The Assassin boh-5

by W. E. B Griffin

  Mr. Baltazari then raised his glass, and Mr. Rosselli followed suit.

  "Health and long life," Mr. Baltazari said.

  Mr. Savarese smiled.

  "What is it the Irish say? 'May the sun'-or is it the wind?- ' always be at your back.' I like that."

  "I think 'the wind,' Mr. S.," Mr. Rosselli said.

  "I think it's the sun," Mr. Savarese said.

  "Now that I think about it, I'm sure you're right," Mr. Rosselli said.

  "It doesn't matter, either way," Mr. Savarese said graciously.

  "The cherrystones and the swordfish for Mr. Savarese, right?" the maitre d'hotel asked. "And for you, sir?"

  "What are you eating, Ricco?" Mr. Rosselli asked.

  "Lamb chops."

  "Same for me," Mr. Rosselli said. "Sometimes swordfish don't agree with me."

  "How would you like them cooked, sir?"

  "Pink in the middle."

  The clams, on a bed of ice, were served. While they were eating them, Mr. Savarese inquired as to the health of Mr. Baltazari's wife and children, and Mr. Baltazari asked Mr. Savarese to pass on his best respects to Mr. Savarese's wife and mother.

  The clams were cleared away, and the entree served.

  Mr. Baltazari made a gesture, and a folding screen was put in place, screening the table from the view of anyone in the front part of the restaurant.

  "Open another bottle of the Fiore e Fiore," Mr. Baltazari ordered, "and then leave us alone."

  Mr. Savarese delicately placed a piece of the swordfish into his mouth, chewed, and nodded.

  'This is very nice, Ricco," he said.

  "I'm glad you're pleased, Mr. S."

  "It has to be fresh," Mr. Savarese said. "Otherwise, when it's been on ice too long, it gets mushy."

  "That was swimming in the Gulf of Mexico two days ago, Mr. S."

  'Tell me why you told Joe Fierello to make the police officer a good deal," Mr. Savarese said as he placed another piece of swordfish into his mouth. "Tell me about the police officer, is what I want."

  "I was going to call you this morning, but then Carlo called and said you was coming, and I figured it could wait until I could tell you in person."

  Mr. Savarese nodded, and then gestured with his fork for Mr. Baltazari to continue.

  "I try to keep my eyes open," Mr. Baltazari said. "So when I saw this cop flashing a wad in the Warwick

  "How did you know he was a police officer?" Mr. Savarese interrupted.

  "I can tell a cop, Mr. S.," Mr. Baltazari said, a bit smugly. "So I checked him out."

  "How?"

  "I happened to be with a lady," Mr. Baltazari said, just a little uneasily. "I had her do it for me."

  "Can this lady be trusted?"

  "She's a divorced lady, Mr. S. With a kid. She has a hard time making out on what they pay her at the phone company, so I help her out from time to time."

  Mr. Savarese nodded, and Mr. Baltazari went on.

  "She struck up a conversation with this guy, like I told her, and come back and told me he's a corporal, working at the airport, and that he just come home from Vegas, where he won a lot of money…"

  "How much?"

  "I don't know exactly, but he was talking about buying a Caddy, so I figure fifteen, twenty big ones, maybe a little more."

  Mr. Savarese nodded his understanding again.

  "So I figured this was one of those times when you have to do something right away, or forget it," Mr. Baltazari went on. "So I sent the lady back to the cop and told her to tell him she has an uncle who has a car lot who would give him a good deal."

  "Is this police officer married?" Mr. Savarese asked.

  "I don'tknow, Mr. S. He told Antoinette he's a bachelor."

  "It would be better, if he was married," Mr. Savarese said.

  "I'll find out for sure and let you know, Mr. S. Anyway, I figured if this wasn't such a hot idea, no harm. So I called Joe, and told him…"

  "What you should have done, Ricco," Mr. Savarese said, "was call me and let me talk to Joe."

  "I wasn't sure if you would have time to talk with me today, Mr. S."

