The Mongoose Deception

by Robert Greer

  “Okay, okay. So he’s your lovable lapdog.” Rosselli stroked his chin thoughtfully. “How much does he know about the whole goddamn plan?”

  “Yeah. How fuckin’ much?” asked Trafficante, riding a new wave of anxiety.

  “As much as he’s been told.” Marcello bit back the urge to lash out. “He knows he’s workin’ backup detail on a big-time hit, and he knows who the target is. But he don’t know nothin’ about anywhere else but Chicago. He’s aware that he’s fallback and a fallback only, and he knows that the lead singer in this deal is somebody else, not him.”

  “And he’s all right with that?” asked Trafficante, flashing a knowing glance Rosselli’s way.

  “Yeah,” Marcello responded, looking puzzled. “Ornasetti’s got him under control.”

  “Ain’t what I hear,” Trafficante countered. “I hear that little Creole swamp bug of yours likes struttin’ center stage. Hear he’s into takin’ special bows.”

  “From who?” Marcello shot back.

  “Don’t matter from who. What matters is, he may be too fuckin’ Hollywood for us,” said Trafficante.

  Marcello’s face turned salmon pink. “Goddamn it, Santo! I know where you’re headed with this. You still want this whole goddamn thing to play out down your way in Tampa. You’ve been tryin’ your best to nose things that way from the beginning. But you know what? Ain’t gonna happen.”

  Trafficante smiled. It was a self-satisfied gotcha kind of smile. “And you can bet I wouldn’t use a nigger, or some half-breed Creole, or whatever Ducane claims to be—or for that matter anybody without the same bloodlines as me—as backup on a job like this, especially on my own home ground.”

  “We both know that,” Rosselli said, playing peacemaker once again. “You’ve told us before, Santo, so move off it. Let’s say for the moment we all try and be a little objective. Bottom line is, not one of us should be pushin’ for Chicago, or Tampa, or any other city, or for offshore hires, U.S. regulars, Chinamen, niggers, or Jews. You think a dog with a thorn in its paw gives one shit about who takes that fuckin’ thorn out? Hell, no! And right now we’ve got ourselves one hell of a thorn-pokin’ problem, gentlemen.” Rosselli paused for effect. “Or maybe it’s just me who’s feelin’ the pain, and the two of you ain’t hurtin’ a bit.”

  “Oh, I’m feelin’ it,” said Marcello, licking a tenacious piece of shrimp batter from his thumb. “And what I’m feelin’ is more and more like that goddamn lyin’, pussy-chasin’ asshole and his pissant brother need to be dealt with. They’re takin’ turns puttin’ their dicks up my ass. They’ve got me in fuckin’ court, I’m losin’ contracts, leverage, and, worst of all, I’m losin’ money.”

  “Same for me,” Trafficante chimed in. “Word has it they’re plannin’ on prosecutin’ my whole damn family. And Hoover’s office ain’t been one goddamn bit of help. So much for courtin’ that sissy.”

  “So there you are, summed up all over again,” Rosselli said with a quick, insightful nod. “It’s shit-or-get-off-the-pot time, in case either of you missed it. We’ve got three shots at solvin’ our problem in just under a month, and the first one’s here in Chicago. I say we stick with what’s been planned. Any discomfort?” Rosselli flashed a quick thumbs-up and turned to Marcello.

  Marcello’s thumb rose quickly.

  “Santo?” Rosselli’s tone escalated with the question.

  Trafficante, who’d been holding out for weeks to have things play out down his way in Tampa, eyed the limo’s plushly carpeted floor, gazed out the tinted window toward the conga line of hungry Negroes still lined up outside the whitewashed cinderblock bunker that was White’s Shrimp House, shook his head, raised a thumb, and said hesitantly, “I guess.”

