Operation Bamboozle

by Derek Robinson

  “And we lose every last nickel we put in,” Vito said.

  “I should also add that I have been contacted by a man from the Government who wishes to meet you as a matter of some urgency,” Luis said. “More than that he would not say.”

  Vito threw his golf club at Nicky. “Go get the lousy money,” he said. “Fifty grand? What’s fifty grand?”

  Nicky didn’t move. “I want to talk to these big-name investors.”

  “They won’t confirm or deny,” Luis said. “They won’t say a damn word. Would you, if a total stranger came calling?”

  “Move your ass,” Vito ordered. “I’m good for ten. You and your nine bums each chip in four. Makes fifty. Do it.”

  “Cash,” Luis said. “By nightfall.” They watched Nicky walk away. “I was the Venezuela Amateur Champion once. Do you fancy a round? Twenty dollars a hole?”

  “I’ll caddy,” Julie offered. “I get ten percent.”

  SHOTS FIRED

  1

  The trouble with money is that if you have enough of it, you don’t need to do anything with your life. And the less you do, the easier it is to do nothing. Once Michael Stagg realized that he would never inherit the B strain of neurostatic hypostasia, he drifted into a bland and lazy existence. He was young and rich, he could afford to waste time and so he wasted a lot of it. He slept, he ordered room-service food, he watched a lot of TV. He might not shave or bathe or brush his teeth for a week. So what? Sometimes the memory of Luis Cabrillo came back to annoy him, and he fantasized different means of revenge. They involved effort. They went away.

  One job he could not avoid was going through his father’s papers, decide what to throw away, what to box and store. The lawyers kept reminding him, and in the end it was easier just to do it.

  There was a lot of stuff. He moved from room to room, pulling out drawers, opening files, recognizing the handwriting but finding it hard to remember the man as a man and not a businessman. He noticed a tall wall cabinet and tugged at the handle. Locked. Well, he could do something about that. An iron doorstop felt good and heavy. He smashed the lock.

  Shotguns. The old man had kept a pair of shotguns locked up. Probably wise of him. All the same, Michael Stagg felt angry. He had always wanted to own a gun and the old bastard had always forbidden it. And never mentioned the shotguns. “Sonafabitch,” Stagg said. “He didn’t trust me.” He took them both. And a box of shells. Just carrying them, he felt different. He felt free, enabled, empowered. There were things that only a man with a gun could do. Perhaps things that he must do.

  2

  Nicky Zangara drove up to Konigsberg at 8 p.m. and gave Luis a briefcase of money. He watched it change hands as if it was his last dollar and he hadn’t eaten for two days. He had a question: how a million bucks would get to Ukraine? By Western Union? Pony Express? Luis said he operated a need-to-know policy and Nicky didn’t need, but if he felt so strongly he could fly to Switzerland and open a secret account at the Zurich International Union Bank, where the manager would explain absolutely nothing. “His name is Emil,” Luis said.

  “You’re a smartass,” Nicky said. “Why Vito got into bed with a smartass, beats me.” He left.

  They didn’t count the money. “The Mob is trustworthy,” Julie said. Luis took twenty bucks and they drove down to the shore, ate steak sandwiches at the coffee shop, strolled on the beach in the moonlight.

  “Life is a lottery,” Luis said. “I was glad to hear you say that. I had it in mind from the very beginning of this con. The whole point of faking a lottery was so that I could fake the winning tickets. Everything builds toward that. It’s the curtain line at the end of Act Two. Thank you for delivering it so well.”

  “What’s in Act Three?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe the theater burns down.”

  “Sure. You never know what’ll hit you next. I said that too, Luis. Maybe the you is you.” When he laughed, she thought: He takes nothing seriously, except the joke.

  Michael Stagg bought a dun-colored raincoat, long and roomy, with reach-through pockets so you could fish out your keys without unbuttoning the coat. He practiced walking with the shotgun inside the coat, held by his right hand, out of sight. Purely for self-defense, of course.

  He drove to Santa Monica Canyon Road. There was a trail through the brush on the opposite side of the canyon. He climbed it and got a good view of Konigsberg. He sat on a rock for an hour. Nothing happened. Next day he did it again. Same result. “Ain’t good enough,” he said. He was impatient with himself. Cabrillo had robbed him. So rob Cabrillo. What was the problem? He went down the trail and drove home.