  "Joe called me," Mr. Savarese said, "and asked exactly what was going on. I didn't know, and that was very embarrassing. So I told him I would talk to you and get back to him."

  "If I stepped out of line, Mr. S., I'm really sorry. But like I said, I figured no harm…"

  Mr. Savarese interrupted Mr. Baltazari by holding up the hand with the fork in it.

  "Gian-Carlo," he said. "Get on the phone to Joe. Tell him there was a slight misunderstanding. Tell him I have absolute faith in Ricco's judgment."

  Mr. Rosselli laid down his knife and fork and pushed himself away from the table.

  "There's a pay station in the candy store on the corner," Mr. Savarese said.

  "Right, Mr. S.," Mr. Rosselli said.

  When he had gone, Mr. Savarese laid his hand on that of Mr. Baltazari.

  "Ricco," he said. "This may be more important than you know. This police officer works at the airport? You're sure of that?"

  "That's what he told Antoinette."

  "Do you recall reading, or seeing on the television, two months back, about the police officer who was killed in an auto accident on the way from the shore?"

  "I seem to remember something about that, Mr. S."

  "He was a friend of ours, Ricco."

  "I didn't know that, Mr. S."

  "And he worked at the airport. And now that he's gone, we don't have a friend at the airport. That's posing certain problems for us. Serious problems, right now."

  "Oh."

  "This police officer you found could be very useful to us, Ricco."

  "I understand."

  "Whatever is done with him has to be done very carefully, you understand. But at the same time, so long as we don't have a friend at the airport, the problems we are having there are not going to go away."

  "I understand," Mr. Baltazari said, although he had no idea what Mr. S. had going at the airport.

  "I want you to let me know what goes on, when it happens, Ricco. And while I trust your judgment, whenever there is any question at all in your mind about what to do, I want you to call me and we'll decide what to do together. You understand me, Ricco?"

  "Absolutely, Mr. S."

  "Why don't you go get us some coffee, Ricco?"

  "Certainly, Mr. S."

  ****

  Marion Claude Wheatley did not own an automobile, and had not for several years. He suspected, and then had proved by putting all the figures down on paper, that it was much cheaper, considering the price of automobiles and their required maintenance, and especially the price of insurance, to rent a car when he needed one.

  And the inconveniences-particularly that of getting groceries from the supermarket checkout counter to the house-were overwhelmed by the elimination of annoyances not owning an automobile provided.

  Paying his automobile insurance had especially annoyed him. There were, he was quite sure, actuarial reasons for the insurance company's classifications of people they insured. They were, after all, a business, not a charitable organization. Statistically, it could be proved that an unmarried male between twenty-one and thirty-five living in Philadelphia could be expected to cost the insurance company far more in settling claims than a thirty-six-year-old who was married and lived, say, in New Hope or Paoli. But there was an exception to every rule, and they should have acknowledged that.

  He had never had a traffic violation in his life, had never been involved in an accident, and did not use his automobile to commute to work. He drove it back and forth to the supermarket and every month to New Jersey to check on the farm. Sometimes, on rare occasions, such as when Hammersmith, or someone like him, felt obliged to have him to dinner, he drove it at night out to Bryn Mawr, or someplace.

  But most of the time the car had sat in the garage, letting its battery discharge.

  He had tried to make this point to his insurance broker, who had
not only been unsympathetic to his reasoning but had practically laughed at him.

  He had solved both problems by selling the car and changing insurance brokers. Marion believed that when you know something is right, you do it.

  And he had learned that while renting a car wasn't as cheap as the rental companies advertising would have one believe, it was possible, by carefully reading the advertisements and taking advantage of discounts of one kind or another, to rent a car at perfectly reasonable figures.

  When he returned to his office from having lunch with Hammersmith at the Union League, he spent the next forty-five minutes calling around and arranging a car for the weekend. The best price was offered, this time, by Hertz. If he picked up the car at the airport, not downtown, after six-thirty on Friday, and returned it not later than eleven-thirty on Saturday, they would charge him for only one twenty-four-hour day, providing he did not add more than two hundred miles to the odometer. They would also provide him a "standard" size car, for the price of a "compact."

