble—and frightened for him, Taggart turned to help. Mikey used the distraction to kick him in the groin. He collapsed in searing pain, trying to cover up as the mobster hit him with a flurry of kicks and punches. The Sicilian picked up his gun and aimed it with two hands. He shouted for Mikey to move aside, that he had Taggart covered.
Taggart drove the pain from his consciousness, like a debt he would pay later. He seized Mikey with both hands, and held him like a shield. Mikey fought back. The Sicilian looked for an opening. Reggie, hunched over, breathing hard and holding his ribs, moved in sudden swift silence and chopped the Sicilian’s neck again. This time the Sicilian collapsed on the deck with a helpless whimper.
“He tricked you,” Reggie said bleakly, after they had dropped Cirillo and his bod
yguard and the boat was pulling away from the Mill Basin pier on a creamy wake. “You told him too much.”
“Fuck him.”
“You’ve gone too far. Until now you had the heroin as a club over him. By showing your concern for Helen Rizzolo, you’ve given Mikey a club over you.”
Taggart saw he was right, but caught an answer on the wing. “Maybe so, Reg, but if he thinks I have the hots for her, he won’t make the real connection.”
Reggie leaned back heavily in the padded seat, holding his ribs, angrily waving Taggart off when he tried to help. Taggart brought the boat back toward the light on Staten Island that he had been steering for. Reggie drew a handkerchief from his pocket.
“He is going to go looking elsewhere for reliable sources.”
“Then we’ll take care of elsewhere.”
“Which takes you further away from your goal.”
“Relax, Reg. You’re getting way down.”
Reggie put the handkerchief to his mouth, spat, and examined it dispassionately by the red glow of the instrument lights.
“You okay?”
“Maybe I am getting ‘down,’ as you put it. The real trouble is, I’m getting old and you’re getting out of control.”
16
CHAPTER
Just as Reggie predicted, Crazy Mikey asked for a meeting with the narcotics importer Vito Imperiale. He suggested some sort of neutral ground like a Manhattan restaurant, but the word came back: No way was Vito Imperiale coming into the city while a war was on. Instead, Crazy Mikey was invited to Imperiale’s house. For Mikey to call on a lesser figure violated protocol, but his father and Consigliere Ponte urged him to accept.
“Give a little now, take later,” said Ponte.
Imperiale’s driver delivered a garage-door opener folded in a map of Alpine, New Jersey.
“What the fuck is this?”
“The garage is attached. You drive inside, nobody sees you.”
Mikey and his bodyguard drove up the Palisades Parkway in a rented Honda. Twenty minutes north of the George Washington Bridge they exited into the bedroom community and found Imperiale’s house in a maze of broad and empty suburban streets lined with maple trees that had turned bright yellow. It was a new three-story, Tudor-style house with bright white stucco and dark brown beams, set on a fenced four-acre lawn. Across the street a telephone truck was parked beside a stanchion on the grassy shoulder.
The fence reminded Mikey of his father’s place on Staten Island, which was bigger and finer-looking, being constructed of brick and marble. Nonetheless, Vito was doing all right. They drove into the driveway, pressed the garage-door opener, and Imperiale’s garage door, which was disguised to look like a stable entrance, opened.
After they drove in and the door rumbled shut, Vito stepped into the garage with a friendly smile. He was a fat, pear-shaped man, with a big nose, widely set dark eyes that appeared darker yet because his skin was so white, and shiny black hair. Crazy Mikey left his man in the kitchen with Vito’s men and followed his host into the living room. At no point, he noticed, did Imperiale address him by name. He led Mikey through a big living room cluttered with overstuffed beige couches and chairs, and out french doors onto a big stone patio. A high, whitewashed brick wall shielded the patio on three sides. The house blocked the fourth. Overhead were blue sky and the noonday sun, which had warmed the furniture cushions.
“No windows to vibrate when we talk,” Imperiale explained. “No bugs and taps out here. But shut up if a balloon comes over!” He laughed and poured espresso from a wet bar set in stone.
“What about that telephone truck we passed on the way
in?”
“Feds. I leave ’em one phone line to keep ’em busy. Whenever I see the truck, I have a man talk nonsense. “Here we’re safe.”
“You mind if I check?”
“Be my guest.”
Mikey opened his briefcase and checked for transmitters and recorders. When he closed it, Imperiale said, “So what brings you to the country?”
Mikey’s father kept telling him to open negotiations slowly, but it was an old-fashioned, stupid thing to do when both of them knew exactly what he came for. “I want to buy.”
“I figured that, with Joe Reina gone. How much?”
“Much as you can. Two, three hundred kilos a week.”
“That’s a lot of product.”
“It’ll save you a lot of trouble if you sell it all to me.”