  Antoine Ducane’s trip from Theodosia’s Elbow Room to his one-room walk-up flat in a flophouse on the corner of Thirteenth and Adams in Gary’s red-light district proved to be uneventful. No cops latched on to his tail, no drunks followed him home, and on the way he encountered not one cheating woman. He settled into his room—a dingy ten-by-ten-foot box that reeked of rancid cabbage and stale cigarette smoke—and watched a couple of sitcoms on TV. Bored with the tube, he doodled in a sketch book for awhile, called home to New Iberia to talk to his mother, assuring her several times during the conversation that he was all right, then went back out and trolled Adams Street for a woman to help him take the edge off a strange, sudden, job-related nervousness. He walked the streets for half an hour, a little disjointed, looking for the right kind of woman—slender, big breasts, all legs, and dark skinned—without any luck before returning to his room.

  He sat back on his bed, his head resting against a pillow that smelled of mildew, still uneasy about his assignment, enjoying the last of his favorite snack, a Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer and a whole-wheat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. He found himself second-guessing his trip north, the entire sketchy Chicago job, and even his loyalty to the two Carlos Marcello contacts back in New Iberia who’d recommended him for the job.

  Over the past ten weeks the Chicago plan, a plan that he knew top-level mafia dons had drawn up to rid themselves of ever-increasing government intrusions on their business, had been seared into his brain. To divert attention from themselves, the crime bosses had called in a collaborator—a trusted but unseasoned Rocky Mountain connection. The man was an eager-beaver, twenty-five-year-old, upbucking would-be don from Colorado who had been recommended to Carlos Marcello, the driving force behind the plan, by a trusted Las Vegas contact.

  The three crime bosses, as far as he could tell, had checked out this fourth collaborator, Rolando “Rollie” Ornasetti, to their satisfaction; anointed him their lieutenant on the street, kill coordinator, and mission director; given the job their stamp of approval; and distanced themselves from the action. In the weeks that followed, Ornasetti, a braggart who never let a day pass without sharing the fact with Sugar Sweet or some other underling that he’d graduated from college at nineteen, that his family had roots in the Rocky Mountain mafia that extended back eighty years, and that his member was ten inches long, had managed to rub Antoine the wrong way. Hoping to make points with upper-level movers and shakers of the organized crime world, the brash Ornasetti had choreographed Ducane through six fully orchestrated trial runs of the Chicago job. It had been Ornasetti who’d suggested that Ducane while away his unoccupied time rotting in Gary, rat-holed forty-five minutes away from the kill zone in a firetrap that smelled of boiled cabbage and piss.

  It hadn’t taken Antoine but a few minutes into their first meeting to recognize what a kiss-ass Ornasetti would turn out to be and peg him as a little fish trying to swim with the bigs. Despite his instant dislike, $25,000 to play low-risk backup on a kill had proved to be too much of an incentive for him to walk away. Ornasetti’s puffed-up, tall-Texan take on the world seemed out of place for a slightly built man from Denver who was barely five-foot-eight, talked with the hint of a lisp, and tended to sound slightly effeminate when he got excited. The fact that he openly coveted the top dog position of his uncle, who was a Denver crime boss, spoke to his lack of loyalty, and that, as much as anything else, rubbed Ducane the wrong way.

  It was Ornasetti, not someone above him, who began to refer to their operation as a deception rather than simply calling it what it was—a hit. It was Ornasetti who relished using words and phrases that climbed over the top of what the whole Chicago affair was all about—killing—and Ornasetti who boasted that the job would probably make him.

  Antoine complained in one of his frequent late-night calls to his mother, a woman who had worked for decades in the low-tide backwaters of Louisiana petty crime—numbers running, illegal liquor sales, and falsified IDs—that his Chicago job, without detailing the job’s specifics, had him dealing with a Rocky Mountain wannabe chickenshit. She assured him that it came with the territory, that some jobs just came with shit-ass bosses.

  Sugar Sweet couldn’t complain to Carlos Marcello, the man who in effect had okayed him for the
job, and he had no way of going up or down a chain of command to which he had no real access. Besides, such a maneuver would have demonstrated that he lacked loyalty and juice. He didn’t like the idea that he was playing second fiddle to a man he’d never met, someone from overseas or offshore, as best he could tell—even that information was still under wraps. But he had the sense that there was more to the Ornasetti-orchestrated Windy City job than he was being told, and that, in fact, should things go awry in Chicago, a backup plan for another time and place was already set.