  It averaged between 178.8 and 192.4 miles, round trip (he didn't really understand why there should be a difference, unless the odometers themselves were inaccurate) from the airport to the farm, so he would be within the 200-mile limitation. And since he was getting a standard-sized car, that meant he could conceal the equipment he was taking to the farm in the trunk.

  Marion Claude Wheatley knew enough about explosives to know that the greater distance one can put between detonators and explosives the better. He didn't think the Lord would cause an accident now, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Marion knew that the Lord would probably not be at all forgiving, if through his own carelessness he had an accident, and hurt-or disintegrated- himself while having a test run of the demolition program for the Vice President at the farm.

  The only risky part would be getting from the house to the airport in the taxicab to pick up the car. He would have to have the detonators, half a dozen of them, in his suit jacket breast pocket. They were getting pretty old now, and with age came instability. There were half a dozen ways in which they could be inadvertently set off. He would carry the Composition C-4 in his attache case, as usual. The cabdriver might look askance if he asked to put the attache case in the trunk, with the suitcases, particularly if it was a small taxi, and there would not be a lot of room.

  The risk was that something would set off one of the detonators. If that happened, it was a certainty that the other five detonators would also detonate. The technical phrase was "sympathetic detonation." If one detonator went off, and then, microseconds later, the other five, it was a possibility, even a likelihood, that the Composition C-4 would detonate sympathetically.

  It was a risk that would have to be taken. The more he thought about it, the less worried he became. If something happened in the taxicab, the Lord, who knew everything, would understand that he had been doing the best he knew how. And if he permitted Marion to be disintegrated, who would be available to disintegrate the Vice President?

  NINE

  Joe Fierello did not like Paulo Cassandro. The sonofabitch had always been arrogant, long before he'd made his bones and become a made man, and now he was fucking insufferable. Joe didn't really understand why they had made the sonofabitch a made man.

  But that didn't matter. What was was, and you don't let a made man know that you think he's really an ignorant asshole.

  "Paulo!" Joe called happily when, around half past two, Paulo got out of the back seat of his Jaguar sedan and walked up to the office. "How are you, pal? What can I do for you?"

  "A mutual friend wanted to make sure that nothing goes wrong when your niece comes in later."

  "Nothing will, Paulo. I talked with Gian-Carlo not more than a hour ago."

  "I just talked with Mr. S., and he suggested I come down here and explain exactly what has to be done."

  Joe Fierello was more than a little curious about that. When GianCarlo Rosselli said something, you knew it was direct from Mr. S. So what was Paulo Cassandro doing here?

  "Let me know what I can do," Joe said.

  "You know this guy coming is a cop?"

  Joe nodded.

  "What Mr. S. wants you to do is sell him a really nice car…"

  "I was going to."

  "…at a special price. Like a thousand, fifteen hundred under Blue Book loan."

  The Blue Book was a small, shirt-pocket-size listing of recent automobile transactions, published for the automotive trade. It listed the average retail sale price of an automobile, the average amount of money a bank or finance company had loaned for an installment purchase, and the average price dealers had paid as a trade-in.

  "You got it."

  "And he wants you to pay him at least a grand more for his tradein than it's worth."

  "Any friend of Mr. S.'s…"

  "Don't be a wiseass, Joe. This is business."

  "Sorry."

  "Yeah. You got a Xerox machine, right?"

  "Sure."

  "We're going to make up a little file on this cop. In it will be copies of this week's Blue Book showing what his trade is worth, and what the car you're going to sell him is worth. And then, on Tuesday, when you run his trade-in through the auction, where you will give it away, we want a Xerox of that too."

  "This has all been explained to me, Paulo," Joe said.

  "Yeah, well, Mr. S. obviously figured somebody better explain it again, so there would be no mistakes, which is why I'm here, okay?"

  "Absolutely."

