by Ed McBain
“Was it your husband?”
“Yes.”
“Very nice. He uses his own wife to …”
“No,” she said. “That’s not true, Andrew.”
“No? Then how … ?”
“I didn’t know about the bugs. He found out about us through the bugs.”
“But now he knows.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re still seeing me. Which means Sonny missed something, the place is still bugged. Otherwise, why would your husband … ?”
“Yes, the place is still bugged.”
“How long have you known about me?”
“Since Mother’s Day.”
“You know since May sometime, and you keep seeing me. So what do you mean no? You are …”
“I see you because …”
“You are working for him, leading me on …”
“I see you because I love you.”
“Bullshit. You’re getting me to talk …”
“No …”
“Yes, you’re an informer, you’re here to send me to jail!”
“I had no choice,” she said.
She was thinking he would kill her. She had seen movies where people like him took informers to the country for a nice little ride. In his eyes, she was an informer.
“Yes, you had a choice,” he said. “You could have told me. You could have …”
“I’m telling you now.”
“Only because I already know!”
“I was going to tell you, anyway.”
She wondered if this was true.
He was wondering the same thing.
“Do you realize I can have you killed in a minute?” he said.
Which meant he himself was not about to kill her. But this didn’t exclude the possibility that he was driving her to a nice little place he knew in Connecticut, where two happy goons would be waiting with garrotes and chain saws.
“I don’t think you’ll do that,” she said.
“In a minute!” he said, and took his right hand from the wheel, and snapped his fingers for emphasis, still not looking at her, his eyes on the road. “A goddamn informer? A fucking rat? You know what we do with rats?”
He said nothing for the longest while, searching for a spot where he could turn off Bruckner onto a side street. He found one some three minutes later, pulled off the road, drove past a gas station pumping diesel for trucks, and then turned onto a sunny street with scrawny trees and small whitewashed houses. He drove along until he came to an empty corner lot with a Cyclone fence around it. There were junked cars heaped high in the lot. There was razor wire on top of the fence. Not a soul was in sight. He cut the engine. The sun-washed street was still except for the sound of cars and trucks rushing past in the distance. He turned from the wheel.
“Are you wired?” he asked.
“No.”
She was still wearing the sunglasses. He couldn’t see her eyes.
“Take off the glasses,” he said.
She took off the glasses. Reached into her handbag. Put the glasses into their case.
“Look at me,” he said.
She turned to look at him.
Blue eyes wide in that gorgeous face.
“Tell me again. Are you wired?”
“I’m not wired, Andrew.”
“Open your blouse,” he said.
She obeyed immediately, unbuttoning her blouse to expose her bra. He felt inside the bra, ran his fingers around and under her breasts, ran his hands over her back and her ribs and her belly and her buttocks, reached under her skirt to touch her thighs and her pubic mound. These were not a lover’s hands.
“Empty your handbag,” he said.
She looked at him stonily for a moment, and then she picked up her bag and turned it over, dumping its contents on the seat between them. She buttoned her blouse while he began rummaging through the items on the seat. The sunglass case, her wallet, her house keys, a package of chewing gum, her Filofax, a tube of lipstick, a comb, a hairbrush, a package of Kleenex, a paperback copy of Howard’s End, some loose change. He flipped through the pages of the book to make sure it hadn’t been hollowed out. He opened the Filofax to make certain nothing was buried in its pages. He turned the bag upside down, shook it, felt inside it with his hands. He found nothing even remotely resembling a recording device.
“All right,” he said at last, and turned away from her and started the car. As he drove back toward Bruckner, she put everything back in the bag, item by item, silently, slowly, deliberately, angrily. When they were on the highway again, she said, “Well, that was a nice little indignity.”
“Listen,” he said, “it’s your husband who’s the fucking DA, not mine!”
“Are you satisfied now?”
“Yes.”
“That I’m not wired?”
“Yes.”
“That I’m here only because I want to be here?”
“Yes.”
“Then slow down,” she said. “I don’t want to die in a car crash!”
He glanced swiftly into the rearview mirror, nodded, and eased up on the pedal.
“I didn’t realize I was going so fast.”
“You drive like a maniac,” she said.
They rode in silence for what must have been ten, fifteen minutes. At last he said, “Does he know you’re with me today?”
“Yes. He wants me to keep this going. Until he has everything he needs.”
“How much does he already know?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What did you mean when you said you had no choice?”
“My daughter.”
“What’s she got to … ?”
“He threatened to take her away from me.”
“Would he do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know him anymore. He has a video of me going in, he has …”
“A video! Jesus, what else have they … ?”
“They’ve been watching the door on Mott Street,” she said. “They have pictures of anyone who goes in or out.”
This had to be the truth. She wasn’t wired. She was telling him the absolute truth.
“He showed me the video,” she said. “He also has tapes of everything you and I said together. He played them for me.”
“Who else?”
“Did he play them for? I guess the people he …”
“No, who else has he got on tape?”