  He didn’t like the fact that he’d amassed a binder full of information on his mark but only a sheet of information outlining the full blown plan. All he really knew was who his Chicago contacts were, where he would be positioned as a shooter, and that when the job was over he’d be wired $25,000.

  Dismissing his concerns with a shrug, his thoughts locked on the money, he dusted the crumbs from his sandwich off his boxer shorts onto the floor. Ignoring the boiled-cabbage smell that seemed to seep from every wall surrounding him, he stretched out, rested his head on the lumpy, musty, poor excuse for a pillow, and drifted off to sleep. Twenty minutes later, an 11:30 phone call jolted him out of a pleasant dream.

  “Ducane here,” he answered, groggy, fumbling with the receiver.

  “R. O.,” came Rollie Ornasetti’s coded reply. “Our event starts tomorrow, 7 a.m. We just got a package from overseas.”

  Realizing that the primary shooter had arrived, Ducane said, “I’ll be there.”

  “Good,” was the only word Rollie Ornasetti uttered before hanging up.

  Ducane sat up, turned on a nightstand lamp next to the bed, and scanned the semidarkness of the foul-smelling room, aware that the next day would involve the real thing, not another trial run. For a fleeting moment, he thought about calling his mother. Instead he simply let out a hollow, lost-child’s sigh, turned off the lamp, lay back down, and a few minutes later drifted back off into dreamland.

  Chapter 3

  Chicago, Illinois, November 2, 1963

  Scheduled to meet Rollie Ornasetti and their overseas connection in Chicago at the rear of a building on Seventy-ninth and Stony Island at 7 a.m., Sugar Sweet Ducane left Gary for Chicago on the 5 a.m. South Shore train. Standing dutifully in place by 6:30, several blocks up the alley from where he’d stashed the car that had been left for him near the train station, Ducane waited. He was still waiting an hour later. A half-hour grace period, no more, no matter what the job or the connection, was a cardinal rule of his, and Ornasetti certainly hadn’t earned even that much leeway. Leaving the appointed meeting spot and stewing, Antoine headed for a pay phone three blocks away to call Ornasetti.

  A half block from the pay phone, a Checker cab nudged over to the curb and intercepted him. The rear door opened slowly, and a distraught-looking Rollie Ornasetti waved Antoine inside. A stocky, dark-haired man wearing a stingy brim hat and European-style wraparound sunglasses sat at the other end of the rear seat. As Antoine climbed into the cab’s spacious rear, the man barely looked up. Before Antoine could take a seat, Ornasetti announced, “The whole thing’s off.”

  “Why the scrap?” Sugar Sweet asked, disappointed and sounding angry.

  Ornasetti shook his head. “Outside forces.”

  Antoine eyed the man in sunglasses, then looked over at Ornasetti. “Your man from overseas?”

  “Not important,” Ornasetti said dismissively as the cab’s engine shut down.

  Antoine nodded, eyed their other passenger from head to toe, and said, “Hello.” He got no response. Trapped between a man who was barely talking and another who wouldn’t, he had the sudden feeling that there were probably plenty of things about the now scrubbed assignment that he’d never been told. Important things. Things that had him feeling blindsided.

  “So what about my equipment?” Ornasetti asked.

  “It’s in the trunk of the car that was left for me, right where it’s supposed to be. You were supposed to be here at seven.”

  “We’ll go back and pick it up. Easy enough.”

  “Yeah, let’s.” Antoine shook his head. “Things sure took a quick one-eighty.”

  “Situations, just like people, sometimes take a turn for the worse.” Ornasetti glanced at the man in sunglasses as if expecting an amen, but all he got was silence.

  “You wouldn’t be holding back on me, would you, Ornasetti?” Antoine asked boldly.

  “And if I were?” Ornasetti continued, eyeing the man in the sunglasses.

