Knockdown

by Don Pendleton

  Bolan and Coppolo sat down for lunch in an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side.

  "I don't care what Saul says, the mustache makes you harder to recognize."

  "Forget me. It's you I'm worried about. For every guy in town who'd know me, even without the mustache, there have to be twenty who'd know you. I guess there's no point in telling you to lay low."

  Coppolo shook his head. "But I got an idea. Something I did for a little while when I was with the force." He paused, tipped his head and smiled. "Being a little fellow, I, uh, was sent out as bait for sex maniacs. You know what I mean? I mean, dressed like a woman. The fact is, I can be pretty damned convincing. Wig, makeup…you know. And I got another idea. Mr. Joe Businessman could have a woman with him. It'd make you harder to spot, too."

  By the middle of the afternoon, Joe Coppolo was transformed into a pretty little woman. First he bought a wig — dark brown to match his eyebrows — then a kit of makeup, then clothes. It was only when he wanted the padding to fill out his figure that he ventured into a costume shop. They offered him a dressing room, and the fussy little proprietor helped him with his transformation. When, after half an hour, he emerged from the dressing room, Bolan — who had expected to laugh — stared in amazement.

  Coppolo had bought two outfits. This one was a loose, wind-driven red skirt, worn with a white T-shirt and a red linen jacket. He needed long sleeves to cover the muscles in his arms, even though he had shaved off the dark hair. The heels of his red shoes were just high enough to shape the calves of his legs. He had shaved his legs, too, and his stockings covered the darkness that remained. As for makeup, he and the man who helped him had avoided the excess that would have made him look like a man dressed as a woman. Joe had chosen rose-colored lipstick, not red, and an overall foundation that covered the darkness of the whiskers under the skin of his cheeks. He wore a pinkish blush on his cheeks and a slight touch of blue eye shadow.

  When they were on the street, Joe opened his shoulder bag, and Bolan surreptitiously slipped in his Browning automatic.

  They caught a cab for the Barclay. Bolan found himself not in the least self-conscious walking through the lobby with this figure at his side. Coppolo looked anything but grotesque. A small man, he was able to fit into this role with ease.

  * * *

  Joe Rossi maintained a hideaway apartment and two homes — an apartment on East Seventy-second Street and a house in Chappaqua, forty miles out in Westchester County.

  His wife and children lived in the house in Chappaqua, where Rossi was known only as a New York businessman with extensive interests in real estate. His neighbors knew that a chauffeur and a houseboy lived in an apartment above the garage. They didn't know that these men carried heavy weapons. They knew that a maid came to the house every morning at eight, just before Mr. Rossi left for the city, and that she drove his children to school each day. They didn't know that this woman, too, carried an automatic in her handbag.

  The Chappaqua neighbors didn't guess that the handsome Mrs. Rossi — Roxanne, known as Roxy — had a license to carry a pistol and was almost never without the.25-caliber Baby Browning automatic. Once a Las Vegas showgirl, Roxy was tall, blond, and a fading, though still striking, beauty. She carried off her Ivy League, businessman's-adoring-wife role so well that few of her friends realized she had only a high school education. She was active at St. Joseph's, in the Art League and played a creditable round or two of golf every week when the weather permitted.

  In the apartment on Seventy-second Street Joe Rossi kept a twenty-year-old Brazilian girl named Eva Mueller and their two-year-old child, Joey — as Roxy Rossi well knew. Eva was a miniature, twenty-four-years-younger version of Roxy. Though she had almost no formal education, she knew far more about the Rossi Family businesses than Roxy had ever been allowed to know. It was in her blood, as it wasn't in Roxy's, since her father's position in Sao Paulo wasn't very different from Rossi's in New York. Her father had — to cut the deal to its essence — given her to Rossi when she was sixteen. She had never resented that, never regretted it. He was old enough to be her grandfather and was minimally demanding, and, like a good grandfather, he was generous. She knew enough about business to know that the trust fund he had established for her and her child wasn't dependent on the Rossi Family businesses. She lived in luxury and always would.