  Tomorrow.

  Charlie Denny invited Agents Moody and Fisk to the meeting with DiLazzari. “I don’t want to be alone in the room when I give him the news,” he said. “These people can be volatile.” They agreed to be present. Denny left.

  “I wonder about him,” Fisk said to Moody. “I know you checked him out, he’s genuine CIA, but … This whole Ukraine lottery thing is so … What’s the word … erratic. I mean, is it possible he’s moonlighting? Running some kind of freelance operation for his own benefit?”

  “Possible. Does it matter? As long as DiLazzari gets screwed, do we care about the details?”

  “I suppose not. Especially if he knows he’s been screwed.” Fisk brightened. “Double-screwed, in fact.”

  Moody had heard enough. “You like complicating things. The Mob doesn’t complicate. It simplicates, usually by deadly force. Just don’t come running to me if you get killed in the crossfire.”

  Charlie Denny’s office was at the top of the Perry Como Building, one of the new earthquake-proof structures that reached above the smog. It was midafternoon, and the view was of a gray-white blanket that covered almost all the city. Moody, Fisk and Cabrillo were on time. Vito and Nicky arrived fifteen minutes late and did not like being outnumbered. While Denny was shaking hands, Vito asked who these were. “I’m Uncle Sam,” Fisk said. “And so is he.”

  “Feds,” Nicky said. He spoke like a pest control man.

  “That’s the last they say,” Vito told Denny, “and they said too much already. I came to meet you.”

  “Yes, of course. Ignore them, old chap, they’re harmless. They go around selling Girl Scout cookies and I let them stay to rest their poor feet. Now, about Ukraine.”

  “Him, I know.” Vito jerked a thumb toward Luis. “Einstein on stilts. Ten ways to fall off a ladder, he invented fourteen. Me an’ him, we’re kickin’ Stalin right in the rubles.”

  “Stalin’s dead,” Fisk said softly.

  Vito stared. “It moves, it speaks, it wets its pants.”

  Fisk grinned. Luis remembered that grin. Sharing a taxi into Manhattan. Thomas G. Duffy. Garbage disposal. Bloody hell. Could nobody be trusted?

  “Ukraine,” Denny said, with just a hint of impatience. “Your spadework in this operation is appreciated, Mr. DiLazzari. Washington recognizes a staunch trailblazer. The national interest now requires that the Central Intelligence Agency assumes total control of Bamboozle in all respects.”

  Nobody moved. From the harbor a siren began a somber hooting and soon quit. Vito pointed to Nicky and clicked his fingers.

  “Cabrillo said Bamboozle was too hot for the CIA,” Nicky said. “Said the CIA was afraid to touch it, so he came to us instead.”

  “Oh, you mustn’t believe everything Mr. Cabrillo says. Mr. Cabrillo says a lot of things. He told me, for instance, the whole Ukraine fake lottery idea is a con. He said Bamboozle is an invention.” The absurdity of it made Denny’s eyebrows bounce.

  “Certainly,” Luis said. “I told him that. But you mustn’t believe all I say. Mr. Denny’s own words.” He gestured, giving credit where due. “I lied for the finest possible motives: to protect Mr. DiLazzari’s sizeable investment—made on admirably patriotic rounds—from a hostile takeover bid by the CIA.” He let the room think about that for a moment. “I fought off the CIA’s grab with the only weapon I could find
. I insisted that there was nothing to be grabbed. I did my best. Unhappily …” He shrugged, and turned away. “Mr. Denny knew better.”

  “We know what we know.” Denny ticked off the facts with his fingers. “One, Ukraine state lottery. Huge. Two, KGB runs it. Three, KGB general is a crook. Four, he sells counterfeit tickets. Five, everyone loses except the general, who always wins big.” Denny raised his clenched fist. “Comrades! A unique opportunity for clandestine subversion! Capitalism at its purest—we screw the Soviet workers and the USA gets all the benefit.”

  “That’s cute,” Vito said. “One thing wrong. You didn’t do it. We did. Bamboozle beat the field.”

  “Indubitably.” Denny like the sound. “Incontestably. Irrefutably. We had our ducks in a row. We called it Operation Masquerade, which translates unforgettably into Ukrainian as …” He saw that Vito was absorbed in making a silver dollar perform gymnastics across his knuckles and back again. “Nothing that need concern us. Bamboozle’s launch put Masquerade on the back burner. You took the ball and ran with it and scored. Congratulations. But now the team has a new owner, a new coach, a new name. You’ve served your nation well. You can retire from the field with honor.”