“I don’t know. He’s going for an OCCA. Do you know what that is?”
“Yes, I know what that is.”
“He threatened to use the tape in a divorce action if I didn’t do what he asked.”
Andrew nodded.
He was silent for several moments.
Then he said, “They want me to have you killed. They know about your husband, they think you may have …”
“How’d they find out?”
“They put a detective on you.”
“A private de—?”
“NYPD. Tin. Somebody we own. They already knew about you and me, I don’t know how they found out.”
“Billy,” she said at once.
“Maybe,” he said, and nodded. “They think you’re an informer. A rat. And informers have to be taught a lesson. So nobody else will even think of informing.”
“Informers have to be killed, is that what you mean?”
“Yes,” he said. “Informers have to be killed.”
“Even well-connected informers?” she asked.
“Especially well-connected ones,” he said.
“I’m not talking about my husband. Not that connection.”
He turned to look at her, puzzled.
“I’m talking about you,” she said.
Trucks were spe
eding by on either side of them.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“You asked me to marry you,” she said.
A huge eight-wheeler rushed past on their left, raising dust, scaring them both.
“Did you mean it?” she asked.
“I meant it,” he said.
“Then, yes,” she said.
She came out of the bathroom naked, her bag slung over her shoulder. She carried the bag to the dresser near the four-poster bed, and went to him at once.
There was for her—as there was whenever she was with him—the same sense of urgency and need. She went into his arms like a wanton, immediately abandoning herself to the same passion she’d known from the very first time they’d made love. Even knowing who he was and what he represented, she was nonetheless helplessly, hopelessly enamored. He was her love, and she loved him still.
The inn was on the edge of a narrow river with a small waterfall. Swans glided on the still, pondlike expanse of water before the falls, just under their second-story window. As they lay naked in embrace on the four-poster bed, they could hear the tumbling water below.
He was brimming with questions, bursting with plans, bubbling with excitement, babbling as steadily as the rippling river outside. When, would she tell her husband, how soon could she get the divorce? Would he consent to it? Could she move out meantime? What about her daughter?
Ah yes, what about my daughter? she thought.
“I know she likes me,” he said, “but …”
“She adores you,” Sarah said.
“But this is different, this is a divorce, this would be a new father coming into the picture …”
“It’ll be difficult, I know.”
“I’ll take good care of her, Sarah.”
“I know you will.”
“And you too. No one will ever harm you while I’m around.”
“I know,” she said.
“You’ll have to meet everybody,” he said. “Well, not everybody, just the people who matter. Actually, it gets down to two people who have to know, Bobby Triani and Petey Bardo, they’re second and third in command—I make it sound like an army, but it isn’t that at all.”
“Do you need their approval?” she asked. “Is that it? To marry me?”
“No, hell no, I don’t need anybody’s approval to do anything. This is like a courtesy, Sarah, a way of showing respect for the people you work with. When I told you I was in the investment business, I wasn’t lying, that’s what we are in a sense, investors looking to make a profit, the same as any other investors. Bobby is immediately under me in the organization, and Petey comes after him. Everything funnels through us, the profits, and we decide how they’ll be distributed, which percentage goes to which person, whatever position he may hold in the organization …”
And now, perhaps because hiding the truth about himself had become an intolerable burden over all these months, now the truth that had been dammed within him burst free, rushing over the dam and through the dam, destroying the dam itself and the silence it had forced, words tumbling free in a torrent as swift as the running river outside. And as he spoke she thought she’d never loved him so much as she did now, when he was telling her the truth about himself at last, revealing himself completely at last, trusting her, revealing all at last.
“. . . mostly a cash business, so most of our distributions are in cash. In fact, one of our big problems is getting rid of money. I don’t mean throwing it in the streets, I mean giving it respectability, do you understand what I’m saying? I guess you realize the reason my place was bugged isn’t because what I do is legal. You asked me if I was involved in anything criminal, and I told you no, because in my mind a criminal is somebody who kills somebody else or who sticks up somebody else or who hurts somebody else in a serious way, none of which things I’ve ever personally done. I suppose in your husband’s eyes—and maybe in yours, too, for all I know, I don’t know—doing things like making it easy for people to gamble or to borrow money or to indulge in pleasures they seek of their own accord, these things may seem criminal to him, which would mean that anybody involved in these things would automatically become someone involved in so-called criminal activity. But my father and my uncle and me, too—I have to admit I feel the same way—think of this activity as providing services that people want and need. Petey, Bobby, we all feel the same way. Sal the Barber, these are all people you’ll meet someday, Ralphie Carbonaio, he’s the Carter in Carter-Goldsmith Investments, Carmine Orafo, he’s the Goldsmith, it actually means that in Italian, Orafo, all of them, we’re all in this business together to provide services which, by the way, in different times of history and in different places all around the world, would have been considered legal.