  Unlike Roxy, Eva never carried a gun. She traveled about the city without a bodyguard. She could. She was anonymous. Also, she understood, as did anyone who might have wanted to kidnap her, that she was expendable. Joe Rossi would surrender nothing important to save his mistress, and all a kidnapper would earn was the undying animosity of the most powerful don in New York.

  The apartment that Roxy had never seen was furnished with distinguished works of art by eminent twentieth-century artists. Here Joe Rossi had made no compromises with Roxy's more conventional tastes. Here he displayed what he had collected over the years, which Roxy couldn't appreciate. Maybe Eva couldn't appreciate his art, either, but Eva's tastes made less difference to him; her status in his apartment was different from Roxy's in their house.

  The men who came to the apartment for business meetings could not appreciate it, either. Tonight, for example, three men sat at his dining table, in a room dominated by a sort of lopsided bull's-eye done in red-and-blue paint and gold leaf. Their eyes lingered, not on the painting, but on the figure of Eva, proudly displayed in a short, snug-fitting emerald sheath. The tabletop was glass, and they could see her legs almost to her hips.

  The youngest of them was ten years older than Joe Rossi. One had been born in Sicily before the First World War. The other two were sons of Sicilian fathers: Lucky DeMaioribus, from Providence, Rhode Island; Peter DiRenzo, from Miami; Vincenti Sestola, from Baltimore — members of the Commission.

  The Commission was the governing council of La Cosa Nostra. The members were the dons of the most powerful Families in America. Only four were here tonight — Joe Rossi, too, was a member — but the Commission was an informal body, and only rarely did all the members meet. The four could discuss and decide anything, then secure acquiescence from most of the others, and their decision became the decision of the Commission. The group assembled tonight had come together to discuss the disintegration of the peace in New York.

  * * *

  Mack Bolan and Joe Coppolo didn't know that the members of the Commission were meeting in Rossi's apartment. They came to look for an opportunity to shake Rossi's cool self-possession. Bolan had insisted that no matter what opportunity they found, they were not going to kill Rossi. Before he attacked Rossi, he wanted more hard evidence of Rossi's complicity in the death of Joan. No, it would be better to shake him, the way he had shaken DePrisco, make him think he was a target, maybe of the killer who had taken out Phil Corone last night, maybe of Angela Corone, maybe of Barbosa or Segesta.

  The first problem was how to enter the building. Saul Stein had warned them it was a secure building. Celebrities lived there. The staff was alert to keep away people who might come to annoy them.

  Bolan and Coppolo walked east from York Avenue, on Seventy-second Street. The left side of the street was a row of three-and four-story brick apartment buildings. On the right at the end, the target building was a ten-story white stone building. The street ended at a barrier, some fifteen or twenty feet above FDR Drive. At the end you could stand at the barrier and watch the traffic speeding in both directions — and beyond, the traffic on the East River.

  "Who you figure is sitting in the black Caddy over there?" Coppolo asked.

  "I'd take that for somebody keeping an eye out. I'd guess that since last night, Brother Rossi has gotten a little nervous."

  "Which means that you and I get just one approach," Coppolo concluded. "If we walk away and come back, that's suspicious."

  "We can stand and look at the river for a couple of minutes."

  Coppolo was wearing the second of the two outfits he'd bought that afternoon — a short, tight bl
ack skirt, dark stockings, black shoes, a black tank top and a loose white scarf around his shoulders. Once again, his appearance was anything but that of a hard-muscled man dressed as a woman. He didn't look like a hooker, either. To complete the image, he walked arm in arm with Bolan. In his businessman's suit, Bolan looked like a man taking his girlfriend for a walk before he had to leave her, reluctantly, and catch a late train for a home and wife in the suburbs.

  "I have a feeling the Caddy isn't the only car with a watchman in it," Bolan said. "There's a BMW across the street with a man in it, too."

  "Well, if a don lives in the neighborhood, you can figure he'll be guarded."

  "Something odd, though," Bolan stated. "The Caddy's got a Rhode Island license plate."

  "Okay. Are we going to try our little gimmick or not?"

