by Justin Scott
“Reassessing the risk,” the deputy mayor replied blandly.
“It’s not your money. For crissake, can’t you get it through his bald head that all I need is the city’s enthusiastic permission? I’ll raise the money. Just give me a break by making me look good.”
“And if you blow it, the mayor looks like a schmuck.”
“Have I ever blown a building?”
“His Honor doesn’t want to be in on the first. This is a lot bigger than just a building. And a lot more exposed.”
“You’re telling me a Manhattan stadium won’t go? Next door to the convention center? Accessed by a federally subsidized subway link? What is your problem?”
The deputy mayor glanced around. “I’m not saying I’m saying this. But there is a feeling that an indoor ‘Polo Grounds’ with million-dollar sky boxes is a bread-and-circuses sort of thing.”
“It is an election year,” Adler chimed in. “Again.”
“What does His Honor want from me? A low-income high-rise on top?”
Helen was still paying rapt attention to the European, who was leading her toward a second painting. Taggart whipped out his wallet, turned to the notepad. “Mr. Deputy, you just gave me a great idea. You want something really hot? Something the mayor can sell? Look.” He drew a round ball with his gold pen. “This is the stadium, right?”
“The famous white basketball.”
“Now.” He drew a tall, slim triangle on top of the ball.
“What’s that?”
“The tallest building in the world.”
The idea had popped full-blown into his head. He should have thought of it ages ago—would have if he weren’t living half and half. “A supertail building atop the dome. Two hundred floors. Convention-center hotel on the lower levels, condos and executive suites on top. Even some City space in between so the mayor can shack up when the home teams are in town.”
“There’s no economies in a supertall,” the deputy mayor protested.
“Don’t talk to me about elevators. There are values in a project like this more than the money. Ask Kenny. New York needs the biggest.”
“How much?”
“Think billions instead of millions,” Taggart admitted, “but it has the pizzazz to draw the money. I’ll bet I could pull it off without the Urban Development Corporation. Screw the state. We can do it right here in the city.”
The deputy mayor looked interested because, as Taggart well knew, the mayor hated ceding control to independent agencies like the UDC.
Adler asked, “Does it have a name?”
“It has a name that team franchises will sell their mothers to broadcast from. The Manhattan Super-Spire.”
Adler smiled. “The mayor would love nothing more than to turn the Jersey Meadowlands Arena back into landfill.”
“Maybe we ought to have lunch sometime,” said the deputy to Chris.
“I am having dinner with the governor next week. Just remember I gave you first shot—catch you later.”
He cut swiftly across the room. The European had been pressed into carrying folding chairs, and Helen was inspecting the hors d’oeuvres. When she reached for a shrimp, Taggart speared it first.
“Excuse me.”
“That is mine,” she said icily. “And you are a prick for moving in on me like this.”
“I want to see you.”
“I came to hear music. Not for business.”
“Reggie handles that.”
“Leave me alone. My brothers are going nuts waiting for the Cirillos to drive up the street in a tank, and you’re jerking my strings like a puppet. I really have to get away sometimes.”
“It cost me a hundred thousand dollars to get invited tonight.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been dodging me. When I heard you were coming here, I established a lunch-hour performance fund for chamber music in my new building. I hired our host to select the performers.”
Helen gave him a slow smile. “Just to see me?”
“Worth every penny.”
“And tax deductible.”
“Would you like to have dinner after?”
“No, thanks. The guys in my car get nervous if I stay too long.”
Sunlight, stirred by the river, snaked through the tall french ballroom doors of an estate house south of Croton-on-Hudson, rippled on the ornate ceiling, and bounced softly into a humidity-controlled vault where it played on a perfect cone of near-pure heroin. An icy, malevolent mountain, four feet across and a yard high, the heroin looked like enough flour to bake fifty cakes or enough snow to build a backyard fort.
