Washington I.O.U.

by Don Pendleton

  I’ve never had any illusions that I am saving the country, or that I am even going about things the right way. I only know that it is my way. I can’t even think in terms of right and wrong. I’m simply doing what I have to do, and I don’t care if anyone understands or not. I know, even, that my way will never make much of a dent in the mob. They’ll walk over my mangled body one of these days soon, my “delaying action” will be finished, and the world will not even remember my name. To hell with “glory,” I’m not looking for that.

  None of that is to the point.

  The point is that this country had better get its head together damned soon or the mob will be walking over its mangled body.

  I keep getting back to the Vietnam thing, in my mind, but that’s because it is all so interconnected. I wouldn’t want to go back to ’Nam—no man in his right mind would. But if it were not for this new war, I know I’d be going back. I’d have to, for my own peace of mind. Cannibalism is a disease. It spreads when unopposed. Go ask the Mafia. If a national attitude of “peace at any price” carries over into this closer cannibalism at home, then I feel nothing but doubly dead in a very troubled grave.

  Sometimes, dammit, you’ve got to be ready to sacrifice peace in favor of a higher morality … and don’t anyone think that peace itself is the highest order of things.

  It can be the lowest order.

  Peace, in its ultimate form, is death.

  I’m expounding like an expert with a Ph.D. in Life, I know, but it doesn’t take a degree to recognize the truth when you’re staring right into it.

  I have stared into a lot of raw truth these past few months.

  Life is violence, motion, a striving, a non-peace, a fighting for the good and a determination to go on functioning.

  Maybe I should be classified as one of the cannibals myself. I prefer to think of myself as a counter-cannibal. I can’t see much value to a livingness built entirely of peace and love and sweetness—not when you are turning away from life itself. When you live with constant death, you begin to see what life is really all about.

  I do know that the traditional idea of “heaven” seems silly to me. I could not live in a silly heaven. Most people I’ve ever known could not. They’d run screaming into hell long before the seventh day. I’m wandering afield here, but I have to get this down also. Most of the people I have known who yearn so for the eternity of heaven can hardly stand one hour a week in church. How the hell are they going to remain sane through an everlasting round of hosannas?

  The guy who designed and built this awesome universe would also go nuts in that kind of “heaven.” He’s a do-er, a mover, a builder—not a psalm-singer.

  I guess this all does figure in. I’m getting my head together, I guess. What I’m trying to say is simply this. Life itself is a violence. Living, when it’s worthwhile, is a conflict. It’s a reach toward total agitation, not total rest. Take away the conflict, take away the goals and the struggle for them, and friend you are living in some sort of silly heaven.

  Total agitation is simply another way of saying “violence.” Life itself is a consummation of violence. We all kill and ingest other living things so that we may go on living. Even the gentle doe mangles and crushes and digests the beautifully-alive wild flowers, adding them to her own storehouse of life, and she does so without a quiver of conscience. This is the universal nature of life.

  The human mind knows that there are unacceptable limits of violence, though. Maybe that’s what this process of human evolution is all about, maybe it’s the universe growing a conscience. A civilized man understands that this violence of lifeform upon lifeform must be controlled and restricted as much as possible.

  The trouble is, some men never become civilized.

  They respond to only one thing—counterviolence, or at least the promise of it.

  That is why peace marches are so damned futile.

  You can’t unilateral yourself out of a cannibal’s pot.

  Someone has to keep the cannibals in line … with a big stick.

  Okay, that’s what I’m doing in Washington. And I guess it’s also why I’m so damned worried about dying here. The job is not finished, not even nearly. The cops can’t handle the thing without the help of an aroused people, and nobody around here seems to be alarmed about anything except the war in Vietnam.

  I’d like to see some war marches in this country. The mob is eating you alive, people. Right now they’ve only reached to about your shinbone. Pretty soon, though, they’ll be eating your heads, and you’ll damn sure be alarmed then.