  "We're going to try it," Bolan replied. "If it works, we're in. If we're in, who cares what hardmen are out here?"

  They walked to the apartment building, up the three steps to the wide glass doors and into the lobby.

  The uniformed attendant who sat behind a table reading a newspaper looked up. "Yes?"

  "Uh, my friend is nauseous," Bolan stammered. "Thinks she might throw up. Do you have a ladies' room available where she could get some cold water and…"

  "Buzz out, buddy."

  "How long have you been working here?" Bolan asked, feigning indignation. "Is that the way the building management expects you to talk to people? Listen, my friend Joe Rossi lives here, and…"

  "Rossi?" the attendant asked skeptically, getting up. "You know Mr. Rossi?"

  "Certainly," Bolan said, still playing the businessman outraged by the rudeness of a uniformed lobby man. "And I've never been talked to this way in this building before. You buzz Mr. Rossi. He'll tell you."

  "Mr. Rossi isn't here, buddy," said the man who by now had revealed clearly that he was no apartment building lobby attendant.

  "I know he is."

  "Well, I say he's not," the hardman snarled.

  He grabbed at something inside his double-breasted gray jacket. With his attention fastened only on Bolan, without an inkling that the little dark-haired woman might be a threat to him, the hardman was a sucker for the punch Coppolo threw at him. The agent's hard fist caught him on the temple, just forward of the ear and a little above. The hardman crumpled.

  In an instant Coppolo was down beside him. He reached inside the double-breasted jacket and pulled out a Smith & Wesson.38.

  "We better pull him into the elevator," Coppolo suggested.

  Bolan dragged the stunned hardman into the elevator, out of sight from the street. The guy shook his head to clear the fog and began to mumble. Coppolo drove a fist into his nose, bloodying it.

  "You're in deep doo-doo, mouthy," he growled into the hardman's face. "So talk. What's goin' on? Where's the real lobby man?"

  The hardman cupped his nose in his hands, and blood oozed out between his fingers. "Paid good," he mumbled.

  "How many more guys you got in the building?" Bolan asked.

  The hardman shook his head. "Nobody. Everybody else is on the street."

  "How many?"

  "Two. I mean, three. Three. Who the hell are you guys?" He blinked at Coppolo. "My God! You ain' no woman!"

  "Why?" Bolan asked. "What's coming down?"

  The hardman shook his head. "Nothin'. The guy's scared because of what happened to Corone."

  Coppolo slapped him across the nose, which was already beginning to swell and become excruciatingly sensitive.

  "So, you guys paid off the regular lobby man — if that's really what you did — and set up inside-and-outside security because Rossi's scared? If he's scared, you lying son of a bitch, he's not just scared tonight. No way. This is something special. So what's special tonight?"

  "What's special is that the Commission is meeting upstairs. They'd kill me for telling you…"

  Coppolo sneered. "We figured it out for ourselves," he said. "Which floor?"

  "Nine."

  Bolan was at the controls of the elevator. He ran it up to the top floor, a utility floor above the penthouse. They led the stumbling hardman to the control room for the building's air-conditioning system and bound rum securely to a heavy pipe, using the cord from a vacuum cleaner Coppolo found in a nearby service closet. They stuffed the man's mouth full of cleaning rags and tightened more cord around his neck and jaw to hold it in. When they closed the door, even the sound of his grunting was covered by the roar of the air-conditioning equipment.

  "Nine, huh?" Coppolo adjusted his wig and checked his makeup. "Ninth floor. The Commission, yet!"

  * * *

  Eva had supervised the serving of coffee and brandy by the maid, then she had smiled on the men seated around the dining table and left them to talk business. She looked in on her child and found him sleeping peacefully. From there she went to the master bedroom, where Joe would join her later, and changed into something he would like.

  In the dining room, behind closed doors, the four men began to talk earnestly.

  "Phil Corone was an expensive man to know," said Miami's Peter DiRenzo. "I sent him two hitters and he lost both of them."

  "Barbosa did," Rossi said. "It was Barbosa who sent them to that book."

  "Two days later my consigliere disappears," DiRenzo continued. "It's got something to do with the same deal. I don't know what."