  The man adjusted the glasses on his nose without responding, and for a fleeting moment Sugar Sweet Ducane’s mouth went dry. There was something foreboding about the way the man had moved his hand. Something about both the grace and dismissiveness of the motion that suddenly made him feel that if he protested any further, the man in sunglasses might very well pop him on the spot. Glancing at Ornasetti, Antoine ran the bare-bones framework of the scrubbed mission through his head. He was to have been the high-post shooter, the man in sunglasses undoubtedly the shooter in the low post. He studied the solemn-looking man again, and for a brief moment he had the eerie, uneasy feeling that even if the aborted plan had actually played out, things might not have unfolded quite as they’d been planned.

  “I still expect a payday,” Antoine said calmly.

  Ornasetti smiled. “Of course. It’ll simply arrive a little later than we discussed.”

  “How much later?” A brewing anger was evident in Antoine’s tone.

  “A couple of days or so. That’s all.”

  “Don’t screw with my money, Ornasetti.”

  Visibly agitated, Ornasetti sat back in his seat, his upper lip quivering. “You’re not dealing with the kind of swamp-rat throwbacks you normally do business with, Ducane. You’ll get paid. Now, let’s go get that rifle.”

  “Fine by me.”

  Ornasetti tapped their cab driver, an enormous man with no neck, on the shoulder and the cab, which Antoine now realized wasn’t an official, city-licensed Checker cab at all, began rolling. “Fine by me,” Antoine reiterated, aware as the cab gained speed that although he’d known every tiny nuance of his role as the aborted mission’s high-post shooter, he’d never fully been briefed on the role of the man in the low post.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, Ornasetti, with his .30-06, scope, and custom-made shooting wedge in hand, had their driver drop Antoine off at the South Shore train station, leaving him with instructions to return to Gary, retrace his every step, erase any hint that he’d ever been in the Steel City, return to New Iberia, and wait for his money. Sugar Sweet stood on the steps of the train station, bewildered and wondering, though he hated to, if he hadn’t stepped into something a level or two over his head.

  A half mile from the train station, Ornasetti changed cars and drivers. The new wheelman headed directly for the Calumet Expressway.

  The man in sunglasses, who’d remained silent during more than an hour’s worth of drop-offs and car exchanges, small talk, bold talk, and innuendoes, finally spoke up. “How much does the Negro know?” His words rode the crest of an unmistakable French accent.

  “Enough to make him dangerous if he ever has the sense to sit down and think things through.”

  “He should be eliminated, then,” the man in sunglasses offered matter-of-factly.

  “I’m considering it.”

  The man removed his sunglasses, revealing a broad nose and deep-set eyes. An already evident five o’clock shadow covered most of his face. He looked Ornasetti up and down, suspecting that, like the light skinned Negro, Ornasetti was in over his head. He trained a brief, incisive stare on his American host, drank in his all-too-evident unseasoned youthfulness, and glanced out the window of the car, relieved that things hadn’t come to a head in Chicago. He was well aware that the American crime bosses who’d hired him didn’t want any fingers pointed their way if the mission Ornasetti was proudly calling the Mongoose Deception, as if he’d thought it up himself, went belly up, but he wasn’t certa
in they fully understood the price they might pay for jumping into bed with people like Ornasetti and the money demanding Louisiana Creole. He wasn’t, however, in America to dissect his employer’s plans—far from it—and unlike the man called Ducane, he was a seasoned veteran in the killing game. Killing didn’t faze him. It never had. He never blinked when it came to killing—even in the face of the worst imaginable kind of storm. He could only hope that in the end, the men who’d hired him were capable of doing that same thing.

  The Calumet Expressway rest stop that Handsome Johnny Rosselli had chosen for their scrubbed mission debriefing with Ornasetti, Trafficante, and Marcello, rather than being one of Illinois’ roadside bucolic picnic areas, was a glass-enclosed bridge and restaurant that spanned the always clogged expressway. It was in fact a sun-drenched, futuristic, architectural and civil engineering leap of faith designed to give travelers the sense that they were part of some interstate highway brave new world as they dined in the rest stop’s restaurant, urinated in its bathrooms, and purchased trinkets to take home from the Windy City. Politicos and a few underworld types, most of them from Chicago, a few from Gary, who wandered in occasionally to bless the place, had carved out a small, private dining room at the far southwest corner of the bridge for private meetings.