The art dealer from whom Taggart’s agents had bought the house had turned the ballroom into a painting gallery and installed the walk-in safe, which Reggie Rand had booby-trapped in case thieves or cops broke in. They had burned the various wrappings that might give clues to the drug’s diverse sources— Reggie’s Burmese, Chinese, and Indian connections—and had blended it all in one anonymous heap. Now, wearing surgical masks, rubber gloves, and hospital gowns, they worked with the door open for relief from the fumes as they bagged it for Crazy Mikey.
Reggie thrust the nozzle of an Electrolux vacuum cleaner into the mountain. A deep pucker appeared, as if a mine had caved in inside it, and the slope began to collapse. The grains hissed through the hose. When the filter bag was full, the motor shut off automatically. Reggie opened the machine and gently removed the plump sack, which weighed almost exactly a kilogram.
Choosing a bag at random, midway through the job, Taggart slipped an electronic tracker through the bag’s slitted rubber diaphragm. The tracker was an RF signal-emitting device sold to businessmen worried about kidnapping; it could be secreted in a briefcase, affixed to a car, or, in a miniature nuclear-powered version, implanted surgically under the skin. Reggie’s device was modified with a remote-controlled on-off switch; it would enable Taggart to turn on the beeping radio signal from a distance—after the Cirillos had finished sweeping the heroin for hidden electronics—and to tell the Strikeforce exactly where Crazy Mikey’s dope was headed.
Reggie encased the vacuum-cleaner bag in plastic, using a heat-sealing food wrapper, and laid it beside the others on a dolly. When the dolly was full they wheeled it aboard a silver straight-back truck which bore the name of a Long Island produce wholesaler.
Taggart knew the risk of dealing personally in heroin, but the risks were even greater with hired hands, because everybody, even professionals, went crazy over the profits. As Reggie liked to remind him, every man carries a number in his head above which he suspends the rules. Thus, as a matter of course, Reggie would park the truck at the Hunts Point Market before informing his people where it was and where to deliver it, just in case they were getting ideas; nor would he tell them that tonight they were trafficking in treachery
In the hours before dawn, Taggart and Reggie waited on a narrow sliver of upper Park Avenue that flanked the Metro North Amtrak rails. The street was crowded with trucks and vans heading uptown to the market. A truck bristling with radio antennas pulled into the archway that carried 104th Street under the tracks.
“That’s the Cirillo escort,” said Reggie. The men inside it were sweeping the area for police radios and tracking devices. It pulled out and headed uptown, trailed by a battered van. “Mobile laboratory and the money.”
Next came Ronnie Wald driving the silver truck that Taggart and Reggie had loaded in Croton. It bore the name “Sam Gordon Purveyors” on its side. A sleek gypsy cab trailed it closely, and the cab in turn was followed by another. Reggie eyed the precautions approvingly. “I like Wald.”
He eased his own gypsy cab onto Park. Taggart sat in the passenger seat, watching the rear. A truism that ruled the lives of Taggart’s enemies now ruled his too: when it came to selling heroin, he worried less about the cops than the criminals. Getting ripped off or killed was the real danger of the life, and a far more likely consequence than arrest.
Wald’s truck stoppe
d at the 112th Street market entrance under a brightly painted sign, “La Marqueta,” as the Park Avenue Market, a vast food and clothing emporium housed under the railroad tracks, was known in East Harlem. Wald backed the truck into the building. His men from the gypsy cab followed. The Cirillos, already inside, would analyze the heroin while Wald inspected the down payment—twenty million dollars in cash and bearer bonds.
“Time,” Taggart said, “to make Jack Warner a hero.”
Reggie drove to a pay phone on Lexington Avenue. Taggart dialed the U.S. Attorney’s office and pressed an “electronic handkerchief’—a portable model of the voice distorter that his secret witnesses used at the President’s Commission on Organized Crime—against the mouthpiece.
“Put Jack Warner on the phone. Tell him it’s Cl Twelve.”