  “That’s horseshit,” Nicky said.

  “But steaming hot,” Luis said, “and beautifully shoveled.”

  “This ain’t about honor,” Vito said, “it’s about money.” He walked to Denny’s desk and made the silver dollar spin on it. “Compensation. Payback. In full.”

  The coin took a long time to fall. “Not from the Agency,” Denny said. “Ask Mr. Cabrillo. He’s the treasurer for Bamboozle.”

  “You ain’t buyin’?” Vito said. “Then we ain’t sellin’.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Vito,” Agent Moody said. “Don’t go to war with the CIA. They’ll boobytrap your toilet, you’ll get blown into Pasadena with your pants around your feet.” But Vito and Nicky were on their way out.

  Denny shut the door. “That went rather well, don’t you think?”

  “Masquerade,” Luis said. “Bloody silly name.”

  “Sit down,” Moody said. “I have a number of questions.”

  “Yes? I have a number of answers. Some of them almost relevant.”

  Nicky drove. Vito sat in the back. For ten minutes he said nothing. Then: “If Uncle was here, I know what he’d say. He’d say, grab Cabrillo, grab your money, cut your losses. That’s what he’d say, and it’s crap. I see the big picture. That’s why Uncle’s under the Freeway and I’m in Beverly Hills.”

  “The big picture,” Nicky said. Somebody had to say something, and he was it.

  “Yeah. So I go after Cabrillo, what do I get out of it? Maybe a hundred grand, tops. What do I lose? Everything, is what. Word gets out I’ve been conned. Vito DiLazzari is the mark in a scam as big as the Ritz. People laugh. My reputation takes a dump. My kudos is on the skids. I’m a busted flush.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That can’t happen. Nobody cons Vito DiLazzari. But nobody.”

  “Sure, sure.” Nicky negotiated an S-bend through some roadworks. “Could be that nobody conned you twice today.”

  Vito didn’t like it and he couldn’t ignore it. “Give,” he said.

  “Charlie Denny was sellin’ snake-oil, guaranteed cure for broken legs, blindness and six bullets in the breadbasket. He’s got no Operation Masquerade. Not unless you count the one he just flimflammed you with.”

  “He got nothing out of me!” Vito shouted. “Not one red cent, you total jerk!”

  Nicky steered smoothly onto an off-ramp. “Maybe he’s partners with Cabrillo,” he said. “Maybe they’re splittin’ two hundred grand right now. A double con. One squeezed you, the other dumped you. How does that sound?”

  No more talk. Vito stretched out on the back seat and, for the first time in his life, experienced despair. You do your best, you work hard, you make sacrifices—Marco, the Bruno brothers, Uncle—and where does it get you? Shat on by fate. Pissed on by Kismet. Fucked by destiny.

  They were in Beverly Hills when he remembered being hit hard by his father, twice, for no reason, except to remind him: self-pity is not box-office. He sat up.

  Inside the house, he went to his bedroom and came back with a sawed-off shotgun. Sawed-off at both ends, so the stock was little bigger than the grip on a handgun.

  “This was dad’s favorite,” he said. “He left it to me. Part of my heritage. One day my son’s gonna have it. Symbol of my legacy. No two-bit con artist is gonna tarnish that legacy. Take it. It’s loaded, both barrels. You whack Cabrillo and you whack Charlie Denny. Or do Denny first, I don’t give a shit. You ever fired one of these? Know how to use it?” Nicky nodded, and cocked it. “Like this?” he said. “And like this?” He aimed and fired and blew a hole the size of a grapefruit in Vito’s chest. He had lied: knew all about shotguns but he had never fired one before now, and the recoil knocked him flat on his ass, his wrist felt like it had been stamped on by the Marine Corps, and his ears were playing the Bells of St. Mary’s on a broken harmonica. The blast had blown Vito ten feet. He lay on his back except for his head which was propped against a chair. He seemed to be squinting down at the bloody disaster. His knees had folded outward, his elbows inwards. He looked foolish. He looked like a clown failing to get a laugh.