  6: MARKED

  Carlo Spinella was a newly made underboss under the equally new Capo Gus Riappi, the latter being successor to the late Arnesto (Arnie the Farmer) Castiglione who was gunned down by Bolan during the British campaign.

  According to the best intelligence readings, the crown of domain had not yet firmly settled onto Riappi’s ambitious head but the coronation seemed a foregone conclusion, especially since Bolan had also recently eliminated Tony Lavagni, the only competitor in the field.

  Spinella himself had been strictly a neighborhood-level boss, running various rackets in and around the national capital under the sponsorship of Big Gus. He had never had jurisdiction in political/governmental circles, however. His specialty items were girls, drugs, numbers, vending machines, a payday loan racket and several bookie joints. He was also a silent partner in two bars, a pool hall and a real estate enterprise consisting of ownership of two blocks of rundown dwellings in Washington’s most blighted ghetto section.

  The Spinella “crew” was relatively small. At the moment of Bolan’s entry into the Washington scene, the “Southwest Boss” had ten soldiers in his official cadre who functioned primarily as enforcers and “controllers,” bossing a larger army of blacks who actually ran the rackets. In addition to these ten, he had four “house men” who saw to the physical protection of his body. These fourteen constituted the entire Spinella “crew.” Bolan had removed three of these from the scene at the first point of contact.

  With Tony Lavagni dead and Big Gus elevated to the exalted status of Capo of the lower-Atlantic seaboard, the small-spuds Spinella had seen nothing but roses in his personal future. By all that was right and holy, he would emerge from the shuffle as the official boss of the entire District of Columbia.

  Myopia had quickly settled into that rosy view, however.

  Big Gus had been sent down to the Caribbean to help Lavagni trap Bolan, on orders from the Old Men themselves. Lavagni came back in a casket or his surviving pieces did. Big Gus himself came slinking back in disgrace, his tail between his legs—licking his bruised ego with a vengeance.

  Carlo Spinella had suffered that vengeance.

  Big Gus took over all of the old Lavagni territory, his holdings, accounts, and crew—everything.

  The son of a bitch was just taking while the taking was good. Carlo knew that.

  Maybe, just maybe, the Commissione would figure that any guy who couldn’t handle a simple job like the Caribbean hit wasn’t fit to wear the crown of the entire lower Atlantic seaboard.

  So Big Gus Riappi was taking what he could while he could.

  What the hell, Riappi was Spinella’s boss. Come hell or high water, disgrace or whatever, that was the way things were.

  Even after the official blessings and forgiveness had come down from the Old Men, even when Big Gus knew damned well that he had the whole damned Castiglione empire in his pocket—even then he’d continued to exercise direct control of the Washington territory.

  Boss or no boss, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t justice, not for a loyal underboss like Carlo Spinella.

  Things like that rankled a guy. They burned at his guts and woke him up in the middle of the night, they even got him to talking to himself and mistreating his own people.

  The thing, of course, that was making Big Gus behave this way was that damnable Lupo.

  Jesus! but Carlo hated that guy.

  The new w
ave, they called heads like Lupo. The new wave of well educated, smooth talking society hoods who’d never been down in the ranks, never down on the streets, ninety-day-wonders who moved in on the top and never knew what it was to pull a territory together from nothing and make the goddam thing hum.

  Nationals.

  Carlo hated nationals.

  But it was the new wave, yeah. A guy couldn’t fight it, not even a guy like Big Gus Riappi could fight it. The older bosses, sure—what the hell, they were the nationals, the commissione. The Old Men didn’t have to worry about heads like Lupo. Hell, they’d created them.

  Fucking fancypants bastards with their college educations.

  Big Gus hated Lupo as much as Carlo did.

  And with better reasons.

  The Old Men had decided that Washington should be declared an open city. But Carlo knew—they had made that decision so they could send Lupo in there. If that wasn’t an invasion of holy territory then just what the hell was it.

  Nobody—not Carlo Spinella, not Big Gus, not nobody in the whole damn Washington area—nobody could lay a hand on Lupo.