Confidential Informant Twelve was the designation Warner had assigned the scramble-voiced informant who had telephoned a week ago about a supposed Cirillo heroin buy. He had no way of knowing it was Taggart, or that Taggart and Reggie had carefully spread the rumor by priming numerous agents with a variety of informants. Precise details about the buy, the time, and the participants differed from story to story, but each informant had named Park Avenue as the locale and five hundred kilos as the amount. The hastily formed Strikeforce intercept had been code-named “Park Avenue,” Reggie had learned, though it was anyone’s guess on exactly which of Park Avenue’s one hundred and eighteen blocks the deal was going down.
“It’s on the truck,” Taggart said when Warner picked up. His own voice, disguised in the earpiece, sounded as if a third person were on the line. “I’ll call back in ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Any idea where, yet?” came the suspicious reply.
“Not yet. But I know it’s going to be five hundred keys.”
Silkily Warner inquired, “Want to tell me why you’re performing this public service, fella?”
After a long night of sitting around smoking too many cigarettes, Warner and his fellow agents were beginning to suspect they were being jerked around. As he hung up, Taggart gave an answer the bent cop could believe in. “They ripped me off.”
They drove back to La Marqueta, where dozens of trucks were unloading produce. Five minutes later, Ronnie Wald appeared driving the battered van. Wald lowered the window, the signal that it contained the down payment for the heroin, and drove west guarded by his gypsy cabs.
“Are you sure Wald’ll deliver the money?” Taggart asked.
“No, I’m not,” Reggie replied cheerfully. “Twenty million dollars is the most tempting amount he’s carried yet, though I think I’ve convinced him that I’m not a man he would want to worry about in the middle of the night. More important than the money is that he simply gets away from here.”
The next moment, the Sam Gordon Purveyors truck full of heroin came out and headed east. Reggie trailed it. But several blocks along, he had to stop for a red light, because a police car was on the corner. The heroin truck kept going, around a corner and out of sight.
“Pray that they’ve stopped sweeping.” Taggart flipped the tracker switch, and the location device they had buried in the heroin broadcast a loud beep. He unfolded a New York City street map and when the light changed, Reggie steered by the frequency intensity of the sound. They continued east. Taggart compared their route to the street map.
“Phone!”
He dialed Warner again from the corner of First Avenue and 125th.
“The stuff’s heading for the Triborough Bridge.”
Jack Warner was dismayed. “You said Park Avenue! We’re all over Park Avenue.”
“They were on Park. Now they’re going for the bridge. It’s a silver truck with Sam Gordon Purveyors on the side. If I don’t read about this in the papers tomorrow, I’m calling the Strikeforce chief to tell him you screwed up.”
He ran to the car. “Catch up, in case they blow it.”
They tore across the lightly trafficked approaches to the bridge. The truck was pulling out of the toll booth area. It continued onto the approach, across the span, and turned onto Astoria Boulevard. There was still no sign of the Feds. Taggart reached for the cellular phone.
“Wait.”
A black car shot past, winking a little red FBI light on the roof. The truck sped up and a second car passed Taggart and Reggie. When a NYPD patrol car came screaming out of La-Guardia airport, the truck cut across three lanes of traffic, shot through a police turnaround in the median barrier, and stopped suddenly by the narrow park beside the water. The doors flew open; two men hit the grass running and disappeared in the dark.
Police sirens howled and Reggie pulled onto the shoulder to let them race by. Cruisers ablaze in blue and red light were converging from east and west and pouring from the airport, and shortly it seemed as if every third car on the highway had an intent-looking DEA agent holding a red flasher on its roof.
Taggart stabbed a switch, which sent the destruct signal. The beeping turned to a shrill whistle and ceased abruptly as, somewhere in the half ton of heroin, the tracker burned. When the Strikeforce examined the dope that they had seized from the Cirillos, the only evidence of treachery would be a knot of charred metal in a glaze of melted heroin.