  "And in addition to everything else you're going to do nice for this cop," Paulo went on, "you're going to give him this."

  He handed him a printed form. Joe looked at it without understanding. It bore the logotype of the Oaks and Pines Resort Lodge in the Poconos, and it said that the Bearer was entitled to have a room and all meals, plus unlimited free tennis and two rounds of golf.

  "What is this?"

  "It's what they call a comp," Paulo explained. "This place is owned by a friend of Mr. S.'s. Let's say, for example, they buy a case of soap to wash the dishes. Or two cases, something worth a couple of hundred bucks, Instead of paying them cash, the lodge people give them one of these.Retail, it's worth more than the two hundred.Cost-wise maybe a hundred. So the guy who came up with the soap gets more than the soap is worth, and the lodge people get the soap for less than the guy wanted.Capisce?"

  "I seen a comp coupon before, Paulo," Joe said. "What I was asking was, is this cop gonna be a tennis player? Or a golf player?"

  "He gets to take the girl to a hotel," Paulo said. "He don't give a fuck about golf.",

  Joe still looked confused, and Paulo took pity on him.

  "There's a story going around, I personally don't know if it's true or not, that in some of these lodge places in the Poconos you can gamble in the back room."

  Joe now nodded his understanding.

  "You tell this guy you shoot a little craps at this place from time to time, and they sent you the comp coupon, and you can't use it, so he can have it."

  "Right."

  "Don't fuck this up, Joe. Mr. S. is personally interested in this."

  "You tell Mr. S. not to worry."

  "He's not worrying. I'm not worrying. You should be the one that's worrying."

  ****

  Antoinette Marie Wolinski Schermer had moved back in with her parents when Eddie, that sonofabitch, had moved out on her and Brian, which was all she could do, suspecting correctly that getting child support out of Eddie was going to be like pulling teeth.

  That hadn't worked out. Her mother, especially, and her father were Catholic and didn't believe in divorce no matter what a sonofabitch you were married to, no matter if he slapped you around whenever he had two beers in him. What they expected her to do was go to work, save her money, and wait around the house for the time when she could straighten things out with Eddie.

  No going out, in other words.

  She had met Ricco Baltazari in the Reading Terminal Market on Market
Street. She had gone there for lunch, and so had he. She decided later, when she found out that he owned Ristorante Alfredo, which was before she found out that he was connected with the Mob, that he had probably got bored with the fancy food in his restaurant and wanted a hot Italian sausage with onions and peppers, which was what she was having when she saw him looking at her.

  She had noticed him too, saw that he was a really good-looking guy, that he was dressed real nice, and that when he paid for his sausage and pepper and onions, he had a wad of fifties and hundreds as thick as his thumb.

  It probably had something to do, too, with what people said about opposites attracting. She was blonde (she only had to touch it up to keep it light, not dye it, the way most blondes had to) and fairskinned, and he was sort of dark olive-skinned with really black hair.

  The first time she noticed him, she wondered what it would be like doing it with him, never suspecting that she would find out that same night.

  The first night, he picked her up outside work in his Cadillac and they went first to a real nice restaurant in Jersey, outside Cherry Hill, where everybody seemed to know him, and the manager or whatever sent a bottle of champagne to the table. Ricco told her right out that he was married, but didn't get along with his old lady, but couldn't divorce her because his mother was old and a Catholic, and you know how Catholics feel about divorce.

  After dinner, they went to a motel, not one of the el cheapos that lined Admiral Wilson Boulevard, but to the Cherry Hill Inn, which was real nice, and had in the bathroom the first whatchamacallit that Antoinette had ever seen. She had to ask Ricco what it was for.

  The truth of the matter was that when he was driving her back to her parents' house she thought that she had blown it, that she had been too easy to pick up, that she had gone to the motel with him on the First Date, and that once there, she had been a little too enthusiastic. She hadn't been with anybody in months, and the two whiskey sours and then the champagne and then the two Amaretto liqueurs afterward had put her more than a little into the bag.