“What makes you think I got trouble selling it where I do?”
“The FBI, the DEA, and the Strikeforce are doing a number on my middle guys. If my middle guys are getting busted, so are yours. The thing is, I’m bigger and I got more guys, so I can roll with the punches longer than you. And another thing, you’re what, fifty-five?”
Vito said, “Sixty-five,” with a smile, and Mikey felt proud he had scored on that one. “So what?”
“I’m only thirty. A guy my age is supposed to fight, likes to fight. A guy fifty-five or sixty, maybe he deserves to slow down a little.”
“Maybe,” Vito conceded. “What makes you think I import so much stuff?”
Crazy Mikey smiled. “My father says you do.”
“You’ll need more than me to fill your needs. I don’t have that much.”
“My father thinks you might know sources.”
Imperiale covered his annoyance. “How is Don Richard?”
“Never been better.”
“Forgive me, I say with all respect that I think your brother getting arrested was good for your father. It makes an old man young to work again.”
Mikey’s expression turned complex, and Imperiale hastened to soothe him. “Particularly if he has another son to help him.”
“What do you say?”
Imperiale’s patio seemed less secure than usual. The world had tracked him down again. The Cirillos must have lost a big supplier. There’d been rumors Mikey had wired into somebody really big. Then suddenly, the street supply had dried up again, as if Mikey had lost that supplier. So now Mikey was leaning on him.
He shrugged. “I been thinking of easing up a bit. Maybe if I supply you exclusively, I’d get off the street.”
“It’s an easier living,” Mikey replied, amazed by some of the things he heard himself say these days. Six months ago he would have said that if Vito didn’t get off the street, he could kiss his street crews goodbye. Today he took his father’s advice and spoke softly.
And the amazing thing was that Vito took the hint.
Taggart was in the telephone repair van across the street from Imperiale’s house. The white stanchion was the wire closet for the immediate area, which was serviced by underground lines. Reggie focused a laser listening gun on Imperiale’s kitchen window. A conversation played through the van’s speakers.
“The bodyguards,” said Reggie. “Mikey and Vito will talk on the patio, where we can’t hear.”
“But at least we know they’re meeting.”
“Yes.”
“Just don’t hurt Mikey.”
“Not to worry. No one shoots his pilot.”
He turned off the laser, which picked up the vibrations of voices rattling the kitchen window, and drove away before the phone company or the Feds came along on their business.
Each new battle of what Vito Imperiale called the Strikeforce War—the Bronx shootout, the Mulberry Street bombing, the Rizzolo bus barn bombing, and the vengeance-fueled street fights that followed—reminded Vito how glad he was that he had moved his family to the suburbs. They lived like kings in Alpine and didn’t have to worry about day-to-day shit. Let his capos fight it out in the city. When he was home, he was home free. The house was lighted and guarded in case some Bronx asshole tried to track him down out here. Even the Feds were cooperating, hanging around outside in their phone truck.
Not that it was all a bed of roses. There was always some damned thing going wrong with the house, and out here there was no super to raise hell with or neighborho
od handyman to set things straight. If a faucet leaked you called a plumber and paid thirty bucks just to have him drive in your driveway. No hot water? Up drive the electrician and the plumber, and you kiss goodbye to four or five hundred bucks for a new heater. This morning, he realized, after Mikey had left, the lawn mowers were late. And those who finally did come a little before lunch were new guys who didn’t know the property. And as this late-fall morning would be the last mowing before winter, it was doubly important that it be cut right.
They were the blackest blacks Vito Imperiale had ever seen; their skin was so black it was almost gray. He called from the door, “Where’s the regular guys? What’s his name, Washington?”
“Washington, his wife be sick.”
Funny accent; maybe from the Caribbean. “I hope they told you what to do.”
“We know, boss.”
Imperiale closed the door, scratching his head. “Boss?” Funny accent. He watched suspiciously from the picture window. His wife called him for lunch. “What’s the matter?”
“The landscaper changed the lawn guys. They’re going to screw up. They’re going to miss the lights.” He had yelled all summer to teach the regular crew to trim the grass around the security lights.
They ate lunch in the kitchen with the bodyguards; his wife was always fussing after them, like they were sons or nephews. He was irritable. Mikey was offering a pretty good deal, but he didn’t like having to take it. Since the first request for a meeting, he had known this was coming and had decided not to fight. But with one headache out of the way, he was going to have another—keeping the supply up. Three hundred kilos a week were not smuggled past customs without risk. It took a lot of people, and the better they were, the more they tried to lean on him. If he thought about the future, it would get overwhelming, so he shifted his worries to the lawn again. It was flourishing so late in the year, thanks to a wet, warm autumn, and he knew the substitute lawn guys were going to screw up.