“I wonder how Mikey’s going to pay me back.”
The driveway to Don Richard’s house had never seemed longer, and Crazy Mikey felt like crawling the distance. His father’s summons had been curt. A car had glided up to Mikey’s Bayside condo and the driver had said, “Your father wants to see you.”
Mikey, still awake after a long grim night of assessing damage, had shaved and dressed hurriedly and ridden across Queens wishing he had taken the time for a cup of coffee. When he told the driver to stop at a diner, the driver said he wasn’t allowed. Mikey snorted a hit off his little shotgun instead.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were taking me for a ride,” he joked sourly, to which the taciturn driver had replied, “Not yet.”
Now the driveway yawned ahead. The car pulled around the circle. The house hulked somberly in the morning mist. Mikey got out and a servant opened the front door, itself a lousy sign. When things were okay he used the kitchen door. But today he felt more like an employee than like family—an employee who had screwed up. His mother didn’t even come out of the kitchen to greet him. Instead, a cousin, who worked as his father’s secretary, waited in the center hall.
“Where’s my mother?”
“Florida.”
“That bad?”
“Sorry, Mikey.”
He led him to the library, a room with shelves full of knickknacks and photos. His father was sitting in a wing chair, his shrunken profile toward the fire, his eyes on the harbor and the city beyond. He faced Mikey with a cool smile and motioned him to a straight-back chair.
“I hear you got trouble.”
“What do you got, spies?”
“Spies?” Don Richard asked scornfully. “I read the newspaper. Biggest heroin bust in history. Who else but you?”
“Us.”
“No. We share the loss—not the blame.”
“Pop.”
“What the fuck did you do?”
Mikey hung his head and worked his big hands. “I don’t know.”
“Did you agree to a vig?”
“Two percent a week.”
“Half a million dollars a week?”
Mikey looked up. His father had found out the numbers already. There were people still going behind his back. “A month free.”
“Wonderful. A whole month. Why did you agree to a vig?”
“I needed the stuff. I—”
“How you going to pay?”
“I don’t know.”
“How you going to get more stuff?”
“I got everybody looking. There’s stuff around. It’s in little pieces. This guy had big pieces. You know?”
Don Richard sighed. “Tell me about this guy.”
Mikey told his father the little he knew about the
guy in the mask, and about the boat, the Brit who fronted for him, the way he shot his bodyguard, and the enormous amounts of heroin he was able to supply. When he was done, his father said, “That’s all?”
“I think so.”
“Has he ever done anything strange?”
“Like what?” asked Mikey. He didn’t want to talk about the night he and his best bodyguard got beat up.
“Does he shoot dope?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Sniff cocaine?”
Mikey squirmed as his father’s gaze burned into his golden spoon. “No.”
“Nothing?”
“One thing, maybe.... He’s got the hots for Helen Rizzolo.”
“He knows her?”
“I think so.”
“I wonder if Helen Rizzolo knows what he does.”
“Pop, this guy is more secret than the Russians. His own mother doesn’t know.”
Don Richard touched his fingertips together, sighted the Wall Street skyline over them, let his gaze drift over the harbor, and finally brought his old eyes to bear on Mikey’s face. “But you should know when you deal with somebody. You should know who he is.”
“How? I tried, for crissake. Nobody had one bit of postage on him or the Brit. It’s like they’re from another planet.”
“Maybe you don’t concentrate. Maybe you sniff too much dope....”
“I’m not stupid about it.”
“Then maybe you waste your mind on boxing matches.... ”
“That was five months ago!” Mikey protested, wondering who in hell had told him. “Memorial Day weekend. What does that have to do with now? It was just—”
“You put two girls out of work for weeks.”
“Come on, there were guys paying extra to fuck ’em right there in the blood—Pop, we’re running a billion-dollar business. Why are we arguing about a couple of whores? Christ, is there anything they don’t tell you?”