  "The heads of two Families have been killed in a week," DeMaioribus added. "Tell us, Joe — is New York out of control?"

  Rossi clasped his hands before his chin. "The death of Philip Corone was no loss," he said. "The death of Carlo Lentini is something else. I have a strong suspicion that Corone arranged the murder of Lentini."

  "So, what happens?" Sestola asked. "Who takes over the Corone and the Lentini families?"

  "Maybe we should discuss that," Rossi suggested.

  * * *

  While exploring the utility floor, Bolan and Coppolo found a service elevator. A buzzer was sounding in the elevator, so they sent it down. They used the service elevator to descend to the ninth floor.

  The elevator doors opened on a service room with access to both the apartments on that floor, whose doors were marked A and B. They had no idea which apartment was Rossi's, but both doors were locked anyway.

  They listened at each door and could hear nothing. Coppolo took a serrated tool from his bag and set to work on the lock on the B door.

  "So," he grunted after a minute.

  He turned the knob and slowly, cautiously opened the door. It opened into the kitchen of the apartment. The room was lighted by a fluorescent fixture under a cabinet and over the sink. The ruby light on the coffee maker showed that the pot of coffee was hot.

  Coppolo turned and shrugged. There was no way to tell whether this was the Rossi apartment or somebody else's.

  Bolan nodded at the other door, and the Justice agent crossed the service room and went to work on that lock.

  The kitchen beyond this door was much like the other. Except the dishwasher was running. The coffee maker was steaming, brewing a pot of coffee. And the air was heavy with cigar smoke.

  "The Commission," Bolan whispered to Coppolo.

  "Probably."

  Bolan stepped inside. Three doors opened off the kitchen. A swinging door obviously was the door to the dining room. Beyond another door was a pantry. A third one, closed, probably opened onto a hall so that the kitchen could be entered and exited without passing through the dining room.

  Bolan stood close to the swinging door. He could hear conversation, men's voices, one of them gravelly. The Commission.

  Coppolo was looking around the kitchen, looking for anything that would prove this apartment was Rossi's. He had found it, an envelope in the trash, when he and Bolan started at the sound of a doorknob turning.

  Bolan leaped across the room, grabbing Coppolo, shoving him into the pantry and pushing in behind him. They crouched on the floor.

  The door opened. A young woman
entered the kitchen, exquisitely beautiful. She was tiny, hardly more than five foot two, blond, and she was dressed in a tight black corselet, high-heeled shiny black shoes and long dark stockings held up with short straps from the corselet. She went to a cabinet, took out a mug and poured herself a mug of coffee. Then she paused for a moment, until, as if on a sudden impulse, she reached for a brandy snifter and the bottle and poured herself a generous drink of brandy.

  She moved languidly, in no hurry at all — which was a good thing, for if she had come through the door faster, she would have spotted Bolan and Joe before they could throw themselves into the pantry.

  She took a sip of her brandy, then turned up the bottle and replaced that sip. With coffee in one hand and brandy in the other, she left the kitchen.

  Coppolo sighed. "I'll never look like that, no matter how hard I try," he whispered.

  "Rossi's mistress," Bolan said.

  Bolan returned to the dining-room door. Coppolo spotted a wooden wedge apparently used to hold the swinging door open, and he wedged it under the door into the hallway. Both of them stood at the door and listened.

  * * *

  "If the Lentini gambling businesses were fairly divided, it would strengthen the other four Families," Peter DiRenzo said.

  "I think Joe might suggest that we shouldn't strengthen all four," Sestola offered, smiling. He sucked smoke from his cigar and blew a heavy gust across the table. Then he reached for wine. "Of course, if there aren't Five Families anymore, then…"

  "Then one of the New York Families might become unacceptably strong," DeMaioribus interrupted.

  "If you're thinking of my Family," Rossi said, "let me tell you I don't want the Lentini books and loan sharks. I'm interested in very different businesses."

  "The Corone Family must have a leader," DeMaioribus growled in his gravelly old voice. "That woman… A woman can't control a Family."