  The son of a bitch had a license, he had a commission directly from the Old Men, and Big Gus had been ordered to cooperate with him “in every way possible.”

  If Lupo said “cool the action for a few days”—then they had to cool the action. It might interfere with something “delicate” Lupo was trying to work. Meanwhile, money was being lost. Lost money never got recovered, Carlo had learned well that grim fact of life. It was like a piece of ass—every piece missed was a piece gone forever—there was no way of catching up.

  And if Lupo said “send me over a gun crew”—then they had to send him over a gun crew. Something “delicate” had gone sour and turned into something brutal. But who paid the gunners, and who had to take care of their protection—who had to answer to the cops if a hit went sour? Not Lupo, hell no.

  That guy had the whole District right under his thumb.

  Yeah. Carlo hated the guy.

  Probably, though, Big Gus hated him worse. More was at stake for Gus.

  At this particular moment, however, it was a toss-up over which of them had a right to hate Lupo the most.

  Via some twenty-five miles of telephone wire, Spinella was telling Riappi, “That’s what I said, Gus. All three of them. Horse and Tommy and Chick—parked out in front of the house here. Dead as hell. It was that damn Wolf Crew, I know it was. They didn’t even have the common decency to dump the bodies somewhere else, they left them right out here in front of my house. And they didn’t even ring the bell or call or anything else. We didn’t even find them first. The damn law got to them first, Gus. Now what the hell, is that adding insult to injury or isn’t it? What the hell do I tell the law now?”

  “Your boys carry credentials, don’t they?” Riappi growled back.

  “Sure, but what ice does that cut? Dead is dead, I gotta have a story for the law.”

  Riappi sighed as he replied, “You tell them no story, Carlo. Because you know nothing about it. It’s as easy as that. Your boys are bonafide security agents in your south-west apartments. They probably made some enemies, that’s all. They’re victims of a black vendetta. You know the routine.”

  Following a tense silence, Spinella said, “Well that’s not what’s really bothering me, Gus. We can’t let that guy get away with this kind of shit. We’ll lose the respect of our own boys.”

  Riappi sounded regretful and conciliatory as he replied, “That was your fault, Carlo. I hate to say it but it’s true. You started it, the whole thing, and what you did was wrong. You were fucking around with something way over your head, fidele … we all would have been in hard trouble if you’d been allowed to go through with it. The way it is now, Lupo and me both are covering the thing. We’re covering it for you, Carlo. We’re sorry your boys had to pay the price. But that’s the way it is sometimes, Carlo. When a guy fucks up as bad as you fucked—”

  “I know, I know,” Spinella agreed worriedly. “I still say Lupo should’ve let us in on his big secret. Well okay. If you say so, okay. I’m not bitching about anything I guess except the way they left my boys here without even saying hello about it. I mean, parking ’em dead right in front of my house. I take that as a warning, Gus, a very clear warning to me. I think I should have gotten above that kind of thing. You know.”

  “Sure, I know,” Riappi agreed. “Look, just cool it. Lupo’s time will come, don’t worry. He’s running high, wide and handsome right now but he’s building a lot of enemies while he’s doing it. We’ll all remember Lupo’s sins, don’t worry.”

  “He didn’t have to kill those boys, Gus.”

  “Maybe he didn’t and maybe he did. You should know your own boys better than I do. What do you think?”

  Spinella snorted as he replied, “Maybe he did. I still don’t think any broad in the world is worth three of my boys.”

  “This broad is, believe it and forget it,” Riappi said quietly.

  “I’ll believe it but I won’t forget it.”

  “Forget it, Carlo. For now.”

  “Okay. It’s forgotten.”

  “Tell the cops what I told you. And don’t worry. I already got the fix in.”

  “Oh, swell, I’m glad to hear that.”

  “No big wake for your boys, Carlo. Quiet, very quiet. And see you don’t go yammering around about how they died. You know.”

  “Oh sure, hell, I know.”