  Nicky got his breath back. “Just business,” he said. “Nothing personal, you dumb stupid stinkin’ miserable sonofabitch.” The acrid smell of explosive revived him. Nobody came. The staff were few, and knew better than to investigate the sound of gunfire. He searched Vito’s pockets for shotgun shells and found six: enough. He found a thousand dollars too, and took that.

  3

  Agent Moody began the questioning.

  “We met once before, Mr. Cabrillo. Remember? Tony Feet got into the trunk of his car, shut it, shot himself dead, and threw away the gun, never found. All this, outside your front door.”

  “Total mystery,” Luis said.

  “But he’d already called at your house, hadn’t he? To see Stevie Fantoni.”

  “Ah, now she was a total mystery of a different kind. Did you know she—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we know. Three-times-married virgin. But Stevie Fantoni’s not at home and Tony Feet is permanently absent. On your premises. Explain that.”

  “You chaps are very hard on the girl. She didn’t choose to be born a Fantoni. She was trying hard to escape the family. She was chez moi as a life model for the eminent painter, Princess Chuckling Stream.”

  “Vito DiLazzari bought her pix. By the truckload.”

  “Join the dots,” Fisk said. “Tony Feet, Fantoni, DiLazzari. Do we start to see a different picture?”

  “Have you no charity, sir?” Luis cried. “No generosity of spirit? DiLazzari is a patron of the arts, in the great tradition of his native Italy! Where would Michelangelo have been without Lorenzo de Medici? Where Raphael? Leonardo? Hispano-Suiza?”

  “That’s a car,” Denny said.

  “It’s a car and a half. It’s poetry on wheels.”

  “Forget Stevie,” Moody said. “Let’s go back to your time in El Paso. Two more bodies on your doorstep. What’s going on?”

  “Irresponsible, inconsiderate, antisocial behavior, sir. Americans dump their rubbish without thought for their neighbors. One discarded corpse attracts another, and soon …”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Denny said.

  “You make the jokes,” Luis said. “I just tell them.”

  4

  Hollywood has a lot to answer for. It shows a killing by gunshot and immediately the shooter—bright-eyed, unworried, even a little cocky—charges into the turmoil of the plot, facing challenges and making decisions as calmly as if he had just put his socks on.

  Perhaps a veteran hitman can be so cool. Perhaps a soldier, fighting for his life, can kill and instantly forget. But most people experience a severe shock when they know they have taken a life. Tough policemen who kill a man are not fit for duty for some da
ys. Nicky Zangara had never killed anyone, had never even wounded anyone, and the shock caught up with him as he walked to his car. He couldn’t breathe properly, his heart was a runaway train, his knees tried to bend the wrong way. He got his keys out and his hands were sticky. His face in the wing mirror had streaks of blood. He had blood in his hair, on his shirt, everywhere. He closed his eyes and saw Vito with a hole in his chest you could put your fist in. Both fists. He got out of the car and puked. On his pants. On his shoes. Some on the ground.

  He walked in big circles until his hands stopped shaking. He got into the car and said aloud: “Priorities.” First get cleaned up. He spat on his hands and wiped the blood streaks off his face. He drove out of Beverly Hills, found a general store, bought some jeans, a work shirt, a pair of sneakers. They guy didn’t like the smell but he took the money. Nicky added a dollar and said, “Somewhere I can change?” and bought the freedom of the men’s room.

  Back on the road, second priority: get the money from Cabrillo, all two hundred grand. Screw Cabrillo the way Cabrillo had screwed the Mob. Which needs a new top man. Step forward Nicky Zangara, proven troubleshooter. Why not? Time for a change. And if Cabrillo wants a fight? Blow his foot off. Blow both his feet off. Leave him without a leg to stand on. For the first time that day, Nicky smiled.

  “Enough bodies,” Charlie Denny said. “Let’s look at Ukraine. Take us through Operation Bamboozle from the beginning.”

  Luis thought. “It all goes back to my years with Allied Counter Intelligence in World War Two.”

  “Skip that. Cut to the chase.”

  “Oh.” Luis looked hurt. “It was jolly riveting stuff … Still, if you know better, you kick off and I’ll chip in as necessary.”

  “Your agents in the Ukraine,” Denny said. “The ones who found the no-good KGB general. Names.”

  “Donald Margaret Ferguson. A bisexual. The gender varies from day to day. That’s what fascinates the general. He’s besotted with him. Her. Them.”