“You won’t have to worry about the business, my mother never worried about it, still doesn’t, you’ll be meeting her, too, so she can give you her Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, huh? I’m not expecting a problem with her, she’ll fall in love with you the minute she sees you, why wouldn’t she? I have to tell you, though, it isn’t going to be easy, expecting these guys to open their hearts to someone who’s got a history like yours, your marriage I’m talking about. There’s what you might call a natural animosity there. It’s a matter of mindset, Sarah. Guys who are used to believing that loan-sharking isn’t such a terrible thing, these guys aren’t going to understand why I would want to marry a woman whose ex thinks otherwise. Sal the Barber, for example, who’s the man who gave me that ring, remember? The black ring? The one your jeweler said was stolen? He’s a decent, hardworking man, you’ll see when you meet him, though he sounds like a roughneck—well, look at the beautiful ring he came up with. That’s not the kind of thing someone without sensitivity could find beautiful, is it? Sal didn’t know it was stolen, either, by the way. The guy who passed it to him is sorry he ever did, believe me—if he can still be sorry about anything, which I promise you he can’t.
“So there might at first be Hey, what’s Andrew doing, bringing this woman around, what kind of craziness is this? But you’ll get to know them, they’ll get to know you, and before you know it, everything’ll be fine. Especially since later this month they’re all going to come into a lot of money, everybody all the way down the line, when this new venture of ours goes into operation. Everybody’s going to be very happy, believe me, when the profits begin rolling in and we start distributing those profits all the way down the line. All these people are going to be looking very affectionately on anything I do. I don’t think any of them are going to find fault with you in any way, I promise you. I think each and every one of them will show you the proper respect.”
“What new venture is this?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know how you feel about dope, Sarah, I’m sure there are people who would like to lock up anybody caught smoking even a joint. But there are millions of people all over the world who smoke marijuana on a daily basis, and there are millions of others—I’m not talking about hopheads or junkies now, I’m talking about legislators and lawyers and criminologists and judges and social workers, people like that—these people believe that the best thing that could happen is for narcotics to be legalized. I’m not taking a stand one way or the other. I’m only saying there are millions of people who depend upon drug use to get themselves through the day, and it might be a bigger crime to deny these people the support they need to live their lives in some kind of peace. I’m not even talking about marijuana. I’m talking about hard drugs like cocaine or heroin, yes, there are people who believe these drugs are less dangerous in the long view than either alcohol or cigarettes. I never heard of a cocaine addict dying of cirrhosis of the liver or lung cancer, did you? And, by the way, I’m not even sure there’s any proof that crack cocaine is addictive. Cocaine you can smoke, you know? Crack cocaine. Or even heroin you can smoke, which is this new thing we’re bringing in, a combination o
f cocaine and heroin, what’s called ‘moon rock.’ Do you remember when I went down to Florida with my uncle?”
“Yes?”
“It was to talk to this man named Luis Hidalgo, who took over the Putumayo Cartel after Alonso Moreno met with a terrible, ahem, accident. What we’re doing … Do you remember when I asked you to go to Italy with me? That was to meet with the man who’s handling distribution on the Continent. It’s a three-way setup, you see, what you might call a triangle. Hidalgo provides the Colombian product, which we ship to various ports in Italy. Meanwhile, Manfredi is taking delivery of the Chinese product. We process it right there in Italy, and turn it around as moon rock …”
On and on he went, the words gushing from his mouth, trapped too long, pouring forth excitedly now, directed toward Sarah where she sat cross-legged on the four-poster bed, listening intently, and then moving past her to where her bag sat on the dresser near the bed.
A reel-to-reel NAGRA tape recorder was hidden under a Velcro flap at the bottom of that bag. A wire from the recorder had been sewn into the lining and fed up into the bag’s strap, where the microphone showed only as what appeared to be one of a pair of black rivets fastening strap to bag. Sarah had turned on the machine while she was in the bathroom. It was now capable of recording four hours of conversation before the tape ran out.
“. . . Stonington some Sunday,” Andrew was saying. “I’ll ask my mother to invite Ida and the kids, you’ll love Ida, she’s my cousin, we’ve been best friends from the day she was born. I used to call her Pinocchio, because she has my uncle Rudy’s nose, and she used to call me Mickey Mouse, because I had big ears when I was a kid. I was nicknamed ‘Topolino,’ in fact, which means Mickey Mouse in Italian, because of the ears. Well, ‘Lino,’ it got abbreviated to. My mother still calls me Lino every now and then, can you imagine? Lino? The house in Stonington …”
The two men met on Memorial Day in the rectory of the Church of the Holy Redemption on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, where a priest named Father Daniel frequently extended hospitality and privacy to men of their persuasion in exchange for contributions to his perpetual building fund. In the cloistered silence of the rectory, with sunlight streaming through the leaded windows, and music floating from the church outside where someone practiced in the organ loft, Bobby Triani and Petey Bardo discussed this serious problem they now seemed to have.