  Riappi clicked off and Spinella slowly cradled the telephone, glaring at it as though it were something foul and slimy.

  Which one, he was wondering, did he hate the most now? Lupo or Slimy Gus?

  He slid off the bed and struggled into a robe, belting it tightly around silken pajamas, then he strode out to the “crew room”—a lounge area for his retinue of personal bodyguards.

  Only Rocky Lucindo, the soldier who had brought the disturbing news to his bedside, was present—and he was standing tensely at the window and staring down onto the scene of confusion just below that window.

  A couple of meat wagons were out there, several marked police cars, as well, and probably one or two unmarked official vehicles. Photographers were milling about and popping flashbulbs, some of the lenses being directed at the house itself. The street was blocked off to traffic, the cops trying to disperse a growing crowd of spectators. People in bathrobes … broads with their hair up in curlers … it was still pretty early in the day.

  Lucindo was the chief houseman. He was an old soldier who went way back with Carlo Spinella. He was a close personal friend, perhaps the only man in the world whom Carlo trusted implicitly.

  The triggerman muttered, “It’s a circus out there. Why does everybody always want to see it?”

  “Makes ’em feel good it’s not them,” Spinella replied caustically. He moved away from the window as another flashbulb pushed back the early-morning gloom. “What time is it?”

  “About five,” the bodyguard reported. “What did Big Gus have to say?”

  “Same old crap. Cool it for now, Play dead.” The capo-regime snorted. “I’d like to cool you-know-who for now and forever.”

  “Just say the word,” Lucindo replied soberly.

  “Naw. We play it straight, just like Gus says. He’s the boss. Where’s Fred?”

  Lucindo jerked his head toward the window. “Out there, with Ripper. Being concerned citizens. Ripper was the first one out there. He says those other soldiers are a mess, a hell of a mess. Gave it to them in the head, all of them.”

  Spinella shuddered and went to the bar. He poured a cup of coffee and carried it to the television, turned the set on, selected a channel, and eased onto an ottoman as he sipped the coffee and stared at the blank screen.

  A moment later he growled, “Hell, is it that early?”

  “I said five,” the bodyguard reminded him. “Try that independent station, that channel uh.…”

  The hallway door opened and another man shoved head and shoulder
s through. “Plainclothes guy wants in,” he reported. “Says it’s just a routine—”

  “Tell him,” Lucindo snapped, “nobody saw nothing.”

  “Yeah but he wants to talk to Mr. Spinella.”

  “Tell him Mr. Spinella is too upset to see anybody right now. He’ll give them a call when he’s feeling better. What the hell, those cops got no feelings for the dead?”

  The hardman replied with nothing but a tight smile and immediately withdrew.

  The chief bodyguard went over to hover above his boss. “What do we tell them, Carlo? We’ll have to face it sooner or later.”

  “The niggers did it,” Spinella replied quietly.

  “Okay. I guess that’s as good as anything.”

  “Sure. Lousy bastards never want to pay their rent. So they jumped our collectors. Probably robbed them. Then left the bodies at my front door just for kicks.”

  “One story is as good as another,” Lucindo agreed.

  The outer door opened again and the hardman reappeared, this time his face pulled into angry lines. “This guy has a John Doe warrant,” he announced loudly.

  Another man walked in behind him—a slightly built Negro of indeterminate age, sharply dressed, smiling soberly.

  “Sorry to disturb you at this hour, Mr. Spinella,” he said in a soft voice.

  “So go disturb John Doe,” Spinella growled, hardly looking up.

  The smile remained. “We knew you’d be anxious to cooperate. That’s a pretty brutal thing that happened to your boys.”

  “Employees,” Spinella corrected him. “And you bet your ass I’ll cooperate. If you don’t have those people rounded up and behind bars by nightfall, I’ll round ’em up myself.”

  “What people?” the cop asked.

  “You know who I’m talking about, Walker. Those people of yours, those coloreds. They’ve been headed toward something like this for a year now.”